By MAR RENO
In the 2024 State of the Union address [X], Joe Biden shouted out the transgender youth of the U.S., “You’re so brave! … Your president has your back!” Nearly four months later, just as Pride season had wrapped up, the Biden administration retreated on a key issue of bodily autonomy for transitioning youth, issuing a statement that undercut the defense of gender-affirming surgery as a legitimate element of gender affirming health care.
Headlines read: “White House says it opposes gender-affirming surgery for minors.” The July 2 statement was a response to a news leak about a response from Dr. Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to a request from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health that the secretary review a new set of medical guidelines. Dr. Levine urged WPATH to remove mention of specific ages at which mastectomies or genital surgeries should be performed, arguing that inclusion could spark a political backlash against all gender-affirming care for youth.
By publicly bowing to this fear of backlash, the White House legitimized trans panic and gave steam to the anti-trans offensive by the right. What could have provoked this adaptation to fear-mongering and what can all working-class people do to protect our civil rights in an era of reactionary health-care bans, unending economic downturn, and one environmental catastrophe after another? The answers lie in understanding the capitalist forces that are driving the Biden government and the entire U.S. political system during election season, and most importantly the only thing that can challenge it—a massively organized working class.
How “progressive” is the Democratic Party?
While it may seem that the Biden-Harris White House is targeting the Queer community, the move is not so different from Biden’s orientation towards other social issues, such as abortion, immigration, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza—progressive in words, conservative in actions. That is especially glaring since in its first two years, the administration presented itself as a balanced, tolerant, and socially progressive alternative to Trumpism that would “Build Back Better” the economic and political wreck left by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump government. This included promises to women to protect reproductive health care, to Black voters to address ongoing police brutality and misconduct, and to LGBT people to protect against a myriad of political attacks—all of which have now fallen by the wayside.
Now, soon after Pride season has ended, so too has the opportunity for Biden, and now Harris, to use LGBTQ people as their “progressive” feather boa. For one thing, by petitioning the Supreme Court to decide on the constitutionality of transgender health care for minors, the incumbent Biden White House can continue to release statement after statement avowing support for all LGBTQ people while the Court destroys LGBTQ civil rights.
Early statements by Kamala Harris on the campaign trail suggest that she will probably lend modest support to some social issues, like abortion rights and access to child care, in order to differentiate herself from Trump—while generally holding fast on issues such as aid to Israel. Just as they did in 2020 and earlier this year with Biden, “left” supporters of the Democratic Party can now present Harris as the “lesser evil.”
And what about trans rights? There is no evidence that swing voters, or all voters, are concerned with regulating transgender youths’ access to health care; they consistently rank issues like the economy, immigration, and social programs as the most important for the presidential campaigns to address. [X][X] Thus, a direct electoral push from the base and potential base of the Democratic Party explains little. In fact, what has driven the Biden administration’s choice to step away from supporting transgender rights has nothing to do with what’s important to working-class people and everything to do with a deeper historic pattern of the Democratic Party, and ultimately any political party that is bankrolled by the capitalist class. At the end of every campaign, both Democrats and Republicans rely on and answer to the same masters—big banks and corporations of every kind. From fossil fuels to healthcare, nuclear arms, surveillance, policing, prisons, and even education, profiteering comes before social reforms under capitalism.
In a 1985 essay, Robert Brenner describes this “Paradox of Social Democracy”: “So long as capitalist property relations hold, the capitalist class, through its control over the means of production, retains control over the investment function, and thereby holds the key to the development of the productivity of labor, to economic growth, and to economic prosperity—and, on that basis, to employment, social stability, and state revenue. Since capitalist investment depends on the capitalists’ ability to make a profit, short of revolution, all elements of society find sooner or later in their own interest to ensure capitalist profitability. ‘What’s good for GM is good for the country’ captures an important aspect of reality under capitalism.” [X]
Throughout the essay, Brenner describes the interplay between the massive social movements of the 1960s-’70s, such as the feminist movement that won the (now overturned) federal right to abortion access, and the distinct social layer of politicians and union or NPO bureaucrats who momentarily pandered to these struggles with one hand and kept them at bay on behalf of the capitalist class with the other. However, oftentimes there are no true concessions made by the capitalist class, only transient pressure valves meant to release steam from the movement long enough for it to be broken up.
For example, in the early 1970s the greatest anti-abortion forces in the U.S. were actually concentrated amongst liberal Democrats and Catholics, who also supported the anti-Vietnam-war movement and movement for minorities. The anti-abortion movement was framed as a “poor people’s” issue, and was lined up alongside anti-draft and anti-racist themes. However, the millions-strong and militant feminist movement was upending the country’s traditional patriarchal social order, and it successfully lobbied the Supreme Court in 1973 to federally codify the right to an abortion. Literally at that moment, key Democrats who had previously swung pro-life, including Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, and Al Gore, decided it was more politically profitable (and legally defensible) to support a pro-choice position.
Meanwhile, the anti-abortion mantle was taken up by a layer of Evangelical Christians, who later joined with other reactionary Christian groups (today, known as Christian Nationalists). [X] The Christian Nationalist-dominated Supreme Court has recently given all corporations a free pass around federal regulations, and all presidents (especially Donald Trump) a free pass to conduct insurrections.
Short of a sustained national mass movement that can bring millions into the streets and threaten paralysis of the economy, “short of revolution,” as Brenner would say, Biden and the major figures of the Democratic Party are content to pass off issues like abortion and civil rights to the ultraconservative Supreme Court and let the chips fall where they may.
The far-right legislative war
This year’s record-breaking downpour of anti-trans legislation is matched in ferocity only by the spike in homicide and hate crimes against transgender people. Both policy and homicide records have been broken every year for the last five years. So far in 2024, there are 621 anti-transgender bills under consideration, with 64 of them at the federal level, a new and ominous development alongside the Biden administration’s rightward turn against LGBTQ civil rights. [X]
The atmosphere of anti-trans-mania is one of a myriad of far-right-driven social sicknesses in the U.S. today, including mass shootings [X], unhinged police brutality and misconduct, skyrocketing levels of houselessness, and “epidemics” of suicidality amongst teenage girls and transgender youth. Each of these social crises can be directly connected to the social alienation, economic exploitation, and political oppression that the capitalist class uses to continuously extract profits from the labor of working people. For example, the epidemic of suicidality amongst teenage girls is directly linked with the explosion of social media usage amongst teens and their exposure to commercially driven beauty standards. The rise in mass shootings is directly linked to the weapons manufacturing industry, the video game industry, and the rise of neo-fascist ideologies.
Unsurprisingly, there is also a sector of the capitalist class that is fomenting these social ills in order to gain greater power in the government through electoral means. Recently, Donald Trump made a statement vaguely distancing himself from the Heritage Foundation’s [X] Project 2025 , an ultra-conservative think tank that has produced a 900-page plan for the transition to a conservative U.S. president who will do their bidding. The wish list includes a complete restructuring of the federal government, shutting down the Department of Education, federally restricting abortion, and of course curtailing basic rights for LGBTQ people. Although Trump vaguely disavowed the organization, there are dozens of personnel connections between the Trump campaign and the writers of Project 2025, and more importantly the think tank has stated numerous times that their playbook is written for Trump. [X]
The Heritage Foundation, founded in the Reagan era by three conservative Christian capitalists, has made such playbooks for past Republican administrations too. By the end of Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, his administration had implemented 60% of the 2000 proposals included in the first Heritage Foundation playbook. [X]
But these shadowy networks of far-right capitalists are not waiting for a Trump victory in November. In fact, their machinations over the course of the Democratic Biden administration are what directly led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and what has mapped out the anti-trans feeding frenzy across state governments since then. A trove of leaked emails from South Dakota Republican Rep. Fred Deutsch showed how the representative helped craft anti-trans legislation and coordinate with hundreds of anti-trans politicians, pundits, and right-wing organizations, who in turn used the ready-made bills to push anti-trans legislation in their own states. [X]
Similar operations have long been conducted by conservative think tanks such as American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a non-profit organization of conservative legislators and capitalists who collaborate on the drafting and implementation of model bills on every subject from anti-gun-control to anti-immigration to anti-LGBTQ issues. [X]
Homophobia is baked into the cake
It’s not by coincidence that the far right, driven by the ultra-rich, invests so much into anti-women, anti-trans, anti-immigrant bills. The division of the working class into sectors by gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and any number of socially constructed categories is essential to the continuation of the capitalist project. Without these categories, it would be more difficult to instigate competition between workers, an essential aspect of the capitalist economic model since its emergence almost 200 hundred years ago.
Frederick Engels pointed out in 1845: “The workers are in constant competition among themselves, as are the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other” (“The Condition of the Working Class in England”).
Engels went on to describe the way that competition between workers of different ethnicities, citizenship status, education, and social class drive the wages of all workers down by lowering the rate at which the most exploited workers are forced to sell their labor. While capitalism is far more developed than the monopolized textile mills of Engels’s time, the premise of the system remains virtually unchanged, if not more sinister, because of the introduction of surveillance, policing, workplace technology, and commercial propaganda constantly pushed on working-class communities.
Today, the capitalists fully mandate competition through racist, sexist, and homophobic legislation. And whatever discrimination between workers isn’t written into law can be built into the social code, such as the racist Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War Southern U.S., which prevented Black people from rising to the same economic class as their poor white sharecropping counterparts, thus preventing a class unity that could have upended the former slave-holding, landowner class. Another example is the difficulty of obtaining work visas for migrant workers on whom the U.S. economy depends. Without an unprotected class of workers, highly exploitative industries like agriculture and meatpacking would be forced to provide minimum wages and basic workplace safety, thus decreasing their profits. When far-right pundits claim that undocumented migrants drive wages down for U.S. born workers, they’re often the ones who profit from and maintain the exploitation of these workers.
Discrimination against LGBTQ people can be directly tied to wage competition amongst workers (in a similar way to how women are discriminated against in the workplace), but LGBTQ-phobia runs much deeper than that. Because of the role that gender plays in shaping the nuclear family, the mere existence of LGBTQ people goes directly against the purported values of the capitalist class, and the thinly veiled religious ideologies they use to control us. In the case of the U.S., the Christian vision of the nuclear family is a white, heterosexual patriarchy. The enforcement of this vision is so strong that in the 1950s, homosexuality was equated with communism and Bolshevism in a mass purging of Queer people from government jobs known as the Lavender Scare. Rightly so, as the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first anti-capitalist revolution to decriminalize homosexuality, legalize fast and easy divorce, create public child-care centers, and equalize wages for women and men in the workplace.
Some sectors of the capitalist class, including the liberal Democrats, would be open to supporting some civil rights for LGBTQ people today. This is thanks to a century of struggle of LGBTQ people, the broad social acceptance of LGBTQ people, and the considerable increase in the number of people (especially young people) who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming (an increase of 0.9% to 2.8% between X-X). However, as Engels mentioned, the capitalists are also in competition with one another for supreme reign, and so their support for LGBTQ people, women, racial minorities, and any other oppressed categories is contingent upon its utility to the capitalists.
In that vein, the Democrats support reforms when they can use them to pander to a more liberal base, but when the rubber hits the road, they will pivot to the most conservative position possible. So-called “Squad” members like Andrea Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib present a timely example. In a moment of pressure between the pro-Palestine antiwar movement (supported by Squad members Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) and support for Joe Biden’s reelection, Ocasio Cortez and Tlaib came out swinging for Genocide Joe.
Now Bowman, Omar, AOC, and the other Squad members have quickly endorsed Kamala Harris. The sole exception is Tlaib, who has said she is “eager” to speak with Harris about calling for a ceasefire. If these politicians were really “progressive,” or in solidarity with the people of Palestine, they would break with the parties of big business completely.
The LGBT struggle then and now
The terrifying reality of the escalating social crises against the LGBT community, antiwar demonstrators, women, people of color, and immigrants, will not recede on its own. In fact, as Biden, Harris, and the Democrats cynically concede more ground to the far right and willingly increase criminalization of social movements, they accelerate the degeneration of our rights.
This happens in at least two ways. First, the Democrats, with this statement of non-support to trans health care, are stoking the fears used to justify anti-trans legislation and creating opportunities for deep and broad reaching anti-trans measures at the federal level. Further, by posturing themselves as the champions of LGBTQ rights, and then in their actions attacking trans rights, they legitimize the reactionary trans-panic ideology of the far right, and confuse sectors of the working class who are still looking to the Democrats for political leadership.
The answer to this problem does not lie in continuously lobbying the Democrats or attempting to push them back to the left. Now more than ever, huge numbers of people in the U.S. believe that neither Democrats or Republicans care about what happens to ordinary working-class people. LGBTQ people and all oppressed people to guarantee our rights, we must look into history for what has always served our needs, and abandon the tactics that have set us back in our struggles.
The major victories for the LGBT community, the decriminalization of homosexuality and gender non-conformism, marriage equality, the US government addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis, and access to gender affirming care, were never won on our behalf by liberal politicians. On the contrary, these rights were hard fought for by mass movements, millions of people organized through marches, strikes, and other direct actions. The LGBT rights movement was not alone in its struggle; in fact, there was a concerted effort to join with the women’s and antiwar movements to draw the throughline between the struggles of all oppressed people. At the “March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights” in 1987, where at least 750,000 people attended, the platform was multi-sector, multi-issue:
- “The legal recognition of lesbian and gay relationships.
- The repeal of all laws that make sodomy between consenting adults a crime.
- A presidential order banning discrimination by the federal government.
- Passage of the Congressional lesbian and gay civil rights bill.
- An end to discrimination against people with AIDS, AIDS-related complex (ARC), AIDS-related conditions, HIV-positive status, and those perceived to have AIDS.
- Massive increases in funding for AIDS education, research, and patient care.
- Money for AIDS, not for war.
- Reproductive freedom, the right to control our own bodies, and an end to sexist oppression.
- An end to racism in this country and apartheid in South Africa.” [X]
The march had several high profile non-LGBTQ speakers, including the National Women’s Organization leader Eleanor Smeal, Black civil rights leaders, and leadership of the United Farmworkers Movement. This was one culminating moment amidst decades of struggle, and shows what kind of struggle LGBTQ people must build today.
The chief characteristic of the movement at its most powerful is that it was not a movement of militant minorities committing direct actions; it was massive. Further, it was not limited to movements of identity, but included organized and unorganized labor, drawing the connection that popular struggles are the struggles of workers. Finally, it did not limit itself to a narrow platform, but made direct links with other mass movements of the time: the antiwar and anti-apartheid movements, the feminist movement, and the immigrant movement.
LGBTQ activists and our allies should focus not just on building the labor movement through rank-and-file-driven militancy, but on involving it in the struggle for LGBTQ rights at the local level. To this end, workers can form LGBTQ caucuses within their unions, or solidarity committees in unorganized workplaces, to participate in consciousness-raising educational activities or activism within or beyond the workplace. One example of this type of activity is the Pride Caucus of the Teamsters Local 1150 [X], whose members participated in the national coalition of the March to Protect Trans Youth.
We must not only fight for contractual gains and working conditions, but for protection of our basic rights to freely protest the genocidal war in Gaza. We must link with other sectors of organized labor and work toward the building of a workers’ party that doesn’t only represent us, but is composed of and governed by working-class people.
