Around the world, LGBTQ+ rights are under attack. While this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, there has been an uptick lately, and as the far right continue to gain traction in many places, queer people and especially the extremely vulnerable population of transgender youth will continue to find themselves in the crosshairs of this reactionary social offensive. Across the US and the UK, leaders plead “family values” as an excuse to slash protections for trans kids. Bolsonaro launched vicious attacks against ‘gender ideology’ in his recent campaign that saw him consolidate much of his support. And in Italy where the most right-wing government since WW2 holds power, LGBTQ+ people along with migrants and women are similarly blamed for economic instability.
As the global economic crisis deepens, the ruling class needs scapegoats. Of course, they could never fess up and admit to sending the world careening toward disaster due to decades of neoliberal austerity and capitalism’s relentless cycle of crises. While working people face the consequences of energy shortages and anticipate the skyrocketing cost of living only increasing further as winter approaches, right-wing politicians threaten our rights and pit us against each other by continuing to foment division, increasingly with LGBTQ people as the target. The right are attacking the gains of social movements and spin the lie that gains made for LGBTQ+ people stand in the way of gains for society at large, when quite the opposite is true.
Bolsonaro Consolidates Support
The Brazilian presidential run-off election resulted in the narrow defeat of far-right Bolsonaro by Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party. Bolsonaro’s minister of women and family, Damares Alvarez, announced on her first day in office in 2019 that “there will be no more ideological indoctrination of children and teenagers in Brazil,” referring to those questioning their gender identity. Bolsonaro has since sought to make it illegal to discuss “gender theory” in schools or educate students about transgender issues, and while the Supreme Court in Brazil has acted as a check on these efforts, they continue to gain popularity with Bolsonaro’s base. Similar to in the U.S., a loud Evangelical minority has helped to normalize this rightward shift and capitalized on people seeking an alternative to establishment politics and business as usual. Queer youth in Brazil, women, and all progressive young people and workers are breathing an enormous sigh of relief with Bolsonaro’s defeat. But Bolsonaro, who won 58 million votes (49%) and is planning anything but a retreat from his right-wing agenda, will continue to use bigotry to shore up his base.The fight against Bolsonarism is far from over.
Russia
In Russia, citizens can be fined up to 400,000 rubles for promoting “LGBT propaganda” to people of all ages, an expansion from a previous law which only banned it for children. A Russian lawmaker, Alexander Khinstein, describes LBGTQ+ issues as part of “hybrid warfare,” from which Russian values, society, and children must be protected. The recently inaugurated prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, was elected on a similar basis, having campaigned on blocking migrant ships from docking in Italy and on protecting “family values” as a dogwhistle for slashing protections for LGBTQ+ people and for those seeking abortions.
Tories Whip Up Transphobia
In the UK, while Liz Truss bungled her short stint in office as Prime Minister, her replacement in the form of near-billionaire former chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak offers nothing more promising on the LGBTQ+ rights front. While Liz Truss declared herself a fighter in the “war on woke,” Sunak takes a subtler approach, and proffers transphobia masquerading as feminism, claiming that the introduction of more gender neutral language “erases women.” His false appeals to feminism also go so far as to say fighting for equality for trans women is tantamount to cancelling out “some of the things [cis women] have fought really hard for and rights that are important to them.” Currently, conversion therapy is banned in the UK regarding sexuality, but not gender identity. As women are hit disproportionately hard by the cost-of-living crisis in the UK, these divide-and-conquer tactics by the ruling class must be ruthlessly opposed by the feminist and working class movement fighting for a real solution.
Revolt Against Gender Oppression in Iran
In Iran, where protests have recently erupted following the death in custody of a Kurdish woman arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly, the regime is notoriously brutal in its treatment of LGBTQ+ people, alongside women and ethnic minorities. The mass uprising in the streets demands equal rights for women, and major industries are on strike linking feminist demands with the need for better pay amid a severe economic crisis. It is only a mass movement like this, employing class struggle tactics and solidarity across different groups, that could stand a chance at ending the death penalty for homosexuality in Iran and go on to win liberation for women and workers throughout the country if it escalated even further.
Criminalization of LGBTQ+ People Across Africa
Thirty-three of the sixty-nine countries where gay relationships are criminalized are in Africa, and in many cases this is a holdover from the colonial period. Throughout the continent, activists are taking on these laws by attempting to change constitutions, like in Kenya and Angola. While in Angola they were successful in revising the penal code, Kenya is more emblematic of the situation across Africa, where penal codes with harsh sodomy laws remain in effect.
The courts rule that they are not discriminatory since they apply to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, despite in practice clearly being used to target and perscute LBGTQ+ people. There are dire consequences and extreme limitations to this approach, where every year more people are arrested and even tortured for violating sodomy laws. It will take mass uprisings and democratic social movements to overthrow these remnants of imperial rule that local elites continue to use to maintain division and control.
Trans Youth Under Attack in the US
In the U.S., since the landmark supreme court decision Roe V. Wade was struck down, Republicans have speedily put forward many bills which not only target abortion rights but LGBTQ+ rights as well. There is Florida’s now notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill which inspired school walkouts as students demanded respect for themselves and their LGBTQ+ classmates. Now it has a national cousin, the so-called “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” which if passed would prohibit federal funds from being used for sexual education for children. Laws like this lump education about gender identity together with pornography, and claim to be protecting children from unnecessary sexual content, when their real aim is clearly to use people’s unfamiliarity with LGBTQ+ issues to fearmonger and divide the working class, painting anyone who fights against these measures as a pedophile or otherwise corrupting children.
This particular lie is used over and over again by the American right, who have also put forward bills requiring trans student athletes to compete on the sports team of their assigned sex at birth. Some states like Iowa ban them from school sports entirely. Many places have “bathroom bills” which require students to use the bathroom of their assigned sex at birth, and in Virginia, students are not allowed to use their preferred names and pronouns at school without legal documentation of a name change. Teachers are required to disclose to parents if their child requests to go by a different name. These attacks do not end at school either; in Arkansas, gender affirming healthcare for children is banned outright, and under Texas state law it is considered child abuse. But none of these attacks have been made without a response.
Right-wing Attacks Spur Radicalisation
While these abhorrent attacks on transgender youth, made in the name of “protecting children” risk deepening anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in some sections of the working class, they can also have the opposite of their intended effect. Students and teachers in the US, appalled by state overreach, have walked out and rallied in protest of many of these bills from Texas to Florida and beyond. In Virginia, students also planned to mobilize their classmates to future school board meetings, and to submit public comments decrying the recent legislation.
Polarization goes both ways; while the attacks become more and more egregious and stir up conservative fervor, they can also serve as a ‘whip of counter-revolution’ that deepens the radicalization of trans youth and students. The University of Antwerp in Belgium exemplifies this, where after a right-wing demonstration marched through the student district, anti-fascist students from different clubs quickly came together and organized a much larger march in just three days. There they protested a right-wing nationlist politician, Filip Dewinter, and they now call for these types of protests to spread around the country as Dewinter’s speaking tour continues.
In Belgium and across the world, more and more young people are coming to the conclusion that they have to not only stand up against these laws and bigoted politicians, but that to protect their rights and those of their peers — a totally new system is necessary that doesn’t rely on scapegoats and social division to distract people from capitalist crisis. Young people are often at the forefront of movements. They see that a better world is possible and are hungry to fight for it. Their leadership will be crucial in the struggle going forward.
The walkouts and rallies that have already been organized across the world are a vital and necessary step toward building a mass movement to fight for LGBTQ+ rights. They point to the fact that young people especially have an instinct toward class struggle tactics and strategies for movement building. And action can’t end there! Students and teachers in all countries faced with attacks on LGBTQ people must link up to coordinate more walkouts, and even build toward strikes. To cut across reactionary and divisive politics, the labour movement must take a stand and champion the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. An injury to one is an injury to all: solidarity is needed to fight for our collective liberation.
Solidarity Needed for a Socialist Fightback
ISA argues that these youth movements also need a broad political program. We need fully inclusive public education to serve trans students and treat them equally to their cisgender peers; we must ending long wait times for gender affirming health care by fully funding hospitals and social services, and; we must tax the rich to fund affordable housing and transportation — especially important for LGBTQ+ youth who make up 40% of the world’s population of youth experiencing homelessness, and which is undeniably crucial for the whole working class as well.
It will never be possible to fully achieve all these things and more under capitalism, where the great strides of any social movement are openly attacked by a section of the ruling class, like the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., or in Ghana, where after years of progress a new bill has been proposed which could require up to ten years of conversion therapy for out gay and lesbian Ghanaians. Revolutionary socialists understand that under capitalism these fundamental rights will always be in danger, and that only by linking up the movement to defend LGBTQ+ rights with the struggle for socialist change will we succeed in building a world where full freedom of sexual and gender expression is possible.
While liberal or center-left forces often pay lip service to fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, like the Democratic Party in the US or the Labour Party in the UK, they have shown time and time again they lack the program and approach to resist right wing attacks. That’s why we need a movement and mass organisations that can take up this fight with a socialist program, that are independent of corporate money and establishment politics, rooted in struggle, and run democratically by the working class and youth in all its diversity. To end attacks on LGBTQ+ youth worldwide requires waging a fight against the capitalist system at the root of all the morbid symptoms we see today — reaction, war, economic crisis, climate breakdown. By offering a program that identifies our common class enemy and points a clear way forward, we can mobilise the working class in a united struggle for a democratically planned socialist society where everyone is free from all forms oppression, discrimination and exploitation.
