PARTISAN!

Mila Volkova reports back from Transfeminists Unite’s May 24th ‘Rally to Remember’.

Transfeminists Unite (TFU) is a new socialist organisation dedicated to the liberation of all women, including trans women, as part of a perspective that unites feminism and transgender liberation. Their unity statement makes three demands: for bodily autonomy, solidarity, and socialism. In a recent interview with 3CR (Community Radio), one of TFU’s three elected organisers claimed that one of the organisation’s aims is to develop, through reading groups and hands-on experience organising rallies, less-experienced members into movement leaders who can fight for TFU’s demands.

She also claimed that the organisation has over one hundred members, by which she means that there are over one hundred individuals with the ‘member’ role on the TFU Discord. Despite this large number, I have not been to a reading group with more than ten members in attendance. The organisation is formally open to anyone of any identity category and aims to expand to include them; but at this stage, its members are almost exclusively trans women. This is an expected result of the organisation growing out of the Community Defence Marshals System (CDMS), which a CDMS member informed me has a plurality of transgender members.

“Women united will never be defeated!” and “our existence is resistance!” said the pamphlet that TFU members distributed at the rally, attended by more than one hundred people. The ‘Rally to Remember’ was organised by TFU in opposition to ‘femicide’, the gender-motivated murder of women by men, following the news of the murder of Juniper Blessing, a trans woman from New Mexico who was stabbed over forty times in a laundromat. This was only the latest act in a global campaign of femicide. In 2019, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that more than sixty percent of queer people had experienced violent abuse at the hands of an intimate partner. In that survey, the figures for the sexual victimisation of trans people are even worse. More than fifty percent of Australian women in their twenties have been experienced sexual violence, according to NASAV. That same study also shows that a woman is murdered in Australia every nine days, on average. In addition to the two TFU hosts, the rally had six speakers. The speakers all shared a common message: that femicide was an innate part of the capitalist system.

The first speaker was Debbie Brennan from Radical Women (RW), who spoke in detail about the growing right-wing backlash in the US and the UK, and how this will spread to Australia. In a hopeful voice, she told the audience that before class society, humans lived in primitive communism and matriarchy, and that there were no enforced gender binary and trans people existed in peace. There was no mention of the working class at any point in her speech. Isidoro, a speaker on behalf of the Latin American Solidarity Network (LASNET), made a similar speech later. He praised indigenous and anti-imperialist struggle, claiming that it is imperialism that brought patriarchy to South America and that, before then, transgender people were an honoured section of society. Freya, a speaker on behalf of Socialist Alliance, praised intersectionality; the theory that society is made up of interlocking forms of oppression. Though she added that class is “the bow that ties it all together”, it is unclear how this fits together with her intersectionality when its major theorists, such as bell hooks, altogether reject the primacy of class.

I had the honour of speaking as both a member of Communist Unity and TFU. I platformed the commonality of grievances across the entire proletariat, and that we must unite as a class in all our colours against the church, the state, capital, and the liberal NGOs to overthrow the class system. Afterwards, Zohreh spoke on behalf of Voices of the Iranian Revolution. She argued that the oppressed position of Iranian women is a result of interlocking political, economic, and cultural factors. But did she mean all Iranian women? The audience was left to ponder. Finally, a coordinator of TFU (a team-lead as opposed to an organisational-lead) gave a fifteen minute speech that left some attendees moved to tears of inspiration. Among Lauryn’s talk of gendered oppression, the rituals that enforce it, and the need to resist, one statement stood out:

Only we can save ourselves, only we care about the problems that directly affect us. This is by design, because we are the only people capable of caring and capable of doing something.

As we finished up the rally by marching towards the Eight Hour Monument, I wondered: who is ‘we’? How much in common do I really have with bourgeois women? What about the small section of our trans feminine ‘community’ who are very well off? Is it them that I have more in common with, or is it the other half of the working class that have been labelled ‘male’, who shares in my exploitation, my work, and my lack of stability? Whose bodily autonomy is really at stake? Is it really solidarity with those affected by other oppressions which motivates us, or is it the recognition that, in the stratified layers of our class that is without property, we see a broken mirror of ourselves? What even is the political content of socialism?

There is no doubt that that, in an era where more than 20% of American youth identify themselves as queer in one way or another (according to a 2022 poll by Gallup), queer and trans people constitute some kind of threat to the status quo. But what kind of threat is this? Is it a revolutionary one, which threatens to upset the entire social order and replace it with another? Or is it a more modest threat, one which temporarily undermines birthrates and reduces the rate of profit for capital? If existence is resistance at a base level, then perhaps something beyond bare ‘existence’ will be necessary if we want to liberate ourselves and to finally, one day, live without fear.