PARTISAN!

The state has launched yet another offensive against the bodily autonomy and rights of transgender youths, first through an attack against gender affirming care for under 18s in Queensland, and second through a federal “inquiry” into the use of hormones and puberty blockers for transgender children. The workers movement must defend the bodily autonomy of transgender children, youths, and workers. Communists must stand with transgender workers against these ongoing attacks.

Despite the shameless pinkwashing initiatives promoted by the Labor Party and the ACTU, these organisations do not meaningfully fight against these attacks, in and out of the workplace. The inaction of the Labor Party and the union bureaucracy rightfully pushes queer activists towards political alternatives: at times communists and socialists, most often the Greens.

But the reformist Greens and the progressive NGOs are wholly incapable and ill-equipped to carry out this liberation struggle in full. Instead, they aim to smooth out the quirks of capitalism to make it more bearable for queer and transgender workers. These are not quirks to be smoothed out, but structural features that cannot be overcome through legal recognition or welfare reform. Queer and transgender people must break with the reformist paradigm and seek an alternative. Communists must put forward this alternative.

This year on Transgender Day of Visibility, communists must put forward clearer demands and make known that the path to transgender liberation is inextricably tied to the path to the liberation of all workers – through the overturning of capitalist society. We must elevate the queer and transgender activist movement into a militant struggle alongside that of the working class.

The Revolutionary Communist Organisation raises the following revolutionary minimum demands, which will put power directly in the hands of the queer and trans workers, and begin the transition to communism:

• The decriminalisation of sex work and the unionisation of sex workers.
• Full provision of gender affirming care and transgender healthcare to any who desire it, regardless of age, wealth, or region.
• Expansion of youth gender clinics to make access to gender affirming care easier for transgender youth in all circumstances.
• Use of the “informed consent” model in every health clinic, allowing all people informed access to hormones, surgeries, and puberty blockers.
• Abolition of invasive surgeries on intersex children and youth.
• Universal healthcare and sex education.

While the rank-and-file of the working-class time and time again rejects these hostile attacks against it, our class’s leadership in Labor and the ACTU actively sabotage these efforts. Therefore, communists must step forward and struggle for leadership of the movement against reformists in both the Labor Party and the Greens Party.

A renewed Communist Party, one that unites the sects and the entire socialist movement under a common program for seizing power, would be the only organisation capable of carrying out the struggle to its conclusion. Only by overturning capitalist society, which enforces and reproduces patriarchy and social domination, can we emancipate queer workers, transgender workers, and the working class in general.