A Facebook "friend" keeps posting stuff about transgenderism and how right people like her were/are to have been supportive of the likes of Trump because he is rolling back those "trans rights" which impact on women's rights.
I look at this way; prior to and concomitant with the rise of neoliberal (global corporate) capitalism, there was a radical shift of political theory and praxis to the right which meant that the popular perception of a “centre ground” – the fulcrum point if you will – shifted significantly to the right.
Accompanying, and in fact aiding that was the rise, first of interest group, and then identity politics.
Instead of great national and international movements aimed at achieving and sustaining systemic change, there was a proliferation of smaller “issue”, latterly “identity” based movements.
The old "red left" which aimed for foundational socio-economic change – not just accommodations within capitalism – lost ground, especially with the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.
Social democrats and socially liberal people shifted rightwards with the fulcrum point, adjusting their ideas and expectations of what being "left-wing” meant.
For many of them it was simply not being “right-wing”. In the weird world of US politics, it was the patent absurdity of the Democratic Party being "left”.
For socially and politically liberal centrists – having abandoned all hope of socialism (if they ever had any) and with that class-based theory and praxis – the focus on interest group, and then identity politics, was palliative.
Attachment to movements that merely sought accommodations from Neo-liberal compliant states – but which in no way threatened the economic status quo – soothed their liberal hearts and minds as they benefited materially from neoliberal capitalism’s intensification of economic exploitation which was accompanied by an increased oppression of workers – somewhere.
For me, the big issue with transgenderism as political theory and praxis is that it is both individualistic and individualising. As such it dovetails perfectly with the right’s aim of breaking all great political-social combinations which challenge capitalism – not just into competing interest groups, but right down to the level of the “aspirational individual”.
In the transgenderist orthodoxy that takes the form of a focus on the right to a bespoke sex/gender social and legal “identity” with an accompanying bespoke physical appearance.
Anyone who supports/promotes “Trumpism” because of the political right’s and ultra-conservatives’ opportunistic coat-tailing of feminist opposition to the transgenderist orthodoxy, is either a rightwing ideologue or some variety of useful idiot.
What annoys me about both extremes of this debate is the level of social and political myopia and a self-centredness that risks tipping into full-blown narcissism. It’s maybe why both extremes are drawn to Trump .. like attracts like.
The social and natural worlds are in states of intense and worsening disequilibrium. Fact.
Marx warned that there was no inevitable progression of the social world beyond capitalism and into socialism / communism; if the hands of the hyper-exploiters and oppressors are not wrested off the controls, we could see the social world tip into barbarism.
Women who are cheerleading for the likes of Trump need to look outside the imperial bubble and the smaller bubbles of relative privilege which bounce around inside it, and place all their hyperbole about the threat to women of transgenderism, against what is objectively threatening women in the rest of the world – and who and what is behind those threats.
More to point; they need to stop exaggerating and catastrophising as much and as risibly as the most ardent of transactivists ever did, and ask who and what can stop the slide into barbarism?
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