I don’t know if any CW are required for this but if so suggest them and I will add. I’m not mentioning any particular hateful things; just the presence of them.
An old comrade of mine has fallen into the grips of anti trans bigotry.
It has been happening for 10+ years and I have raised the issue multiple times when we’ve been together or in touch. They downplayed their investment in the ideas.
Recently I have learned that it has crept into their mass organizing. This person is an excellent, committed, powerful organizer working for years at a local level.
I think they are now getting in to organizing explicitly on anti-trans grounds. They have capacity to be highly effective at this. But really it is the integration of anti-trans stuff into legitimate mass organizing work that is more dangerous. My understanding is that they are seeking to orient these orgs against the interests of trans people and to exclude trans people and even trans-allied people from organizing.
This person made many key political contributions to who I am. Much of the good I have done as an organizer is due to their influence on me. Without them I would have ended up the most insufferable kind of lib. On a personal level, it breaks my heart to see this has happened to a dear friend. I feel compelled to attempt to return the wisdom and patience they afforded me when I needed it, and offer them a better perspective, help them be a better organizer.
I plan to attempt intervention. We live far away from each other but do keep occasional contact. Less so over recent years just due to being on different social media platforms. I could get some correspondence and maybe a phone call to discuss this on the basis of our long standing relationship. I would offer to maintain the dialogue on going if they were willing.
- general advice?
- have you tried this and if so how did it go?
- is there hope?
- some kind of FAQ covering anti-trans misinformation; more in-depth and comprehensive would be better (for me to read)
- writing/ideas aimed specifically at communists/socialists
- theory to understand trans* from marxist/materialist perspective
- I know this sounds stupid but they already have theory to hate trans*
- This person is coming at it from a TERF (as in actual old school radical feminsm) perspective, not a right-wing/fash perspective
- The idea of “bourgeois decadence” is important here. It’s not something I ever found to be very compelling so I don’t have much analysis to counter it.
Of course I have my own ideas and knowledge but I’m sure all of the above has been perfected so I want to make sure I have the best at top of mind.
This person is pretty stubborn, as required to be a lifelong revolutionary. So I know I’m not going to turn the ship around in one conversation. I am considering strategy of reformism or harm reduction. For example if I could convince them to avoid bringing these ideas into their organizing, even while still holding them privately, it would be a benefit.
That fighting against culture of bourgeois decadence is, in itself, decadence of material philosophy. Being exploited doesn’t give a shit about someone being trans, but it surely helps when there is society around them ostracize them. Or there are socialists to rally around dividing working people, fbi would be thrilled.
They can just join pinkertons and cutout the ideological middleman in their head, if they (plan to) organize not against capital, but against fellow workers or divide them across
racialgender lines. usa has rich history of unions doing that with race and immigrants, didn’t work out so wellha! I have considered asking them if they have come into the employ of the state. or if they have considered that they might have been the target either individually or as part of a group, of a campaign of distraction/diversion/division. Even if I was completely neutral on the idea of trans people, I would be able to see that this person’s eyes are no longer on the prize.
Not sure it’s a winning argument directly. If I was targeting people around them to try to minimize their influence I would use it.
Depends on their self-reflexiveness, maybe it will become a needle probing consciousness when their thoughts go in that direction, maybe it won’t, never know without knowing a person. I’m not saying tell them they are feds or imply it, i’m saying they might be doing fed work for free influenced by some societal germs floating around (and you can’t come to those ideas intelectually, stranded on a lone island traveller won’t arrive at the idea of trans people not being real).