Transgender people need solidarity-Now more than ever.

Winston Peters thinks that the job of a journalist is to report exactly what he says without criticism. 
Descriptively rather than prescriptively, I’m worried that he’s right. 

In the past two weeks of its coverage, NZ First MP Jenny Marcroft’s new member’s bill attacking the rights of transgender people–which will replace her existing members’ bill on water fluoridation–has been reported on virtually uncritically in terms of what New Zealand’s neofascist party says it is versus what it will actually do.
Even Peters’ supposedly “fiery” RNZ interview has only caused upset around a threat of censorship. Even as both interviewer and interviewee shrugged their shoulders through first a statement that the entire self-identification system should be thrown out and then the apparently matter of fact suggestion that people should be subjected to sex checks before taking a shit in a public bathroom. (“Have you got a licence for those genitals?!”)

However much RNZ or Stuff or the Herald re-printed Peters’ statement that the bill is “not anti-anyone,” the truth of the matter–and this is actually very obvious–that it very much is.
On its own, a bill which seeks to categorise trans men as women and trans women as men is an attack on our ability to exist as ourselves in any official context. Such legislation explicitly aims to remove us from public life. 
It makes us even more vulnerable to discrimination by bosses and landlords than we already are and will result (as the recent court ruling this bill is a direct clone of is already doing in the UK) in the state sanctioned sexual assault of transgender women by male police officers. 
It’ll prevent transgender people from standing up to patriarchal oppression in the workplace.
It’ll close channels for trans women to seek help when we’re abused by our partners. 
It’ll send us to men’s prisons where we will be raped. 

Any coverage of this bill which does not lead, in the clearest possible terms, with the acknowledgement of the suffering this bill would cause should it become law–and the acknowledgement furthermore that this suffering is the entire point of the bill–is complete, utter, dangerous journalistic negligence and a failure to report on the actual facts.
And that’s before we get into the further, even more far-reaching attacks on the rights of transgender people NZ First are planning in open air. 
As much as he may whinge when one interviewer is not perfectly polite to him, Winston Peters very much already has the media statement printing press of his dreams. That much is obvious. 

In looking at this bill, though (and, frankly, in the increasingly repetitive conversations I’ve ended up having with entirely too many of my fellow communists) I feel we’re missing why this is being done. Both here and by fascist movements the world over.

In their respective rather lukewarm oppositions to the bill, both Labour and the Greens have described the American and British coattails that Peters and his ilk are running after here as a “distraction” from the real material issues faced in our country. 
This is no doubt true, the scapegoating of racial and sexual minorities for the misery of a decayed and brutal capitalism has always been page one in the Nazi playbook, but it misses a great deal of the material aim here (especially in the Liberal version of it. I’m not exactly won over by Swarbrick and Hipkins’ lockstep statements that the destruction of our rights is merely “not a priority”).

There’s a reason that, in the US, Trump’s anti-trans legislation is taking place at the same time as abortions are banned, immigrants are rounded up into camps and union laws are attacked. It’s the same reason as they’re coming through next to the final destruction of the welfare state in Britain. 
Transgender rights are a class issue. Because, to capital, transsexuality is a social reproduction issue.

As Marxists, we of course understand that the entire construction of gender and the subjugation of women are done under capitalism because the system relies upon a massive amount of unpaid labour towards social reproduction. 
It’s been 101 stuff since the ‘60s: bosses need new workers when they’ve broken and killed the old ones. Someone’s got to have the babies and cook the food.
In a wealthy Liberal country, more or less of this may fall to a marginalised underclass of hired help, but the origins of the oppression remain absolutely the same. Capitalism requires that reproduction and social labour must be controlled. The bodies of the workforce must be controlled. The ways in which the workforce lives, dies, marries, has sex, eats, sleeps and moves must be controlled in order for the capitalist class to ensure that there will be a workforce tomorrow. 

Anything which could pose a threat to this in any way–access to abortions and contraceptives, homosexuality, any welfare system which allows its poorest any independence whatsoever, advancements in the power of women and marginalised workers, and, yes, transsexuality–poses a threat to the control, reproduction and structure of the workforce.
There’s a reason fascism always requires a rigid commitment to the heterosexual nuclear family unit. There’s a reason today’s far right thought leaders are obsessing over birth rates and mailing their sperm to random women on the internet. It’s the same reason they want to eradicate trans people and the same reason they want to ban abortions and send women back to the kitchen and bedroom. 

It must also be noted here that–due to the material discrimination we face–trans people overwhelmingly end up in the reserve and auxiliary forces of labour. Many of us–and in particular many transgender women–are kept unemployed or in incredibly transient and casualised lines of work, impoverished and desperate. If capitalism can ever find a place for us, it’s powerless at the bottom of the ladder.  

It all comes back to class. It always does. 

All of this is very, very basic stuff (it feels odd to frame Engels’ Origin of the Family as a queer classic), and yet the left at the moment seems to be fundamentally failing to find our feet on this issue. There’s been a lot of talk as of late from what public figures we have about dropping issues of, amongst other things, patriarchal oppression (which the persecution of transgender people unequivocally is) in favour of so-called “bread and butter issues.”
There’s also a subset of (self identified and non-passing) so-called “Marxists” who buy the fascists’ line on gender wholesale, who’s existence should be acknowledged but needn’t be dignified with a response any more than the Israeli group that wants to “colonise gaza in accordance with marxist-leninst principles,” - sometimes something is just straightforwardly wrong and stupid. 

What’s important here, as the labour movement and what exists of the organised left respond to a truly global recent swing hitlerwards, is that we present an opposition on all fronts and fight for a better world for all workers. Any socialist resurgence must have a counterargument to the currently unchallenged fascist line on gender.

The worthwhile and correct critique of the gender politics of the past ten years is of its liberalism. That it has atomised oppressions and diversities into tiny, isolated and virtually apolitical categories which each must be individually accepted, instead of anything which could possibly be fought for.
This argument is true only if it is made to argue for a more radical answer on these issues.
Too often today, it’s instead being made as a way of suggesting we throw transgender people (or immigrants, or disabled people, or whoever’s turn it is to be the fascist punching bag this week) under the bus. Your transgender comrades deserve better than that.

Global Capitalism is currently undergoing a period of very violent restructuring.
The fascists have won people to their side because everybody knows the current neoliberal system is untenable and miserable. The only responses have been a liberal defence of the norms or an (apparently) left attempt to get alongside the fascists in the name of those oh-so-selectively defined “bread and butter issues,” both of these are utterly stupid strategies which will fail. 

What we need to fight for today, as socialists, as workers, as union members, is a reordering of society on our terms. 
When they attack the current system of co-governance, we as a labour movement need to fight back in favour of real constitutional transformation and Māori sovereignty.
When they attack the health and safety at work act, we need to fight back in favour of more power for workers to refuse unsafe work and to control our conditions and workplaces in general.
When they go after pay equity, we need to fight back for truly gender-equal pay and working conditions and the liberation of women as a class. When they mass-privatise state housing, we need to fight back for a programme of massive investment in the construction of new state housing through a new ministry of works. 
And, when this first in what will be a long line of anti-trans bills gets its day in the house, it will not be enough to defend the current liberal norms and legislation on gender.
The labour movement has to get behind calls for sweeping improvements on trans healthcare and sorely needed social support. 

The Council of Trade Unions is currently trying to build a campaign to "fight back together" against the present government's attacks on working people. Socialists and Communists need to see this as an opportunity to build a response to fascist-capitalist gains.
There’s a great deal of political anger in the workforce at the moment, and if it is only harnessed in defence of an existing and loathed establishment, or is only addressed on the condition that the issues of the people most hurt are disregarded and toned down, then it will accomplish nothing. 

Alongside our friends and comrades, Te Nuku Mauī will be working in the coming months to ensure that “Solidarity With Trans Workers” is made an official and acted-upon policy within the labour movement.

Wherever you are, your union can and should fight for the rights of its transgender workers against workplace discrimination and violence in the workplace and it should fight for our empowerment in society. As a union member, you should read up on what your union’s current work in this field is and you should be talking to your fellow unionised workers and to your organiser about organising to improve things in your workplace.
In the event of substandard support, your union is–at least on paper–a democratic organisation and you have every right to organise within it for the liberation and empowerment of working people.