The Green Sickle

The single largest gain resulting from real equality for transgender people will be women’s equality because it will help free women from the spectre of biological determinism. Just like our media have convinced workers that immigrants are their biggest threat, so too media has worked hard to convince women that transgender people pose a threat to feminism.

Most people on both sides of this debate accept that gender is a social construct that varies from country to country and society. Historically, capitalism has enjoyed the benefits of rigid gender constructs because it helped them create the Victorian ideal and with-it breadwinner ideology. But even capitalism has recently struggled since deindustrialisation to square its ideals with the cost-of-living crisis and reduced economic consumption, and so the alliance to free women from gender constructs has faced less organised hurdles. The conservative right remain organised against women’s equality and they are increasingly achieving dominance in our media coverage especially because it is a useful wedge issue to promote disunity among progressives.

The largest challenge facing feminism today is to liberate women from the expectation that they must shoulder the largest burden of care giving duties. That looking after our elderly and our infants is women’s work. There are more than ten million unpaid carers in the UK, overwhelmingly women, and that doesn’t even include those looking after children. It must be a duty of our whole society to carry out the care giving role reducing what Wallerstein called ‘the invisible economy’ which overwhelmingly discriminates against women.

Western society had long tied women’s reproductive capabilities with women’s care giving duties. Women have been hitherto defined by their reproductive organs to restrict their freedoms in areas of work and sexual liberation. The right to divorce, to a job, to a vote and to choose their own bodies decisions have been restricted in capitalist economies so as to hold back women and gear the economy towards optimising productive capital. Large family sizes suited the industrial economy, and so the expectation that women would bear the brunt of the battle for births grew. Biology became a useful tool of opression.

It was not always this way. We have much to learn from pre-capitalist societies where communal child rearing was considered the norm. Gender constructs were less rigidly defined because the household economy was more dominant than factory capitalism.

This is a dangerous moment for feminism. A retreat into biological determinism would weaken the battle for true equal pay, affordable childcare and equality in society. An alliance with the transgender community could sweep away the patriarchal societies last arguments and hold in preventing a more equal society.

There will always be people for whom their religious beliefs cause conflict in this area. The solution here is to listen and understand their perspective and to respect their religious conscience. This doesn’t mean changing Green Party policy to incorporate small minority held views, but it should entail respecting their right to disagree and to vote according to their personal conscience as has been an historical political convention for centuries. Observant religious groups will rarely be proactive transgender allies, but it would be naïve to assume this automatically makes them the enemy of transgender people. This is not a binary issue.