Sexual politics

In South Korea, there was a focus on hate and discrimination against transgender people in 2020 and 2021, when the Covid-19 backlash targeted LGBTIQ people.

Against the Current advisory editor Peter Drucker, the author of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anticapitalism, is one of a handful of scholars who have in recent years developed the field of queer Marxism. Another pioneer of queer Marxism, Kevin Floyd, died tragically in 2019. This year the Marxist Literary Group honored Kevin Floyd’s legacy with a special issue of its journal Mediations, including this tribute by Peter Drucker.

The following text comes from notes for an educational for Anticapitalistas that I have reworked. The aim was to look back at the “polemics” posed by the new transphobic currents in feminism, from a theoretical and strategic point of view and in the context of the debates on the “Trans law”. It is not, therefore, a text that goes into the issues explored in depth or that claims to be exhaustive, but rather an introduction to the theoretical and strategic problematization of trans oppression from a Marxist perspective.

Our understanding of the term gender is that it is separate from the term sex, the latter refers to physiological features, the former to a socially constructed role. To quote Simone de Beauvoir: ‘one is not born but rather becomes a woman’. This has always been the general position of Marxist feminists – oppression is not a direct result of physiological features but the social role assigned in general to those who have those features.

The big question surrounding the centenary of the October Revolution: Is this event a hundred years ago still relevant for the left today?

Talk at the International Meeting Against Homophobia and Transphobia, Kaos GL, Ankara, 13 May 2017.

This year’s pride marches in Europe have taken place under the shadow of a threat, compounded by the recent terrorist attacks in Western Europe (Paris, Brussels and now Germany) and the slaughter at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. We have been urged not to give in to fear, while at the same time we’ve been told that undisclosed security precautions are being taken. The route of the Paris pride march was drastically shortened, supposedly for security reasons. It’s not clear whether the attack in Orlando was motivated by religious fundamentalism or was more the product of anger and anguish about the attacker’s life and sexuality. Either way, it could be just a matter of time before a similarly murderous anti-LGBTQI attack takes place in Europe.

Just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision to legalize same sex marriage, president Obama ordered that an undocumented transgender woman be escorted out of the White House Pride celebration because she interrupted the President to raise her voice against the state-sanctioned torture and deportation of LGBT people.

I arrived in the United States prepared to talk about why and how queers need to fight Islamophobia: the fear and hatred of Islam and of Muslims. But [on November 13] the day after my plane landed, Paris was hit by a wave of terrorist attacks. So I can’t give quite the same talk that I prepared.

Forty-six years ago patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a popular New York City gay bar, fought back against abusive police, and in doing so launched the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement.