Emery Addams & Claire Bayler
Portland, ME / Worcester, MA
Healthcare worker (personal capacity)

On Saturday, April 1, 2023, in Portland, Maine, roughly 25 neo-Nazis organized a march to City Hall and assaulted a group of counter-protestors opposing the fascists. The attack took place in front of the police, who took no action. This march is only one of the most recent provocations in a series of escalating far-right demonstrations in Maine. 

In April 2023, the Proud Boys protested a drag story hour in Concord, New Hampshire. Last June, about 100 uniformed Patriot Front members marched through Boston, MA, carrying flags and shields and assaulted a Black man in the process. Another fascist group, NSC 131, followed in July, marching through Jamaica Plain, Boston, to intimidate a drag queen story hour. The same month, 31 armed members of the Patriot Front were arrested in Idaho on their way to attack a Pride parade.

Nationwide, the right directs anti-trans attention on LGBTQ+ students and educators in public schools. Many states are banning trans students from sports and bathrooms or writing policies that would force teachers to out students to unsupportive families. Conservative activists have also worked to ban books mentioning LGBTQ+ people from libraries and classrooms.

States have banned educators from mentioning anything about the LGBTQ+ community—increasing curriculum restrictions and forcing LGBTQ+ educators back into the closet. Some incredibly concerning rulings would force children to have their genitals inspected before playing sports, have trans children be forced to detransition (end medical, hormonal, and social changes they’ve made), or be taken by Child Protective Services (CPS) from supportive parents. 

The government and far-right groups are two prongs of capitalism’s attack on workers’ rights and living conditions. Over the years, the far-right shifted from hidden organizing and standouts to increasingly violent attacks. They use “culture-war” issues as a recruitment tool, spreading transphobia and racism, trying to divide working people and weaken social justice movements.

Anti-trans rhetoric and policies are intensifying as the crisis of capitalism—and its inability to meet people’s basic needs—continues to sharpen due to lingering effects from the pandemic, high inflation, and widening inequality.  The debilitating housing crisis, skyrocketing prices for higher education, price gouging on food, gas, and electricity, unsafe working conditions, and unlivable wages are all parts of the “normal” situation of precarious jobs and economic instability the capitalists wanted to return to as quickly as possible after the initial stages of the pandemic. 

No Liberation Under Capitalism

Far-right attacks against trans people are rooted in defending strict gender categories and roles regarding family types, marriage, and parenting. Capitalism puts the burden of everyday existence (food, shelter, child-rearing, elder care) on the family unit instead of funding social services. To prevent these tasks from being handled as the collective responsibility of society—and keep the working class vulnerable, divided, and unorganized—capitalism uses education, media, religion, and laws to maintain structural sexism and transphobia, among other types of oppression. 

Far-right propaganda decries trans people as “violent threats in the bathroom” or claims they “steal” opportunities from women. One division they seek to exploit is to put cis women and trans women on opposite sides—to make it seem like one group can gain rights and better conditions only at the cost of the other. This approach also reinforces what the far-right says defines a “true” woman: “biological sex,” which often boils down to reproductive capability.

No oppressed group can achieve total liberation living under a system where we have no control over how society is run and how people can lead their lives. Socialist demands like higher wages can unite cis women and trans people by improving both groups’ financial independence in the face of wage discrimination and domestic abuse.

The right has latched onto the symbol of the traditional family, which was once needed by class society to reproduce the working class and to secure property inheritance. In reality, capitalism has no real problem with different kinds of family structures that fulfill the same role. But the “decline” of traditional values is linked in right-wing propaganda to workers’ real anxiety about jobs, living standards, and political crisis. 

Ironically, the “golden age” of the family frequently portrayed as the “American Dream” is the stereotypical house, car, two kids, and white picket fence of the post-WWII era. The prosperity achieved by some workers in this period was a product of high union density and militancy during the previous decades, rather than traditional values. Organized labor, heavily influenced by socialist ideas, won major concessions in the form of higher wages, benefits, and broader social programs for some layers of the working class. 

Societal, financial, and family pressure to conform to more traditional family structures are the main factors for trans people to go through different levels of detransition, either temporarily or permanently. The most common reasons for detransitioning are lack of support at home, problems in the workplace, harassment, and discrimination. 

To back up these social norms, capitalist governments establish legal constraints on how people can identify themselves officially or change their names, what types of marriages are recognized, and tax, healthcare, legal, and inheritance benefits based on marital and parental status. The government also enforces these norms by what it doesn’t do—not enforcing anti-discrimination laws, protecting the right to transition and abortion, or protecting trans people from police or far-right physical violence. 

The Battle within Schools

Public education is one key battlefield for defending trans rights. The bigotry of capitalist society is baked into curricula developed by companies and reinforced by government policies like “No Child Left Behind,” forcing educators to “teach to the test” to maintain school funding. Commonly accepted knowledge around gender and sex, for example, as expressed in science and health classes, significantly impacts the ideas children grow up with. Banning books and silencing teachers tries to erase the simple everyday existence of LGBTQ+ people.

Public schools not only teach children the basics of math, science, reading, and history, but also how people are expected to function in society. The assumptions students are trained to adopt as “common sense”—like the “goal” of education is to get a job—socialize working-class people to accept the logic of the capitalist system. 

Public schools, run and funded by multiple levels of government, provide childcare for and educate the majority (91%) of children in the US. It is no coincidence that most educators are women—a central workforce of the “caring industry” (read more in International Women’s Day 2023: Post-Roe Struggles Deepen).

Public education is focused on creating young workers with the habits, skills, and knowledge that capitalism thinks it needs at the moment (like comparatively high amounts of private and public funding for STEM programs). Schools teach children basic reading and writing skills and respect for authority while accustoming them to sitting quietly in a room and working for most of the day. Between caring for children and turning them into future workers, public schools are an incredibly important part of society and the economy. When teachers are gone, children are home, and parents can’t work.  

At the same time, the capitalist class sees public services, including education, as an “untapped” market to exploit for more profit. As a result, local, state, and federal government policies have systematically undermined and underfunded the public school system for decades. This “death by a thousand cuts” prepares the ground for privatizing education as an alternative to the “failed” public model, targeting working-class families frustrated with the inadequate system.

Given the central role of public schools in society, they are a workplace where organized workers can have disproportionate weight in the class struggle. It is no coincidence that public education is the most unionized sector of the US economy and that public school educators are denied the right to strike in many parts of the US (read more in Unite Educator Strikes to Win Better Contracts). 

If the problem in education is understood as stemming from teachers, books, drag queens, and trans people, it shifts the focus from the real crisis in education. Transphobic bigotry is one way to justify increased control of educators, more restrictions on funding, weakening the fighting power of the teachers’ unions, and pushing for more privatized education based on for-profit or religious curricula. It makes certain teachers and students appear to be the problem, rather than the bloated budgets of top administrators or politicians lobbying to reduce school funding.

Stop Playing Defense, Start Playing Offense

The rights that the LGBTQ+ community has won resulted from years of mobilization. The gay liberation movement was able to organize mass protests and boycotts during a period of general social unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Standing alongside other movements of its time like Black Power, women’s liberation, and the student movement, the LGBTQ+ movement fought for changes in healthcare, education, law, and more. 

But as the wave of mass movements ebbed, LGBTQ+ rights groups became isolated. The Democratic Party and other elements of the capitalist government worked hard to demobilize powerful mass movements and militant unions, replace or co-opt radical leadership, and cut off efforts to organize a political party of the working class.

Far-right groups capitalize on social, economic, and political crises under capitalism.The lack of a political alternative to the two corporate parties enables far-right radicalization. Many of these same people turning to right-wing ideas for answers are actually reacting to capitalism’s structural failures. The far-right seeks to convince working and middle-class people alienated by capitalism that trans and other marginalized people are responsible for the crisis in their communities and the economy. 

Blame for the rise of the far-right is assigned to the Republican Party, particularly the Trump presidency. The Republican Party openly relies on racist, sexist, homophobic and, transphobic rhetoric and policies to gain votes. But they are not alone. Biden reminds us what the Democratic Party thinks of trans rights by allowing limitations on trans students participating in sports. 

Historically, it is also the Democratic Party we have to thank for trans people’s legal vulnerabilities. LGBTQ+ organizations and advocates campaigned for gay rights legislation from the 90s-2010s that included protecting trans people against discrimination. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party refused to advance these bills unless trans people were excluded, claiming we made the bills “too radical”. 

The far-right, in the service of the capitalist class, use bigotry to divide working-class communities, and pit us against each other. The greatest threat to the far-right and the capitalist class is a united working-class movement. Healthcare and education workers whose sectors are targeted by anti-trans attacks can play a major role in fighting back. 

Educator unions can protest, picket, and strike—demanding that trans rights be upheld, that workers have control over school curricula and libraries, that schools are funded, and that workers are paid a living wage. Healthcare workers can mobilize to defend access to affordable, trans-inclusive healthcare and fight intentional staffing shortages. Finally, CPS and Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) workers can refuse to remove trans children from supportive homes. 

All workers, regardless of workplace or sector, can organize pickets, walkouts, strikes, and a coordinated mass movement to demand that “Don’t Say Gay” bills and trans bans be removed in their states. The oppression of LGBTQ+ people is not innate to society and hasn’t always existed. It can be overcome. 

This Pride, ISG Demands:

• Defend LGBTQ+ rights, including the right to transition, self-identify, and live openly.
• For free, universal, trans-inclusive healthcare and comprehensive, consent-based, sex-ed for all. Rebuild a mass movement to legalize abortion on demand nationwide.
• Fight discrimination in public education–no book bans or attacks on trans students or workers.
• Mass union drives to fight workplace discrimination and the cost-of-living crisis. 
• No public platform for the far-right! For workers, youth, left groups, and unions to mobilize their members in mass standouts and protests to drive the far-right out of our cities. 
• Workers, activists, and left organizations must break from the Democrats to build an independent workers’ party, free of corporate money and accountable to its members. A party for working people can unite with mass movements and labor to fight for civil rights and help defend and extend LGBTQ+ rights. 
• For a mass workers’ movement fighting for better housing, jobs, wages and benefits, education, public transit, childcare and more to out-organize the far-right. 
• For a socialist world that replaces this exploitative and oppressive capitalist system with a society democratically run by and for the benefit of the working class.