Editor notes: Following is a transcript of Episode 13 of the Blood and TERF podcast (audio format) based in the UK. We have graciously received permission to host a copy of the transcript as a warning and breakdown of resistance strategy to US readers. Credit for the podcast goes to M and E, and the labor of the transcript to a third comrade working with them.
This message pairs with Harry Josephine Giles’ Medium article Trans in the UK: What the Hell Are We Going To Do?, which is referenced in the podcast. We also received permission to mirror said article in full. We remain ever grateful to our trans comrades in the UK and their efforts to outreach resisters of organized transphobia stateside. With solidarity comes strength. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
Content notes for QAnon cross-over and all of its transphobic, antisemitic, and pedophilia-obsessed nonsense. This is a connection that we have noticed as well and are in the process of writing about in more detail. There’s also references to Islamophobia. Take care of yourself accordingly as you read.
M 0:25: Britain’s fucked. Every week we get bizarre updates about the latest maneuvers in the culture war. The situation has become so bad that the state is now explicitly anti-trans on a level of policy and totally beholden to fascist reactionaries. For many liberals this was a shock, because we always see ourselves as America’s progressive cousins, where a benign liberal technocracy would legislate the LGBT movement’s ideals into reality. This hasn’t happened. The counter-campaign has totally outmaneuvered us, and the reformist option isn’t really open anymore. Many of us had seen this as a uniquely British phenomenon. The Terf Island was so isolated that it could be considered a distant nightmare.
E 1:15: However, deep down we all knew, you all knew, that it could happen there too. After all, the American right in the age of QAnon, Pizzagate, Trump, Proud Boys, and triumphalist dominionism could always be counted on to pick up any weapon it could find for fighting the class war.
In 2016, the radical anarchist collective CrimethInc. published an article immediately after Trump’s election that began with the following words:
We were right about the direction things are heading, but wrong about the timeframe. We thought Clinton would win the election, and would then be discredited by new scandals and the challenges of preserving an increasingly unpopular status quo, producing a reactionary surge like the one that recently toppled Dilma in Brazil. Instead, the scandal broke before the election, with the announcement of further FBI inquiries into emails associated with Clinton. And, as with the Brexit vote, everyone underestimated just how desperate and reactionary the general public has become—at least the ones who still identify with the ruling order enough to vote at all. It’s later than you think.
M 2:25: If you’re listening to this, you know how true that was, and you probably know that we are now at the point where trans liberation and antifascism have to advance hand in hand. In 2016, the hour’s later than you thought. And in the last five years, the neoliberal world and all of its assumptions have been totally uprooted via imploding institutions, plagues, a collapsing climate, and vast international waves of street battles. Many of these things were seemingly unpredictable, but if researching this has taught us anything, it’s that while you can never reliably predict a specific instant, sooner or later the trend begins to live in its own right, walking, talking, and killing in front of you. The patterns are becoming evermore observable and predictable, and are about to make a leap to becoming very lethal, just as you all saw throughout the Trump administration. In this case, and at this juncture, you have another choice to make about how late you want to act to stop this.
E 3:29: Welcome to Blood and Terf. I’m E,
M 3:31: And I’m M.
E 3:33: We’ve recorded this episode specifically for our American audience. You probably sort of know this already, but you’re all about to get totally fucked and outmaneuvered, just like we were. Think of the situation as a mixture between how Bernie got ratfucked and a campaign of Atomwaffen-style terrorist attacks. We know that US antifascists, both those who are trans and their cis allies, are well versed in many aspects of these kind of fights. But there’s a wave coming and you need to prepare. We’re hoping that by reporting from the absolute gorefest that is the UK culture war battlefield, we can explain how we lost this phase of the struggle so that you can be forewarned, and thus forearmed.
M 4:10: We’ll be covering a few of the areas that explain how badly things went down in Britain: legislature, media, healthcare, reactionary convergences from the right and the left, and our theory of their strategic institutional synthesis. We will also be talking about the strategies we believe can be used to push back and eventually defeat this tide. We’ll start with section one, legislative threats and the media.
Table of Contents
I. Legislative Threats and the Media
E 4:33: Transphobes use a number of tactics to influence the media and high level political centres of power. In the UK this has been going on for years, as anyone familiar with the Times’ and the Guardian’s antics will know. It’s really important to understand this phenomenon because it’s a key tool for the transphobic movement. As Harry Josephine Giles summarises, “Anti-trans organising holds power through party politics, its own social movements, and the media. We should think about anti-trans politics as primarily conservative: it uses feminist rhetoric, but has only weak roots in feminism.”
M 5:04: In the UK context, as we covered in other episodes, there seems to be this emergent strategy of directly influencing legislators, such as members of the House of Lords or MPs, which are the two legislative chambers in the UK, and combining that with really pervasive influence amongst major institutions in the world of print and broadcast media. Obviously the classic that everyone knows about is the Guardian, but actually in the UK, one of the more influential ones was actually the Times. These are big, big newspapers, and they really define terms for mainstream liberal centrist debate on this issue.
E 5:41: Yeah, one of the things that’s really worth pointing out in the UK specifically, we do essentially have a monopoly on the media. Rupert Murdoch’s empire essentially has a monopoly on the media. So the media in the UK really does control the political scene far more directly than in the US. As we mentioned with the Bernie ratfucking, Jeremy Corbyn, and now the current leader of the Labour Party, absolutely, the public opinion rises and falls with whatever hit piece is published in the media that week, and that extends to trans people. The Times specifically is notable for having had an anti-trans article basically every day in 2020. And amongst that backdrop, if transphobes can get that sort of media foothold, it translates into direct political power faster than you would think, and in a way that’s much less clearly observable and counterable. It seems to fade into white noise, and then suddenly the state sits up and takes notice, by which point it’s too late.
M 6:44: It’s relatively unlikely that, for example, the New York Times will be able to suddenly fall to this kind of mentality. There were certain dynamics that went into making UK media institutions this way. We’ve gone into that in previous episodes, particularly our two parter about institutions, which I recommend people go back and listen to if they care to. In some ways, Americans are a little bit insulated from this specific dynamic suddenly erupting, but you are going to see it in some form. It may not be as dominant, but it will happen. You will see columnists, you’ll see people move from guest spots on shows like Tucker Carlson to guest spots on slightly more, shall we say palatable, things. Think the kind of person like Glenn Greenwald, who’s a controversial figure, generally viewed as a bit of a crank, and who isn’t trusted by centrists. If that guy talking can drag more and more people who are general centrist commentators in the debate into talking about this kind of issue in a hyper-reactionary way, then it means that they can expand the field of play to include anybody they want, and they can just drag in more and more talking heads. It’s about creating white noise and dominance in the media landscape, and then translating that into a stranglehold on intellectual life.
E 8:04: As Harry Josephine Giles says, the use of feminist rhetoric, even though like she says, it only has weak roots in feminism, is the primary difference between transphobic reactionaries and other forms of reactionaries, because that’s the best way that they can gain these footholds, is by having feminist concerns about any particular issue, which to your average person, especially if they’re using feminist theory and throwing a bunch of stats at people and using things like obfuscatory terms. It’s been quite successful in Britain, and I think that’s one of the things that they will try in the US too.
M 8:44: One thing that I think about quite a lot when it comes to right wing misappropriation of feminist rhetoric, and could easily be very, very successful in the US, is what happened in Britain with the grooming gangs thing. Here in the UK, there’s this town called Rochester and there was a major scandal with child sexual exploitation. The far right really jumped on this because several of the perpetrators were non-white people, and were Muslims. So they managed to basically jump on this general concept of there being Muslim grooming gangs, which is partially where that whole meme comes from. You’ve probably heard it before. Now, this also dovetails in with the rise of modern online far right grifters. Several of them in the UK are women. Obviously it’s not an entirely male movement. And although those women would generally say, Oh, I’m not a feminist, I’m not a man hater, blah, blah, blah as a standard reactionary piece of rhetoric, they would also be the kind of person who would love to talk about grooming gangs in a sort of, I’m here to stand up for little girls type of way. This is going to be one of the primary ways in which they push forward transphobia in the US context, the most obvious specific avenue would be in relation to QAnon, in relation to child sexual exploitation, and in relation to the kinds of stunts that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are pulling. What you’ve got to understand is that there’s this collaboration between the legislative level and the grassroots. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene act as sort of test probe appendages for this larger movement, which has this sort of decentralised brain. It makes these unconscious decisions and creates these figureheads, and sometimes the figureheads will get the sequence of actions right, and they’ll be able to essentially trick people into buying the reactionary narrative. It doesn’t matter if what Marjorie Taylor Greene does tomorrow completely humiliates her and destroys her political career, because ultimately, she’s expendable. She’s an experiment, and after her there’ll come another more sophisticated experiment. After Trump there’ll be another better fascist, after Marjorie Taylor Greene, there’ll be another better QAnon congresswoman.
E 11:01: If you look at people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer, they’re both spent now, but they achieved their aims. (Editor note: On March 9th, Yiannopoulos came out as ‘ex-gay’ and stated his intent to “help rehabilitate what the media calls ‘conversion therapy'” over the next decade. So we may still wind up seeing more of him stateside.) In Britain, going back to the fascist rhetoric around children, which again we’ve also covered in our episode about Little Timmy, the biggest failure for trans people happened recently in the UK, which is that healthcare for under-18s has now been entirely outlawed for trans children. They can’t access any gender-based healthcare, and that was greatly influenced by the grassroots cranks constantly bleating about safeguarding, and constantly spreading mistruths around healthcare for under-18s generally, because things like HRT, puberty blockers, are already prescribed to cis children generally, in most countries in the world. And that led to this extremely upsetting and shocking interference from the state directly into the lives of trans youth, because of these convergences.
M 12:13: In fact, this has already begun to turn up in the US context. Just a few days before recording this episode, the state legislature of Alabama voted on a bill to restrict medical operations for trans youth. It’s now a felony to do certain forms of medical treatment for trans people in Alabama. That is essentially what our side of the Atlantic, the transphobes over here would absolutely love to do that sort of thing. They would love to essentially scream their heads off about Paedogeddon, and then basically illegalise being trans in public. And they’re well on their way to doing that. They’re now engaging in probing attacks in the US, which is really what you got to be careful for. You’ve got to look simultaneously at the level of the grassroots, at the level of municipal legislature, and at the level of national stage stuff with major Congress figures, Senators, possibly even people in the Biden administration, if they get sufficiently brainwormed in a short period of time.
E 13:15: Yeah, in particular, the grassroots side of the transphobic movement has often opted for using their existing ties in organisations. So over here, trade unions or media bodies to get their message into briefings with MPs. Over here, this has now become so advanced that Graham Linehan, the bile-spewing grifter of the Brit terfs, he’s not a politician, he just wrote some sitcoms, is now testifying before the British parliament on free speech. So what starts with one-on-one discussions between MPs and reactionary activists in their constituencies can quickly explode onto the national stage. In the UK, this method was used by the right wing press, and the far right, as M said, to create a racist mythos of British schoolgirls being predated upon by roaming Muslim grooming gangs. And that narrative has now been effectively broadened into useful transphobic narratives, anti-black narratives, and general anti-left campaigns. So this is essentially the playbook for transphobic political actors attempting to game legislators and key influencers. We’ve sort of mapped how we think it will happen at the various levels.
M 14:26: Bearing in mind that the legal and political systems work totally differently in the US in the UK, and there’s federalism versus parliamentaryism meaning our government structures are completely different, the broad strategy is roughly the same. What you’ll get is you’ll get this combination of local, regional, and then national-level campaigns with varying degrees of extremity and sophistication. So on the municipal level, what you’re basically probably going to be looking at is a reiteration of 1950s-style Red Scare hyperlocalist small town conservativism. You’ll see the kinds of tactics that turned up in the McCarthy era with people really trying to control—You’re essentially looking at arguments over what kind of books are allowed in your schools, except now it’s going to be arguments about what kind of genders are allowed in your schools. So it’ll be things like forcibly excluding trans children from schools in certain states if they think they can get away with it, you know, bathrooms and sports. You already all know this stuff. America has a long history of doing this in various different iterations, including in the civil rights movement, and the increasing carceralisation of the school system in general. It’s even plausible that they’ll take some rather unusual tacks, like attempting to weasel in rhetoric about trans children being so disturbed that they might be a school shooting risk is one thing that I spitball imagined that a particularly creepy and manipulative politician could come up with. There’ll certainly be narratives about self-harming and safeguarding that will crop up. In the UK, we sometimes see this with relation to this government policy called Prevent, which is an anti-radicalisation program, famed for simultaneously being completely useless, and being extremely racist and oppressive. It’s often used to basically harass brown kids, but its focus has now widened to include any teenager who gets a little bit too political in the classroom. Anti-trans right wingers will basically just concern troll, in order to form a kind of neo-McCarthyist position. They’ll use the various bits of wreckage of the Trump period attempts to do this to create this coalition. They’ve already got a lot of resources set up for this.
E 16:45: So again, on the hyper-local level, in the UK, terfs often try to intimidate people and businesses into following a misinterpretation of our Equality Act, which is basically our national legal norms around what sex and gender are. So for instance, convincing a business that trans people can’t use appropriately gendered services. This also applies to things like pools, or any kind of sport or recreation facility where families and children are, and also will probably in America go along lines similar to all of that right wing media debacle around gay wedding cakes, and things like that.
M 17:23: The whole purpose of this is basically to simultaneously exclude trans people and the legitimacy of trans lives from civic life and their general local communities, but it’ll also apply on the economic level. You will get things related to the healthcare debate, for example. So it did occur to us that right now, the argument over healthcare in the US is, and there’s nothing the liberals can do about this, it is openly an aspect of class warfare. However, it is plausible that by linking this to things like gender issues and gendered healthcare and trans healthcare, the liberal centrist bloc that doesn’t really want to do anything on healthcare could put things on a detour and turn it into a culture war instead of a class war. So if you were to get into a situation where the Biden administration is simultaneously pressed in relation to coming up with a progressive trans policy, and also clamping down on all these weirdos in the schools that might do something to your kids, whilst it’s also facing pressure in relation to healthcare, then you could potentially see some really weird outcomes on the local and the national level. It’s even conceivable that because of the Pelosi Democrats’ tendency towards just persuading themselves to come up with insane means-tested systems that a vulnerability could crop up where they essentially apply some kind of bizarre algorithmic gender phrenology to decide whether or not you get health insurance as some kind of stop to the right wing. It’s already pretty bad in terms of giving health insurance to trans people, and I would not put it past the Democrats to, if they were persuaded to take a transphobic tack, come up with some way to pass this off as a progressive reform.
E 19:13: Yeah, as a trans person who is very interested in healthcare generally, and who does a lot of research, one of the things that I’ve noticed if you compare the US and the UK systems is that, obviously we have technically nationalised healthcare, although it’s becoming increasingly privatised, especially in sectors like gender healthcare and disability and things like that. But the big difference as I see it is that over here our trans healthcare is controlled by the state. So we already have gender phrenology in the form of our GICs. The big issue is that in the US, and I may not understand the whole story, people are able to fill a patchwork of paying for healthcare out of pocket, gaming insurance systems, and dealing with places like Planned Parenthood. Now of course Planned Parenthood, because they provide general reproductive healthcare and sexual healthcare, are very much always at risk from the right, and so the danger of left-lib insertion into the trans healthcare debate would be to leave Planned Parenthood and its more radical counterparts completely vulnerable to this right wing fuckery, even if it doesn’t actively erode the current systems first. Going into the state level, one thing that I can definitely see happening is ballot initiatives. So using the crankiest wing of the Republican state legislators, the Q lot, the Trump populist wave, will be the main injection sites here. So look to the previous successes of counterorganising during the Trump administration for tactics to use now. Obviously, there is no trans solidarity without sex worker solidarity, so I would look to the sex worker movements to see how they counter these sorts of ballot initiatives and proposals, because they do great work and have had some successes.
M 21:11: One thing that is notable is that when the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] took a turn towards a slightly more electoralist tack over the last three or four years, a lot of that focus was on ballot initiatives, so there is already a fairly hefty mainstream far left section that has a little bit of organisational experience in this regard, and I would hope that some kind of coalition of solidarity could be struck up in that area.
E 21:36: How we live in hope.
M 21:38: We don’t have the luxuries of functional organisations over here, so this is all hypothetical to us. Anyway, we mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene earlier. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a really important case study, because basically she’s brilliant at making relatively useless liberal commentators and politicians fall into really basic traps. Because her fundamental political modus operandi is to be a highly disruptive weirdo, she’s sort of like a disempowered version of a UK politician who’s called Joanna Cherry. Now Joanna Cherry is a Scottish regional politician. She’s extremely powerful in one of the regional parties called the Scottish Nationalist Party. And she’s one of the main salespeople of the transphobia brand in the UK. She’s done this through a combination of outrage peddling, being very aggressive in terms of threatening lawsuits, and getting unhinged columns in various different national papers. Now, she’s significantly more lucid than Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I think they fill similar ecological niches and they are there to push boundaries, and they’re there to disrupt the status quo and inflame these culture war flashpoints. As I said, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s great at causing libs to fall into traps. The classic example is this recent incident where she got into a social media scuffle with a Democratic congresswoman over the placement of either a trans flag or a sign outside Taylor Greene’s office that said “Believe the Science”, which was obviously a co-optation of COVID-related messaging. We’ve talked in previous episodes about how COVID trutherism and generalised hoax/conspiracy theory mindsets often heavily overlap with transphobia. It’s because the fundamental aspect of a lot of transphobic politics is that it’s a conspiracy theory. There’s many similarities between it and for example, generalised New World Order conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories about transhumanism, Jews, people coming to steal your kids, all that sort of stuff. And accordingly, it can be just directly downloaded into the psyche of a lot of American voters without needing to even install any new software. This means that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, if they continue churning out this kind of viral content, believing that they’re doing it for the kids and to trigger the libs, they can really crystallise this thing into being a proper centre of power for them. And once they realize that, they definitely will. Marjorie Taylor Greene has clearly already realised this.
E 24:16: Yeah, and talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene compared to Joanna Cherry, Marjorie Taylor Greene is linked to Q which is linked to the January uprising, which was a violent one where people died. That is a big difference between the US and the UK. And I think it’s one that’s really worth thinking about in terms of political violence. I won’t go into endless detail about how transphobes’ ability to enact political violence in the US and the UK has grown over this past year, and, you know, few months alone, but the exterminatory vision of the terfs has become far better realised than anyone in the UK could have imagined. They agitate in favour of conversion therapy, state-organised child abuse by the medical and psychiatric professions, and their endgame, like we’ve said, is total trans examination. This has been aided and abetted by the British government’s right wing populist strategy. This is something the US is obviously also vulnerable to. The big difference is that in the US, you guys have guns, and terrorist attacks and general violence have the capacity to be far, far more directly deadly in the US than in the UK, whether it’s vehicular terrorism, or more insurrections or whatever. The Trans State Watch UK group, I don’t know if there’s a US equivalent, but if not, I think it would be good for one to exist, uses a working definition of state violence which includes “interactions with the police, the prison system, the immigration system, and psychiatric detention (‘sectioning’)”, which I think is a good definition and something to really keep in mind when we’re talking about grassroots versus state-based political violence.
M 25:57: So with the mention of the January uprising and the QAnon movement and the various different grassroots elements that feed into this national legislative area of conflict, we’re now going to move on to section two where we talk about the reactionary convergences between various different elements of the transphobic movement. As E just mentioned, one thing I think is important to bring up in relation to the difference between the degree of real existing political violence in the UK and the US is that at the January uprising, it’s now emerged that one of the QAnon crowd actually gouged someone’s eyes out. Now, in the UK, we do have political violence at protests, you know, I’ve seen fascists throw things at protests that I was in. We occasionally have people who will attempt to bomb mosques, but it’s obviously not to the degree of violence that is over in the States. And concurrently, the degree of sophistication of American antifascism is much much greater than the degree of organisational sophistication in the UK, because our antifascist movement is really very much on the back foot and has been for about two decades. It’s particularly been on the back foot in relation to a reactionary convergence that we’ve noticed is now emerging in the modern Western fascist movement. Which brings us on to section two which is about that reactionary convergence.
E 27:22: Section two: girlbaz and other reactionary convergences.
II. Girlbaz and Other Reactionary Convergences
M 27:26: Should we explain what girlbaz is just for like five seconds?
E 27:28: Girlbaz is—
M 27:30: It’s girl, Baz. Baz is a slang term that popped up in the British lefty online political sphere. It originated on popular podcast, and it basically refers to a lower-middle-class right wing guy who really really likes Tommy Robinson, and considers himself part of the true grit working class because he’s a small business owner. And girlbaz refers to some specific people who we ran into in our general adventures in relation to UK terfery who were doing exactly the same thing, but trying to do a deliberately aesthetically feminised version of it in order to turn terfery and transphobia into a grift. These people are part of an increasingly reactionary coalition that is informally formulating itself in the UK. This kind of convergence is exactly what you’re going to have to watch out for, because it’s actually quite powerful.
E 28:33: Yeah, girlbaz is specifically in contrast to girlboss, which obviously Americans will know thanks to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Feminism. So you’ve got liberal grifts and then you’ve got the much more Baz-ish, not plebeian, but pseudo-working-class reactionaries.
M 28:54: Think of it as being the equivalent of people like Andy Ngo. Various different reactionaries supported the UK ruling which ended up denying trans youth medical care. This was in order to further their own eugenicist, anti-intersex, anti-feminist agendas. There was the example of pre-established links between the Heritage Foundation, which American listeners either will be familiar with already or should be, and British transphobic groups. What that meant is that this upper crust of American reactionary thinktanks and Republican policy wonks was given a taste of how tactically fertile anti-trans platforms can be in a populist situation. This will start happening in the US. What they’ve done is essentially, because the UK is like a shitty little protectorate of America, it’s been used as a very large focus group. It’s like a petri dish for all the wild policy experiments they want to try next, and for all of the various different reactionary sections of middle America they want to target. Anything that they think might fly, just generally to a WASPish American audience, they will take a punt and making it work with middle Britain, because they fundamentally really quite similar. There’s a lot of concerns about economic instability, they’re socially very conservative, they’re vaguely religious, but not quite. And that means that with transphobia, they’ve hit this potential goldmine for political action. The speed of metastasization that we’ve all seen over the last six months should show anybody paying attention how serious this problem is. What I mean is this specific section of the problem, because they are going for a very specific demographic, and it’s a very politically potent one.
E 30:43: If you’ve seen the successes that the Heritage Foundation had with British terf groups, they had all of those successes, and they were flying British reactionaries to America to meet people, making all of these connections, and now they’ve gathered all of that data and they have those connections pre-existing, and they can do this on their home territory. So of course it’s going to be faster, of course it’s going to be more powerful.
M 31:06: What this means is that you’ve got this convergence of various different figures, because the general street protest movement reactionary livestream guys scene has a vast quantity of people in it. That means that it’s extremely complex and diverse, so you’ve got people like the Q Shaman, and then you’ve got people like Andy Ngo, Ian Miles Cheong, all these kinds of guys. Now to the average listener, they’re all basically just right wing hyper-online weirdos, but it’s actually quite a broad coalition. It speaks to a lot of different audiences. So the grassroots side is in this grift scene of individuals like Andy Ngo and QAnon streamers like the Q Shaman. In the UK, they follow a similar model. We’ve actually seen people in the UK firsthand who are similar individuals to Andy Ngo or whoever, who will turn up to the same protests as transphobic cranks. We saw this with the anti-lockdown and the COVID hoax demos. Those were attempts at populist pushbacks against a government policy. And they were very similar to American fears about the liberal Big Government coming for the kids and nefarious doctors. These general strands of thought and these general demographics will converge in the US. The other day, Ian Miles Cheong was basically just totally shitting the bed about a vial of HRT, which, you know, came off the internet and had an anime girl on the box. That kind of thing is going to be exactly the sort of stuff that they put on their placards, in the same way that for example the anti-abortion movement had completely demented stuff on their placards. You’re going to see this at any upcoming terf demo or transphobe demo in general. Keep an eye out for what they put on leaflets, the rhetorical content of their posts, and crossovers in patterns of speech and different phrases between how they talk about dangerous injections and creepy influence, and how other kinds of cultists and conspiracy theorist movements talk about, you know, the nefarious doctors, the CDC, the New World Order, 5G Corona, all that kind of stuff.
E 33:25: Ian Miles Cheong freaking out about the vial of HRT is very specifically relevant because that was an online supplier. Now supplying estrogen, it’s not a controlled substance, which testosterone is, and it’s a gray market, but it’s, I think, pretty much legal to do and absolutely fine. But trans healthcare, because it has become this culture war issue, you’ll probably start to see more stuff like that, where people create outrage around “untested drugs”, and who’s sending these things, and safeguarding, safeguarding, safeguarding. That’s how they start making these inroads.
M 34:00: Yeah, for example, specifically in relation to the untested drugs/safeguarding thing, what would be an absolutely classic maneuver is if they tied this stuff into the drug war.
E 34:11: Exactly.
M 34:12: Which would be bad. Anyway, all of this stuff is just going to create a whole right-centre spectrum of transphobic political positions that appeal to a wide range of constituencies.
E 34:21: Accordingly, they’re going to start expanding their already existing sets of front groups, online communities, and figureheads to appeal as much as possible to as wide and varied a coalition as possible. They’re going to try and tend to get in bed with short bets first, like we’ve said with QAnon, fundamentalist anti-abortion movements, including Heritage Foundation, people obsessed with paedophilia, and arguably the reactionary bit of the New Age movement, but they will be at that thing and expanding into as many markets as possible. So you’ve got the extant fronts and friendly orgs that we know of, they’ve all got terrible names, PROGDK, which is Parents of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Kids, which is a nationwide organisation of American parents, and LGB Fightback, which is an attempt to co-opt the LGBT movement with revamped classic terf rhetoric.
M 35:18: Yeah, LGB Fightback is clearly jumping off the bandwagon from the whole LGB Alliance thing, which I’m sure that again, many listeners will be familiar with. Side note, PROGDK. I’ve just seen that in the notes again, and I got reminded of what I thought about when we wrote it down, which is that it looks like an obscure subsection of the Soviet government. That’s exactly how their acronyms work. Oh, no, sorry, Vasily can’t come in. He’s been liquidated by PROGDK.
E 35:49: Yeah, especially the stuff that directly takes inspiration or is a clone of Brit terfs will just be this absolutely stupid shit with stupid names, because it clearly run by like, seven people.
M 36:03: It will have loads of money.
E 36:05: Yeah, it will have loads of money. And at the moment, it’s very much astroturf, but the more exposure they get, the more genuine converts they’ll have. And that’s where things stop being funny, and start becoming serious pretty fast. I think from the US, you’re going to start seeing these genuine convergences, which I wouldn’t class PROGDK and LGB Fightback as. PROGDK? That’s Trix for kids. But the more serious stuff I think you’re gonna see is anti-abortion stuff, general fundie stuff. Family values I’ve seen from a bunch of American reactionaries in a way that you just don’t really get so explicitly here. It’s not that we’re not conservative around the family unit. It’s more that our government does that economically anyway. They have sort of forced family values through policy, whereas in America, I’ve seen rhetoric specifically about people respecting family values, being anti-family values, as a rhetorical stick.
M 37:12: It’s a bit more bible thumper-y in the US, I guess. As we’ve already seen, expect to see it from Instagram influencing wine mum woo cultists, all that kind of stuff. Facebook groups, as with QAnon, will be a big radicalisation site, because transphobes tend to be middle-aged, although they’re not always, They will use any social networking site. You know, this is obvious basic bread and butter stuff. Essentially, expect to see all of the classics come out from the post-GamerGate era of online reactionary networking, and just be prepared for it and figure out how to combat that. But yeah, it’s worth saying even though it’s obvious. However, there is something which is a little less humorous to talk about, and is a little bit embarrassing for everybody involved, which is that there is actually a bit of a threat from the potential for left reactionaries to kind of fuck this up. There’s two routes that this can come from. One of them is from reformist co-option, which we talked about earlier in relation to healthcare. Another one is in relation to entreprenurial, professionalised liberal activists who do feel good protests, Marianne Williamson-type people. There’s also a concern that you will see a red-brown thing begin to emerge, which would not exactly be unprecedented in the context of American or UK cultural political battles. So I think we’ll just start with a brief bit about co-option.
E 38:47: And one thing I think it’s really worth mentioning is, as M said earlier, the UK left has been in retreat for decades, and therefore everyone is much more on the fringe, much more hardened, and arguably we’re much more prone to cranks. We’re just less mainstream in general. In America, that’s not quite the case. But that, as we’ve seen with BLM, as we’ve seen with healthcare, as we’ve seen with all of the settle down and vote for the Dems kind of shit, you guys are way more vulnerable to co-option by liberals in a way that we really aren’t. And so you’ll get these feel good protests cults, but also you’ll get things like representational consumerism. Listeners may have seen there was a massive brouhaha about this fucking “trans healthcare app”, which was just venture capital shit linked to the HRC group. One thing that’s really important to keep in mind is that trans liberation by its nature has to be intersectional. It has to be related to houseless advocacy, sex work advocacy, harm reduction advocacy, and to cut off trans liberation from these things and co-opt it into trans liberalism, you are going to start seeing more and more of this kind of thing. So there’ll be apps, there’ll be fucking trans-branded vitamins, trans-branded retreats, and that’s something that really needs to be stopped, because it is left stagnation and it’ll turn to left reactionaryism very quickly. That’s what happened with cis gays in the in the US and the UK.
M 40:31: It will also tend to dovetail in with mainstream Democratic attempts to return to legislative promises. It’s essentially one wing of the co-optation movement. You’ll get lots of symbolic votes in Congress, and people symbolically putting up flags, but you won’t get any real changes. The insider threat aspect of this, the red-brown threat, is something I think we should probably touch on. So in the UK, this was totally critical, and it completely fucked us. The UK left was borderline useless in terms of actually practically fighting back against any of the stuff that happened over the last five years or so.
E 41:13: Yeah, I remember being in a leftist meeting several years ago, when this stuff was all rising, and literally being laughed out of the room when I brought up the fact that anti-trans stuff is an antifascist concern. That’s the level to which the left was entirely vulnerable.
M 41:31: It has slowly, slowly, marginally improved, I mean, you will at least get vague rhetorical flutters of interest from left wing groups, but the amount of left wing groups in the UK that are actually both ideologically and practically in place to do something about this is actually relatively minimal. We could go on at length about the exact state of the UK-based political scene and the antifascist scene in particular, but we won’t. Essentially the point I want to make is that you’ve got to watch out, otherwise, you’re going to get a DSA terf caucus. Leftist listeners in big social democrat or democratic socialist-style organisations, larger organisations, even the relatively disparate and disorganised ones should try and force the issue in terms of actively promoting organisational antifascist trans solidarity. Now, the tactical purpose of this is so that you can sort of pull the veil off anybody who is holding reactionary or trans-ambivalent or trans-exclusionary views, because if you can force the organisational issue, and you can make policy, then that means that either they will be cowed into a position of powerlessness, or they will kick off about it. And if they kick off about it in enough organisations, then it means that you’ll begin to see where the chips fall, and the field will be much, much clearer for you to maneuver in. It is far more beneficial for you to know whether or not you are going to lose the internal struggle within an organisation than to not know and leave it in ambiguity, in order that you’d later get completely sucker punched. The specific qualitative nature of this issue plus the current political dynamic means that assuming good faith on the part of people who want to push back against these kinds of policies, assuming good faith on their part is really unwise, and you’re just gonna have to start shoving reactionaries out of the movement, or you’re going to be completely screwed.
E 43:43: Yeah, when you look at an organisation, for example, being a bit weak on the issue of street antifascism in say, 2017, that could have simply been foolishness or cowardice then, but we’ve all seen that outcome. Similarly, if you don’t force the issue now, if you don’t force organisations to take a specific stance now, all that will happen is that you’re going to lose organisational time and energy when you could be using it. As M says, you need to know where the chips fall, because in the UK we let this rot spread completely unchecked, and then we had to deal with people who had ascended quite highly in leftist organisations suddenly turning out to be terfs. Then we were fighting on both fronts and it just completely fucked us. If you do it now, you can fight the homefront first.
M 44:43: You’ve essentially got to Dig for Victory, to use a World War II metaphor. That was a famous World War II slogan to do with growing lots of potatoes in order to not be starved. But seriously, what happened in the UK is that the left and the antifascists slept on this issue, as a result we lost the Labour Party.
E 45:02: Yeah. And we didn’t just lose the Labour Party, we lost everyone. We basically burnt out an entire generation of activists. We had this thing called Momentum, which—
M 45:13: We had? We have, it does still exist.
E 45:16: Well, it’s not gonna exist for much longer. But when I say we had it, there was a period where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of genuine leftists were signing up for Momentum, which was a sort of street wing of the Labour Party under Corbyn.
M 45:31: Basically the closest local analogue to the DSA.
E 45:35: Yes, but it enjoyed, unlike the DSA, a much closer relationship with the Labour Party, which at this point under Corbyn was proposing comparatively left social democratic-style reform. And it really mobilised people, and its destruction had even wider implications than electoral politics. So we got fucked on every avenue, you know, like street activism, trade union activism, worker activism, local stuff, just absolutely everything got subsumed into this whole and then destroyed. This had wider implications for the left generally, but specifically on trans stuff, the Corbyn administration was plagued by, not rumours, but concerns around certain members’ involvement with terfs. As we spoke about earlier, there was a period in the UK where terfs were trying their hardest to meet up with specific politicians to get them to listen to their very reasonable concerns about gender fascism. But in terms of actual quality of life stuff for trans people, Corbyn was going to propose healthcare reform and benefits reform. That would have been a great thing for trans people, rising tide lifts all boats and all that. So even though people like John McDonnell, who was Jeremy Corbyn’s right hand guy, was meeting up with terfs and listening to their concerns, if you compare the issues that the left has had with Corbyn in that political landscape to the issues that we have now, we are in a far worse place. But because we didn’t approach these things tactically, we didn’t gain anything. We just lost everything. One of the big differences between the US and the UK, which is good on the US’s part is that people compare Bernie Sanders and Corbyn. We did not engage with Corbyn cynically enough at all, in the way that Americans have kind of engaged with Bernie in a more cynical way, specifically, and correct me if I’m wrong, the way in which organisations like the DSA related to Sanders. Anyway, as a result of that, we essentially put all of our eggs in one basket and then allowed the state to take them from us.
M 47:52: Yeah, I’ve written about this in a general capacity on my personal Medium page, but my overall strategic analysis of how the UK got suckered during the height of the Corbyn and Momentum periods is functionally as E has just laid out, but one thing that I think is quite notable is that even the reformist wing of the DSA is significantly more openly politically aggressive than Momentum is, because Momentum was highly subservient to the Labour project. Even the most reformist portion of the DSA is much less subservient to even the Sanders campaign. Much though anarchists and anarchist communists like myself would criticize the DSA for its reformism, they don’t take their orders from the top in the way that Momentum ended up doing. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that you’re going to have to clean house in the left, just so that you can make sure, because the consequences of not doing it are genuinely very bad. You should not be afraid of having these embarrassing unpleasant arguments with people who you think are comrades. If you can have that kind of argument over the matter of anti-imperialism, then you can have that kind of argument over the matter of transphobia. And you’ve got to do it, otherwise it will torpedo your policy.
E 49:13: Yeah, the reason Momentum and the DSA are relevant is that you, I mean you as American listeners, are in a better position than we are. So do not waste it. Pease force these conversations, because if they go well, you will be surprised at what comes out of them. One of the good things that we’ve had in the UK is that groups that came out on the right side, as it were, after you’ve done this revitalisation by forcing the issue, people are much more likely to be actively in solidarity in a way that they weren’t previously. Because if you’re an organisation with people who are not actually your comrades, even if they’re keeping that to themselves, they’re still going to have a dampening effect on your organisational energy. Once trans people know without any ambiguity that they’re welcome somewhere, then they can get to work in a way that they were never able to do, for example, with Corbyn’s Labour, even though in hindsight it would have been better if we had done so.
M 50:10: Yeah, I wish to stress for the various different American listeners who are not in the DSA or who are in other organisations, the reason why we picked that specific example is purely because it’s big, and it’s a relatively normie section of the far left in the US. You should do this too in your local anarchist collectives, in your communist parties, in your base building organisations, mutual aid groups, whatever. Just do it.
Anyway, we move on to section three, a strategy of institutional synthesis.
III. Strategy of Institutional Synthesis
M: Right, so this section is basically to explain our theory of the hybrid model. This is our theory of the enemy, and what you need to think about when you’re designing your strategies. The transphobic political movement, the operational model in the UK was basically a hybrid of grassroots zealotry and institutional access, and that was backed up by a reactionary unifying but very vague political theory, plus the boots on the ground that were expressed through hundreds of headless little cult organisations and front groups. And also, you know, money from evangelicals and conservatives. It’s not coordinated at every level, but it is internally unintentionally cooperative. There’s an emergent cooperation from this chaotic system, because there’s a unified goal without there being a unified policy, and there’s a unified pattern of behaviour without there being any training or organisation structure. It’s kind of like an amoeba or a slime mould. It’ll continue to evolve in ways that strengthen its methods. Wherever it can get political nutrients or power, then that’ll be an area in which it sees itself as being politically rewarded. It’ll tack towards that, and it’ll begin to develop itself. That’s what you’re looking at fighting. It’s a sophisticated stochastic network that then can become a Karenvolksrepublic of grassroots QAnon cranks, disenfranchised lower middle class American Trumpists, hyper liberal weirdos from the depths of the most brainwormed echelons of the Democratic Party, think Buttigieg mixed with the Terminator, and then elite legislators with axes to grind, and any kind of frothing dominionist. All these people who failed to establish their total control over the class system under Trump, but got pretty fucking close, that general blob under Biden has decided that it’s reorienting away from Trumpist drain the swamp rhetoric. It’s reorienting away from Proud Boy-type of stuff towards a different area of culture war, because it sees weak points where it can hit. This is the next thing on the menu for it. This is what it thinks will be politically nutritious to its cause, and they’re trying to eat you.
E 52:57: Yeah, one of the ways I think about stuff when I’m trying to understand what’s going to happen or make predictions is both this slime mould metaphor, which I think makes a lot of sense in terms of figuring out where these rewards will be coming from. As M says, it’s vague, there’s no specific one leader and therefore you have to think of it in terms of this almost system level in order to be able to figure out what’s happening. In the UK, for example, if you want to predict Tory policy, you literally just have to think of a selfish kleptocrat, and that governs everything that they do. The UK is much more openly kleptocratic than the US is, and also we don’t we’re not driven quite so much by war-hawking and things like that.
M 53:44: I wouldn’t quite say that we’re more openly kleptocratic. It’s just that their kleptocracy has been so institutionalised that it’s simply a legal component of how government procurement works. Whereas here, we’re still slightly crimey about it.
E 53:59: Yeah, I guess we’re more gauchely kleptocratic.
M 54:02: Yeah, we do it in a slightly more distasteful way. Whereas over there, you actually negotiate over it in committee meetings.
E 54:12: True. I guess the point I’m making is that that’s relevant in the sense that over here, because it’s not part of the legal component, you have to think of it in terms of backroom deals, literal backroom deals, rather than it being openly part of negotiations. But if you want to figure out where things are going, you just have to think of these simple conditions, rather than trying to profile the next fucking transphobe. We do not need to know the rich internal lives of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, we just need to think about the systems and what they will reward and what they will punish. And think about that specifically in the context of the Biden administration, and what its priorities are, which we all know and are all very transparent.
M 54:59: Yeah, As Biden said, nothing will fundamentally change.
E 55:05: Oh, well, I do really hope he uses the special relationship to fuck Boris over regarding Ireland stuff, though. That would be a fun change.
M 55:14: Oh, god, yes. Can you imagine? But for now, yeah, that wraps up our strategic analysis of how the transphobic institutional blob is going to conduct its attack.
E 55:26: We’ve spoken about this in other episodes, and we’re not just making references to our other episodes to get you to listen to them, although technically we are. It’s more that this stuff has taken a lot of conversation and a lot of watching things develop over many, many months to come to this conclusion on. So if anything we say seems a little bit shorthand or incomprehensible, I genuinely do recommend that you listen to, you know, my podcast for more detail, because this stuff is quite complex when you’re first getting your head around it, but once you do, all of this stuff starts falling into place and becomes very clear.
M 56:05: Section four, a call to arms.
IV. Call to Arms
E 56:08: So, because these attacks come from a range of converging forces and directions, leftists need to think about how these threats are constituted in each environment, local, state, national, hyperlocal, etc. As we’ve said, we’re basically looking at a headless alliance. Even if all the bits of these don’t agree with or coordinate with each other, their efforts are ultimately directed at this one centre, which is maintaining hegemony over society via the means of violent control over marginalised bodies, which includes trans people specifically, but not uniquely. So we’re gonna look at some counter strategies for this terrible aim.
M 56:43: So these counter strategies are largely based on our experience of antifascism and our experience of mutual aid organising. Again, this is gonna be stuff that’s familiar to a lot of American listeners, and we’re not trying to teach our grandmothers to suck eggs or anything like that. We’re just laying this out so that for those of you who aren’t familiar with this stuff, there is some kind of framework for explaining how you need to combat this general attack. You need intelligence about your opponents, you need to look at how existing antifascist networks in the US and the UK gather information about right wing agitators and right wing organisations, you essentially need to do what’s called open source investigation. Now, open source investigation has existed for a significant period of time, and it’s a generalised online practice of doing grassroots citizen journalism-type investigation of things that are secret, and possibly clandestine, but where nevertheless information exists about them on the net somewhere to find. Now there’s various different online resources for this, and I’m going to link those online resources both in our show notes on our PodBean account, and in the Twitter thread where when we post this up. But as some general examples, the kinds of things that you will need to learn how to do is stuff like geolocation from photographs, there’s various different guides on websites such as the Bellingcat website, and you’re also going to need to learn how to do network mapping.
On the ground information has been very useful for us. For example, a few months back, I attended some of the anti-lockdown demos, and it was notable to see an emergence of QAnon and transphobic narratives on placards there. That’s very, very basic intelligence gathering. And because it’s basic, because it doesn’t require you to develop a superspy skillset, that means that you can actually use it if you’re very new. Specifically on the ground intelligence gathering is a brilliant thing to get cis comrades to do. The reason for this is that, A. they’re not going to get clobbered to death if they end up in the middle of an actual fascist rally, and B. they’re not going to get sussed out if they’re in the middle of a slightly more generic transphobic movement, although they don’t have to be the only people doing it. That is a tactical decision that you and your comrades are going to have to make in your specific groups. The reason why it’s useful is that you can get information on particular people being at particular events, then you can begin to create networks and maps of who is talking to who. Who attends different kinds of actions, who will focus on doing different kinds of things at different kinds of events, who is a speaker at a conference versus who is the ringleader of a street attack? This kind of information is really critical for antifascism.
Another area that I’ve just mentioned is geolocation. This relates to essentially photography and imagery analysis. Fascists, the livestream guys, they love to post loads of material online, and that material is a goldmine. Radicals will often say stuff like “don’t go to a protest without a mask on”, and obviously nobody’s going to be doing that now. So you’re- I assume that you will be wearing a mask when you go out to an action anyway. You certainly should be unless you have an extremely good reason not to. But the other side tends to do this a lot less for a whole bunch of reasons. This is actually really good, because it means that we are much more able to identify who’s at particular things. What you need to do is begin to develop a skillset of identifying specific people in specific photographs, connecting them to specific locations at specific times, and then connecting that to any kind of other information you can find in the images that they themselves were broadcasting. If you cast your mind back to the January uprising, a lot of people were eventually just caught not even by the feds, but just by random journalists on Twitter, because they managed to match them to the locations where major felonies were being committed in the Capitol building from photos that these people themselves had uploaded. Transphobes will do this stuff as well. Transphobes will commit idiotic crimes, they’ll do absolutely stupid stuff, they’ll take photos of it, because they think they’re doing the right thing. They think they are leading a revolution against an evil cabal of transgender paedophiles, and that they need to document all of it because they’re heroes. The thing about heroes is that heroes are stupid. Be a supervillain. Track down where the hero lives.
E 1:01:16: Mapping is also very useful in terms of the more administrative counterorganising. So if you are going to be countering ballots, if you’re going to be countering local transphobes, you need to know who they’re having meetings with, not necessarily in a street capacity, but so you know how many people they have on side, how likely they are to be able to pack a meeting, how many mates they have who can turn up and start having bad faith arguments in your DSA meeting or any other organisational meeting. Mapping is very well thought of by many leftists, specifically syndicalists and labour organisers for this very reason. It’s really worth doing at basically every level, specifically when you’re doing counterorganising. As someone who’s had to counterorganise several times against specific people, the way in which I have mapped has often been socially, because humans are social creatures. And because of the pandemic, a lot of this stuff is online, and you should really take advantage of that.
M 1:02:15: Particularly when it comes to the organisational and more abstract area of mapping, it will also help you create a sort of theory of the enemy in your specific locale. So if you’re dealing with a localised transphobic group, then the more you map their interactions with other organisations, with local politicians and so on, the more you will begin to understand how they make decisions. You can do this with just a couple of friends. Me and E largely just consult with each other, and people who I could describe as specialists, when we’re doing intelligence gathering for this and our other antifascist activities. You don’t need a vast branch of twenty socialists to pull this stuff off. It can just be you and your five friends on a chat server. However, mentioning chat servers, that does bring us on to something else. All of these tactics we’ve just described can be used against you. You do need to have a proper respect for information security, and not just do all this crap on Slack or Discord. Those of you who are already doing antifascism will definitely have Signal downloaded by now. But if this podcast is inspiring you to go and do anything, I would strongly advise talking to experienced antifascists that you already know, or activists that you already know, taking their advice on how to do proper, safe, and accessible operational security with your digital devices, because it’s important, and we don’t want you to get hurt.
E 1:03:42: Again, I want to stress that there is no trans liberation without sex worker liberation, and on that note, groups like Hacking and Hustling have done some really great work with opsec education for people generally. It’s really worth supporting organisations like this because they’ve had to deal with very similar issues to the ones that trans people will face. In the UK, terfs really like to identify prominent trans people or anyone that they really take a disliking to, in the same way that Andy Ngo does with leftists. I know many trans people who, for the crime of existing in the UK, have had their workplaces bombarded with calls. Anyone working with children needs to be very careful around opsec because of these safeguarding concern trolling tactics used. I don’t mean to scaremonger, but in terms of a threat model, specifically if you’re a trans person or someone who is going to identify yourself as an ally to trans people, you kind of need to assume that the minute you start talking about this stuff, at any moment, transphobes could descend on you and try and make your life hell. Now this stuff can be avoided but you do just need to be quite fastidious with it.
M 1:04:53: So mapping is the basic intelligence element of this. Information should then be fed in through an organisational context, whatever that might be, whether it’s a local political party, whether it’s a local branch, or some other activist organisation, or radical group, or whether it’s simply an affinity group that you organise with, depends on whatever your preferred model is. But regardless, the purpose of the information is to empower you to take action later. Now, there’s various different actions that you can take. Some of them you will already be familiar with, in the context of highly publicised antifascist activities over the last five years. So we’re not going to go on a big explanation of how to do street protests, because to be honest your street protests look a lot more sophisticated and fun than ours do. That’s a joke, they look fucking terrifying. But regardless, there are some things that you should consider that are beyond the street aspect of it or apart from it. You’ve got to start thinking about counter-institutional organising. If you’re looking at the local level, there’s going to be all this crap about schools. Those of you with children, or with social or professional connections to schools or connections to teachers’ trade unions, anything like that, should begin to advocate in the face of this managed chaos strategy for trans-affirming policies. Trade unions would be a really good way to start with this, because it’s a workers’ rights issue, and also you can frame it in a progressive way that gets local politicians on side.
E 1:06:15: This has the advantage of clearing out organisations. Once you have done that, and you know that people stand with you, you can work on this stuff a lot faster and a lot more efficiently, but not before.
M 1:06:24: Yeah, for example, let’s say you wanted to do this, but you had not cleaned house in your organisation, then you could easily get someone who pulls out the workerist rhetoric, saying that this is a distraction from a genuine workplace struggle in order to just sandbag your proposal. Now, if you’ve already pushed through this ideological battle in the organisation, that person will be heavily disempowered and will not be able to pull this reactionary double cross on you. You don’t want that to happen, because it will be annoying, and it will screw you over. It’ll be a monkey wrench, and we want to monkey wrench the capitalists, not each other. Anyway, trade union organising would be a really good way to start because then you can link the social and cultural aspect of the struggle back to the class aspect, which means that it much more falls into the core of really agitational activism, which is where our main strength lies. And accordingly, those of you who are in large leftist organisations like the DSA, For The People, and other Marxist Center affiliates, local organising such as Philly Socialists, Philly and Omaha, Nebraska also have very strong radical tenants’ unions, things like this. Organisations like this are really good blueprints, and people who are in them should focus on specifically turning at least a portion of organisational attention towards this issue. As I said earlier, this will include professional organisations like unions, but the point of this is that this can be combined into something that is roughly similar to what leftists call a dual power strategy. This is something that combines independent centres of power that are not under the control of state apparatus with a highly radical political program in order to create a generalised independent movement that can counterattack against the state whilst also creating its own infrastructure, which means that the state has less of a monopoly on the infrastructure that you require to survive. This will be particularly important to trans people.
E 1:08:24: It’s also very important to agitate in these spheres specifically, because the US, unlike the UK, doesn’t have the same worker protections, doesn’t have the same housing protections, and doesn’t have the same healthcare protections. Although we, in practice, don’t enjoy great workplace rights, great healthcare rights, and great housing rights, we do have a legal framework, and fortunately a state-reliant framework that you guys don’t have. Now you can see this as an opportunity to create your own, as M said, and create dual power that’s independent of the state. It does take extra work, but the rewards definitely are worth it.
M 1:09:00: Antifascist groups in the Pacific Northwest and around DC and Virginia are already extremely well established. The street battles over the last five years have meant that over in the States, you guys all have an absolutely incredible repertoire of experience and skills for dealing with this kind of stuff. Start prioritising a section of that general skillset and general reserve army of excellent antifascists towards looking at how to deal with this. It will help you deal with QAnon.
E 1:09:31: It’s like the apocryphal quote about an army marching on their stomachs. Behind every bombastic leftist action, there are people providing street medic care, people bussing people in, people who have informational networks, people who are providing emotional support. These are all things which are generally good to have and shore up as leftists. They’re also things that are really relevant to trans people specifically. If you are an American trans person listening to this, I’m sure you will know that there are trans groups where if you needed advice on obtaining your shots or finding safe housing, you already have these informal networks. Formalising them and radicalising them, and having these convergences with existing organisations is a good thing. And considering how the right are already doing it, we may as well catch up.
M 1:10:26: Essentially, what you need to do, the general rule of thumb is to play to your strengths, build power there, and then apply that power against the centre of gravity in the enemy organisation.
E 1:10:38: So like I said, if you have these informal connections, or if you’re in actively trans-affirming groups, you should work on strengthening your specifically materialist connections and resources, so that you can mobilise more effectively to counter state violence. It’s not helpful if you have a group of trans friends, but you’re all burnt out, because of course you are, and there’s a great organisation who has the resources that could help you, but you don’t know if they’re on your side or not. If you’ve done this clearing house, and if you’ve made these connections, you can have all of these nodes in your network, mobilise when needed, and you can all help each other. Moving towards this integrated model with nascent abilities just means more power when the cool zone eventually happens, which it is going to happen. As we said earlier, the last few years have really fucked with the neoliberal status quo. It really is a case of socialism or barbarism at this point. If you don’t build these centres of power, you’re going to be totally vulnerable, because the state cannot be relied on.
M 1:11:38: Yeah, you’ve already had one cool zone over there. We didn’t even get any. And I think you all know what that was by now. Anyway, the other reason why we want you to do this is purely selfish. We kind of need you lot to get your act together so you can do humanitarian intervention and like, get Biden to send over the B52s to just carpetbomb the UK flat. We need you to do special ops military advisor trips to go and give British antifa loads and loads of fucking “advice” to make them much more useful in any kind of tactical confrontation with the far right. Please. Please, can you send in NATO, we’re dying. Anyway, the moral of the story between comparing the UK and the US left is basically that there’s a complete gap in our ability to respond to threats. We have very little ability to respond to attacks at the minute. There’s some good groups over here that are trying to build it, but because of how badly we got fucked over during the Corbynist reformist wave, we just don’t have the capacity. You guys do have the capacity, and I would really advocate for you using it. It’s sort of like when two countries decide to adopt different kinds of policies in relation to combating a shared enemy. You essentially have done the equivalent of actually bothering to put some money into your defense establishment, whereas over here we didn’t put any money into our defensive establishment, and now we’ve been invaded by Nazi Germany or whatever. That’s kind of what you’re looking at. And admittedly, it’s not like the struggle is easy over in the States. In many ways, it’s much worse. It’s certainly more lethal than in the UK, and it certainly looks like it’s a lot harder. But because it’s harder, you’ve had to deal with it in a way that has made you a lot stronger. And if you don’t maneuver now, you’re going to be completely screwed. And given you clearly have a lot more capacity to maneuver than we do, I would really advocate for doing so.
E 1:13:42: I’d like to end this with a quote from Harry Josephine Giles, who I quoted earlier. The reason I’d like to do so is she wrote a very long article, which I do recommend you read, but I will admittedly say that it’s taken me a long time to read it and in chunks, basically doing a breakdown of the failures of the of the UK trans liberation movement. I think, again, like this episode, it hopefully will offer some insight.
That many trans people have invested too much in charities and NGOs, and in campaigning for legal rights and symbolic recognition, and have not invested enough in movement-building and in winning resources for trans people.
That the dominant tactics trans movements in the UK have used lately — political lobbying for rights on the one hand, and reactive campaigning against organised transphobia on the other — have failed to either win rights or stop transphobia, and so we need better tactics.
[…]
Ultimately what I’m saying is, build a local trans group wherever you are, fight directly and locally for resources for trans people, connect those groups in a national movement from the bottom up, and always centre trans liberation.
You know, the best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago, and the next best time is now. The tree here is gay trans anti-state shit, and its fruits are delicious. So yeah, that’s my take.
M 1:14:59: If you’re a regular listener this podcast, can you please chuck this episode specifically at any American radicals you know who you think might benefit from it? We’re really worried about what’s going on over there, and it’s a little bit scary.
E 1:15:14: We wanted to get this episode out as soon as possible because it has been very clear that all of the transphobic maneuvering and general reactionary maneuvering in America is coming hard and fast. As M said, we slept on it when it happened to us, it’s happening to you faster, we would really like it if you didn’t sleep on it. So yeah, please, please do promote this specific episode. It’s not even about our podcast. We just want Americans to be forewarned. Please. Anyway, we will see you next time. Goodbye.
M 1:15:47: Bye, everybody.
E 1:16:40: Also, there’s a bit right at the end which is from our original notes which technically isn’t relevant now, which is ask the Americans to Iraq War us and do special ops military advisor trips to make British antifa remotely useful. Which is something that I think is a concept that would be nice to keep in the episode.
M 1:16:58: We should do that. We should do that.