Despite a bleak outlook, the situation is not hopeless; not only is transgender liberation featured in socialist struggles across the world, but this text itself is part of the fightback we are all desperately due. A spark of hope in the dark, that cuts through the malaise and lies in order to firmly reject hatred and error, in the name of solidarity and belief in the masses of the world. In that name, we must build revolutionary movements that do better than those we see around us. The vision is this: build in communities and workplaces, doing the hard work to grow trust by fighting side-by-side with the working classes and those people most oppressed by capitalism, transgender people included. Build a party that is safe and secure for members, to be a home for the politically homeless. A party where we have each other’s backs, a party of the working class, and a party of the oppressed.

This text shows what Marxism can do: unwavering solidarity towards the transgender community, rooted in an analysis that holds up and is motivated by solidarity. We can and must learn about the history of transgender people, our origins and our trajectory. This work, which looks at transgender people throughout history and in the present day, casts an intelligent and sympathetic eye and highlights our struggles. Simply put, it is one of the most sophisticated texts on transgender liberation that I have encountered. It looks directly at transphobia, for we must understand what those who oppose our freedom say in detail; it is at times uncomfortable to read, but it is necessary for the fight. If you struggle with the content, I encourage you to read with loved ones or comrades to lean on, be it for emotional support or help with the reading itself. This text was in part written collectively, and should be read likewise. And finally, the pamphlet shows that Marxism-Leninism is, at its heart, about the liberation of all people everywhere. The likes of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the CPGB-ML, the Labour Party and so many others have tarnished what it means to be a revolutionary socialist—it is about time that we restore honour to that name and remind people that to be a socialist is to be a tireless fighter for liberation.

Not long after my experience with the CPGB-ML, I saw tweets they posted attempting to pick a fight with a plucky new group called Red Fightback. They accused Red Fightback of being too pro-trans. This was a ringing endorsement, and I applied to join. That Party, which I am now in, is one which heralds the values of this pamphlet.

Marxism‌ ‌and‌ ‌Transgender‌ ‌Liberation: Confronting‌ ‌Transphobia‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌British‌ ‌Left‌ is the response to transphobia that we need in this vital moment in the struggle for transgender liberation. Amongst many things, it articulates the conditions in which we experience such severe abandonment and isolation. So many of us feel this way—particularly as transgender, non-binary, intersex and otherwise gender non-conforming people. We are scapegoated and gaslit, terrorised and depicted as terrorists, beaten and abused, murdered and forgotten. We turn to the left for support, in a nation where lesbians and gays supported the miners and the miners led a pride parade in response, and find nothing. The liberal left offers at best hollow words, enacting the same hatred and violence as those they barely claim to oppose. Many on the far left offer crude ‘materialism’ as their grounds for perpetuating these oppressive structures, and claim to break with capitalism despite not challenging its transphobia, racism, ableism, misogyny or homophobia. This pamphlet thoroughly exposes the analytical incoherency and moral deficiency within so much of this supposed left; their position, which is plainly morally corrupt, is proved to also be analytically impossible.

I wish my experience was an outlier, a cause for alarm sweeping across groups, organisations and parties on the British left. Instead, it is only one of so many stories of transphobia—or perhaps a line in one singular story. Months later, the CPGB-ML published their line decreeing that LGBT* oppression does not exist.

In Britain, the options are limited. Parties rotten with untreated sexual harassment cases, where men covered up their mates’ disgusting behaviours at the cost of the safety of others, mouldy with opportunists valuing ease rather than work, dizzy on a merry-go-round of newspapers, directionless demos and blood bonds to a failed and imperialist Labour Party. It is a dire state of affairs. So, for lack of alternative I turned to the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), then without some of the infamy they have now. I never became a member (they require at least a year’s support and fees before they will consider you), but I attended two meetings. The first was broadly unremarkable and rather uninspiring. In the second, I said that I was transgender, specifically non-binary, and use they/them pronouns. The group of members responded by collectively guessing my genitals. One called me a ‘liberal fascist’ and a ‘naïve child’, and another remarked that I handle abuse well, and mused that the reason for this was due to childhood trauma. Suffice to say, I never came back.

In early 2018, I decided to bite the bullet and find a revolutionary party to join. It is a necessary thing for any communist to do: to find others who share your beliefs to struggle alongside, in an organised way that can achieve what the world so desperately needs. Any attempt to organise on your own, without people to guide and support each other, or without a connection to real people, is a dead end.

Finally, the concluding section outlines the current stakes of transgender liberation. It points out that actual socialist movements and governments in the Global South, notably in Cuba, are making great strides on LGBTI+ issues, through revolutionary-humanist approaches committed to transforming human relations and eroding social oppressions in tandem with the revolutionising of the state and economic life. In the British context, I argue postmodernist pro-LGBT ‘symbolic resistance’, emanating from academia and divorced from any class perspective, is futile. The other strategic dead-end is social reformism, presently represented by the Labour Party, which has consistently shown its willingness to throw trans people under the bus, in addition to failing ( even under Corbyn’s leadership ) to present an anti-capitalist alternative capable of challenging the exploitation and degradation of the working class. If it hopes to succeed, the left must adopt a totalising class viewpoint, attuned to the necessity of confronting the overarching capitalist state (whether Labour or Tories are at the helm), while simultaneously championing battles against racism, transphobia, misogyny and ableism etc., and in the process fostering true working-class unity.

Section IV explains why, all of a sudden, TERFs—Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists—have become a prominent part of the British feminist mainstream. The rise of transphobia has accompanied the worrying resurgence of fascism and neoconservatism, not only in the US but also across Europe and beyond. That TERFs rely on crude biological determinism—a doctrine inextricably tied to the history of colonialism and eugenics—makes them natural allies of race science proponents, and indeed many high-profile TERFs are explicitly racist. Firm links exist between TERF groups and far-right networks, think tanks and media outlets—which are all typically anti-abortion rights, and staunchly anti-LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex). The section also addresses the issue of transphobes appealing to ‘common sense’. The most vocal middle-class transphobes claim to be speaking for an ‘authentic’ working-class constituency, while preaching their hateful and violence-provoking beliefs from established media platforms. Transphobes paint trans people as privileged attention seekers, but the majority of trans people, in Britain and globally, comprise a particularly marginalised segment of the working class. Dogmatic Marxists claim that acknowledging differences among working-class people is divisive, but it is they who divide the working class against itself, by pretending its constituent elements (women, racialised minorities, LGBTI+ people, the disabled) don’t exist.

Section II explains what it means to say that sex is socially constructed, which is not the same as ignoring biology, or implying that bodily rights do not matter. Patriarchal (and imperialist) ideologies heavily influenced the development of modern western science and shaped the creation of a hard ‘sex’ binary. ‘Social construct’ does not mean non-existent: race is also socially constructed and has major, devastating, real-life ramifications. The transphobic belief that people are fundamentally divided by sex essence (sex essentialism) is not only out of step with the genetic complexity of sexual traits in humans: it also typically carries traditional misogynistic assumptions, reinforcing spurious notions about gendered hormones and brains, in addition to having harmful consequences for both trans and intersex people (people born with atypical variations in sexual characteristics).

The first section addresses the question of the origins of gender hierarchies. Transphobic 'feminists' claim that patriarchy is determined by 'biological sex’ and is thus a ‘natural’ occurrence. But decades of ethnographical data contradict the premise that clear-cut gender roles existed in early human hunter-gatherer societies—a belief still shaping dogmatic Marxist accounts of women’s oppression, including in most Trotskyist groups. A profound anti-intellectualism pervades most of the contemporary British left. I follow Marxist feminists Eleanor Leacock and Sandra Bloodworth in arguing that pre-class human societies were even more egalitarian than Marx and Engels realised, and that the creation of defined gender roles which accompanied the advent of original class relations and new social divisions of labour represented a qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, shift in human existence. The hard gender binary, associated with the nuclear family and the separation of productive and reproductive spheres, only really solidified during the transition to capitalism in Europe, and colonialism abroad progressively distorted or destroyed more flexible kinship models.

As a cisgender person (i.e., my present gender identity corresponds with my birth-assigned ‘sex’), I cannot speak about the hardships of anti-trans oppression from experience. My purpose in writing this pamphlet is to systematically show the incoherence of the transphobic worldview, demonstrate that transphobia is a central facet of the international fascist resurgence, and provide a cogent revolutionary-Marxist account of gender. I draw heavily on transgender Marxist and Marxist-Leninist writers, including Alyson Escalante and Jules Gleeson, in addition to classical Marxism.

It is a strange time to be a socialist in Britain. Globally, class struggle is on the upsurge, with revolutionary and anti-imperialist uprisings in Chile, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon and Ecuador, as well as new radical movements in western countries pushing back against decades of brutal austerity, including the yellow and black vests in France. During a time that calls for a convergence of anti-capitalist struggles against exploitation and oppression, swathes of the British left are preoccupied with the moral panic against transgender people (including non-binary gender people), with many parroting the same hateful rhetoric used against gay people in the 1960s-80s. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which likens trans people to 'a circle identifying as a square', only represents an extreme, farcical expression of the transphobia which is systemic across the left—including in the trade union movement, the Labour Party, and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB).

Class Origins of Gender

For TERFs and their allies, women’s oppression is rooted in biological ‘sex’, hence it is ‘natural’. The TERF group Woman’s Place UK claims women are ‘a distinct sex class’ and that ‘sex defines our destiny’.[1] The latter is, of course, a position long held by proponents of patriarchy. ‘Radical feminism’ doesn’t necessarily imply radicalism in any meaningful sense, it just refers to a specific strand of feminism that emerged in the 1960s, which posits patriarchy as a universal system of oppression whereby women are a sex-class or -caste. Radical feminists are often sex essentialist, meaning they view biological sex as the fundamental essence of a universal maleness and femaleness. This position has long been criticised by socialist feminists for failing to recognise the historical, class-related causes of women’s subordination; and by Black feminists, for erasing non-western conceptualisations of gender and gender roles. The foundational radical feminist Shulamith Firestone was not anti-transgender, but the problems inherent to biological essentialism still emerged in her ludicrously reductionist claim that ‘racism is sexism extended’.[2] As I show in section IV, TERFs’ sex essentialism is frequently coupled with explicit racism. Biological essentialism is an ideology that was rejected by Marx and Engels over a century ago. Marx and Engels outlined the historical development of patriarchy and the gendered division of labour—although, being products of their time, they still held a number of sex essentialist assumptions, and thus the classical Marxist theory of women’s oppression needs updating. But today, many British Marxists have become active proponents of biological determinism. Claims about women’s oppression are made without any engagement with the Marxist-feminist tradition, or with the broader ethnographical literature, demonstrating a culture of profound anti-intellectualism. For instance, Marxist computer scientist William Paul Cockshott, in four very tedious articles attempting to defend sex essentialism, does not engage with any Marxist feminist theorists, yet he claims to draw legitimacy from ‘the feminist community’ who are apparently uniformly anti-transgender. Cockshott, who attacks trans rights on the grounds that 'women don’t have d**ks’, currently has a book deal with respected Marxist publisher Monthly Review and was invited to speak at the 2019 London Historical Materialism conference.[3] British Marxism has been decimated since the 1980s, due to reversals associated with the global neoliberal counterrevolution and the loss of the Soviet Union. While presently the class struggle is everywhere on the upswing, in Britain newer comrades have inherited a smattering of small surviving socialist parties, often with the same dogmatic leaderships as forty years earlier who proselytise a very narrow and outdated understanding of the working class. The party leaderships are typically middle-aged and ‘institutionalised’; aloof from the working poor and preoccupied with book deals, bureaucratic trade union manoeuvrings, academic or long-standing editorial positions etc.[4] These leaders have drawn around themselves cliques of younger sycophants, but the good news is this model doesn’t appear to be sustainable, as suggested by recent exoduses in 2013 (in response to sexual abuse coverup in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party), and from 2016-19 (in response to anti-LGBTI+ attitudes and sexual abuse apologia in the nominally Communist groups). The concluding section will reflect on how to move beyond the present impasse. Most of the 'socialist' transphobes in Britain are grouped in the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which, despite its revolutionary rhetoric, politically mirrors the left-wing of the pre-Blair Labour Party. The CPB was formed as a ‘revolutionary’ splinter from the much-larger Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which peaked after the Second World War with around 50,000 members, and self-liquidated in 1991. While the post-war CPGB had abandoned any revolutionary challenge to the capitalist state it had at least, towards the end, begun to accept the necessity of combatting racism, sexism and anti-LGBT oppression as part of the broader class struggle. The CPB lost these creative cross-fertilising currents, but also quickly succumbed to the CPGB’s reformism and support for the Labour Party, thereby losing its sole purpose for existing. The CPB is affiliated with the Morning Star (MS) newspaper, which still enjoys some influence in the official trade union movement, and which over the last several years has published dozens of articles on issues of sex and gender. But the CPB’s actual understanding of sexism remains basically non-existent; rather, these articles are just dedicated to transgender-bashing. A 2016 MS article by ‘radical feminist’ Jennifer Duncan attacks what she calls ‘transgender politics’ and declares: ‘Women are not oppressed based on our identities, we are oppressed on the basis of our female biology’—no explanation for this is given whatsoever, other than that ‘male and female . . . refer to the two reproductive functions of mammalian species: those who produce sperm which can fertilise ova, and those who produce ova and can bear young.’[5] At the CPB’s 2018 congress, it was decided to defend and promote ‘sex-based rights and protections’ based on the contention that women’s oppression is caused by ‘biological sex’, and ‘reinforced by gender stereotyping’. The British Trotskyist left is, thankfully, not overtly transphobic. Conceivably, this is because of the Trotskyist groups’ greater investment in the student movement—typically socially progressive—compared with the CPB and other nominally Communist organisations. However, serious problems still arise from the Trotskyist groups’ officially anti-feminist positions, and dogmatic adherence to some of the obsolete assumptions and mistakes found in Engels’ account of patriarchy in Origin of the Family. A Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) pamphlet titled Women and Socialism states that in early human societies ‘a division of labour existed based both on age and sex. The dominant pattern was that men hunted large animals, especially where this entailed long expeditions away from the camp, and women gathered insects and plants and hunted small animals . . . since it was women who gave birth to, and suckled children (often for several years), their mobility was more restricted than men’s.’ As will be seen below, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) promotes a similar redundant account. Cockshott also asserts, without any citation, that among early humans there was ‘a fundamental asymmetry of the sexes’.[6] Decades of ethnographical data have shown this model to be demonstrably false. The classical Marxist account of the origins of women’s oppression, which harbours a dangerous and misleading sex essentialism, needs revising.

Ethnological Distortions

For centuries, sexists across the political spectrum have drawn ammunition from the notion of an original 'man the hunter, woman the gatherer' division of human life. The former presumed to be competitive and inventive, the latter nurturing and docile. Darwin hypothesised that male hunters’ 'great intellectual vigor and power of invention' drove the evolution of humans' large brains.[7] This perspective is still prevalent, even among certain ‘feminists’: prominent British TERF Emma Hilton (a biologist) defends sex essentialism by declaring that typically, across species, ‘males are competitive and must win the favour of females’. The assumption of a natural division of labour predicated on male competitiveness and female passivity and/or maternal instinct has long set the terms of archaeological and anthropological analysis, and only began to be challenged in the late-twentieth century. Even today, the archaeological literature is 'permeated with assumptions, assertions, and purported statements of "fact" about gender'.[8] In archaeology, modern gendered meaning is often retroactively applied to implements or dwelling layouts. For instance, ‘[m]ost stone tools are simply assumed to have been made by men’.[9] Archaeologist Rosemary Joyce has humorously called this the ‘law of the conservation of gender’. Anthropologists too have constantly imposed modern social ideologies onto the societies they study, for instance the patriarchal identification of menstrual blood as polluting has often been wrongly cast as universal across cultures. As Marxist-feminist historian Sandra Bloodworth stresses, anthropology was pioneered by ‘colonial invaders and Christian zealots . . . Overwhelmingly male, they took with them the cultural and social values of capitalist society which distorted their interpretation of what they saw, especially when it came to gender relations.’ A further problem arises in the study of surviving hunter-gatherer societies, due to false premises that 'the decimated, marginalised existences of peoples pushed to the edges of their environment' by thousands of years of interaction with class societies can serve as models of original human social life. In other words, until very recently, analysis of early human gender relations was distorted by the fact that ‘societies studied by anthropologists are virtually all in some measure incorporated into world economic and political systems that oppress women, and most have been involved in these larger systems for centuries.’[10] Indeed, precisely as European anthropologists began collecting data, hunter-gatherer and semi-sedentary societies were being warped by contact with the colonisers—a defining characteristic of this contact being ‘a decline in the status of women relative to men.’[11] The case of the Montagnais (Innu) residing in Nitassinan (eastern Quebec and Labrador in Canada) is instructive. From the mid-sixteenth century, permanent French trading posts were established along St Lawrence Valley. Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary who lived with the Montagnais in the early-seventeenth century, described how the women held 'great power' and had 'in nearly every instance . . . the choice of plans, of undertakings, of journeys, of winterings.' When circumstance required it, Montagnais women hunted, and men looked after children. The Jesuits were tasked with converting the Montagnais not only to Christianity, but also to monogamy and patriarchy.[12] After a decade of colonial missionary activity and trading relations, the Montagnais had begun to institutionalise a male chiefly authority who traded with the Europeans, as well as violence against wives and children. The Montagnais became dependent on the fur trade, and animals became scarce: over time their large kinship bands were divided into smaller family units, with an increasingly rigid division of labour privileging men as fur trappers.[13]

The Making of Man The Hunter and Woman The Gatherer

The mythology of a universal gendered division of activity is further predicated on the manipulation of ethnographical data to conform with modern western expectations. In 1968 the hugely influential (in both popular and academic terms) book Man the Hunter was published; the result of a 1966 symposium of the same name. Participants in the Man the Hunter symposium ‘simply reclassified the pursuit of large aquatic animals as hunting rather than fishing, and they also redefined shellfishing as gathering rather than fishing . . . Hunting was more narrowly construed to highlight the pursuit of large and mobile animals . . . by narrowing the scope of “hunting,” the symposium participants eliminated women’s contributions’.[14] The myth of man the hunter has subsequently been overturned by a growing ethnographic literature which “documents the simple but undeniable reality that women also hunt”, sometimes including large mammals. Contra Darwin’s model of ingenious lone-huntsmen, in the last several decades ethnographers have emphasised the importance of collective hunting methods involving men and women, including drives (pressing animals into surrounds or over cliffs), ambushes at river crossings, poison, snares, nets etc.[15] As Marxist feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock pointed out, the lack of clear work divisions ensured the absence of unequal or coercive class relations: ‘food and other necessities . . . were directly distributed by their producers (or occasionally, perhaps, by a parallel band member, ritualizing the sharing principle) . . . there was no differential access to resources through private land ownership’. In this context, prestige and influence was predicated on ‘wisdom and ability to contribute to group well-being.’[16] The absence of a clear gendered division of labour is sometimes even seen in Neolithic dwelling layouts, from a time when class relations had already begun to develop. For instance, at the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which was occupied ca. 7400-6000 BC, archaeological interpretation and advanced DNA analysis of skeletons have found that 'overall, there is little evidence that gender was very significant in the allocation of roles . . . There must have been differences of lifestyle in relation to childbirth, but these differences do not seem to be related to major social distinctions', such as 'the transmission of rules and resources or in terms of social status and lifestyle'. Lynn Wadley, examining Stone Age sites in South Africa, suggests activities in the past may have been organised principally along lines of age, ability, or status, ‘with gender distinctions playing a comparatively minor role.’[17] As Rosemary Joyce puts it, in the face of such evidence it would be false to assume that gender roles are ‘timeless, and more important than any other social distinction’.[18] The absence of gender roles among early humans is further suggested by the resilience of gender equality in many (though not all) modern hunter-gatherer bands. In societies such as the !Kung of southern Africa and Mbuti peoples of tropical Congo, women until recently participated in decision-making and productive activities as equals with men, and had sexual autonomy. Among the Willow Lake Slavey nation in northwest Canada a third of all tasks, including small mammal hunting, are performed by both female and male children and adults. Aeta women in the Philippines hunt deer and wild pig. Yup’ik women in Central Alaska ‘not only directly harvested half the community food supply but also were regarded as the owners of the food as they dominated its storage, preparation and distribution’.[19] Wadley, as well as Caroline Bird who studies aborigine societies in Australia, have demonstrated ‘indigenous women’s complex and widespread involvement in a range of hunting activities, including direct harvesting [capturing and killing] of both small and large game animals, as well as toolmaking, gathering, and food processing.’ Conversely, in many low-latitude environments plant gathering by men contributes significantly to the diet.[20] Early human egalitarianism (or ‘primitive communism’), with collective decision-making and equitable resource distribution, was based on the absence of a gendered division of labour. Lack of gender roles and monogamy was likely useful for early humans because it ‘suggests a scenario where cooperation among unrelated individuals can evolve in the absence of wealth accumulation, reproductive inequalities, and intergroup warfare . . . this social system may have allowed hunter-gatherers to extend their social networks, buffering environmental risk and promoting levels of information exchange required for cumulative culture.’[21] As Leacock stresses, ‘total interdependence’ in such societies is what paradoxically determined individual autonomy and absence of coercion.[22]

Childrearing under Primitive Communism

The other famous tautology in popular representations of hunter-gatherer societies (one often used by sex essentialists) is as follows: ‘women bear children; the early division of labor is related to this fact, as is women’s present subordination; hence there has been a quantitative but not qualitative shift in women’s status relative to men’.[23] Again, this viewpoint is indebted to colonialist ideologies. Nigerian historian Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí notes that ‘western gender categories are presented as inherent in nature (of bodies) and operate on a dichotomous, binarily opposed male/female, man/woman duality in which the male is assumed to be superior and therefore the defining category’. In recent years, archaeologists such as Hetty Jo Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa have challenged the ‘deep-seated assumption that women in prehistory were “immobilized” by pregnancy, lactation, and child care and therefore needed to be left at a home base while the males “ranged freely and widely across the landscape.”’[24] Leaving aside the fact that not all 'biological women' have children, ethnographers have long underestimated the centrality of shared childcaring for hunter-gatherers. Sex essentialists sometimes point to solitary mothering roles in other surviving great apes. Over a hundred years ago, Engels ridiculed attempts by chauvinists to draw support from non-human animal life. In response to an anthropologist’s defence of the nuclear family with reference to bird monogamy (a nineteenth-century Jordan Peterson, though the latter prefers to anthropomorphise lobsters), Engels jested that ‘if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.’ In response to TERFs, however, one could sincerely retort that 40-50% of all primates practice shared infant caring, and that bonobo chimps (with whom we share 99% of our DNA) are matriarchal, showing that motherhood does not necessitate social subordination.[25] More significant, though, is the fact that humans are set apart from all other non-extinct great apes by the absence of mothers’ constant attachment to offspring. Humans produce the largest and slowest-maturing offspring of all apes, owing to our peculiarly large brains. This offers a clue to the cause of early human egalitarianism: ‘Higher offspring costs would require investment from both mothers and fathers, as seen among extant hunter-gatherers. The need for biparental investment predicts increased sex equality, reflected in the high frequency of monogamy and the reproductive schedules of male hunter-gatherers, who typically stop reproducing early and exhibit long life spans after their last reproduction, in contrast to male farmers and pastoralists, whose reproductive spans extend well into late life.’[26] But mothers and fathers weren’t the only childrearers. Early hominid alloparenting (caring for non-descendant children) was plausibly one basis, along with toolmaking, for the evolution of humans’ characteristic sociability. By age one, human babies develop intersubjective involvement, meaning they are concerned with what others think about them. Hunter-gatherer alloparents include both maternal and paternal kin: ‘grandmothers, great-aunts, older siblings, fathers, and even visitors from neighboring groups.’[27] Among modern hunter-gatherers there is huge variety in childcaring models, but male caring is still common. Male caregivers in the Central African Efé include fathers, brothers, cousins and less frequently grandfathers and uncles. Among the neighbouring Aka foragers, fathers are nuzzling, kissing, hugging or holding their babies 22% of the time they spend in camp, and when hunting they bring infants and other children along.[28] Filipino Aeta hunter-gatherer men are also active in childcare. The role of colonialism in disrupting these egalitarian systems can again be illustrated by the Montagnais case. The Jesuits sought to introduce corporal punishment against children and cement male patriarchal authority by eliminating polygamy and divorce right. In one instance, the Jesuit Le Jeune recalled being rebuffed by a Montagnais man: 'I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, "Thou hast no sense. You French people only love your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe."' In another instance, a French child struck a Montagnais adult, who demanded gifts as retribution. The French countered by explaining they would punish the child with whipping, in response to which the Montagnais 'began to pray for his pardon, alleging he was only a child'.[29] In many societies around the globe today ‘there exist customs and beliefs that help mothers elicit tolerance, protection, or assistance from men who are only possibly, rather than certainly’ related to the mother’s offspring.[30] Socially-conservative ‘evolutionary psychologists’ like Steven Pinker assert that male ‘sexual jealousy’ is an elementary aspect of human nature, but this is far from the truth. Take the existence of ‘partible paternity’—the belief that semen from more than one person can contribute to the formation and development of a foetus—among numerous surviving hunter-gatherer societies in South America. This ideological system, which mitigates against monogamy and male control of women’s reproduction, is ‘found among peoples whose cultural traditions diverged millennia ago’.[31] Because they comprise social systems of varied kinship reciprocities, hunter-gatherers typically have a worldview of the physical environment as a 'giving' place, occupied by people likely to be well-disposed—despite the scarcity of food and dangers of predation. In class societies, by contrast, ‘a long history of patrilineally transmitted resources leaves men preoccupied with genetic paternity and puts children whose paternity is in doubt at a serious disadvantage.’[32] Kinship models not based primarily on gender have however survived in some pre-capitalist class societies, especially prior to colonial contact. In traditional Yoruba society, social categories ‘do not rest on body type, and positioning is highly situational’: Because the fundamental organizing principle within the [traditional Yoruba] family is seniority based on relative age, and not gender, kinship categories encode seniority not gender. . . . Hence the words egbon refers to the older sibling and aburo to the younger sibling of the speaker regardless of gender. . . . There are no single words denoting girl or boy in the first instance. With regard to the categories husband and wife, within the family the category oko, which is usually glossed as the English husband, is non-gender-specific because it encompasses both males and females. Iyawo glossed as wife, in English refers to in-marrying females. The distinction between oko and iyawo is not one of gender but distinguishes between those who are birth members of the family and those who enter by marriage. . . . This hierarchy is not a gender hierarchy because even female oko are superior to the female iyawo. . . . Thus relationships are fluid and social roles are situational continuously placing individuals in context-dependent hierarchical and non-hierarchical changing roles In any case, as the traditional assumption of a ‘natural’ male-hunter/female-childrearer binary has been so thoroughly undermined, we need more flexible ways of thinking about gender in early human societies. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), in defending a party motion against ‘identity politics’, declared that ‘Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin didn’t devote much attention to the politics of gender fluidity because it did not exist as an issue. This concept—contrary to the opinion of those opposed to this motion—is not “as old as humanity”.’[33] What is the absence of a gendered division of social activity (social activity being the essence of human existence) among early humans if not the absence of a gender binary itself? And if gender fluidity is a 'postmodern invention', how does the CPGB(ML) account for the prevalence of non-binary gender identities in pre-capitalist class societies? To list but a few: the Indonesian bissu; Zapotec muxe; Albanian burrnesha; Omani khanith; Samoan fa’afafine; Swahili mashoga, Madagascan sekrata and Mohave alyha. There is great variation in these gender roles, which cannot be encompassed by the western category of ‘transgender’. They have entailed people being ‘reassigned from masculine to feminine or vice versa; in other cultures, [gender variant] people have been defined as a third or even fourth gender; in still others, they have been defined as non-gendered.’ While in pre-capitalist class societies these and other forms of gender/sexuality expression were rarely allowed completely free expression, it is undeniable that under colonialism and capitalism they have been subjected to unprecedentedly systematic suppression. For instance, same-gender eroticism (or what was perceived as such by Europeans) among indigenous peoples of the Americas was a major justification for the Spaniards’ genocidal colonial practices, and in the Caribbean castration was used as a specific punishment for 'sodomy'. Dozens of indigenous people were also burned as “sodomites” in the Portuguese colonies.[34] Leslie Feinberg pointed out that laws criminalising ‘same-sex’ relations in India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Singapore and Brunei ‘all have the same name—“Article 377”—because the same colonial power wrote the law: Britain.’ In India hijras, a group with indeterminate gender expression that traditionally had a public religious role, were criminalised by the colonial authorities and misgendered as male “professional sodomites”. Hijras remain a marginalised group in India today. On a less extreme note than the CPGB(ML), the Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency (a successor of the Militant Tendency), in an article addressing LGBT rights, insists that ‘a male/female biological sex exists in nature’ and that consequently ‘gender identity’ also exists in nature. This is anathema to Marxism, which recognises that “social consciousness is determined by social-historical being”. Gender identities cannot have existed before the advent of defined social gender roles.

The Advent of Patriarchy

In all the false assumptions of a natural gendered division of labour, ‘the source of transformation in women’s status is bypassed: the development of trade and specialization to the point that relations of dependence emerge outside of the band, village, or kin collective, undermine individual control and personal autonomy, and lay the basis for hierarchy.’[35] This problem emerged to a certain extent in Engels’ Origin. Engels was among the first to recognise and chart the historical development of women’s oppression, but his account of original patriarchy nonetheless relied on the false assumption that to ‘procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so.’ For Engels, as with today’s dogmatic or ill-informed Marxists, there had always been a fundamental, natural division of labour along ‘sex’ lines (the difference is that, while Engels rapaciously absorbed the latest scientific advances and ethnographic data of his day, our present dogmatists ignore the wealth of evidence that has emerged since the 1970s). Engels’ sex-essentialist assumptions led to an overly-mechanistic account of women’s subordination: that with the productivity gains accompanying pastoralism, ‘All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man’. Engels argued that the domestication of large animals produced the first surpluses above what society needed (false), and that men were automatically responsible for this work as a continuation of their ‘natural’ role as hunters (also false). In Britain, perhaps the most influential elaboration on Engels’ account of patriarchy came from Chris Harman, who remains the foundation for theorisations of women’s oppression within the Trotskyist SWP/‘International Socialism’ tradition. Harman provided a somewhat different account of surplus extraction to Engels, but still leaned on the wrong assumption that among early hunter-gatherers there was 'a division of labour between men and women, with men doing most of the hunting and women most of the gathering’. The idea of a mechanical transition from a hunter-gather division of labour to a more hierarchical pastoral division of labour needs replacing. Firstly, original surpluses were not immediately accompanied by patriarchal appropriation or accumulation. Rather, as Bloodworth outlines: the first surpluses were probably the result of better production of vegetables, fruit, grains and/or fishing, activities which no one disputes women played an active role in. Neither can men’s dominance be explained by the use of the heavy plough as many argue, because class societies and women’s oppression arose in the Americas before its introduction . . . Some archaeologists now argue that technological and social features formerly associated with fully settled agricultural societies, such as large sedentary populations, socio-economic inequalities, slavery, craft specialisation, etc., are evident among many communities much earlier than previously thought. These developments took off as early as 40,000 years ago in Europe and spread to many parts of the world over the next 20,000 years. Consequently, “the major watershed in cultural development was not the domestication of plants or animals, but the emergence of the more complex societies that first occurred among hunters and gatherers”. Hrdy suggests that ‘unilineal—and perhaps especially patrilineal—inheritance systems began to emerge when foragers in habitats rich with marine resources began living more sedentary lives at higher population densities’, as in coastal South Africa some 4,000 years ago.[36] Though even before then, semi-permanent and seasonal settlement among hunter-gatherers emerged at the end of the Palaeolithic, as the melting of the last ice sheets created fertile soils and marine habitats around the globe. Leacock, and recently Bloodworth, note the agency of women in the advent of patriarchy. Before patriarchy, decisions about production and distribution, moving camp, or inter-tribal politics were decided by both adult men and women.[37] So, asks Bloodworth, ‘why would women . . . just let the men get control? It is not credible that they played no role either in implementing some of the changes or resisting them, possibly both at different times . . . women were active participants in the development of the class divisions which led to the systematic oppression of women themselves.’ Leacock made this point 40 years ago, noting the need to address ‘why people accepted control by others over the products of their work and allowed the loss of their independence.’ The obvious answer is that the women (and men) participating in new divisions of labour weren’t aware of the full ramifications: ‘through exchange and the division of labor, people [including women] were simply enriching their lives and cementing interpersonal and intergroup bonds, innocent of the processes thereby set in motion.’[38] Leacock here draws on Engels, who recognised of the development of new modes of production that 'the more a social activity, a series of social processes . . . appears a matter of pure chance, then all the more surely within this chance the laws peculiar to it and inherent in it assert themselves.' Homo sapiens first emerged 200-300,000 years ago. As Bloodworth points out, ruling classes and states were only established an estimated 8-10,000 years ago, ‘emphasising that there is nothing natural about exploitation and oppression among humans.’ Control of the first surpluses that emerged in semi-sedentary forager societies were presumably allocated to trusted individuals or religious figures, which would include women. Over time however, surplus extraction necessitated new divisions of labour. Bloodworth explains: in more settled societies, children are potentially extra producers. There is also the need to compensate for a higher death rate, the result of a greater vulnerability to infectious diseases, and the possibility of wars over the resources which are stored. So the higher the birth rate the more successful that society is likely to be. It is in the interests of the whole society for women not to take part in activities (such as warfare, long distance travel or later heavy agricultural tasks) which expose them to the greatest risks of death, infertility or abortion. Thus, as Leacock stressed, ‘the significance of women’s childrearing ability is transformed by new social relations when they become producers, not only of people as individuals, but also of what is becoming “abstract”—i.e., exploitable—labor.’[39] Ruling-class women specifically would have supported patrilineality if it meant their family lineage could keep control of the wealth. And with the newly-segregated nature of women’s childbearing role, it made sense for control of production and distribution of social resources to pass through the male line. Gradually, but inexorably, ‘the sexual division of labor related to [most women’s] child-bearing ability becomes the basis for their oppression as private dispensers of services in individual households.’[40] Significantly, not all men got control of any surplus, only those in the emerging ruling classes. The advent of patriarchy (i.e. of original class relations) was a negative experience for both men and women, as suggested by comparisons of nutritional and skeletal health among hunter-gatherer and sedentary pastoral societies.[41] It is hard to overestimate the damaging impact of the idea of a natural man-breadwinner/woman-childrearer schema. Within Marxism, particularly notable is an unfortunate line in Origin suggesting that women entering waged work would erode patriarchy: ‘now that large-scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory . . . no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household—except, perhaps, for something of the brutality towards women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy.’ There’s an implicit assumption here that proletarian women’s continued unwaged reproductive housework (on top of waged work) is a given natural, non-antagonism. This is a belief that has persisted within numerous revolutionary movements, and been used to dismiss women’s particular struggles, with the false dogma that women entering productive/public work will automatically end sexism.[42] And, of course, the belief in an eternal social division of humanity determined by biological ‘sex’ is the basis of TERF ideology, as well as the refusal of many Marxists to acknowledge that the oppression of transgender people is rooted in the class-determined advent and reproduction of gender hierarchies. The development of a rigid separation of productive and reproductive spheres during the development of capitalism, accompanied by the heightened policing of non-normative gender and sexuality expressions by the state, has already been well charted by Marxists so I won’t repeat the story here, except to note that class conflict during capitalist transition has often been accompanied by rebellion against gender strictures.[43] In 1641, a peasant band in Wiltshire rioting against the enclosure of the forests were led by men dressed as women calling themselves 'Lady Skimmington'. In the 1760s, the frock-wearing Irish Whiteboys were an armed popular force who tore down enclosures and demanded the restoration of communal land. In 1812, two crossdressing weavers, 'General Ludd’s wives', led a large crowd to destroy a loom factory in Stockport. In 1839, in the midst of Chartism, Welsh peasants protesting British road tolls cross-dressed and called themselves 'Rebecca and her daughters'. Today, despite the mass entrance of women into the wage-labour market (on terms less favourable than men), women globally do the bulk of unpaid domestic work—cleaning, cooking, caring for children and the elderly—ensuring the survival of the working-class families and communities who generate capitalist profits. The devaluation of reproductive labour through the construction of the naturally-subservient housewife is essential to capitalism, and this is the basis of modern transphobia (and anti-LGBTI+ oppression more broadly). It is telling that an early British anti-women’s rights tract claimed that feminists’ end goal was the imposition of ‘hermaphroditism’/the elimination of ‘sex’ distinction.[44]

A Brief Note on Warfare and ‘Masculine Aggression’