As government scapegoating of trans people grows, Kevin Ovenden argues that the left must fight for a politics of liberation based on the connection between class and oppression

The Tories’ conference this week has seen at least six cabinet ministers reference trans or gender issues in their speeches, often tied to changes in policies. Along with the vile attacks on migrants, falsehoods about Labour supporting a tax on meat or the claims that there are ‘blanket’ impositions of 20 mph speed limits, these are attempts to use issues which they deem to be controversial to shore up their crumbling support and create ‘culture wars’ which they hope will benefit the right. Socialists should make clear that they will have a fight on their hands. In reality, however, there are signs that this will be a much harder task for them in Britain than it has been in the US, and that attitudes to individual social and ‘moral’ issues are in their majority positive for the left. On questions of controversy, however, the left needs to fight openly for its politics and not assume that these arguments are already won.

One sign that in many areas there have been major changes for the better is the latest annual British Social Attitudes survey , a major study that provides a lot of insight into mass thinking on social and political questions and their trends. That is especially so this year, the 40th report since the series began in 1983. As several commentators have written, that provides a neat moment to consider how social attitudes have changed since Thatcherism appeared triumphant.

Lindsey German points out that according to the report ‘there is strong support for more generous benefits, higher public spending, eradicating poverty and much more. In terms of so called “culture wars” there is little support for the right-wing discriminatory policies so beloved of many Tory MPs.’ She adds:

‘One area surveyed which has shown a remarkable change over the past 40 years is that of the attitudes to sexuality, sex and the family. In 1983, only 17% regarded “sexual relations between adults of the same sex” as “not wrong at all”, whereas 67% agreed with that today. Only 9% think that same-sex relations are “always wrong” compared with 50% in 1983. Then, 42% said that pre-marital sex was “not wrong at all”, now 78% believe that. There have been similar advances over issues to do with cohabitation, single parents, and abortion.’

Despite the decline in working-class organisation, people’s sense of being working class remains very strong.

Class awareness

It is a point highlighted by Observer columnist Kenan Malik in his exploration of what the survey shows about mass consciousness over race, class and immigration. He makes the important point that it is not only that the majority of people consider themselves to be working class. It is also about how seeing class as not just another identity but as constitutive of your political outlook has a profound effect on social and political attitudes:

‘At the same time, what the report calls “class awareness” dampens hostility to immigration. Working-class respondents who are more concerned by inequalities and think it more difficult to move between classes – that is, those who have a more politicised view of class – have more positive views about immigration and are more left-wing.

‘Those who see fewer barriers to social mobility, and so are less concerned with inequalities, are more negative about immigration and more right-wing. Another way of reading this is that those for whom being working class is a cultural identity are likely to be more right-wing and more hostile to immigration whereas those for whom it is more a political marker lean to the left and are more welcoming of immigration.’

These points are important for the left if we are to recover from the collapse of Corbynism in the Labour Party and from the resulting considerable demoralisation and confusion.

The survey is of mass opinion. We need to look at the contradictions that it throws up, but also deal with the social reality if we are to make the most of the fact that the findings here show the image presented of the working class as seething with reaction is false.

So there is a big increase in the proportion of men and of women who believe domestic labour should be shared. On these and related issues there has been over the last 40 years nothing short of what polling expert John Curtice calls ‘a social revolution’. But it is still the case that women do the bulk of domestic labour even though men do more than they did. Overall, we can say there is an awful lot of unpaid domestic labour going circuitously to capital and largely from women – and we may add from grandparents and other relatives taking a greater role in childcare.

That raises pertinent questions about the reproduction of women’s oppression and the limitations of the neoliberal period which was hailed as introducing freedom for women. Such things were supposedly just vestiges of the past, with all of us having greater individual liberty in the globalised marketplace.

Conservative reaction

Whatever advances were made in that period, it is over. Despite more egalitarian mass opinion, the impact of austerity and growing socially conservative reaction from political elites across Europe mean that the actual position of most women is in danger of being thrown back, in contradiction to still broadly liberal opinion. We are seeing forces of the radical right across Europe and North America insinuating themselves into that space on an ‘anti-liberal’ or ‘anti-woke’ basis. There is a renewed reactionary push against abortion rights, despite high levels of support for a woman’s right to choose. The conservatives claim that it is somehow the right of abortion that is responsible for women facing the brunt of austerity and economic crises. They argue that women would be better off at home, married to a man and focused on bringing up children.

The radical right has seized on trans people as a wedge to press a wider agenda, as we see in the US. The BSA has a section on attitudes towards trans people. Those questions have only been asked since 2016 so there is no comparison going back four decades. The answers show a high degree of ‘acceptance’ – to use that loaded term – in 2016 and then a drop. The biggest part of that drop was between 2019 and 2022. Between 2021 and 2022 the proportion of people saying they were ‘not prejudiced’ against trans people fell from 82% to 64%.

Understanding the reasons for that is a matter for serious analysis. It is important if we are to oppose discrimination and prejudice against trans people on a firm basis that unites the working class and the oppressed.

Two things stand out from the outset. First, there are most certainly anti-trans forces. The ethno-Christian Trumpists in the US are in the vanguard and have been extending their influence internationally since well before Trump. They are overwhelmingly also anti-gay and against women’s rights to abortion and to social autonomy and equality. They seek to enforce sex-role stereotypes. The Alliance Defending Freedom has played a major role in the introduction of vicious anti-gay legislation in Uganda, for example. That makes a mockery of the Ugandan government’s claim that homosexuality is some western imposition on the countries of Africa. The opposite is closer to the truth.

But in terms of Britain, there has been no concomitant fall over this period 2016-2022 in support either for treating gays and lesbians equally or for a woman’s right to choose, acceptability of divorce, single-parenthood and so on. So the figures in relation to trans people cannot be a simple result of some generalised reaction, even if various political actors seek that – as parts of the Tory party, witnessed at the current conference, are clear about.

Second, this period of the last seven years is exactly when LGBT+ charity Stonewall and other corporate-NGO bodies decided to insist not upon the basic principles of opposition to oppression and discrimination, but upon a series of ideological dogmas instead. Alongside this went a further turn to corporate capitalist techniques which meant capturing policy of institutions behind closed doors rather than through winning mass support and engagement.

The mantras included that everyone has an innate ‘gender identity’. But this is at best disputable. Most people do not say that they do. Most people do not know what such a thing is. Many of us who have heard of it say that it has no scientific validity or definition. There is also the claim that sex is a spectrum – when the science continues to be clear that it is not. The refusal to countenance any debate on these and other questions, and merely repeating that transwomen are women and transmen are men, has led to the view that raising any problems and clashes of rights arising from that claim was just ‘transphobic’.

Thus from the middle of the last decade there has been an inflation of the concept of transphobia. It has gone from meaning hostility to or denigration of trans people on the basis that they are trans, to not accepting some contested and at the very least questionable claims about the nature of the human species as a whole. Trans people who denied the declared orthodoxy became somehow transphobic on this new basis. That kind of thing is always a bad sign. We’ve seen Jewish people who do not agree with the Zionist ideology accused of being self-haters or not properly Jewish. It was the equivalent of saying that Islamophobia is not anti-Muslim racism – hostility to and discrimination against Muslims as Muslims – but a refusal to accept the ideological/religious beliefs of Islam. Some sectarian, separatist Islamist groups did try to push that position 25 years ago. Thankfully, they were marginalised by organic Muslim communities and anti-racists who fought for a unified position based upon universalist principles. That was enormously boosted through the movement against the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Retreat

Looking at developments in LGBT+ politics in Britain over the last decade, we can see that the retreat from universalism towards fissiparous, liberal identity politics (with corporate outfits often pushing it) has halted progress on the basis of class struggles as a means of fighting against oppression. It has invited forms of reaction that were on the doorstep anyway. It cannot be explained simply by socially conservative reaction triumphant. Instead what it demonstrates is that the left has to fight for its politics and try to project ways in which the rights of one group must be fought for by alI. Otherwise the right can use these issues to divide and weaken working class people and to strengthen reaction. The social conservatives think they have an opening over trans rights – we have to show them they are wrong by a principled support for all the oppressed but also for real debate about these issues.

We should recognise the divergence in social attitudes over trans people and those over gays, and abortion, not-marrying, single-parenthood. Sure, the radical right will aim to shift the balance of social attitudes on those as well. But a succession of opinion polls before this report has shown that what they have been able to exploit in whipping up hostility to trans people is the disaster of hitching good, widespread sentiment of non-discrimination and equal treatment of trans people to demonstrably false assertions about what transphobia is.

The MurrayBlackburnMacKenzie policy collective was one of several in the debate over gender recognition reform in Scotland to point out that high levels of support for trans people against transphobia were coupled with a pragmatic good sense over respecting the rights of both trans people and women. Ipsos in June found 77% in favour of protecting trans people from discrimination, but far less support for various demands raised by Stonewall and others These have included a number of claims that most people who strongly oppose transphobia reject – because they are plain wrong. These include the argument that men have no advantages in athletics over women; that a girl expressing an affinity with stereotypically ‘male’ things ought to be considered as perhaps a boy; or that not using the word ‘women’ in health screening that is about women is somehow inclusive.

Contested

When multi-million-pound campaigns and corporate HR and PR operations did this over the last seven years it has helped undermine what was a pretty good societal position in Britain. It said you must sign up to positions that were highly contested on the left, let alone in the working class and in society, as a precondition for fighting the radical right and opposing what the average person (at one point 82% of people) was righteously against – ie actual transphobia.

In doing so, some activists denounced feminists and socialists as reactionaries because they did not agree with the bad ideological construction upon the good common sense of fighting transphobia and oppression. Then came along real reaction, sniffing a chance. You can argue that the radical right would have done this anyway. True, but that is no excuse to provide them with an opportunity. As in other fields of struggle, we are seeing here the failure of the left – in its broadest sense that encompasses the liberal-left, the NGOs and that whole stratum. It also includes, sadly, some of the radical left that has got this wrong.

It is possible to turn this around. It is urgent that we do. The Tory conference this week shows just how nasty the efforts to scapegoat are by an ailing regime. Defeating those, however, means not yoking opposition to reaction to support for demonstrably false ideas of an equally ailing neoliberal era. Above all, as I argued in this piece in June, it means a return to the politics of class struggle and unity of the oppressed – dealing with the dilemmas that arise on that basis.

‘More than 10,000 women fleeing domestic violence were refused a safe house last year. We don’t know how many transwomen could not find a refuge. That’s one reason why we need to count both sex and gender. But the issue is the appalling lack of refuge provision, expanding it, and on that basis being able to offer women safety and specialist provision to transwomen and anyone else. The fight is with the government and the capitalist class for resources. Arching over the collapse of the Tavistock clinic is the crisis of funding for child and adolescent mental health services and the crisis in young people’s mental health. It is in these common struggles that unity may be built and the very real differences overcome collectively. That is an aspect of the anti-capitalist perspective that is central to emancipating all of us. Activities that set themselves against that approach are a dead end or worse.’