Is Transsexual Another Word For Lumpen? A brief response to Bromma

Strap in sisters, this is a rough one. Let me start by saying that I appreciate Bromma’s effort here. I’ve long found his work useful and I think he’s dancing around the shape of something real in this essay. Right wing anti-imperialism has captured and, for the moment, sterilized the Palestine solidarity movement in this country. Hope for revolutionary change can only be found in the autonomous militant organizing of women. There’s two massive problems with Bromma’s piece though: unexamined use of israeli propaganda and dismissive bioessentialism and transmisogyny. I am not, i don’t think, the right person to break down all the hasbarah in Bromma’s piece. I will just say that maybe quoting extensively from the Jerusalem Times isn’t going to fill your essay with useful information. I am however going to tackle the transmisogyny here, hopefully to cauterize it before it spreads to other rads in this time of state sponsored transfemicide.

Bromma has long been a necessary voice against the shambling zombie of male leftism. His work, building off the work of Butch Lee and J. Sakai, has been unflinching in its insistence that the proletariat was globally centered around women and that it would be women who built the next revolutionary wave. Further, his criticism of male fascist anti-imperialism is sharp enough as to be viciously controversial. Have spent long, tired hours arguing well into the early morning over his piece New World Hard Choices at the dinner tables of numerous sisters and comrades. Leftists are often resistant to hearing that truth, afraid that without Hamas or Iran or the PRC or Maduro we have nothing. Bromma knows that the male left is over, no argument from me there. 

So imagine my disappointment when I got through the meat of his most recent piece, Against Both Imperialism AND Fascism, and found a solid (if sloppy) argument against male fascism and right wing anti imperialism unceremoniously fucked at the last minute by a casual dismissal of transfeminism. It’s easy and popular on the male left to dismiss transfeminism as “postmodernism,” a term no one can seem to define but obviously denotes petty bourgeois degeneracy. You usually see this kinda thing in the borderline unreadable publications put out by male left sects. Kenny Lake and 100 lesser maoists routinely use this dismissal and it amounts to little more than a bigoted refusal to take us trannies seriously. We are a kind of lumpen women, always cast out of the classes of women we might belong to, reviled and highly suspect. 

I expected better of Bromma, frankly. Like Butch Lee and J. Sakai, whom he quotes at length, he had come across as a more thoughtful and intentional thinker, not prone to this kind of crass dismissal. But there it is, 3/4ths of the way through the essay: 

“— As in the past, today there are ranks of fascist women and neocolonial women who stand alongside “their” men, opposing the liberation struggles of oppressed women and endorsing reactionary male agendas. Sometimes these women employ bogus neocolonialist or fascist “feminisms” to undermine the fight for women’s liberation or attack other freedom struggles. Examples of this include white opportunist bourgeois feminist trends in the West, and anti-Muslim discourses disguised as feminism (including the “pinkwashing” of Zionism). On the other hand, there are various subservient ideologies that promote themselves as anti-colonial feminism or religious feminism which deny or minimize the oppression of women by fascism. There are even postmodern “feminists” who deny that women exist as a biological sex and political subject, or that women are oppressed by systematic male supremacy. “Woman,” they say, is merely a malleable social construct.”

Bromma, in keeping with the theme of this entire piece, identifies the target and then misses it by a country mile. Up to the point where he uses postmodern as a slur i can’t say i disagree with him much. There are numerous examples of zionist feminisms that have come to the defense of the zionist state since October 7th. There are also supposedly “decolonial” feminisms that do little more than run cover for male fascism in the third and fourth worlds. I’ve criticized this before and I am glad to see others having this conversation. 

But right there, at the end of the quoted paragraph, Bromma trips and falls on his face. He equates feminists who see womanhood as a social construct with those who would deny the oppression of women based on our sex. Frankly, I do not understand how anyone could read, let alone live through, the second wave of women’s liberation and come away with this poor of an understanding of patriarchal oppression. It was perhaps the fundamental insight of radical feminism that gender and sex are social constructs. Even Butch Lee, who Bromma quotes extensively, wrote about gender as such:

“Amazons fight for justice, for womankind. Inescapably our Amazon lives are political. This is what the capitalist patriarchy tries to suppress about us above all else. And Amazons are about killing men. Not some of them but the entire gender. We want them to be an endangered species, because in the end either they or we will be. i noticed in my medical book the funny line, “Complete tracheal obstruction is incompatible with life.” Men as a social construction are incompatible with women’s lives. Now, this is a challenge worthy of women’s abilities.”

– Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of Women and Children

That womanhood is socially constructed is an idea that even predates second wave radical feminism. Simone de Beauvoir is widely credited with popularizing the idea in her 1949 work The Second Sex where she insists that “one is not born, but becomes, a woman.” The influence of that idea on radical feminism cannot be underestimated. Without that insight the entire radical wave of women’s liberation would have been undercut. Everyone from Andrea Dworkin to the Combahee River Collective to Die Rote Zora used and expanded on it. If womanhood is biologically decided then women’s oppression has a natural basis and cannot be changed. But if womanhood, like all class structures, is socially constructed and mutable then women’s liberation is a distinct possibility. You don’t really think Butch meant killing everyone with a cock, right? Right?

You would be hard pressed to find any serious transfeminist who would deny that patriarchal oppression takes on certain biological forms. Certainly there are feminists who now deny that women’s liberation can have any coherent subject at all, like Sophie Lewis (whose work criticizing colonial feminisms is excellent but who routinely falls into this kind of liquidationist trap). This argument mostly comes from feminists who are not themselves trans women (Lewis, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam etc) and who think that our existence poses some kind of existential threat to or outright disproves radical feminism and ideas about women as a class or as a people.

Critically though this is not how radical transfeminists think of ourselves. The only time Bromma refers to trans people at all in his piece is when he refers to male fascism’s oppression of “LGBT people.” Perhaps I am reading in bad faith but it would seem to me that, given the few times Bromma uses “LGBT people” and “homosexuals” interchangeably, he’s flattening the varied and complicated experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexual, and transgender people into one sort of “queer” experience. Radical transfeminism, however, insists that in order to understand transsexual women’s oppression and exploitation, what we call transmisogyny, we must be accounted for as women. This is counter to both how cissexual women’s liberation movements have often treated us and how the queer liberation movement has treated us. Both have resorted to a kind of ugly degendering, what we call third sexing. Describing us as neither man nor woman, but instead degenerate and monstrous. Not bourgeois, not proletarian, but lumpen, in a gendered sense.

Patriarchal civilization oppresses and exploits women in part on the basis of reproductive capacity, but it is also much more dialectical and varied than that. Patriarchy could not be a world spanning civilization if it was so simple. Patriarchal civilization defines women not solely as those who are capable of pregnancy and birth but also as those who are “naturally” subservient, obedient, and feeble-minded. Butch Lee herself tackles this in Night Vision when she digs into the way that both Chinese migrant laborer men and enslaved New Afrikan men were distinctly feminized in american discourse in the 19th century. Neither were given the full status of man under the settler regime. Neocolonialism has since complicated and changed that picture, but it’s one hint that patriarchy is too dynamic a system of oppression for us to stick to one rigid definition of what a woman is.

When transsexual women assert our womanhood we are not, as some bad faith readers assume, asserting that there is no difference between us and cissexual women. Rather we are asserting that the feminized character of our lives, oppression, and exploitation make us women. Trans radical feminist Talia Bhatt puts it like this in her essay The Third Sex:

“None of this is to attempt to collapse all forms of gendered oppression into a singular category, to erase distinction and equivocate between related yet distinct forms of patriarchal violence. Nor do I believe it is edifying or productive to try to determine whether a woman forced to bear children for a family that reviles her, or a woman expelled from society and forced to live on the margins, suffers more.

Rather, this is an explication of the underlying root of patriarchy, its core mechanisms and systems that constitute the guiding principles of (trans)misogyny, lesbophobia—all instances of gender-marginalization. Sex is not quite as binary as advertised, because the heterosexual regime has always regarded people as one of human, broodmare, or freak. If you are not a person with autonomy, then you are a vessel for those who are … and if you cannot even be that, then you are a waste of flesh, something to be fucked, killed, or both.

The butch derided and beaten as a delusional “he-she”, the tranny who can be endlessly violated, and even the woman who merely refuses to have children, are bound by this commonality. If we cannot participate in reproduction, we must be fixed … or disposed of.”

The line between “broodmare” and “freak” is razor thin, like the slash in lumpen/proletariat that Sakai uses in The Dangerous Class. Bhatt spends much of The Third Sex working through western academic treatments of the Indian gender category “hijra.” Hijra are usually said to be similar, but in some orientalist fashion very different from, trans women here in the west. Western academics, including even transfeminists like Jules Gill-Peterson, deny that hijra are women, trans or otherwise. Bhatt points us in another direction. Many hijra are in fact trans women, and many are other sorts of gender outlaws, but all thought of as “barren women.” Bhatt again:

“Cultural anthropology may have coined and codified “third-sexing” to legitimize the degendering of transfeminized populations in the Third World, but that does not mean that the term is inherently without value, or is not an observation of a real phenomenon. After all, the treatment of the hijra as something outside of gendered duality, as “possessing the qualities of both”, as well as misconceptions of hijras all being born “hermaphroditic” or intersex, are rooted in Indian and Hindu culture.

Indeed, in the eyes of Indian patriarchy, “hijra” is an expansive category, one that is meant to encompass all those deemed—bluntly—sexually ‘defective’. Girls who do not menstruate may be considered hijra, and while intersex individuals were the minority amongst them, they too are stigmatized and ostracized into hijra communities. The “third sex”, such as it is, is not a prescriptive category, but a dumping-ground, a landfill in which to deposit everyone that a society organized around the reproductive imperative considers extraneous and aberrant.”

Across the globe transmisogyny lumps us in wth other kinds of “deviant” or “defective” women. If you ask my sisters this is a widely ignored opportunity for feminist solidarity. But if you ask the male left then the “postmodernism” that has, in their minds, given rise to our existences, is a dire threat to not only feminism but revolutionary theory of any stripe at all. If we accept that our bioessentialist critics are reacting to anything real and not just indulging in petty bigotry, they’re likely reacting to the kind of academic queer theory i mentioned above. What no one stops to consider though is that the academic treatment is for us, as it is for many peoples across the globe, a burden imposed from above. It is not a result of our own self determination or internal study and struggle. Surely Bromma knows the difference between how an oppressor culture describes its castoffs and freaks and how those oppressed people talk about themselves?

Trans women experience rape and femicide at remarkable rates, both here in our crumbling settler empire and across the globe. In Colombia the International Forum on Feminicides in Ethnic-Racialized Groups: Murder of Women and Global Accumulation devoted special attention to transfemicide (what they term transfeminicide or transfemigenocide), especially amongst Afro-Indigenous women. In “The Uncertainty of Feminicides in Transwomen: Approachesto Trans Genocides among Racialized Women” authors Alejandra Rangel Oliveros and Valentina Garcia Marin describe the shape of transfemicide committed by armed actors in Colombia:

“This type of violence is potentially ‘genocide for the fact that the masculine position can only be attained–acquired, as a status–and reproduceitself as such by exercising one or more dimensions of a packet of powers, that is to say, forms of interlaced domination: sexual, military, intellectual, political, economic, and moral.’ The prefix ‘geno’ is used to desiginate feminicides that are directed lethally towards a woman as a ‘genus’ (gender) in impersonalized conditions, as Segato notes.
    In Colombia, femigenocides in the LGBTQI+ population have taken place, as indicated above, within the framework of armed actors who usurp the bodies of women–their territory–as well as their sexual orientation and gender identity. In this way, through transfemigenocide or transgenocide, the goal is to eliminate a demographic group (trans people) that counters the social mandate, thereby destabilizing patriarchal power. In symbolic term, through the ritual that encompasses this crime, a forceful message is sent to those who form part of this group: ‘we are elminating you.’

I can’t be the only one noticing the parallels here, right? Transfemicide in Colombia (and much of the world) taking on the same social role as the witch hunts. It’s no coincidence that Feminicide and Global Accumulation is edited by Silvia Federici (another social constructionist whose work is more useful than her personal opinions on trans women). Feminists, including Butch Lee, looking at the witch hunts can see where women were broken apart, where euro women started to become white for the first time, through mass violence. Transfemigenocide, i insist, serves dialectically the opposite function for trans women. Permanently exiling us from not just manhood but patriarchal gender as an organizing force and leaving only the raw, distinctly feminized violence. Turning us not just into women but into the most abject women. 

Our communities are stratified by race or nationality, just like all women’s communities are, but almost as a reflection in standing water. The exact same processes happening lower down, dirtier, more violent, and more easily ignored. Black trans women are murdered at incredible rates every year and, just like femicide against Black or Indigenous women on the rest of the continent, no one says a thing and no one stops it. Do the academic treatment of trans existence or its male left critics do anything for these women? We get the memorials every year on trans day of remembrance, ceremonies that read as insult more than anything these days. I have a few sisters on those lists of names at this point in my life, ask me whether i think academic postmodernism or male leftism did anything for them. 

Bromma’s dismissal of “postmodernism” is actually a dismissal of radical feminism as a whole. A male supremacist line that Bromma maybe doesn’t recognize because he got it from women. But women acting just like men to further the reactionary ends of their oppressor classes and nations is nothing particularly new, it’s been the focus of revolutionary feminists since the radical feminist wave started to ebb in the late 70’s. In turn the outlaw, the other, the lumpen, was at one point the center of militant revolutionary theory and praxis. So was class betrayal, something i know Bromma attempted as a young radical. Do you really expect to be able to destroy patriarchy and stay male? We want the abolition of these class systems, a classless society. You don’t get to stay petty bourgeois either.

So is our oppression the same as cissexual women’s? Not in every regard, no. But that’s true of plenty of the different classes of women. The crucial lesson of Bottomfish Blues, unheeded even now, was that sisterhood demands the disunity of white women. What clearer example of sisterhood could you look for than a group of women who were offered the chance to literally be men, to buy into patriarchal civilization and become its soldiers and labor aristocracy, and who said no? Even now when we are only united with cissexual women by shared oppression and not by solidarity or even liberal sentiment, we continue to say no. So we become the lumpen of the gender-class system, side by side and cast out at the same time. Loathed even by radical thinkers who have to acknowledge our potential to make or break their revolutions.

Bromma is a crucial thinker for understanding the transformation of the colonial world into the neocolonial one. His work has deftly navigated the shipwreck littered waters of the male left and helped to point the way out and into the woman-centered revolutionary future. Like him and countless other radical men of his generation, i also left a university life to work in an industrial setting with class betrayal on my mind. Like countless radical women i am writing this on my day off while caring for my small child with little help, my partner away at their own job. Did i consciously choose to betray manhood when i started to transition? No, but i think we more effectively betray maleness as a gender-class than the 60’s rads did when they went and got factory jobs before they became professors. Whether we can organize that process and wield it for our own liberation remains to be seen, but i at least know where we stand. It’s obvious for anyone willing to actually look.

Radical feminism didn’t always have a good track record on trans women, and notably it was most often the bioessentialists who believed that womanhood was a natural, immutable sex category who led the charge against us. Feminists who accepted gender and sex as social constructs didn’t always get it right either, but their politics are still useful tools for working out our place in the class war here today. Butch, quoting Audre Lorde, said that when you account for women you account for the other. When you, as Dworkin and Wittig and Butch Lee and a thousand other thinkers did, highlight gender as “class in drag” then you are going to find outlaws who were thrown out or intentionally abandoned their class of origin in the mix. Killing the gender male means people that are men now cease to be men. Not necessarily by force of medical transition but because the power to be male has been overthrown and abolished. This was always a promise of the most radical feminists. Trans women are the spurned daughters of radical feminism come to demand that its theories be carried to their logical ends. By any means necessary.

sarah harpy

sarah-harpy@proton.me