R. Nesbitt | Red Phoenix correspondent | Maryland–

This Transgender Day of Remembrance falls on the solemn and ominous forecast of a second Trump administration, a Republican-controlled Congress, and the most conservative Supreme Court since perhaps the Civil War. We as Marxist-Leninists, as queer Marxist-Leninists, are under threat whether the levers of this capitalist oligarchy are controlled by Harris or Trump, Democrat or Republican. We find ourselves in a place where there is no choice but to fight for our rights, for our survival, and for our happiness.  

Under Democratic or Republican administrations, far too many brothers, sisters, and siblings have been taken from us, with all of their gifts, either as the result of hate crimes or conditions which drive them to take their own lives, or deprive them of necessary shelter, healthcare, and employment. When we somberly remember these lives, and do not forgive the robbery of them by the capitalist system, we must join that to a will to fight! We must organize against all laws, state or federal, that seek to defund gender-affirming medical services; that seek to bar transgender youth from participating in sports, acumen and training; that gut our education and culture in order to otherize us, to dehumanize us, and to fertilize the soil of bigotry that thrives in these decrepit times.  

The American Party of Labor wholly and unequivocally stands behind the rights of the transgender community, and opposes any attempts for us to be used as a scapegoat for the advancement of the fascistization of this country — a tried and true tactic of the fascist right from Mussolini exiling homosexual men to volcanic islands in the Adriatic, to the Nazis burning queer art and attacking clinics performing gender-affirming medical care in Germany. Now, in the U.S., Trump and his ilk crusade for “parental rights” and “common sense,” while Harris and the right-running Democrats argued for “following the law” in their cowardly abandonment of the transgender community. 

The bourgeoisie will not save us! We look at equal regret to our lost loved ones to the absence of a revolutionary workers’ movement in this country, which includes all workers, and we are prepared for the struggle that is necessary to vanquish the state which is so decrepit as even to question the human rights to which people of the LGBTQIA+ community are entitled.  

Hard, medieval days await us. Our community will be our lighthouse, the buoy that holds us above water, but if there is any hope for reaching land, our community must adapt itself to organization, to education, and to constructing a new socialist working-class movement of students and workers, of straight allies and of queers, of cisgender and gender-nonconforming people, all oppressed under the boot of the ravenous capitalist class. Only in the establishment of socialism, of a democracy in which the majority have a true voice, a true interest, which disarms the most backwards strata of our society, and promotes a brave culture and encourages education, will we be safe. Only then will we no longer weep for the lives torn away from us; only then can we say to a truly free and equal land and declare with pride, “never again!” 

Categories: LGBTQIA+