Malcolm was right.

Today, as trans day of visibility was rebranded as a trans day of vengence, we have seen more than our usual share of virtue signalling by those exhibiting high confidence in their poorly informed knowledge on matters related to gender ideology.  (See the diagram explaining the Dunning-Kreuger effect, below for some context on how that works).  What follows is my response to an old comrade with whom I worked some, thirty some years ago, but have for this past decade exclusively encountered on social media.  He posted this image above to his profile, where it showed up in my feed.

As a comment he added this meme, quoting Brother Malcolm X (may he enjoy a favored place in Jannah for his important contributions).  

Brother Malcolm was right. 

The media has us hating the women being oppressed and loving the men doing the oppressing.  The political left used to do a much better job at concealing its always present misogyny.  But now the backlash against the decades of gains which women's organizing has won are subject to an ongoing and withering assault.  The thinly veiled threats of violence depicted in the photo in this post are only a small taste of what that looks like.  These threats of violence are being backed up with projection and gas-lighting and all of the DARVO tactics we have traditionally associated with men's abuse of women; only writ large and in public and without apology; with no one exercising the courage to intervene.  

Its far past time that men who care about the lives and rights of women step up and speak out.  Women should not have to face down the mob violence of men's rights activist alone.  (For anyone not paying attention, see: Melbourne, Hobarth, Aukland to name some high profile examples from the past month; a coordinated Days-of-Vengence action across the country in the aftermath of last week's mass shooting in Nashville).  

Its past time that we not only let women speak, but that we listen to what they have been trying to tell us for years:

that sex matters and should not be conflated with gender;

that women need protections as women in public policy and cultural practices;

that the dignity, safety and privacy of women requires respect by men and in public policy for women's only spaces;

that women must enjoy their human rights to association, assembly and speech, protected from the heckler's veto and mob violence;

that ill thought changes to public policy must be guarded against with vigorous and meaningful yet respectful debate, free of coercion and in an environment conducive to democratic engagement;

that children must be safeguarded from a predatory medical and pharmaceutical industry which seeks to pathologize for its profit the natural and expected distress of puberty;

that gay and lesbian young people must be protected from the trans-away-the-gay conversion therapy which leaves them sterile, with shortened life spans and facing nearly a million dollars in lifetime medical expenses for the hormone treatments alone;

that young girls must be protected from the social media induced social contagion which makes eating disorders look like a walk in the park;

that academic research and medical protocols must be driven by evidence, not ideology.  

Gender ideology is a marketing campaign in service of capitalism.  That is not original.  Women have reached this conclusion for years.  

There is a growing body of literature which dissects gender ideology and identity politics, their pervasive destructiveness including to the cohesiveness of our organizing on the basis of economic class and for the preservation of the Earth's capacity to sustain human life.  Eight or a dozen books of significance on this subject were published only last year.  A dozen or more insightful, English-language articles on the subject are published each week.  The point being that there are dozens of links for further reading which might have been added to this comment.  

I pick here one published only yesterday, responding to the 'social-media meltdown over (the) defence of women’s rights' published this past week by the Communist Party of Britain.  The CPB is hardly the first organization of the political left to take a public stand in support of sanity and material reality.  They are only the most recent.  

As their statement, linked from the article below, puts it:

"The real innovation of this Bill is to legislate for the self-ID of someone’s legal sex, embedding self-declared 'gender identity' in law. But when pursued to the exclusion of such considerations as the sex-based rights of women, and the fragmentation of equality legislation across Britain, it undermines the drive to build unity within and between the working class and the oppressed and disadvantaged groups in our society."

"The Communist Party is the only (British) political party with a coherent political analysis of sex and gender. Gender as an ideological construct should not be confused or conflated with the material reality of biological sex. Gender is the vehicle through which misogyny is enacted and normalised. Gender identity ideology is well-suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as opposed to collective rights, enabling and supporting the super-exploitation of women."

As Brendan O'Neill, the author linked below, puts it:

"Yet even as the bourgeois identitarians furiously WhatsApp each other to work out how to rebrand communists as fascists, they might also take the time to read the CPB's statement. It's very good. It bristles at Scotland's gender self-ID law, the one Westminster plans to block, on the basis that it will be bad for women. Making it easier for blokes to be legally recognised as 'women' will raise 'great difficulties' for 'sports organisations and other clubs and societies' that are organised on the basis of sex, decrees the CPB executive committee. What’s more, making self-ID the 'sole requirement for access to single-sex spaces' threatens to expose women and children to 'predatory and abusive behaviour by men who can simply declare themselves to be women'. The committee is correct."

   .  .  .   

"The CPB has thrown down the gauntlet to the post-class bourgeois left, the left that gets more excited about the right of men to piss in women's toilets than it does about the right of millions of working-class voters to remove Britain from the clutches of that ultimate capitalist club, the European Union. It is forcing these LINOs (leftists in name only) to ask why they so often find themselves on the same side of the barricades as the neoliberal elites. Why they fly the same flag – that eyesore trans Pride flag – that every bank and hedge fund flies. Why they are as one with 'big business' when it comes to the importance of using people's preferred pronouns. Why they are in full agreement with the armed wing of the state – the police, the army, the prison service – that a person with a dick can be a woman if he wants. The middle-class graduate left with their well-thumbed bell hooks books and their selfies at Marx's grave can make fun of the CPB as much as they like, but at some point they're going to have to answer the question it has raised: if transgenderism is progressive, why do the ruthless owners of the means of production love it so?"

Why capitalism loves transgenderism
Some British communists have finally said it – the trans ideology is neoliberalism in drag.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/30/why-capitalism-loves-transgenderism/ 

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The Dunning-Kreuger Effect