NYU Professor: Trans Activism Is Part of Larger Effort to Bring About a “Communist Revolution”

Kay Gabriel, faculty member at New York University, asserts that trans activism is part of larger effort to bring about a “Communist Revolution”.Show more

QUESTIONER: Why do we say that "Trans liberation calls for a Communist Revolution"?

KAY GABRIEL: Starting with a big one! Um, OK, I'm gonna leap on this first but then, I promise, I'll take a back seat.

The dominant Liberal Bourgeois reframing of Trans Liberation as "Trans Rights", "- Recognition" is based in the supposedly successful pattern of, say, Gay Liberation, transformed into rights and recognition, realized in some of the states – not everywhere.

We make the claim that not only is this insufficient but that pouring our energy into this thing is actually not going to get us what we want or what we need.

This kind of economic transformation that would be a kind of Communist horizon, right? A world in which everyone has what they need – so why does this immediately matter to trans people? Well, what do trans people, in our particularity have to say or to offer that expands the universalism of a Communist society, right?

Which is to say one that would be achieved in time through processes or events that we could call "revolutionary" – that we would have to call revolutionary – because it requires the abolition of society as it currently is.

When we demand that society be re-arranged in certain ways, this is a part of the project!