On this Trans Day of Remembrance, we express our deep grief at the oppression faced by trans and gender diverse people, the vilification and scapegoating they face in the current political climate, and the reality that their lives are often marred and ended by violence. We also express our appreciation of the role that trans and gender diverse people play in working class movements and struggles against oppression, both historically and at present. Working class liberation and trans liberation are inextricably bound and our political organising should work to utilise the strength of this relationship.
At this current moment we face a genocide in Gaza and in the Congo, a wider escalation of global imperialism and the domestic swing to far-right politics within the UK. All of these factors represent a drastic attack by capital on the bodies and lives of the working class and oppressed, an attack on liberation, self-determination and life itself on both an individual and social level. This attack stems from the imperative of capital to constrain the bodies of working class and oppressed people so as to keep in place the categories of race, gender, and sexuality (amongst others) which the capitalist classes use as tools in their arsenal.
We must stand in solidarity with trans people not only because of the longstanding oppression that they have faced on a ‘structural, institutional, societal, and direct’ level, but also because in defying patriarchal concepts of sex and gender, they represent the possibility of challenging the social relations upon which the perpetuation of capitalism relies.