4 July 2026
A talk by IBT supporter Vera Ashbourne at an IBT online forum on 14 June 2026.
Like many progressive struggles at this moment, the struggle for trans liberation finds itself in a corner. On the one hand, it has many brave and dedicated fighters; on the other, it seems incapable of producing a leadership or program fit for making or defending real social gains. As anti-trans reaction grows worldwide, the need to resolve this contradiction becomes ever more acute. But despite the evident interest trans people have in revolutionary politics, trans activism remains mired in reformism, while ostensibly revolutionary organizations around the world have largely failed to contest the liberal leadership of trans struggle—or even seriously grapple with trans people’s needs and issues. Why is this?
The simplest answer is also why liberal ideology and leaderships abound in progressive struggles everywhere. Demoralized by the fall of the USSR, the decades-long downturn of class consciousness and class struggle that followed and the atrophy of the Marxist intellectual tradition, the modern left has largely proven inept at responding to social changes and movements that have arisen in the post-Soviet period. Many left-wing organizations have failed or refused to allow their trans cadres a voice in shaping their program for trans struggle, resulting in even groups with substantial trans memberships having little to say on trans politics (and often considerable internal anti-trans chauvinism). Others, seeking to avoid having to apply Marxist theory to a new and challenging field, have conversely placed the responsibility on new trans members without much Marxist education to simply determine the program, leading them to repeat the liberal frameworks most newly radicalized trans people use to understand their place in the world. Still others, failing to grasp the issue entirely, have fallen into various shades of anti-trans prejudice disgracefully dolled up as “materialism.”
The prevailing liberal ideologies in trans politics, and the politics of sex more generally, are mostly various forms of feminism. Accordingly, the left has largely adopted feminist frameworks to understand trans existence and oppression, ranging from reactionary Trans Exclusionist Radical Feminism (TERF) to more sympathetic strains like queer feminism. Perhaps the most widely accepted feminist current in the liberal-progressive and left movement for trans rights is intersectional feminism, or intersectionality, a framework for assessing oppressive social relations and particularly their “intersections”: the ways different, seemingly unrelated sets of social relations interact with one another to produce unique manifestations of oppression. A person’s experience of one social oppression is mediated through other oppressions they might face, in ways which would go unnoticed by focusing on one oppressive relation in isolation.
While analyses that consider the interactions of different forms of exploitation and oppression have existed for some time—similar ideas appear in early Marxist analysis of working-class women’s oppression—intersectionality as such was developed and popularized by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black feminist and legal theorist still active in the United States, in her 1989 paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Crenshaw’s essay, now regarded as the seminal text of intersectional theory, was a reaction to mainstream American feminist and anti-racist movements in the 20th century sidelining Black women’s particular struggles with sexism and racism, and an attempt to put Black women’s needs onto the agendas of these movements. It argues that Black women in America do not face the same experience of racism as Black men, but a racism refracted through the lens of sexism that manifests in substantially different ways, and likewise their experience of sexism vis-a-vis that of white women. As a consequence, Black women are poorly served by the existing feminist movement (led by and mainly catering to the political needs of white women) and the existing civil rights movement (ditto Black men), with neither addressing Black women’s particular needs. Over the decades, as intersectionality’s popularity exploded, its framework was applied to other forms of oppression, eventually reaching its modern incarnation as an all-encompassing general theory of oppressive social dynamics.
Intersectionality is much embraced and much condemned by various left organizations, but this tends either to simple capitulations or to vulgar critiques which fail to grasp its real strengths and weaknesses, and consequently reject its ideas outright without fully understanding them. This poverty of existing criticism both drives people who could be recruited to a revolutionary program away from “class-reductionist” Marxism and pushes ostensibly Marxist organizations towards intersectionalism in fear of appearing blind to oppression in the eyes of potential recruits. A better critique is sorely needed.
The most common leftist objection to intersectionality is that it encourages endless division and fracture among different subgroups of the oppressed, subverting efforts to build a revolutionary movement. These vulgar critiques usually fail to grasp the issue in its full complexity, and end up implying that acknowledging or discussing oppression outside class is itself unhelpfully divisive, or that forms of oppression identified by intersectionalists are either not real or too marginal to matter. These are inherently chauvinist positions. One can hardly blame those won to intersectionalism for rejecting them out of hand. A “solidarity” based on ignoring such divisions is no true solidarity. In combating liberal ideology in anti-oppression struggles, it is in fact crucial to expose how existing movements fail to meet the needs of the most oppressed and, through demonstrating this, divide the mass of the oppressed from their petty-bourgeois leaderships. Renouncing the idea entirely is tantamount to renouncing social struggle.
The real source of intersectionalism’s divisiveness is not the questions it raises, but its inability to provide unifying answers. Crenshaw’s thesis highlights many examples of the white leadership of the feminist movement and the male leadership of the civil rights movement demanding Black women’s solidarity without addressing their needs, but offers no solution beyond calling on them to better accommodate Black women and their perspectives. The underlying assumption, for Crenshaw and liberal intersectionalists after her, is that moral clarity is all that is needed to unite the more- and less-oppressed layers of a given social group; the task is to point out and explain the divide, and call on those it supposedly privileges to give solidarity to the more oppressed.
Beautiful though this dream is, it is doomed to fail. A solidarity founded on altruism against self-interest is unstable and incapable of mass appeal. Intersectionality’s underlying premises argue that the more privileged layers of a social group benefit from the oppression of those beneath them, without providing a clear reason why it is in the interest of these better-off yet still oppressed layers to support the worse-off. Its primary argument is an appeal to morality: the socially privileged should fight for the more oppressed simply because they ought to. This might work on individuals, but impassioned moral hectoring is not enough to win the relatively privileged layers of a social group en masse to side with those more oppressed.
Having tried and failed to bind the majority to the minority on this flimsy altruist basis, it is not uncommon for activists to burn out on solidarity altogether, writing off the majority as inherently incapable of mass solidarity with those more oppressed. Thus moralistic activism not only fails to win the majority, but disillusions politically active elements of the minority, driving them into dead-end sectionalist politics which actively reject the idea that relatively privileged groups can meaningfully be won to a politics of liberation. Marxists, by contrast, assert that mass solidarity is possible, but not on grounds of moral obligation or shared humanity. Genuine solidarity must be built on mutual interest—the recognition that different groups do not merely have a duty to support each other in struggle, but a genuine shared interest in overthrowing each other’s oppressive conditions.
To do this, one must draw out the material causes and common roots of sex and race oppression (or whichever oppressive social relations one is comparing), and explain how each jointly serves the needs of a particular social system. Here intersectionality fails entirely as the unified field theory of oppression it claims to be. Its strength over other liberal theories of oppression is that it can incorporate any and all oppressive social relations within its framework without privileging any one of them. But this necessarily leads to its great weakness: its inability to place any form of oppressive social relations above others means it ends up identifying none of them as central. Intersectionality can articulate the outputs of various systems of social oppression well enough, but cannot trace its myriad of oppressions back to any underlying cause. Thus it obscures, not reveals, the nature of social relations.
Unable to provide a unified picture that draws together its observations about oppression and explains how the different threads connect, intersectionalism cannot produce the basis for higher forms of solidarity. This problem exists across the spectrum of social oppression, but is particularly acute regarding trans oppression, where clashing discourses of sex, gender and other factors create an environment in which even the basic forms of oppression at play are disputed, let alone their nuances. Different experiences within the totality of the oppressive social relation of sex—such as non-binaryness, varying levels of passing, or ease or difficulty of accessing medical care—get flattened into distinct and opposed narratives of oppression.
Here intersectionality fails again: with no material basis explaining different oppressive social relations, it provides no means to concretely work out their commonalities. Moreover, its binary framework of oppression and privilege, where every oppression must have a privileged group benefitting from it (usually framed as everyone who doesn’t share that specific oppression), leads naturally to bitter fractures and infighting as different trans subgroups identify other trans groups, usually oppressed and impoverished themselves, as oppressing them. It becomes impossible to evaluate the oppressions different groups of trans people experience or reconcile them into a coherent picture of sex oppression without appearing to slight other groups. This unsolvable confusion and resentment is the engine of the monolithic Discourse in queer political spaces, with which any younger queer person listening will be wearily familiar.
These sorts of arguments are not caused by intersectionalism. They arise from attempts by trans individuals and subgroups to understand and articulate their own experiences of oppression absent any unifying framework. But therein lies the issue: intersectionality is widely accepted in trans circles precisely as a unifying framework for understanding oppression, but fails to resolve the acrimonious mess of conflicting theories that is trans political discourse. So long as the material basis of trans oppression remains obscure, such arguments will proliferate, and any coalition for queer rights will be vulnerable to fracture or deliberate undermining by hostile actors. TERFs are well-known to prey upon divisions between transmascs and transfems, for instance.
The trans movement desperately needs a theoretical framework that can resolve these arguments. Intersectional feminism has not provided this despite its vast sway in trans circles, nor can it. It is incapable of answering the questions it raises.
The most pernicious effect intersectional theory has had on trans politics, however, is not the divides it fosters, but the divide it suppresses: the fundamental opposition of interests between worker and bourgeois. Intersectional analysis reduces class to merely one oppressive social relation among many, not qualitatively distinct from other forms of oppression, with the differences between the oppression of working-class trans people and that of bourgeois trans people no more consequential than, say, the oppression of white trans people versus that of trans people of color. In doing so, it papers over the very real gap in interests between exploiter and exploited classes, to fatal results.
By muddying class relations, intersectionality chains working-class trans activists, often militant and even subjectively revolutionary, to a hodgepodge of liberal cross-class movements—feminist and gay-rights NGOs, community Pride boards, and so on—and the bourgeois or aspirationally bourgeois layer of “community leaders” running them. But a reciprocal ecosystem exists between this layer and the institutions responsible for their oppression. With all kinds of mechanisms, from scholarships and academic tenure, to consulting positions for “specialist advice” on minority issues, to government funding for NGOs, they are co-opted, made to depend for their bread and butter on the bourgeois organizations they claim to be reforming.
For fear of rocking the boat and threatening their place at the table, these leaders in turn constrain struggle against trans oppression to a quietist program of family-friendly respectability politics, minimal reforms and handing rainbow awards to politicians, cops and CEOs: a program, in other words, inadequate to freeing trans people from poverty or defeating the rising threat of fascist violence. This dynamic plays a major role in neutering trans liberation politics, subordinating working-class trans militants to bourgeois social climbers whose main political strategies are hobnobbing with Green MPs or gaslighting trans people into voting Democrat.
The ideological bedrock of this ecosystem is intersectionality itself, whose focus on individual responsibility for society’s ills has proven wildly adoptable by “community” NGOs, university administrations and corporate HR departments. Individuals within minorities are encouraged to climb the ladder as a substitute for empowering the whole, with the whole in turn encouraged to see their own liberation in those individuals’ success. Solidarity against discrimination is reduced to an internal struggle against one’s own biases, while the social systems that engender those biases fade from view. Change is a thing you achieve by winning seats at the table with the powerful, rather than organizing the oppressed for collective action.
This kind of corporate diversity liberalism is often framed as something that hurts all queers, “choice feminism” or “rainbow capitalism,” but in fact it serves the interests of this upper layer of queer people very well. Much like how the bourgeoisie of the nation-state understands and represents its class interests as those of the nation as a whole, Marxists understand that the bourgeois (or wannabe-bourgeois) layers of oppressed groups within capitalist society represent their interests as those of the whole group. The intersectionality of HR departments isn’t a perversion or co-option of intersectional feminism. Rather, the individualistic, legalistic and moralistic tendencies it has borne from birth make it the natural politics of social climbers. This layer gravitates to and promotes intersectionality because it replaces collective action with individual achievement, emancipation with representation, material analysis with moral responsibility. It enables the marriage of upwardly mobile minorities and institutions aiming to capture their talents, while posing no systemic threat.
By contrast, Marxism can articulate how the oppression of trans people arises from mechanisms embedded deep within the capitalist system, and how it is tied to the oppression of other sexual minorities—not merely that they overlap in their practical effects, but that they share a root material cause. At the dawn of the bourgeois epoch, the new ruling class was faced with a crisis of reproduction in the proletariat, which Engels describes at length in The Condition of the Working Class in England. In the grim conditions of industrial labor, death and injury among the working class were very high. Long hours and miserable wages made supporting the next generation a daunting task. Men, women and children were expected to work. Harsh factory conditions made pregnancy difficult and raised the risk of dying in childbirth, for both mother and child. Many children never made it to adulthood. Those broken in body by the industrial regime were effectively discarded, forced to rely on charity or crime, or else left to die. The pre-capitalist family had been torn up by the tyranny of the factories, replaced with nothing. Things became so dire that the bourgeoisie were forced to act from the recognition that their own future prosperity depended on there being a future generation of workers to exploit.
Over the late 19th century, a series of laws and ideological props were put in place, such as Christian moralism and the “scientific” elaboration of binary sex, both of which framed men as natural superiors and providers, and women as meek caregivers needing protection. In this way, working-class women and children were removed from the economically productive labor force—never completely, but close enough—and placed instead in the role of social reproduction. A domestic sphere was invented for the working woman, in which her main role was to support a working husband by arranging his household life and raising their children. Childhood itself was prolonged and framed as a period of helpless innocence, with mandatory education and bans on child labor. The working man was partly compensated for being a slave in the factory by becoming master in his house. Capitalism did not invent sex oppression, the family or the idea of men and women existing in a dichotomy. What it did was regiment them for its own ends, conjuring a new order from the chaos of early industrial society where woman was subject to man, children subject to both, and the economic spheres of men’s and women’s lives were as strictly segregated as possible—presented as both the natural order of sex relations and beneficial for all parties. This structure was enabled by advances in technology which lessened the need to throw as much human labor into factories as possible; women and children could be “freed” from factory work and men’s hours could begin to reduce, because the same rate of production could be maintained with more labor-efficient technology.
This was further enabled by the suppression of alternatives to heterosexuality and the strict gender roles it demands, with homosexuality and gender non-conformity becoming targets of state and social repression at this time. Strict heterosexuality and adherence to masculine or feminine norms were not native to the working class. Pre-capitalist plebeian society did not feature such a sharp division into men’s and women’s roles. Although not equals, men, women and children worked alongside one another in peasant agriculture and handicrafts, and their way of life was far more intertwined than in the bourgeois nuclear family. Likewise, the state had not for centuries concerned itself about who exactly the lower classes chose to sleep with, whether they had abortions, or whether some of them changed sex; it was assumed that the self-sustaining economies of the peasant communes would produce sufficient new peasants when needed, and for the most part they did. The dispossession of the peasantry to create an industrial economy and the need for a secure foundation of social reproduction within industrial society changed that. Ruling classes around the world had practiced varying forms of strict (if hypocrisy-riddled) public morality and seclusion of elite women since ancient times, as a means of securing family alliances and ensuring smooth inheritance of property. The great innovation of bourgeois morality was to extend that outside the ruling class and their close dependents to the property-less mass of society.
This sketch is obviously a simplification. A lot more could be said about the imposition of this system on the colonial world at gunpoint, or its vigorous adoption by colonial and semi-colonial elites as part of their aspirations towards modernization and equality with the imperialists, or the ways in which sex work emerged as its shadow. These three topics are important to queer and trans peoples’ place in modern capitalism and worthy of more examination than we have time for here. And much has changed since the late 19th century. The vast increase in the productive capacities of capitalism, decades of political struggle to ameliorate the oppression of workers, women and queers, and considerable advances in reproductive and transsexual healthcare, have led to a loosening of the shackles of gender and the family, especially in advanced capitalist countries. Women are almost fully integrated into the workforce again, though not on equal terms, affording them a partial and incomplete liberation from economic dependence on a husband and the obligation to raise children. The acceptable mode of life in many countries, or at least their more progressive centers, has broadened to allow queer people a partial and incomplete possibility at open public life. It is possible, though still difficult, to transgress against one’s birth-assigned sex and get away with it.
But this partial liberation exists in tension with the need for new generations of workers. Capitalism can tolerate inefficiencies in social reproduction (such as women’s liberation, homosexuality and transition) only while there’s enough surplus floating around the system to afford them. And our present-day capitalism has been losing fat for some time. Global economic growth has been almost stagnant since the global financial crisis in the late 2000s, while birth rates in advanced capitalist countries have plunged below replacement rates. It’s no coincidence that a global backlash against women’s, queer and other minority rights has been growing steadily since that time. The bourgeois family in the present day is perhaps the weakest it has ever been, but the project to reimpose its supporting foundations is going from strength to strength.
For many sexual minorities, that project is for now merely ideological. For trans people, it has long passed that point and is being enshrined into law in many countries. There are innumerable examples, from the ongoing attempt to freeze trans youth out of medical care around the world, to the EHRC, the British human rights watchdog, releasing “guidance” last month excluding trans people from bathrooms in public spaces. Of course these measures do not just harm trans people: each one mirrors a shackle that has been historically placed on cis women, other queers, young people in general. Each points the way to and supports further shackles on these groups. The reactionary project to reimpose binary gender and the nuclear family has no intention of stopping at trans people, whatever its useful idiots among TERFs and assimilationist gays may think: its purpose is to reinstall, as much as is necessary for capitalism’s ongoing survival, the regime of social reproduction through the family to sustain new generations of workers to exploit, and all the sexist repression and patriarchal brutality that goes with it. The oppression of trans people has a material cause, the logic of which means it can never stop at trans people, nor can efforts to liberate cis people from sex oppression ever succeed without liberating trans people.
This is Marxism’s advantage over intersectionalism—by tying trans oppression to a material cause, and being able to articulate that the oppression of women, gays, and every other sexual minority stem from that same root, it provides a basis for solidarity between those groups that extends beyond mere moral argument. We can tell cis women and gays that they should side with trans people not simply because transphobia is wrong, but because it is an extension of the greater system of sex oppression that targets them too, and its purpose is allied with every other part of that system. We can coherently explain that, for instance, bathroom bans on trans people are not merely an echo of the discrimination working-class women used to face in the factories, but one and the same act, serving the same purpose of enforcing binary gender norms and the strictures of the family on the working class. There is no restriction on trans women’s participation in sport that does not codify women’s physical inferiority, and thus their unequal right to participate in the workforce and society. There is no ban on youth transition that is not a ban on young people’s right to other medical procedures such as abortion, contraception or vaccination against their parents’ wishes—all these rights rely on the recognition that young people can be informed and responsible enough to make decisions for themselves, countering the notion of the helpless child that justifies the entire nuclear family structure. There is no restriction on presenting outside the norms of one’s assigned gender at birth that is not a re-imposition of gender norms on cis people, norms which have always served to reinforce the division of labor between the sexes.
Thus Marxists can explain to cis workers that their own liberation from sex and sex oppression cannot be achieved unless it is with and through the liberation of trans workers from the same system. This applies to working-class cis women and gays, and even working-class cishet men, for while the family system privileges men within the household itself, its price is enslaving them to restrictive masculinity and the most gruelling and dangerous parts of industrial labor. One cannot overthrow the bourgeois sexual regime for cis people and keep its chains on trans people. The necessity to fight for and alongside each other is no mere moral obligation, but a recognition that we face a common enemy—the bourgeoisie, whose interests are served by the maintenance of the system of sex oppression, who have structured that oppression to benefit themselves. Regardless of their own position within sexual oppression, the bourgeoisie rely on the continued exploitation of the working class to perpetuate their own existence. Working-class sexual minorities may at times have a shared interest with their bourgeois counterparts for specific reforms, but what bourgeois cis women, gays and trans people ultimately want is an equal seat at the table to exploit the whole working class, including working cis women, gays, and trans people. For as long as they are leading the struggle—and intersectionality is designed precisely to enable their political leadership over working-class minorities—its aims will be restricted to tepid reforms and bourgeois legal equality.
Marxists are not neutral in the struggle for legal equality, and we support reforms that will genuinely better the lot of trans people. But mere reform cannot adequately address the crushing poverty, discrimination and outright violence faced by working-class trans people. Any serious attempt at trans liberation will inevitably involve attacks on these structures of a kind that the bourgeoisie, no matter how “progressive,” no matter whether they are trans or cis, will simply never countenance: for instance, completely removing the influence of parents from their children’s education; recognizing medical autonomy for trans people regardless of age or other factors; or housing and income guarantees for queer youth (and other victims of patriarchal family norms, e.g. cis women and children) to emancipate themselves from abusive family situations without risking homelessness and poverty. Our struggle cannot be confined to bourgeois legal rights, moral argument and cross-class alliances—the mode of politics that intersectional feminism fosters. Only through breaking sexual minorities from the leadership of their bourgeois layers, and turning them towards their common self-interest with other sections of the working class against the bourgeoisie as a whole, can we seriously hope to build a genuine challenge to the bourgeois order and the oppressive systems it fosters. Only working-class revolution can rip out the causes of sex oppression at the root and win trans people, alongside the rest of humanity, a lasting freedom.
Intersectionality offers nothing to trans people that Marxism cannot do better; Marxists who capitulate to it lose much and get nothing back. It is vital to recognize the complex clusters of oppressive social dynamics that intersectionality aims to expose, and to understand their manifestations—both to combat chauvinism in the working class and to build a program that can genuinely address oppression in all its forms—but the flawed tool of intersectionality is not fit for this purpose. A Marxist analysis can encompass the divergent forms of oppression faced by different sectors of an oppressed minority, while being able to place them in context, analyze their origins and causes, and point out the social structures and material relations which sustain them in ways intersectionality cannot. For this reason, it can also see through the false commonality of interests across the class divide that blinds the intersectionalists and binds working-class trans people to bourgeois NGO politics. Marxism provides the tools for building a fighting solidarity between trans workers and the rest of the class against the common cause of their immiseration. Such solidarity is the necessary first step on the road to working-class revolution, the only possible means of defeating trans oppression for good.
Related articles
‘Then They Came for the Trans People…’ (1917 No.49)
Puberty Blockers & Hormones on Demand! (1917 No.49)
Transphobia & Fascism (1917 No.47)