The Trans Question

I think it's a bit of both, though unfortunately I think it's more sold as distraction and that's why we're seeing more of it. On the one hand, it is arguably pretty progressive to just not give a fuck about gender, be that cis or trans or whatever, and to rather regard all humans as human, and more people seem to represent that notion that they did ten or twenty years ago, arguably due to media coverage. However, on the other more cynical hand we have the media who, whenever possible, will stir up innocuous shit to get eyes and clicks on their articles. Caitlyn Jenner is the perfect example of this. Her transition from something of a masculine role model to a more-than-passing trans lady is something that 1. older folks, at least in America, wanted to pay attention to because they remembered Bruce so fondly, 2. she was willing to be exceptionally public about transitioning, 3. she actually looks pretty good now, and 4. she was out there getting as much spotlight as humanly possible to drum-up buzz for some shitty show she was doing with the kardashians or something.

This is somewhat offset by two things. Firstly, most people in the trans community, from my experience, view her as a pretty shitty representative of trans people. She's republican, a group not known for its acceptance of trans folks, she's already rich -while most trans people are stuck in poverty, and she really did try to be the spokesperson for trans people without their support. I don't think that's so much the case anymore but it certainly was when she came out.

This is the kind of trans that the media wants to talk about. Sexy, open, on screen all the time, rich as fuck, never having to really worry about her physical or emotional well-being. It is in a way the kind of post-acceptance view of trans people that I think humanity would be well served by adopting for all trans people, but that's just the thing, Caitlyn isn't most trans people, she's the .1 percent of trans people. She doesn't represent the day-to-day shit that goes with being trans, but that's not what the media wants to show people.

In that sense, I don't know if I can call this truly progressive in its cause and support. Those factors are incidental, the come with more media exposure, more people thinking about what it would be like if they were trans or their family members came out as trans, but they aren't what is being sold, this isn't what is getting clicks and ad revenue - what is being sold to people in most news articles about trans people is the luxury of having capital and resources to deal with being trans, and in that sense this is just another aspect of the commodification of everything in capitalism.

...

Why isn't this bait thread bumplocked yet?

Yes, but most of the support for it in the current form does unfortunately amount to idealist liberal distraction. Check out Stonewall Militant Front for a great example emerging now of a radical queer anti-identity politics:

Base/Superstructure from German Ideology, slight economism mixed with the central idea from Deleuze and Guattari's book

Straight from wiki:

'Schizoanalysis proposes a functional evaluation of the direct investments of desire—whether revolutionary or reactionary—in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical.

idpol please get out

...

The only trannies middle america are exposed to are like mentally ill tumblr tards or legit dudes in dresses.

Yes, they are always pushing the whole "we want to pump your children full of hormones and take them away from you" bullshit.

Gay people had way better public relations when you thought of gay people it was like Freddy mercury or michael stipe.

stop bumping this bait thread

Where though?

>Gay people could blend in better
That's a weird way to spell do. The few trans folks I know are nice, fun to be around and all, but they certainly stand out. I don't really care because I'm an alcoholic NEET loser who wake up at noon and party for a living, but let's say that it is not necessarily written on your face that you are gay or lesbian when you accept your original body and genitals. When it is, it might be troubling to some people working at government offices and shit, and that's kinda the crux of the issue in the end.
wut.
Man, I agree with the bulk of your post but you probably have been drinking a bit too much of the Holla Forums KoolAid lately.

Also this. Basically, trans people just weird people doing weird shit, and it's okay, but the current obsession with them is akin to a hysteria directed at noise rock enthusiasts or Brakhage fans. Do your own thing, whatever, I don't care.

In 100% seriousness, trans people are mentally ill faggots.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty_blocker

But where are the hordes of trans people advocating the state forcibly inject this into children?

Hot take baby.

Go home Holla Forums, you can't bait for shit.

YOU faggots are the idealists, it's obvious you just dont want to talk about this shit because youre too lazy to have any kind of nuanced opinion so just dismiss any fronts of class struggle you find to boring to consider as bourgeois.

See the Stonewall Militant Front posts as examples of how you are wrong and how sexuality and gender are important for a good materialist reading of capitalism and organizing against it.

lol. Did I ever said that I know how they feel? I said I don't care. They are such a small and irrelevant minority

No, we don't wanna talk about this shit because it's fucking irrelevant, fags and trannies are tiny proportion of the population, they deserve none of our attention, we should be focusing on class and not identity

...

redspark.nu/en/proletarian-feminism/stonewall-militant-front-2018-a-new-year-a-new-us/

literally neer said that

I guess I got you confused with this user>>2345451

Either way if you don't care about them why are you even bothering with this thread?

This is a serious thread I posted, If you dont want to participate thats fine, but don't try to discredit this discussion

Tell me again how the production of new laborers via reproductive labor, a matdrial process that produces society's superstructural configuration of gender and sexuality, is completely unrelated to materialist analysis of class?

Capitalism and capitalist ideologt are hegemonic. If you think class struggle is essential then gender and its contradictions are produced by the contradictions of capital.

Pic related is you not having an argument other than "muh faggits r annoying n tumblr n shieeet"

Just give the trannies their hrt and be done with it, half the screeching is from fat lesbians butthurt at muh males and the other half is christfaggotry and they will get shot anyways.

Oh yeah the discussion about 0.1% of the population that for some we aren't dissmissing them immediatly as having a mental condition
death to idpol

Because this thread is gonna get 300+ replies and I wanted to be part of it somehow

This isn't a topic for brainlets sorry, we're trying to actually do something here sweaty

Because nobody should be bothering, it's a waste of knuckle grease and obvious pol bait to get you to talk about fucking trannies

Fair enough

...

pretty obvious i meant trannies and not communists

There's so few namefags that also puts me in the top five of best posters.

yes! keep talking about meaningless issues that the working class either doesn't care or is hates talking about!
death to idpol

Children shouldn’t be exposed to hormone altering substances for purely cosmetic reasons.

I didn't say namefags though, I rarely see even stray polyps or redditors make as shitty posts as you consistently put out.

These things shouldn’t be used for cosmetic purely reasons on minors.

Trans people from a scientific stand point are really trans, not just men pretending to be women or the other way around. I think approaching the trans question from any perspective other than a scientific one is at best, foolish.

Inb4 "idpol GET OUT"

But are there actually significant portions of trans people advocating that they should or are you just going to link me to a couple of one-off tumblr posts or something?

Oh I know exactly what you meant. Now read it again and try to get your tiny little brain working

trump-tier

What's there to discuss?
Trans people suffer from a mental illness: gender dysphoria. We have the means to help them: we can give them hormones, surgery, psychiatric help and use the pronouns they prefer (pretty sure most people don't flip their shit when you misgender them on accident btw).
I think a discussion on just gender roles could've been interesting, how they've changed, how they're kept in place and what their negative effects are.

Obviously a significant number of people are using it. Else they wouldn’t be manufactured for them.

Are we being raided again?

...

I agree they should be helped, but this massive social agreement that that means "enable them at every turn" speaks of lunacy to me. Dealing with Mental Disorders 101 is that you do not enable or confirm delusions. Don't call an anorexic fat. Don't give the alcoholic their 11am shot to get their day started. Don't call a manic depressive worthless and hand them a loaded gun. Don't call somebody with gender dysphoria what they feel like instead of what they verifiably are.

A significant amount of people don't use bacon lube and they still manufacture that

Besides that still doesn't answer the question of where the thousands of trannies advocating for the forced hormone treatment of children in general or else are

please let this be ironic

..have you used the board before?

Pol has baited you again into talking about idpol, remeber, sage and slide.

Transsexualism is really interesting, but all my interactions with the online queer community has been slightly disappointing with me because most online queers are mostly intersted in queer-culture or subculture which i really don't give a shit about. I don't have a problem with it, if you're queer and in need of a subculture to construct your identity then queer culture is probably a lot more interesting to you, I'm not queer so it's wholly uninteresting for me.
Queerism is intersting because it concerns the slow but methodical breakdown of all identities, which speaks to my universalist tendencies. Gender is, in my opinion, a relic of times past. I know I'm reappropriating the term, but gender serves no social role after capitalist reterritorialization, only the material role of ``we need somebody to do the reproductive labor".
Even though I think I understand why queerism feels like a radical project, I think its wrong to not acknowledge the fact that queerism is a result of capitalist breakdown of identities, and that in the end the capitalist patriarchal oppression is purely material - meaning that it's perfectly compatible with this breakdown of identities if the material need for patriarchal oppression disappears.

Political transsexualism is a distraction insofar as it is part of the media spectacle or a liberal project politically. But the breakdown of gender and sexual identities in a larger sense can be construed as a universalist project, which is very much in key with leftist progressive projects.
Gender and sexuality is completely non-material and so if you're universalist one ought support the destruction of societally defined identities such as those.

Also to all the idiots in the thread: you can talk about identities and their relationship to capital without partaking in identity politics, identity politics is a question of praxis not of theory. I get that threads like this always baits reactionaries to talk about shit they read in breitbart or on Holla Forums but fuck me if we can't talk about this here then where else?

You absolute fucking retard, im saying that your argument of "gender dysphoria only effects a small minority so why should we care about it" can be compared to "only a small number of people are dissatisfied with capitalism so why should we care about it"

I have still yet to see one (1) argument refuting this , if this is dumb idpol bait it shouldnt be hard

Good post.

you're trying too hard Holla Forums. we don't fall for lgbtqwhatever+ garbage here.
death to idpol

Also who says I'm debating? I'm literally telling people not to waste their energy on this because it goes nowhere.

Trans people have faced oppression from both the state and society. Trans women of color especially are constantly murdered and hardl anyone cares. These aren't privileged snowflakes, they're a subset of the proletariat that faces unjust oppression and it doesn't matter that, superficially, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of trans people because its socially unacceptable, the bigotry they face is unfair and wrong.

dude, other than the west everyone hates capitalism

get out

it's a waste of time to discuss the moral consequences of nearly irrelevant things.

you realize being "of color" doesn't make a difference when you're in Uganda, right?

this
also death to idpol

A socialist not worried about ending bigotry, a tool hidtorically used to divide and oppress the working class is a retard. You get out and neck yourself while you're at it, reactionary.

It really isn't.

literally not an argument

you don't care about bigotry, porky, you just want to use it as an excuse to divide the workers by race

Literally didn't respond to an argument. Low effort breeds low effort.

Yes, it's wrong regardless of color. I brought that up specifically as an americentric example and should have clarified.

that's an argument for not discussing idpol, so yeah, an argument
death to idpol

You can't build a mass socialist movement without recognizing the specific issues that subsets of the proletariat face. But ignore the fact that non-white and lgbt proles have horrible, specified oppression that white proles may not and have fun with your shitty divided working clas full of people who dont understand or want to work with each other.

GET
THE
FUCK
OUT

stay mad, liberal/tankie/annarkiddir/polyp/idpolyp

what a meanie racist! get off our safe space please!
idiot

I'll put it like this for you.
I really could not care less about the treatment of trans people in my society. why? because it hardly affects. worst case scenario, I accidentally fuck a trap one day, but shit happens. you know what does affect me on a daily basis? exploitation. coverage. buying power. commodity production. these are the things I choose to care about. any other component of our society's ideology does not affect me. you could argue all you want about how I should care, but I just don't. the thing is, sexual decadence is for the most part unaffected by society's mode of production. capitalism doesn't dictate whether you can be gay or not. you're able to share gay oreo cookies as long as the men up top are able to keep making money. it's only fair that it should be irrelevant to me as well.

Always a great argument for people browsing the retarded half brother of a siamese frogwatching emporium

Where the fuck did you provide a single argument?

See, this is almost an argument. Definitely far more people in the second or third world are dissatisfied with capitalism or openly leftist. People in the first world had any leftist movements violently purged out of existence and usually memory as well. Gender and sexual issues emerge from liberalism trying to find new frontiers to be le ebig progressives on, but because class is ultimately still the underlying issue we see the material logic of class relations expressing itself in the superstructure of gender – yes, gender and sexuality are pure ideology, they are idpol. That ideology and idpol is the result of material class relations created by the capitalist mode of production. Therefore if you actually are not invested in the ideological identities you would not be against realizing the way purely ideological identities like man and woman and straight and gay are used to undermine working class solidarity and the working classes' ability to harness their own labor power.

Yes, this is an issue that emerged in the first world, and when liberals and pseudoleftists act as if propagandizing a new set of 200 genders and sexualities is any kind of revolutionary action they are acting as bourgeois liberals not only reifying the ideology of gender but fracturing it into more identities that can all be commodified. Pure smoke and mirrors distraction to displace the blame of alienation from capital to somewhere else.

So, the challenge becomes, how should leftists address gender and sexuality after understanding that defending traditional conceptions of man and woman as well as inventing new essentialized genders both leverage idealism against proletarian interest? How do we conceive of our biological reproductive potential and the physiologies and behaviors influenced by it after we recognize that any conception will be necessarily ideological, as all conceptions are? How do we establish a materialist praxis opposed to gender ideology without ignoring the material relations of production such ideology reonforces?

Thats the question

tl dr

Nope, that's an assertion, I would argue that discussing the consequences of every little thing in society is what gives you the means to understand the world dialectically.
And it is all too clear at this point, that most of the backlash against trans people on this board is coming from a position of bigotry, so that is a good reason to discuss it here.

sup fullcommunism :-)
how r u doin bb?

Gender and sexuality are ideological, Holla Forums and liberals defend different sides of the same ideological assumptions, leftists should be actively trying to look at the material conditions responsible for influential ideological assumptions such as gender and sexuality but instead Holla Forums covers their ears and screeches idpol to keep their *chan cred or some retarded bullshit

Holy fucking shit i hate how these threads are always a fucking shitshow, is there a way to code your language so you're able to have threads about this without having people shouting at each other about idpol.

Just to expand a bit on my thoughts, I think the entire way that first world culture has been normalizing transsexuality from the start is a interesting case study in how patriarchal culture is able to essentially just reshape as needed whenever anything seemed to radically threaten something as entrenched as gender or sexual normativity, it really is testament to the malleability of the superstructure. One might just make a case study out of a term like gender dysphoria and how it's social meaning has changed through time

There's at the very least been a real material change in the possibility and availability of sexual reassignment, which isnt really a necessary condition but it still has a real accelerating effect on the destruction of societally determined identity.

The answer to all those questions, that also functions as a way to piss off all the twitter liberals and the rose emojis (as though they generally arent the same thing): radical universalism baybey.

Everybody should read Fanged Noumena.

Fuck off spicy.

I've heard a few theories. One is that the shift in work norms is destroying gender. Another is that the fusion of historically separate roles (productive and reproductive, work and home life, labour and entrepreneurship) is leading to identity-confusion. Yet another is that people are becoming trans as a way to take advantage of the wider idpol fad if they're white, male, straight, etc. There's also the "postmodern" tendency to define oneself through mediatised identities to consider. A lot of trans activism is less about the right to *be* trans than the right to be *recognised* as trans (correct pronouns, toilet use, etc). So in a way, it's a follow-through of the pomo/neoliberal idea that we define who we are.

Trans rights is a broadly progressive issue, in a wider context of the right to be different, the elimination of compulsory conformity, the creation of a human-centred rather than capital-centred world. It doesn't have the earth-shattering significance some people seem to think it does. And social media attention whoring, NAP Violation-policing and "right not to be triggered" are liberal or reactionary. Real transphobia is also reactionary. Doesn't matter if it's a mental illness, because mental illness is a social construct and all true socialists are mad liberationists.

i was in this thread but i was actually
, >>2345457 >>2345424

I can see why you'd think that poster was me though

Nick Land? Admittedly I dont know much about him but he's the dark enlightenment guy correct? Would you mind selling me on him, his wiki description is interesting and I would love to read a smart reactionary but dont want to waste my time on some sperglord like Evola.

I agree about universality being crucial. I honestly think that a good reading of both Alain Badiou and Judith Butler provides the best model I can think of. Theyre difficult philosophers to reconcile since Butler thinks all power struggle is radically historically contingent and its functioning defined entirely by that contingency, while Badiou insists on the possibility of Truth as experienced by the Cartesian subject and contingency being reconciled by the reorientation of truth procedures around an Event. I think it can be done though and I would like to see Badiou's radical universality combined with Butler's understanding of power as functioning on a Lacanian symbolic landscape

Sorry for the autistic jargon its my day off and I never get to talk about this shit

I don't know who that is.

idpol, not even once

Links please

DEATH TO IDPOL

we're getting baited by pol or the fbi to talk about this dumb garbage

Can this oppression be quantified, like labor exploitation can be? If oppression can’t be quantified it’s just vague cultural voo-doo that’s meaningless.

He didn't go full reactionary before the mid-00s and Fanged Noumena is a collection of some of his academic and more poetic output from the 90s. He's a weirdo who did a shitton of speed who's really interesting to read because his philosophical output was inspiried by rave music, speculative fiction and lovecraftian horror. He's basically the father of leftist accelerationism, even though most people today think of accelerationism in a slightly different sense.
I got introduced to his thought through this talk on jungle by some other CCRU people which also has Mark Fischer, (a close associate of Nick Land) who wrote Capitalist Realism, in it.
soundcloud.com/ctm-festival/ctm13-death-of-rave-1-uk
Quoting the amazon description:
He's hilarious and pretentious, he's great, horribly underrated.

I've wanted to get into Badiou's writings on universality and politics before but when I've tried it made me feel like a fucking brainlet, are there any good intro's to him? or has he written /talked about it in manners more approachable?

Low quality bait.
MODS

Absolutely sold ill check him out

As for Badiou, hes really fuckin tough theres not really a way around it. As far as supplementary texts, AJ Bartletts Badiou and Plato is helpful. I would check that out along with Badious "Conditions".

Good post.

The first article in the book is - and I'm not even joking the slightest bit - literally about that fucking circle showing how incest between siblings is as wrong as race mixing in that Holla Forums meme. It's called Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest and leads with this quote of Lévi-Strauss:
Nick Land isn't somebody I agree with totally - I think it's hard to do that and call yourself a leftist - and most of the people who constitude his modern legacy are interesting but too anti-humanist for my taste. But I think a lot of his analysis of capital is correct, and I think it's weird that accelerationists and some post-left anarchists are the only people who actually incorporate any of his critiques of the leftist project.

Yeah that's kind of what I suspected, I'll keep an eye out for those texts next time I feel up to the task.

Thats a really interesting observation actually. I completely agree that leftists let dogma decide what theyre willing to read far too often. If youre confident in your theoretical understandings then you can and should challenge them, and if you cant do that without having an ideological crisis you have no reason to be confident in your theory in the first place. Thanks for the rec ill check this out.

viewpointmag.com/2017/07/19/transition-and-abolition-notes-on-marxism-and-trans-politics/

Transpeople have the right to self express how they want and we should be fighting for their personal individual freedom like we do for any other. Doesn't have a whole lot to do with socialism in my opinion, but a lot of transfolk seem interested in socialism so we should be making use of them to shift the overton window left and gain support. Obviously yeah dangers of idpol etc etc but on the base level, they're fine and we should be fine with them.

You mean America loves killing black people? Wow new revelation. LGBT movement trying to steal the show again.