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.
Snap. I don’t think it would be wrong ascribe some of this to the more repressed sort of calvinism and I doubt the person in question would even deny this. It has been present all along accompanied by personality traits favoring adherence to group norms and a feeling that people who draw to much attention to themselves are unseemly. This of course can be very useful in an organizer. But on a personal level I can see how a baseline sort of uneasiness with people who are (or as perceived as) “weird” could open the door a crack and then these stupid ideas come flooding in to justify it politically.
This is a long-time, established organizer and I am far away. There is nothing I can do about it. This whole swing has been pretty public, that’s the only reason it came to my attention, so I’m sure everyone knows about it. You know how it is though, it’s hard for organizations/movements to give up on people who are otherwise effective and reliable. Efforts to do so can be viewed as trying to enforce an unrealistic ideological purity which is not viable in a mass organization.
One thing that has surprised me in finding out what this person has been up to is the complete lack of political and organizational discipline exhibited. It’s one of the most useful things they taught to me about, having come out of a much more freewheeling context previously. Of course they’ve kind of fit their politics somewhat into this stupid obsession, but when I have read some of the stuff they have written on the subject, it’s really fucking weak. Like there is a lot of times when they are writing about their feelings of discomfort and trying to pull the reader along in feeling it as well. I never would have anticipated someone who’s situational analysis can be sharp as a razor blade would ever be doing political writings focusing around getting the willies— on any subject. We don’t organize a union because our boss has bad breath. We don’t organize against a landlord because they have terrible fashion sense. We don’t organize against a politician because we disapprove of their sex life. We have principled political and material reasons for doing these things. Even if our enemies may be unsettling in an interpersonal way, you might mention it here or there in a meme but needing to have it be at the center belies to me how shitty the underlying ideas are. (And makes it look more like some sort of creeping fascism than misdirected communism in which case I really doubt there is anything I will be able to do.) And I am really surprised that this person has allowed themselves to be snookered in this way to replace political with emotional analysis.