'Better Than You': Karl Marx Would Recognize Transgenderism As A Material Class
Discover more from The Distance
'Better Than You': Karl Marx Would Recognize Transgenderism As A Material Class
Make the enemy play by his own set of rules
Karl Marx is a tool.
No, relax, I am not insulting the great prophet of communism, peace be upon him.
I am describing the use of Marx to understand history.
For all his faults, Marx knew what a woman is. In fact, dimorphic biology was the fundamental unit of capitalism in his analysis: woman as the first property, a reality of his 19th Century world, seemingly a thing as old as time, at a time when literal people-as-property was still a thing in the “civilized world,” and people struggled to imagine a different world.
A better world.
Feminists like Marxist analysis because it works very well for analyzing patriarchy to imagine a better world.
For example, radical feminists were the very first people to call out the contradictions inherent to transgenderism, earning the sobriquet “TERFs” by resisting a male colonization of feminism.
Analyzing “trans women are women” as a material sex class phenomenon, they saw patriarchy putting on lipstick and wigs and calling it progressive. TERFs have been under attack ever since, a quiet purge unremarked by the western capitalist media running dogs for some reason. Ahem.
Thus Marx is a tool that can be used, misued, or abused to take history apart and try to understand its hidden structures. Yes, people can write ridiculous “narratives” using Marx and other tools, such as postmodernism, or relativism. The house that collapses in a stiff breeze can be built with all the same tools used to create the most rugged home.
Marx and Marxism enjoy currency among the proponents of transgenderism. As I have explained more than once in this Substack, all ideas have histories, and all ideas are blends or derivations of other ideas. Socialism and Marxism became “intersectional” with liberal religion and queer theory in the academy. However, this does not explain transgenderism as a material phenomenon, a historical movement of people taking action.
It only explains how the material class in question has explained itself. Marx would look deeper.
Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans (PITT), an advocacy group for families struggling with the craze for medicalized gender identity, posted very interesting research last Friday that bears on the question.
This graph shows us where the American “trans kid” lives. Child sterilization centers are densest in blue, urban congressional districts.
Now, this is pretty basic as political science goes, and there are questions one might ask. Such as: are the most progressive places simply the most accepting of “trans kids”? Further studies are surely needed. No argument there with the reader, but it’s not my argument here.
If you still have questions, go ahead and read the whole article, because it is not very long. No really, I insist, read it. I’ll wait.
Looking at that graph, Marx would say that "Blue America" likes "trans" because it is an elite movement.
White, middle class people are allowed to reject their "whiteness," take on a new identity, look down on the Red Staters in red Trump hats, and maintain all their First World privileges. In the febrile environment where just being white makes someone ideologically neuter, while populist anxiety about the loss of the old economy continues to challenge liberal politics for solutions, it is no wonder that so many formerly male Occupy activists are now transgender.
Marx was wrong about the inevitable direction that capital-H History was taking. Capitalism is stronger, more entrenched around the globe than ever. Corporate “rainbow washing” has practically nullified the anti-corporate spirit of the youth generation these days. Brands bought into the LGBTQAlphabet agenda because it is protection money against organized radical action.
Antifa goons are too busy shouting down women speaking out against “gender identity” encroachments on their sports, spaces, and prisons to take on the system, anymore. “Human rights activists” protest organizations that won’t kowtow to transgender supremacy. “Trans activism” consumes progressive energy, time, and oxygen, purges radical ranks in struggle sessions, yet enjoys an absurd degree of funding compared to any issue space I ever saw in my own “netroots” decade.
Rather than worry where the rare earth metals in our iPhones came from, the elites would have us cancel comedians and podcasters and writers for wrongthink on Twitter Mastodon.
Think of it as the “Great Reset,” but with silicone tits. Hierarchies always evolve new forms under stress. Economic and social change, war and pandemic all exert forces on the social-political hierarchies of a society.
In 19th Century France, for example, the middle class used the state schools to cement their place in the Parisian pecking order despite rapid industrialization and multiple upheavals to the state.
During the “Belle Epoque,” the French middle classes signalled status with flamboyant displays of clothing and architecture and art and design. Elites came first; the bourgeoisie imitated their forms and rituals, inventing the modern fashion industry.
“Mass culture” was invented at the same moment, with magnifying effects on these shifts that resemble the siren song of social media gender gibberish on teenagers today.
At the same time, toilets were still a status symbol in the United States rather than a human right. Patent medicine was popular high and low. Placebo effects mostly outweighing its toxicity, millions swore by someone’s branded medical cure-all, but change eventually came from the middle class itself giving up patent medicines.
Disease heuristics are as powerful as hierarchical ones, so we may look to the rise of the covid class, empowered by social media, as another example of how a new material class can be transitory.
A sterilized child is forever, though.
Blue families are smaller, and the status of having a "special child" clearly appeals to some parents. Acres of electrons have been spilled about this topic, but I will simply note that someone in the upper middle-class Jennings family is elevated by the misery of Jazz Jennings, and it is not Jazz.
Elites — and more to the point, people who want to be elite — have sacrificed their children for that purpose since the beginning of time.
Dylan Mulvaney goes from unknown white male mediocrity to White House guest, with a million-dollar tampon endorsement deal, in 222 days, a massive jump in status. Don't tell me it's not about status.
He isn’t alone. Charlotte, aka Charles, Clymer and Rachel Levine are just two white male mediocrities lifted from obscurity to the White House. My friends who are still plugged in to Democratic organizing networks complain that Joe Biden was supposed to be the No Malarky man, but became super-woke. “Gender” is perhaps 80 percent of their problem with the president, by my own estimation, though I have not polled them.
We see it everywhere. It is literally naked in front of us. Jordan Gray, a “transgender” white man, is celebrated for stripping naked to show us his “trans body,” which is the only kind of body allowed to play the piano with its penis on British television. The song title, and theme, is that that he is a a “better woman than you.”
According to the new oppression hierarchy, paraphrasing its own words, transgender people are “the most marginalized community in the world or ever”, deserving the most special status and protection of law and society, as though they were on the Endangered Species list.
Most. Ever.
Men transform themselves into “trans women” and vice-versa with plastic surgery, hormones, voice lessons, a new wardrobe. It all costs money. Capitalism recognized a market that could be constructed and then exploited. We do keep up with the Joneses, as capitalism figured out a long time ago. You can be the “real you,” whatever lunatic or pornsick or traumatized self-image that is, for the low, low price of your body’s health. Caitlyn Jenner signaled the elite acceptance of the “trans woman” as a “female body” on the cover of New York Magazine. So did Gabriel Mac, vice-versa.
Status gained.
CeCe Telfer “transitions,” runs over hurdles set nine inches lower for female bodies according to NCAA rules, and receives glowing coverage in mainstream media as a breakthrough. Unfairness? What unfairness? Objections are silenced, blocked or suspended from social media. Absurd rationalizations abound, pushed to the top of Google algorithms that favor their content.
The status of the media giant is maintained, Telfer’s status has gained, only the women suffer. And who cares about them? Instead of asking the affected women, NBC uses a soft filter, and Sports Illustrated an expensive photo-shoot, to make Lia Thomas look pretty. Isn’t he pretty? So pretty.
Prettiest of all.
History, Marx would say, points to increasing complexity in societies over time, with cascading collapses when mutually-supporting systems rely on fundamental cultural assumptions that stop working. Like, say, a drought: gods are given up, idols overturned, new folkways adopted, homes abandoned because new food sources are required.
Never having seen Twitter, or Blackrock, Marx would still recognize the opposition to Elon Musk’s ownership of that platform as an inter-elite competition. Marx was studying primitive communism (hunter-gatherers, basically) when he died, so he might have been keenly interested in the virtual migration to Mastodon. New fractures, new tribes — history!
More thought-provoking, however, is the potential experiment in which a social media community goes away completely. Extinction. MySpace. What would happen if the dopamine thrills of social media attention, along with the global reach and attention of, say, TikTok, vanished without a substitute?
Marx would ask this question and make predictions. He would conclude, for example, that Libs of TikTok will become a historical footnote, in that scenario, or else transform itself as a brand in order to stay connected to the conservative media elite. See how that works?
“Trans” has succeeded in no small way because of social media: the Tumblr effect of love-bombing and group reinforcement, Twitter language policing, relentless Pink News hit jobs on J.K. Rowling, transparently bad science touted as a revolution in our understanding of human sex difference, ad nauseum.
What would happen if it all disappeared? Would “trans” disappear, or become passé?
We must also also include the Ontario shop teacher wearing huge, fake breasts in class, earning internet infamy, as a perverse, yet real, status boost by way of social media reaction. “No publicity is bad publicity,” they say, but is there such a thing?
Our nausea at seeing the implications of transgenderism become virtual flesh is real. Fetishism becomes a value. Sam Brinton, first-ever openly nonbinary fetish freak ever hired as a Department of Energy nuclear waste safety manager, was elevated by the very thing that is destroying him, having been caught in the act of stealing a woman’s luggage at an airport.
Marx, I think, would predict that specialism is a fad.
“First nonbinary [whatever]” gives the game away. How special is the "first boggogender astronaut," really? Or the “first virusgender candidate for Congress”? Or “the first openly-maverickgender employee of the month”? How much social mobility are we expected to award them?
The kids are coming to "trans" because it has been approved by the elites as a a means to gain status. Teenagers crave status more than anything, because they lack any, so they act impulsively to get it, and reject sound guidance in order to chase it. Elite status is a hormone away, no matter their present status. Society has now organized itself to support them, and as the bill comes due, capitalism will call it economic growth.
Yes: the early-onset dementia and diabetes and brain shrinkage and osteoporosis are all part of the plan. That is a new material class being created for capitalism. Karl Marx would have foreseen its implications, even if he is just a tool.