Contemporary LGBTQ Movement is anti-Working-Class, anti-Woman
Aspen Basaldua: "I wish to address my evolving and dissenting views on transgender ideology."
By Aspen Basaldua
Aspen is a longtime RGV-based activist and poet for several causes including immigrant rights, against police violence, many environmental causes and LGBTQ rights, to name a few.
Coming out as transgender at 17 was a difficult time in my life. But now, at 24, I feel like I must come out against what the transgender community has become. Although I am still transgender, I don't wish to promote my lifestyle as a form of politics, especially one that could possibly veer into anti-woman territory.
Arriving at this point was difficult, but I am starting to become critical of it all. This is by no means a condemnation of trans people. But this is my official break up with the gender ideology movement, also known as the LGBTQ+ movement. Because I seek to be in solidarity with the oppressed of every kind.
I will only air my dirty laundry as a way to speak the truth. I have been a feminist my entire life. Women shaped me, deeply. I was raised by a strong single mother who took care of me and my two sisters. So, the experience and fight for women's rights is near and dear to my heart.
Speaking “my truth,” as many of my old comrades love to say, I was introduced to the trans movement just in time for the 2016 elections, a decisive turning point in U.S. and global politics with the election of Donald Trump, as well as the tsunami of activist movements that sprung up in response to his shocking election victory. Having many confusing questions about my own sexuality growing up, the LGBTQ movement was there to catch me after having fallen off the steep cliff of fundamentalist religious upbringing.
Coming out in a traditionally conservative environment in deep South Texas, along the Mexican borderlands, I can nevertheless no longer reconcile gender metaphysics with material reality, despite how much I care about these progressive causes in my region. In fact, it’s my solidarity with working-class women who are facing the hardest of the brunt inside capitalism’s crisis, with attacks on abortion and the ability for young workers to start families and move out of their parents’ home, many having to move back in with aging parents after university graduation, that inspires me to move in this direction.
Gender ideology started out simply as metaphysical labels for a presupposed abstract, socially constructed term. Its original contention was that ‘sex’ was different from ‘gender.’ For gender is socially defined, while sex is biologically designed. Simple enough: Sex is what's between your legs; gender is who you “feel” you are.
I thought that was simple enough, and well understood. Gender ideology was very simple back then. As I came into it myself, I saw my identity as a woman. Today, I’m ‘gender non-conforming,’ still operating in my biological male body. Even though I wanted, at the time, from 17 to 18, cross sex hormones, I am at this point okay without that because I want to live in my fluid body. While I psychologically reject my biological sex, I politically stand in solidarity with women as the unique and only givers of life, creators of new people, new workers, life givers of humanity.
The emancipation of women is worth stepping out of the self-absorbed spotlight that trans ideology promotes. Despite claiming to be the champions of abortion and women’s rights, the LGBTQ movement has failed women’s rights. I can't stress enough my support for an end to sexist oppression.
I exist as a gender diverse person who rejects the cult of language-policing and political violence that is now a trademark of the LGBTQ movement. A violence coated in an abstract innocence rather than out as it's true violent nature, which negates the historical and biological narrative of the sexes, mainly that of the so called “femme” sex, otherwise known as woman or womanhood, “the second sex.”
I am seeking to establish a rational transgender perspective which acknowledges its own limitations. Of politics and self-identification which encompasses transness. A perspective that opens a new horizon that counters gender ideology. And opens new ground and foundation to understand the place of transgender people in the women's movement for emancipation.
What is the reason behind these attacks on women? How does this serve the movement overall? A deeply fractured logic which demands deeper study. As the gender ideology attacks scientific narratives. Why do they want to erase women and gender altogether?
Which now infects the halls of the academy and the public discourse at large. A discourse grounded in inverted liberalism, claiming to be progressive, and moving the question of sexual division to a new level. Yet this level is only in words, language and theory. As opposed to the current debate over the rights of women in the world. This theoretical attack on women simply seeks to over-step the current historical epoch.
That is something revolutionary workers must fight against in the hopes of saving the revolutionary progress of the past women's and workers movements. This is what is at stake in this game of metaphysic self-identity vs natural material reality. Which is where the oppression of women lies in the material conditions and laws of biology.
The very act of erasing women by using gender-neutral terms does not see the physical body evolutionary sexed. It’s a negation of science.
I remember what I thought back then when gender was first socially constructed, a novel idea. As a young vulnerable human being in adolescence these new linguistic tools spoke to me. Yet today I see my self-identification and rejection of ‘maleness’ as a form of personal choice. Which serves me and aligns with my inner psychology.
To conclude, and to be absolutely clear, I do think that gender roles are social, whereas sex is biological and material. Women's rights are essential. Their sex is historically and presently under attack by anti-abortion forces. But they’re not aided by leftist attempts to erase women as a sex.
One cannot also help but notice that the LGBTQ movement has largely backed the antisemitic attacks against Israel and Jews since Oct. 7. Why?
As well as erasing the concept of women's health, a long battle begins to be undone by woke pseudoscience calling itself “evidence-based-medicine,” now endorsed and supported by the capitalist class and its all-pervasive administrative institutions.
Jonathan Salinas edited, linked, contributed to this piece.
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