Against Trans Vulgar Materialism, For Trans Peoples’ Democratic Rights
November 05, 2026
Samsagaz el Fuerte
In “Why Trans Liberation Is Class Struggle”, published in Historical Materialism, Fraser Amos argues against two positions. The first position, which Amos labels “class reductionism”, argues “that ‘trans issues’ are fundamentally minoritarian and threaten to derail coalition-building around majoritarian bread-and-butter demands.” The second, which Amos labels “trans liberalism”, a term borrowed from the “The Limits of Trans Liberalism”, a 2015 article by Nat Raha in the Verso Blog. Raha, a fellow critic of “trans liberalism”, characterizes it as the ideological belief that “transgender rights are the solution to the problems facing trans people, and will enable our participation in (Western) capitalist society.” Amos writes that trans liberalism “conceives liberation as winning legal equality”, and that, “at its best”, trans liberalism is “supplemented by demands for economic equality, a politics of trans rights combined with redistribution well exemplified by Zack Polanski’s Green Party.”
The position which Amos characterizes as “class reductionism” is not the focus of this essay. It is enough to conclude, for now, that, aside from being a pretense for chauvinist apathy towards trans rights, it is a form of economism whose internal logic would preclude any embrace of the (also currently minoritarian) position that the proletariat, as a class-for-itself, should seize political power.
The position which Amos characterizes as “trans liberalism” is actually closer to material reality than Amos’ confused attempts to argue that trans oppression is “a material part of the patriarchal reproduction of capital and the state.” Communists should indeed fully support the democratic rights of trans people for the very reason that it “enable[s] [their] participation in (Western) capitalist society.” Amos’ position is a form of vulgar materialism that flattens democratic and socialist struggles into a single chimera, and does a disservice both to the struggle for trans peoples’ democratic equality and to the cause of revolutionary socialism.
Concretely, said flattening has ramifications rippling out beyond the trans question, and, in a practical sense, serves to obfuscate the specific character of the proletarian revolution, conflating it with the bourgeois-democratic revolution. It should also be condemned on the grounds that it serves to hamstring and derail the struggle for trans peoples’ legal and economic equality under capitalism. Furthermore, it is a shoddy argument that a “trans liberal” could easily tear apart in the process of advocating for liberalism.
Amos argues that “trans oppression doesn’t persist simply due to interpersonal or even legal discrimination.” Amos is already shadow-boxing, since the “trans liberal” position Amos presents includes capitalist economic reformers such as Polanski who would prescribe “redistribution” as a solution to any economic inequality that exists between cis and trans people under capitalism. I would argue that the economic reforms needed to narrow the income gap between cis and trans people would not even necessitate measures so drastic as to merit the term “redistribution.” However, it is simply a fact that a regime of strengthened liberal-democratic rights can resolve the question of social oppression for a particular group while leaving capitalist relations of production intact. The social position of francophone Québécois today compared to in 1969 would be a good historical example of this principle, although Amos would likely rebut by quarreling as to which forms of social oppression are “a material part of … capital and the state.” Given that, in Amos’ view, trans oppression is an essential component of capitalist exploitation, then the acquisition of democratic rights of trans people would be an advance for socialism in a mechanistic sense. Thus, Amos’ vulgar materialism is selling the illusion that a triumphant success of the liberal trans rights movement (which any communist should welcome) would automatically advance the cause of socialism.
What needs to be concretely understood is that the persistent social inequality between different social groups under capitalism, as is the case with cis and trans people, does not in-of-itself illustrate that said social inequality is part and parcel of capitalist relations of production, but rather that the development of formal democratic equality and liberal rights under capitalism is an uneven and incomplete historical process, due to the dialectical nature of complex social processes. The fact that some forms of contingently persistent social oppression under capitalism have an economic dimension merely speaks to the fact that our social relations are capitalist and interconnected with inertial social processes; for the proletarian revolutionary and the cause of socialism, the primary concern is indeed the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
- Any relation of social oppression, in any mode of production, will affect the position in the economic structure of those affected by it.
- Under the capitalist mode of production in particular, residual social relations of oppression appear as secondary effects.
Therefore the fundamental flaw in Amos’ argument is, because, under capitalism, the secondary effects of residual social relations, affect the economic status of socially oppressed people, and these are definitionally capitalist economic relations we are discussing, then, somehow, oppression is some essential and foundational component of capitalist economic relations.
Social oppression was essential to economic exploitation in feudal, etc. relations of production. However, under capitalism, social oppression is residual, especially if we also consider chattel slavery and 20th century de jure colonialism to be non-capitalist relations.
Amos suggests there are two variants of “trans liberalism”, one concerned only with buttressing trans peoples’ formal, legal rights, and the second (embodied in the example given of the UK Green Party) concerned with economic reforms, with the dubious assumption that the latter can’t eliminate residual social oppression because, in Amos’ mind, said social oppression is not residual but rather structural. However, the reality is that, under capitalism, these forms of social oppression are “secondary effects”.
Let us explore Amos’ arguments to the contrary for a moment.
Amos argues that “[trans] discrimination reflects that under capitalism, labour [is] organised on a patriarchal basis.” The basis of capitalist exploitation is the individual proletarian as an interchangeable seller of labor-power as a commodity. Thus, patriarchal forms of social organization actually fetter capitalist production. This is unless one embraces a retrograde view that females are too delicate to perform wage-labor, which vast portions of capitalists simply and demonstrably do not believe.
Amos simultaneously says “while capitalism promises abstract equality…”, but not only does capitalism promise abstract equality, abstract equality is the basis of capitalist exploitation. Where various forms of non-class inequality persist, this is not due to anything intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production.
Amos says capitalism “emerged from patriarchal class societies”. Since Athena emerged from the head of Zeus, does that mean she is still inside his head? Capitalism emerged from the feudal mode of production, but precisely in so doing it eradicated feudal relations of production, a process that has also been uneven. Marx and Engels put the process plainly in the Manifesto; “the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all… patriarchal …relations.”
Amos says capitalism “relies on patriarchal forms of domination to reproduce itself.” While this sentence is unclear, it may be the first of many allusions to the reproduction of the proletariat in Amos’ piece.
This is as good of a time as any to address the elephant in the room, which is that gestation and birth are a necessary precondition not only of the reproduction of the proletariat but of humanity and hence history as a whole. I do not bring this up to echo asinine arguments that “trans ideology” “denies biological reality”. The role of cis women in biological reproduction is often emphasized by TERFs who offer patronage to “materialist feminism” to make the essentialist point that “trans women aren’t women”; in other words, they fetishize social reproduction like Amos, but towards even more politically reactionary ends. Rather, it is necessary to point out that patriarchal forms of domestic social relations are not a requisite condition of biological reproduction.
While capitalism has partially abolished patriarchal relations, even if capitalism is not particularly concerned with eradicating their residue, were patriarchal forms of domestic social relations a requisite condition of biological reproduction, there would be great cause for pessimism concerning the outcome of abolishing patriarchal gender relations under socialism, given that, at risk of stating the obvious, human biological reproduction will continue under socialism, and if physical reproduction required patriarchal relations, there would be an obvious biological impediment to their abolition, barring sci-fi test tube baby scenarios. Amos seems to argue that patriarchal domestic social relations are essential to some ambiguously defined form of “reproduction” under capitalism. Either Amos is referring to the biological or the social component of reproduction . If Amos is referring to the biological component of reproduction, then the logical conclusion would be that biological reproduction would also have entrenched accompanying patriarchal social relations under socialism. Obviously, physical reproduction is not the only form of social-reproductive labor, but the full expression of trans people’s rights (assuming for a moment, solely for the sake of drawing out the argument, that all trans people engaged in the full expression of their rights would be non-natal, which is not the case) would have a negligible effect on the rate of physical reproduction, i.e. the birth rate, given that they are a small minority group.
In regards to other forms of social-reproductive labor, i.e. housework and domestic child-rearing, these are even less dependent on patriarchal social relations under capitalism. While is true that, where the remnants of patriarchal domestic social relations do persist, and where they succeed in reproducing the proletariat, capital is never motivated to spend money to launch some massive social engineering project to uproot familial remnants of pre-capitalist class societies in order to replace them with capitalist social relations in which children are raised purely under the guardianship of, e.g., the capitalist state (were such an arrangement possible) in other words, a capitalist version of familial relations in Plato’s Republic, capital would also be fully content to exploit single proletarian youth, leaving them to themselves to manage their own daily social reproduction, under a regime of gender equality. In this respect, trans people are not an obstacle to social reproduction, capitalist or otherwise, since they are capable of performing any sort of household labor under capitalism, and can also be employed in socialized childcare and socialized domestic reproduction, under both capitalism and socialism.
In both regards, Amos’ argument actually risks reinforcing the negative stereotypes of transphobic “family values” conservatives, which present trans people as some sort of credible threat to social reproduction, capitalist or otherwise. To state an obvious point that shouldn’t be controversial but probably is, social reproduction will continue under socialism, just in a more gender-egalitarian form.
Amos states that “in the workplace, capital relies on paternalistic management control, infantilising and often feminising workers.” Management control under capitalism is concerned with increasing the rate of exploitation. Obviously, individual capitalist managers can behave in whatever “paternalistic” or “maternalistic” (or unsentimentally controlling) manner facilitates this goal. Amos’ suggestion that the female manager is absent from the modern capitalist workplace belies even the most casual glance at labor statistics. Insofar as this management process “infantilizes” workers, to suggest that this also “often feminizes” them is actually just falling back on a casually negative view of femininity that would be more reminiscent of some machista male worker’s complaints (valid or not) of feeling emasculated by capitalist labor, and fails to illustrate whatever Amos’ point is.
Amos goes on to argue that “in the state, the political rule of capital is underpinned by organised male violence of the military and police…” This is certainly a feature of capitalist states, and likely the result of capitalism emerging from a past patriarchal mode of production, but female cops and soldiers are certainly not unheard of in the modern capitalist state, and it’s unlikely that capitalist states would fail to function if the police and standing armies were 50% or even 75% female, unless one agrees with the deranged ravings of an arch-reactionary such as Pete Hegseth.
Where Amos’ remarks verge into the hallucinatory is the claim that the capitalist state is also underpinned by “masculinist bureaucratic control.” It is certainly historically the case that men dominated the state bureaucracy, (as a consequence of the emergence of the state as the monopolization of violence within the earliest pre-capitalist class societies, e.g. patriarchal-gens societies, barring the notable exception of early class-societies with matriarchal warrior castes) along with most other institutions, but given the overrepresentation of women among recent college graduates, and given the usefulness of a college degree in qualifying oneself for a substantive position employed within the state bureaucracy, this assertion of “underpinning” seems highly dubious. The role of a state bureaucrat seems perfectly suited to be interchangeably filled by a male or female functionary, or for that matter a non-binary person with a completely agender presentation. And, of course, Badiou has famously mused on the rather “maternalistic” posture that female state-bureaucrats deployed against his adopted sons.
“In the home, capital relies on patriarchal family relations to depoliticise and absorb the cost of the care work which reproduces the labour it directly exploits.”
Except under capitalism, we actually see the opposite trend, that the socialization of reproduction via formal waged labor that coincides with increasing participation of women in the labor force (e.g. food service, daycare services, and other personal services) is an important source of valorization.
“Work that produces commodities is masculinised as ‘the economy’; work that reproduces labour is feminised as ‘private life’. Even where women have entered the formal economy, capital pays less for the commodified care work they have historically undertaken within the household for free.”
Under this oft-repeated dubious logic, any job with relatively lower wages is “feminized”. (This would suggest, for example, that the low-waged, preponderately male workers employed in inventory stocking at retail chains, are “feminized”. Similarly, preponderantly female garment factory workers would be “masculinized”, assuming we accept this fetishistic and vulgar materialist definition of “commodity production”, a vulgar materialism which the Amos-type Social Reproduction Theorists implicitly share with the American Communist Party’s unhinged ravings against supposedly “unproductive blue-haired Starbucks baristas.”) It remains unclear how a hypothetical Zack Polanski, attempting to rectify this situation with strict enforcement of laws against sex- and gender-based hiring discrimination and the raising of wages within lower-paid sectors, would run aground against capitalism’s “gendered” DNA.
“… trans women in particular, often find themselves expelled from this division of labour – excluded from the formal economy …”
Anyone who has spent any amount of time seriously studying the conditions of working-class trans women knows they are often excluded from the formal labor market due to systemic hiring discrimination, which is very much the result of the individual prejudices of transphobic hiring managers, and systemic workplace harassment. These are exactly the kind of issues that are addressed by “trans liberalism”. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that trans women are somehow inadequate at performing supposedly “masculine” productive labor, at least in the eyes of a sober-minded capitalist.
Amos continues by arguing that the persecution of South Asian hijras by British colonialists, presumably motivated by Christian religious ideology, somehow illustrates the point that transphobia is an essential part of capitalism. One wonders, is the Church of England’s role as the state religion of the UK also an essential feature of capitalism? While de jure colonialism was a major source of the primitive accumulation of capital, its persistence is not a significant feature of modern capitalism, and in fact was a fetter on capitalist national development in the colonized nation, for the parasitic enrichment of cliques of colonial monopoly-capitalists in the metropole. One could just as easily argue that, since Japan was once a colonialist power, the caste position of burakumin in Yamato society is an essential feature of capitalism. The great irony is that hijras in pre-colonial South Asia are a perfect example of how a non-binary gender-minority can be socially proscribed alongside deeply ingrained patriarchal social relations without it wreaking havoc on social reproduction. The fact that hijras may have experienced social oppression within pre-colonial South Asia is irrelevant to both my point and to Amos’ romanticist historical account, as is the fact that their proscribed gender role would likely rub against modern notions of free gender expression – which is also an important point glossed over by Amos and which illustrates that trans rights also blossom from the concepts of individual liberty introduced by Enlightenment modernity. Without indulging absurd and actually chauvinistic suggestions that British colonialism entirely uprooted pre-capitalist patriarchal relations in South Asia (it transformed them in some cases, but buttressed them in others when necessary, an example of the aforementioned fettering role of colonialism on capitalist development) South Asian feudalism was, by any serious standard, more patriarchal than modern capitalism, not because it was “non-western”, but because it was feudalism.
“The same state which attacks the bodily autonomy of trans people and pushes them out of public space systematically criminalises migrants… While the far-right in Britain sees trans people as weakening the nation by corroding the traditional family from within, they see Muslim and migrant communities as undermining it from without.”
This actually raises the question: if transphobia is the rational capitalist logic of necessary social reproduction, why doesn’t Amos’ imagined all-so-rational transphobic capitalist also support migration, which is also another way of reproducing the labor force? On the contrary, capitalists who support lax immigration typically aren’t transphobic demagogues, and usually indulge HR department-style “woke 1.0” pridewashing. (One would have to go back to George W. Bush, who both implemented guest-worker programs and DOMA, to find something that would approximate such a position, provided one squint.) Were transphobia some hard-nosed capitalist conspiracy to raise the birthrate, assuming trans people even lower the birth rate, would some calculating capitalist obsessed with increasing the labor market at any cost not support both migration and stripping trans peoples’ democratic rights?
Or for that matter, why do they not unanimously support natalist social-democratic policies? Given that the argument that trans people are destroying the birthrate is actually a scapegoating misdirection by the reactionary right to obfuscate economic pressures under capitalism. In truth, women are responding to the economic pressures placed on proletarian families under capitalism by opting out of giving birth, exasperated by the hesitancy to form romantic relations with young men who ascribe to (increasingly) patriarchal-reactionary political ideologies. That economic pressures, more so than patriarchal forms of domestic social relations being requisite for reproduction, are the primary factor, is evidenced by the “DINK” phenomenon among heterosexual couples under contemporary capitalism. This is why socialism not only allows human reproduction to continue, but actually recover somewhat, from the “demographic disaster” occurring now under capitalism – as it removes economic pressure as well as removing continuing patriarchal relations.
This explains why reactionaries increasingly portray single childless women and DINKs as “almost as bad as” trans people, (e.g. the “blue-haired” trope – Even heterosexual men who are attracted to post-menopausal women are not exempt from this, as evidenced by the reactionary online response to the celebration of Michelle Pfeiffer’s 68th birthday) thus trans rights are a wedge issue, where reactionaries can attack a small, socially isolated minority, one that seems “weird” to many “normies”, as a proxy for the modern emancipated life which many more of those “normies”, including conservative-coded ones (the Peggy Hill phenomenon) take for granted.
And why would Amos’ oh-so-rational capitalist transphobe not cheer on the population growth of British Muslims, given that it is social reproduction, and a Muslim worker can be exploited as easily as any other? And of course, while Amos lazily employs “Muslims” as a euphemism for British Asians, orthodox Islamic communitarianism often endorses the very gendered domestic relations that Amos views as essential to capitalist reproduction, illustrating that western conservatives who opine against trans people as the threat from within and Muslims as the threat from without are, in fact, engaging in irrational demagoguery.
Obviously conservative politicians are capitalists, but what people like Amos attribute to “structural” transphobia is either simple electioneering, pandering to existing social prejudices in their electoral base or the irrational ideology of individual capitalists. (And, of course, communists would also defend minority groups imperiled by demagogic lynchmobs, even if it were not “structural oppression.”) The tendency to view all demagogic pandering as a reflection of the “structural” is an error. For instance, was Alito’s now-notorious “domestic supply of infants” argument in the Dobbs ruling really a reflection of a hard-nosed capitalist belief that abortion restrictions could raise the birthrate, or was it retail politics for the anti-abortion lobby?
Amos’ vulgar materialism is nothing more than motivated reasoning towards an a priori conclusion that, since communists support the democratic rights of oppressed groups, i.e., since, where patriarchal relations exist in some places, (and were historically a part of the development of capitalism) communists oppose said patriarchal relations, then persistent patriarchal relations (and all all forms of oppression) are essential for all time to capitalist exploitation. The “radical leftist” faction of the trans rights movement has adopted the stance that trans oppression is intrinsic to capitalist exploitation in response to the popularity of equally misguided intellectual trends, such as materialist feminist theories that the social oppression of women is intrinsic to capitalist exploitation, and theorists of racial capitalism who posit that the ethnic and racial oppression of people of color in countries like the USA is intrinsic to capitalist exploitation, who have inspired the trans radicals to internalize the idea that trans oppression has to be intrinsic to capitalist exploitation in order to be opposed.
The real reason communists support the democratic rights of socially oppressed groups can be found in Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”. A left-leaning Jewish identitarian could just as easily point to Dreyfus or the Shoah and say “antisemitism is intrinsic to capitalism”, and in fact, many do, with the more anti-Zionist among them arguing that the unabashedly Jewish chauvinist State of Israel and its Zionist ideology is part of some imagined global structural antisemitism. In an attempt to present transphobia as an essential byproduct of capitalist rationality, Amos gives transphobia unwarranted credence, as capitalism’s ushering in of rationality into the world sets it apart as a monumental leap of historical progress compared to previous class-societies.