PARTISAN!

Dear Comrades,

On January 28, the Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls, a member of the ruling Liberal-National Party government, announced that trans people under the age of 18 would be unable to access hormones or puberty blockers at state-run clinics.

Alongside the “Making Queensland Safer Act 2024”, which dramatically expanded the state’s ability to convict and imprison children as young as 10, we are seeing a ruthless expansion of state and family authority over children in Queensland.

To calm this trend, the federal Labor government has recently announced an “inquiry” into the use of hormones and puberty blockers for transgender children.

Socialists must oppose all of this!

After a similar ban was introduced in the United Kingdom last year, the Spartacist League published the following in their publication Workers’ Hammer:

“The whole weight of this rotten system is felt on youth’s shoulders like a ton of bricks. Kids’ rebellious spirit and creativity are crushed at school and at home so that they be obedient robots with no future. “Responsible” adults (most of whom can’t get their own lives together) are the ones ordering them on how they should live their lives: “You can’t vape, you can’t drink, you can’t dress as you want, you can’t do this or that; sex is a dangerous and monstrous thing, and if you question your gender, we’ll send you to a shrink because you are sick.” This is what destroys young people. This is what traumatises them and pushes them to suicide. Yes, kids must be helped. They must be informed. But for god’s sake, leave the kids alone! Let them choose!”

The Revolutionary Communist Organisation echoes this statement here in Australia.

At protests, many have criticised the “trans ban” for negatively impacting children’s health or imposing too much state authority on what should be a family decision. We should reject this narrative!

Access to hormones is not a medical matter, it is about bodily autonomy and expression. Children should be empowered to make decisions over their own bodies and lives, not doctors, parents, or the state!

Why must socialists defend children’s bodily autonomy, including access to hormones? Because winning socialism includes the abolition of the family.

This does not mean the abolition of parents or love; it means breaking the obligations placed on parents (primarily mothers) to care for the household without pay.

The family system contradicts the reality of modern life. Children are not just raised by their relatives, we are each fed by millions of workers across the planet. Our toys, clothes, stationary, and schooling are the sum efforts of billions more. Children are already raised socially, but we let the capitalists privatise, control, and profit off all this. Instead, all of society must take over responsibility for the development of free and healthy people.

Homophobia and transphobia, including this ban announced in Queensland, are all efforts to enforce the patriarchal family model on which modern capitalism relies. It relies on the out-sourcing of the costs of creating and raising children, caring for workers, and supporting the elderly. It relies on the ownership of children by their parents, who teach them how to be compliant workers.

In our program, we raise the following minimum demands and call on all socialists in Australia to echo them:

• Free 24-hour childcare run by the state, and state-run canteens, laundromats, and health clinics in every neighbourhood.
• Wages and independent housing for students, paid for by the state.
• Free schooling, including free meals and medical care in every school and university.
• Full provision of healthcare and community control over gender clinics.
• The expansion of youth gender clinics and easy access to hormones, advice, and medical care to the entire population, including regional areas.
• All clinics to provide hormones to adults and children under the “informed consent” model.

If we wish to abolish the family, socialists must build a new society which empowers the free self-expression of all. Everywhere, capitalism enforces conformity to male-female heterosexuality, cruelly punishing all who step outside its rigid assumptions. We must fight against this rotting and backwards system!