Upstream - Trans Liberation and Solidarity with Alyson Escalante

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Our transgender comrades are under attack — not just by incendiary reactionaries on the right, but also by many of those on the more liberal or even left side of the political spectrum. The attacks come in many forms, from outright violence, to genocidal language, to the often arbitrary and reactionary demarcations around what constitutes “womanhood,” to the “just asking questions” industrial complex led by liberal institutions like the New York Times.  In this episode, we explore a robust rebuttal to anti-trans and transphobic narratives and actions — from an explicitly Marxist perspective. And we’ve brought on the perfect guest to lead us in this.  Alsyon Escalante is the co-host of Red Menace — a podcast that explains and analyzes revolutionary theory and then applies its lessons to our contemporary conditions. The conversation we’re going to have is inspired by a cross-over episode of Red Menace and Revolutionary Left Radio titled, “Our Transgender Comrades: Dialectical Materialism, Marxist Feminism, and Trans Liberation.”  The first half of our conversation with Alyson focuses on that episode and lays out a theoretical rebuttal of liberal, bourgeois, and radical feminist approaches to feminism and gender. We lay out a principled Marxist, materialist analysis of gender and ‘womanhood’ and how they differ from post-modern and idealist conceptions.  The second half of our conversation brings the discussion back down to eye-level, and explores the current political, social, and economic realities faced by trans people and why it’s more important than ever for us to stand in solidarity with our transgender comrades and to fight against the reactionary right and their liberal accomplices. Thank you to Against Me! for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. Resources: Red Menace and Revolutionary Left Radio Upstream: Revolutionary Leftism with Breht O'Shea (In Conversation) Upstream: Feminism for the 99 Percent Editor's note:  A member-organizer with the Freelance Solidarity Project (the digital media division of the National Writers Union) and one of the co-authors of the NYT contributors' letter wrote in with a small correction: "I wanted to flag that the initial labor support for the letter came from Freelance Solidarity Project members—the Writers Guild is great and members signed their own letter in support of trans people as part of a broader solidarity effort. The NYT staff are also represented by The NewsGuild of New York—the letter defending signing as protected activity was by NewsGuild of NY President Susan DeCarava." This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.    

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Thank you. And now on with the show. In reality, whether we like it or not, there is an open debate within our society about whether or not transgender people ought to be able to exist in public as members of society, right? And I agree that normatively, that shouldn't be a question, but it is a question that we're facing. And so for Marxists who are involved in struggles for liberation, who are involved in struggles for the working class to build power, we obviously need to think about how groups that are marginalized and pushed out of society relate to those struggles and fit within them and how their struggles for liberation might overlap with ours, right? This is a question that Marxists need to tackle and can't just ignore or choose

to be kind of like apathetic about. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Our transgender comrades are under attack, not just by incendiary reactionaries on the right, but also by many of those on the more liberal or even left side of the political spectrum. The attacks come in many forms, from outright violence to genocidal language, to the often arbitrary and reactionary demarcations around what constitutes womanhood, to the just-asking-questions industrial complex

led by liberal institutions like the New York Times. In this episode, we're going to explore a robust rebuttal to anti-trans and transphobic narratives and actions from an explicitly Marxist perspective. And we've brought on the perfect guest to lead us in this. Alison Escalante is the co-host of Red Menace, a podcast that explains and analyzes revolutionary theory and then applies its lessons to our contemporary conditions. The conversation we're going to have is inspired by a crossover episode of Red Menace and Revolutionary Left Radio titled Our Transgender Comrades, Dialectical Materialism, Marxist Feminism, and Trans Liberation. The first half of our conversation with Allison focuses on that episode and lays out a theoretical

rebuttal of liberal, bourgeois, and radical feminist approaches to feminism and gender. We lay out a principled Marxist materialist analysis of gender and womanhood and how they differ from postmodern and idealist conceptions. The second half of our conversation brings the discussion back down to eye level and explores the current political, social, and economic realities faced by trans people, and why it's more important than ever for us to stand in solidarity with our transgender comrades and to fight against the reactionary right and their liberal accomplices. Here's Robert in conversation with Allison Escalante. So, Allison, welcome to Upstream. It is really, really great to have you on. Yeah, thank you for having me on. I'm super excited.

I have heard so much good stuff about you all, honestly, from Brett just constantly going on about how, you know, working with Upstream has been one of his favorite things in podcasting. So I'm very excited and honored to be here. Oh, that's awesome to hear Brett O'Shea, of course, from Rev Left Radio, who we had on a few months ago now just to talk about revolutionary left politics in general. But so I've been listening to Red Menace, the incredible podcast that you co-host with Brett for a little over a year now. And I really I can't begin to express just like what an incredible resource the show is. I've learned so much about theory and have been introduced to so many incredible books and texts. And yeah,

just really want to make sure to express that first thing and for our listeners to definitely check out Red Menace. It's an incredible, incredible resource. Totally. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think one little kind of shout out regarding the show, there are some discussions that we're going to be having here that actually really overlap with what we're talking about on Red Menace right now. Probably by the time this releases, we'll have just released our episode on Frederick Engel's origin of the family. And that obviously has some overlap with some of what we're, you know, going to be diving into today. So if people want deeper reading about some of these questions, we are kind of getting into that over on Red

Menace right now. So potentially worth checking out. Awesome. Yeah. And I am definitely excited to check that out. So thank you so much for sharing that. And we will stay tuned for that. I'm sure it will be an excellent compliment to some of the stuff that we're talking about today. And before we get into that, though, I am wondering to start maybe if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself a little bit more for our listeners. And yeah, just maybe talking a little bit about how you came to do the work that you do and sort of how you got interested in it. Totally. Yeah. So my name is Allison Escalante for people who don't know. And yeah, like you said, I am one of the co-hosts on the Red Menace podcast where we take different works of political theory, usually from the revolutionary left, although we've dipped into

studying some right wing texts as well. And we just kind of try to break them down, discuss them and give summaries for people to kind of be able to use our episodes as a tool to aid them in studying these texts. And for me, that's, you know, very much an extension of something that I've always been interested in, which is political theory and philosophy. I was a philosophy undergrad major, I did some graduate studies in philosophy as well. So I really, really have always kind of been interested in approaching tech seriously this way. And I kind of didn't expect to get into podcasting. I got invited on to Rev Left Radio originally as a guest to discuss some work that I had written. And eventually Brett ended up asking me back for us to dive into Lenin's State

and Revolution, which ended up being a really fun time. And kind of from that episode, the idea of Red Menace spun out. And eventually Brett and I discussed making our own show where we would be taking texts and breaking them down very similar to how we did there. And that's kind of how I got into podcasting. So it wasn't really what I had planned to go into. But it has been really a wonderful journey. Honestly, I think it's so much fun having a really good co host like Brett, who also has a background in philosophy and theory. And just like taking the time to think seriously together about texts within the revolutionary tradition and not just like treating them in the abstract, but also in terms of what they can tell us about organizing today, what they can tell us about struggles that

exist around us right now. So yeah, that's kind of where it all came from. And it's been a really great journey so far. And although you didn't know for most of it, I was on that journey listening. And it was great to find out about Red Menace. And like you said, I love that it never feels like sort of like an armchair exercise, like you all make it relevant, you bring it into the current world that we're living in, which I really love. And not that there's anything wrong with sort of like armchair exercises. Yeah, I really love that. And so let's dive right into it. There is a lot that we could talk about. Like I have so many different questions that I would

love to explore with you, so many different themes and topics. And we'll have to have you back on the show at some point to get into them. But today I wanted to really focus on an episode that you did sort of a crossover with Rev Left Radio titled Our Transgender Comrades, Dialectical Materialism, Marxist feminism, and trans liberation. And so I thought it was super fascinating that you and your guests on that episode laid out such a comprehensive theoretical rebuttal to a lot of the anti-trans and transphobic quote analysis that we've been hearing more and more about lately, especially. And in addition to like its obvious harmful social and political effects, you all really, yeah, that theoretical rebuttal, I thought was really interesting and something I had never really come across before. And so I'd

love to start maybe on that more theoretical level before zooming back down into maybe some of the more like current event stuff that's going on. So yeah, I'm wondering, and we can pull like in a more focused way on any of these threads throughout the conversation later, but maybe just to start, if you can provide a bit of a bird's eye view on that title itself and the topics that you wanted to explore in that episode and maybe explain a little bit because I don't know how familiar most of our listeners are with sort of theoretical philosophical ideas like dialectical materialism, for example. So yeah, maybe if you could just unpack that and yeah, just talk about how this all relates to

Marxist feminism and trans liberation. Totally. So kind of starting at the broad level about the title. The title of this episode was funny, actually, because it ended up being released under a different title on Red Menace that caused some controversy. So on Red Menace, the episode, we had titled it on the transgender question, and that made some people kind of upset for posing the idea that there is an open question, right? that there is an open question, right? So we end up going with a different name on Rev Left. I think either way, we're getting at the same thing, which is that in reality, whether we like it or not, there is a open debate within our society about whether or not transgender people ought to be able to exist in public as members of society, right? And I agree that normatively, that shouldn't be a question, but it is a question that we're facing. And so for Marxists who are involved in struggles for liberation, who are involved in struggles for the working class to

build power, we obviously need to think about how groups that are marginalized and pushed out of society relate to those struggles and fit within them and how their struggles for liberation might overlap with ours, right? So I think that's what the title is trying to get at in both cases. This is a question that Marxists need to tackle and can't just ignore or choose to be kind of like apathetic about. So on a very high level, I think that's what we were trying to get at there. But yeah, so having said that about the episode title, I think it is a good idea to start with some of these kind of theoretical questions, like what dialectical materialism is, because in that episode, and especially in like most of the

thinking that I tried to do about these questions, dialectical materialism is really kind of central. And I'm going to be very broad in my definition here. Obviously, it's a definition that most Marxists can nitpick because I'm trying to give something very introductory. But like broadly, I would say that dialectical materialism is the idea that society is constantly in a state of transformation and change, which is driven by changes at the level of property and production, right? And central to this idea is the idea that material changes create contradictions, which lead to crises and ruptures within a society as a whole and cause it to transform. A lot of technical stuff in there. So to kind of like

simplify it a little bit, I think, you know, we can focus on a few things. So first is like the dialectical aspect of dialectical materialism. And for Marxism, dialectics is first and foremost, just kind of the insistence that things can't be understood in isolation, or a static and unchanging phenomena, right? If we want to understand something, we have to look at its relation to other things around it, the context in which it exists. something, we have to look at its relation to other things around it, the context in which it exists. And really, as materialists, we have to look at how it relates to kind of the material reality of life. How do we produce food? How do we produce commodities? How do we reproduce human life? And in order to understand various phenomena, we have to think about it in those contexts. And again, since that's still kind of abstract, I think we can kind of follow a move that Ingalls himself makes in his writing to make this a little bit more

concrete by looking at dialectics applied in another context. So Ingalls consistently refers to evolution as an example of dialectics. And I think it's something that people often have an easier time understanding. So I'm going to try to kind of work into it from that. So if I like want to ask a very basic question, the kind of like into it from that. So if I like want to ask a very basic question, the kind of like silly basic question that people who do philosophy love asking, could ask me what is a dog, right? And there's a very straightforward answer to that. I could give you like a definition of what defines the species, etc. But as someone interested in dialectical materialism, I would point out that if we want to understand what a dog is, we have to understand

the evolution of a dog, where it came from. So an interesting thing is like the dogs that we have in our homes today are not a species that has always existed, and also not a species that will always exist necessarily. And in reality, dogs came about from a relationship with humans that led to domestication and selective breeding of certain traits. And really, if we want to add the materialist element in, also, you know, performed labor within changes in human society. As humans move to domestication of animals, dogs could play an important role in herding and protecting and shepherding those animals. And so to understand what a dog is, we can't just look at a dog itself. We have to understand these relations to material realities, to other species that exist

around a dog in order to really understand it. And that's kind of the core idea of dialectical materialism. And dialectical materialism would step away from something really simple like a dog and say, like, what about the working class? Where does that come from? What about the ruling class? What about the way that we trade commodities between each other. And it's going to do a very similar analysis in that way. So that's kind of the broad, like, theoretical level. And so I think, you know, it's easy to hear a definition like that and be like, okay, but like, what the hell does that have to do with feminism, right? What does that have to do with trans liberation? Because again, it sounds really abstract. But really, if we want to like, kind of tie everything together, I think the move that Marxism makes,

and that I tried to make in that episode, and I know my co hosts for that episode, Esperanza and Ray, we're also trying to make is say like this insight for dialectical materialism, it's actually super important for understanding the oppression of women and the oppression of transgender people. So on one level, if dialectical materialism is true, and we want to analyze something like patriarchy, we end up with this really interesting realization that patriarchy can't be a thing that's always existed on its own, because in the dialectical worldview, nothing is a thing that's always existed on its own. It emerges from somewhere, right? And so that's really important, because if we want to fight something like patriarchy, it's really important to insist

patriarchy hasn't always been around. And that implies that it doesn't always have to be around, right? That opens the possibility for struggle against it, which I think is really important. And one of the things that we were trying to get at in that episode is that there are certain forms of feminism that kind of treat patriarchy as this eternal, always there thing. And that's a mistake, right? From a Marxist perspective, we can understand how patriarchy emerged as private property developed and changes in the family unit within pre-capitalist societies emerged. And again, on Red Menace, we're diving into this in Origins on the Family right now, so there's some more depth on it there. But what's really important for us as Marxists is to

say that patriarchy came about because of specific changes within the material reality of society. And therefore, if we want to fight patriarchy, if we want like a feminism that's worth its name, we have to be fighting for socialism as well. We have to be fighting for changes at the level of the material reality of society. And then kind of the last thing to connect there is the question of transgender people, right? So how do transgender people fit into all of this? And one of the moves that we've tried to make there and I've tried to make elsewhere is to say that if we want to start thinking about gender from a materialist and dialectical perspective, one thing we can do is think about the kinds of labor that working women and working trans women are forced into. And this

is actually where we see like some overlap, right? Trans women are overrepresented within the sex industry. Trans women often are overrepresented within forms of domestic labor as well. And that is a unity that they share with other working women, right? And from there, we can start to use kind of these insights about how gender relates to labor and relates to the material reality of society to unpack why there's a need for a coalition between cis women and trans women of the working class fighting for socialism, because our interests are wrapped up together in abolishing patriarchy and abolishing capitalism as well. So that's kind of the big theoretical drilling down there, hopefully not too broad, but trying to give some idea of what we were getting at in that episode. Yeah, no, that's super duper helpful. And it's actually really interesting

that you sort of brought in the sex work or labor issue in there because like you mentioned, like trans people are often disproportionately in the sex industry. And then you have this legislation in Tennessee, which is essentially banning drag shows, which is from my limited understanding, but I've sort of heard a little bit about how drag shows can serve as a way for a lot of trans folks to actually enter into a more formal, like labor situation. And so it's like, not just this weird ideological sort of repressive legislation that stands on its own. It's also like very much a labor thing. And I think we're actually going to get a little bit more into the labor dimensions

of all of this in a bit, especially with the New York Times controversy or whatever, whatever the hell you want to call that. But sticking a little bit more to the theoretical realm right now, I'm wondering if you can, and we've covered this quite a bit in previous episodes and even a documentary that we did, but I'd love to get your take specifically in this context on sort of what the liberal bourgeois feminist and also the trans exclusionary radical feminist ideologies get wrong. And like, particularly when it comes to class analysis and their analysis of like trans people. Right? Yeah. So both of them, I think, kind of make like very similar mistakes that then play

out in different directions, right? But at the core of it is what I would call like a very metaphysical way of looking at the world, and a very metaphysical way of looking at gender in particular. So in like Marxism, we kind of use metaphysical to mean the opposite of dialectical in some ways. So metaphysical is this idea that you can think about things in isolation, you can think about things as eternal and unchanging, right? And actually, both the liberal and the radical feminist sides of things sort of view the world through this lens still, and that leads to a couple different problems. So on the liberal side, I think this takes like a couple different forms. There's kind of an identitarian approach to politics and thinking about gender that treats gender as like it's a personal identity within me, and that's all it is, and it's how I identify.

It's an inner truth about myself, which is unchanging and static. And one of the problems with that idea is that it kind of isolates the way that gender exists in relation to the rest of the world, right? Like, there may be a part of gender that is how I see myself and how I self-identify, but gender also is a structure that forces me into specific forms of labor, that subjects me to specific forms of oppression. So it can't just be something internal, right? It has to also be an external relation. So that's one thing that the bourgeois feminist side misses. And then the other thing that bourgeois feminists miss, and I think this is really crucial, is they try to pretend that there's like a universal experience of womanhood and gender, which unites all women together, which misses something really important and something that Marxist feminists have pointed

out over and over again, which is that often the oppression of working class women and the exploitation of working class women is precisely at the hands of bourgeois women, right? For example, working class women who are brought in to do domestic forms of labor within the households of bourgeois families are often kind of liberating bourgeois women from doing that labor themselves, and their exploitation comes specifically there. I think we could also look at like commercial surrogacy as a potential example, right, where you have this kind of labor relationship that is specifically working women giving their bodies in the context of a specific kind of labor for bourgeois women here. So I think we see that totally missed within the bourgeois

feminist example as well. Now on the radical feminist side of things, I think there's a similar metaphysical view. Gender and sex are treated kind of as unchanging and like trans historical, right? They've always been the same. These are always stable categories that we've always had. In a way that ignores that even if like sexual difference is just like a basic we have different bodies has always existed, that doesn't mean that it's always led to the same like social relations, right? Bodies can have different meanings as different ideologies get mapped onto them throughout history. And one of the things that like Ingalls does really well in his work and I keep gesturing to it is to point out that actually like no, there were matriarchal

societies in history, and the existence of those societies actually kind of repudiates this idea. But at the end of the day, I think both of these myths that gender and sex just can't be understood without understanding class and the way that the emergence of private property took, like, the raw material of sexual difference and mapped it onto a system of labor domination and exploitation through the domestication of certain forms of labor, as well as kind of just, you know, more broadly, as I've gestured to pushing certain working women into sort of lumpenproletarianized forms of labor as well. And the change first occurred from the Marxist perspective at the level of property, right? This wasn't just like an idea that emerged somewhere, it came from changes in how society controlled who owned what. And that means that the solution to patriarchy,

the solution to the problems that gender posed, can't on the one hand be like respecting people's identities, or uniting all women, which we kind of see on the bourgeois side, or on the other hand, some sort of like asserting the uniqueness of womanhood, which we see on the radical feminist side, but it has to happen at the level of class struggle, right? All of those things might get at something true about the ideology of patriarchy, but they don't see where that ideology comes from because they see patriarchy in the abstract, not in relation to the rest of society. And I think that's really kind of the core issue that both of them miss. And that's a way of obscuring and kind of mystifying the class realities that create the oppression of women in the first place.

Yeah, no, thank you so much. And that's so clarifying. And you actually tackled, I had like, several sort of sub questions that I was going to ask about all this, and you sort of have already tackled them in that excellent description of the difference between bourgeois and more Marxist feminism. So I really appreciate that. And I'm wondering, you talk a bit in the episode that you did the crossover about postmodern conceptions of identity and gender versus sort of, again, the more Marxist conceptions, and you get into sort of like the subjectivist versus materialist analysis. And I think you covered a little bit of that in your previous response. But I'm wondering

if you can maybe just explicitly talk about what postmodern conceptions of identity and gender get wrong and why those are not really helpful ways of thinking about things. Yeah, so I think it's a really good question. And kind of what I want to do with this question is do some distinguishing work, because I think postmodern is a term that's like all over the place in terms of what people are trying to get at when they're using that term. And I think it's worthwhile to kind of like disentangle it a little bit. And I think really people are gesturing at two different things when they talk about postmodernism. So yeah, on the one hand, you have what I'd call theoretical postmodernism. And this is kind of like the academic postmodern

view of gender and view of identity, which comes from thinkers like Judith Butler, right? Like, that's probably the biggest philosopher who's theorizing this. And Butler puts forward this idea that gender is performative, right? And this often gets misread in like a bunch of different ways as gender is a performance, which isn't quite what Butler is saying. But this perspective is interesting, because I actually think it gets like a few things right. And that's where Marxists struggle to deal with it. So this kind of postmodernism recognizes that gender is like contingent historically, right? It's changed over time, it hasn't always been the same, and that its meaning and form are open to being able to evolve, right? And's changed over time. It hasn't always been the same, and that its meaning and form are open to being able to evolve, right? And actually, Butler is really interesting because

she's kind of pushed back against the liberal idea that gender is like some internal truth or identity within us. And she does kind of connect it to the outside world. Gender is performative, which means it's a thing that is done, right? It's an action which happens outside of ourselves in a social context. So there's some useful insights that come from that postmodern view. But at the same time, there's also, again, this metaphysical thinking that underlies it. So this postmodern view, like a lot of postmodern philosophy, treats language mostly as like

linguistic, right? It's a set of signs and symbols that are performed around us or sort of semiotic. And even if it changes over time, that's really the level at which it exists. So it fails to kind of think about how gender and these performances come about. It does say, there are changes in them, but where do they come from is an answer that it never really gives. Because post-structuralism is kind of skeptical towards theories of history that allow us to trace where phenomena come from. Like in a lot of ways, it's a rejection of Marxism and dialectical materialism and the idea that we can kind of trace the emergence of social phenomena by looking at changes on the class level. And so when you really press the post-modernists in this

vein on, you know, what is gender, they'll give you this very complicated answer about it being a performance, but there's no historicization, there's no example of where it comes from, and there's no connection to labor or material realities in any way. And that's like not surprising, right? Again, there's a kind of rejection of this within postmodernism. So while there are kind of strengths to the postmodern view, it also has these big limitations that I think are a problem. And then to distinguish a little bit, on the other hand, there's kind of what I would call subjectivist postmodernism, right? And this is another thing people are referring to when they call something postmodern. And this is the idea that gender is like in our head or in our soul

in some way, and that really gender is just like a question of identity and how we identify. And so this perspective will say, well, trans women are women because inside of themselves, they have this kind of fundamental womanhood identity. And therefore, that's the end of the story, right? You'll hear this kind of from liberal feminists when they talk about trans issues, right? There's this reduction to just kind of identity, which is really sort of like a lazy way of thinking about the world, right? And again, here, gender is not understood as an organizing principle within society that dictates certain forms of labor, certain forms of exploitation or oppression. It's just something inside of us. It's just a personal insight. And this individualist, subjectivist, and really like reductive view is again, like at odds with

Marxism. It's kind of the opposite of like the theoretical postmodernism, which is skeptical of these claims about like an internal gendermodernism, which is skeptical of these claims about like an internal gender, but at the same time, it commits the same error. And one thing I do like really want to be clear on is there's a way that my critique here can sound like I'm saying like, these just don't go far enough, right? They just don't connect it to class, they just don't connect it to material reality, which is true. But from a Marxist perspective, there's something worse going on, right? Which is that they mystify that relationship. They actively push us away from seeing it by pointing us either inside of ourselves to an internal identity, or in the case of like the

more academic postmodernism, pointing us to like language and signs and symbols. So it's not just that they fall short, it's that they're redirecting us in a way that hurts our ability to understand gender materially, right? And I think that's an important clarification. It's that they're redirecting us in a way that hurts our ability to understand gender materially. Right. And I think that's an important clarification. It's not just an insufficiency issue. Yeah. So in that sense, like, can you talk about specifically what a materialist analysis of womanhood is? Like, we've kind of talked a little bit about the different sort of the postmodern, the liberal, the bourgeois analysis of gender and sex. And yeah, I'm wondering just explicitly, like what is the materialist analysis of womanhood? And one of the things that I thought

was interesting in the conversation that you had on the episode for Red Menace and Rev Left, the crossover episode, was this idea that like a lot of the times, the material analysis of womanhood is mistaken for like a biological analysis. And those are two very different things. And so I'm wondering, yeah, if you can sort of like, explicate that difference for us. And yeah. Yeah, so this is, I think, an important question. So I'll start with like, explicate that difference for us. And yeah. Yeah, so this is, I think, an important question. So I'll start with like, exactly what you got at there, which is sort of like, what does material mean here? Right? And I think this is where a lot of confusion comes from. Because material, the way Marxists use it is a little bit different than how ordinary everyday

people use it. And that might be an issue that we need to deal with a little bit from like a kind of strategic perspective. But regardless, if we're thinking about this, when Marxists are talking about materialism and the material reality of society, we don't mean just like matter, right? Like we are referring to something more specific than that. And we mean the kind of conditions in which human life is produced and reproduced, right? So when you push Marx, what he really gets down to is what's important, how do we feed ourselves? How do we produce goods? How do we reproduce the species? That's what we are meaning when we're talking about a material reality. But a common understanding of material would mean like referring to matter,

right? So again, as opposed to spiritual, we might think of material, as opposed to ghosts, we think of bodies, something like that. And this is where a difficulty kind of arises, because people then think, well, if we're talking about the material reality of gender, we're just talking about the matter of human bodies. And that's not what Marxists are getting at when we're talking about the material reality of gender, right? We're talking about that relationship between gender and the material reality of society on a whole. And so you get into this difficulty where certain kind of, again, you see us more in the radical feminist camp will say, well, womanhood means to have a very specific kind of body. That is the whole uniting thing. They have this whole

like adult human female, right, is the phrase that they like to use. So they say to be a woman is to have the specific secondary and primary sexual characteristics. And maybe if you push them harder, like a certain genotypical makeup as well. So that sounds kind of nice on, you know, first glance, and as much as like, it's a very stable category. But from a Marxist perspective, again, that's metaphysical thinking, right? You're not theorizing womanhood in relation to the world around it. You're just saying, here's a body in the abstract that makes you a woman. And that's kind of an issue from a Marxist perspective, just because it's anti-dialectical. But also more importantly, and this is one thing we tried to get in that episode, like

if that's what womanhood is, then the oppression of women is kind of innate in women's bodies, right? The problem of patriarchy exists on the biological level, in which case, how can you ever overcome it? And you actually see this in like, I think, more honest radical feminists like Firestone, who kind of says like, actually, yeah, patriarchy is in women's bodies. And basically, like artificial wombs are going to be necessary to overcome patriarchy. So again, this kind of like weird, fundamental essentialism and determinism that begins to crop up there in that view of womanhood, which is a problem. So I think then

if we want to say like, what is a material view of womanhood in a way that Marxist understands it, we get into some interesting stuff. So on the one hand, the Marxist theory of womanhood, like isn't a category that's going to unite all people who might identify as women within the world. And what I mean by that is, again, Marxism is not interested in like every single woman being part of this struggle, because bourgeois women are in many ways, oppressors and exploiters of working class women. So as Marxists, when we want to come up with a materialist understanding of womanhood, we're thinking from the perspective of working women and from the experiences of working women first and foremost.

And again, it's there that I think we can find unity, not in the body, but in the social role that women have played, right? So I've gestured a lot towards this idea of domestic labor, but I'll unpack that a little bit more, I think, because this is a really crucial Marxist insight. So one of the things that Ingalls points out in his writing is that the material isn't just about how society is produced, but also how it's reproduced. And on a certain level, that can mean like literal biological reproduction, having children, but also more importantly, it means raising children, right? It means maintaining a household, keeping it in a certain state.

And this is a form of labor that women have historically been pushed into, right? Often it was men within early capitalism who worked outside the home, and women were sort of confined within the home performing these forms of labor. Additionally, I've gestured towards the sex industry, but obviously the primary workers within the sex industry are women as well, whether trans or cis. And that is a specific shared experience that can be a basis for solidarity on a material level. So when we want to think about womanhood materially, we need to think what are these shared labor categories that women have been forced into and pushed into? And how can that form the basis of solidarity, not for all women ever, but for working women, right, to fight back against the conditions that produce that. And that, I think, is an actual

materialist understanding. It has to start with labor, it has to start with specific forms of engaging in the economy, often ways that aren't recognized as actually part of the economy, right? Like, sexually exploitative labor as well as domestic labor are not seen as real work in the same way that going to a factory or even an office job is, right? So I think starting there, teasing out those commonalities lets us get a womanhood that is materialist, maybe not universal, but universalism isn't the point. The point is a working class understanding of womanhood. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Alison Escalante. We'll be right back. Hey! Your tales are so obvious Thought I status too broad for a girl

Feature-minded, helps you remember where you come from You want them to notice, the ragged ends in your summer dress You want them to see you like they see every other girl They just see a faggot The whole depressed mythic of trust in Rust up on the coast, don't be shooken, it's in the whole day alone Rust up on the coast, don't be shooken, it's in the whole day alone Rust up on the coast, don should go to sleep the whole day long

with you With you With you You've got no cunts in your struts You've got no hairs to shake And you know it's obvious You've got no hairs to shake

And you know it's obvious But we can choose homemade You want them to notice The ragged ends of your summer dress You want them to see you like they see every other girl They just see a faggot They hold their breath and they think it's just a sin Rush up on the coast to wish the good would spend the whole day alone Rush up on the coast to wish the good would spend the whole day alone

Rush up on the coast to wish the good would spend the whole day alone With you With you So much to give to someone who'll stay alone with you With you With you You want them to notice The ragged ends in your summer dress You want them to see your life, they see other girl, they just see a faggot

The whole that rests, nothing gets us sick Rust up on the coast of a sugar It's in the hole, they're alone Rust up on the coast of a sugar It's in the hole, they're alone Rust up on the coast of a sugar It's in the hole, they're alone With you With you That was Transgender Dysphoria Blues by Against Me. Now back to our conversation with Alison Escalante

of Red Menace. So I did want to spend like the second half of the conversation, like I mentioned at the top, like sort of zooming in a little bit on sort of current events and how all this relates to like politics and our current world as we're living in it. And I guess I think maybe a good way to bridge that transition is to ask you just like, why did you think it was important to set out this principled Marxist support for trans liberation and to set the record straight for leftists who might be confused or even coming from a place of reaction when it comes to trans issues and gender issues, and I guess even feminism more broadly. Right? Yeah. So I mean, you know, on the personal level, like I'm a trans woman. So obviously, I feel like I it's worth saying I'm

invested in these debates, right? Like, my being is up for question in the debates that are happening. So that obviously inspires me to kind of push into this. And the other thing is that a lot of my kind of background in studying philosophy and theory is in feminist theory in particular. It's something that I've been interested in for quite some time. Materialist feminism is mostly what I was interested in studying in an academic context. So this is something that I've been passionate about for a while. And I think to me, it matters that we get this question correct. I think as Marxists, we have what Marx called like this duty towards a ruthless criticism of all that exists, right? Like Marxism is not something that just stands back and lets these kinds of debates happen.

It intervenes and it applies the dialectical materialist perspective to things. And that's like a fundamental duty that we have. And then the other thing is just that I think if you're doing politics, having the correct political line is important, right? Like if you are going to be involved in political struggles, you need to develop a correct political ideology. And one reality that I think we have to face is whether or not anyone likes it, the right has made this an issue that you have to take a stance on, right? It has just become the culture war issue that has been very intentionally pushed in order to make sure that everyone has to position themselves in relation take a stance on, right? It has just become the culture war issue that has been very intentionally pushed in order to make sure that everyone has to position themselves in relation to it.

And I think Marxists, therefore, can't just like pretend it's not happening and be like, oh, we need to think about like very concrete forms of labor instead, because labor intersects with this. And also, it's not something that really the right is going to let you take that neutrality on. And what really concerned me and has caused me to speak out about this is that I think a lot of Marxists are getting the question wrong, right? There are a lot of Marxists that are adopting kind of the radical feminist perspective, which I think is incorrect. And I also think reveals that they have a weak understanding of materialism to begin with in the first place if they're able to slip into that. And so one thing that's important here is I think this issue also lets us make corrections on more fundamental philosophical understandings that

people claim to be Marxists have so we can make sure that like, actually, no, we all understand what dialectical materialism means, because some of these errors make me think that there are actually misunderstandings there as well. So that's one reason that I think like, you know, we just sort of have an obligation to intervene into this. And I think it's important that we get that right. So according to Human Rights Campaign, there are over 400 different anti LGBTQ bills that have been introduced in state houses around the country, just in 2023. And at least 150 of those would specifically restrict the rights of trans people. Many bills that have already passed, including the REAP Act in Mississippi, which was passed into law and bans minors from getting hormone treatment or any kind of gender-affirming

surgery. Iowa had a similar ban, and that's waiting to be signed in law. Arkansas has tried to ban puberty blockers. It's a class C felony in Arkansas to get transgender kids hormones or hormone blockers. Bathroom bills don't say trans bills that ban teachers from talking about trans nests, all sorts of sports bills. And that's kind of how the right, I think, originally started introducing this stuff was in sports bills. South Dakota, Tennessee, Arizona, all have bills on the books. Tennessee literally has, as we mentioned, an anti-drag law. And so this is just a small number of the dozens of states that have dozens and dozens of anti-trans bills

currently on the books. And so I'm wondering, can you talk about why you think that the right and reactionaries and even many liberals have set their sights on the quote, as you sort of talked about in the, you know, the top of the episode, the trans question, right? Like why there seems to be a truly alarming level of transphobia and anti-trans ideology popping up in the US, along with this sort of concerted campaign to target scapegoat and fundamentally question in many cases, the right to exist and strip the rights away from trans people. Yeah, this is a really good question, because I think, you know, like you got the staggering just number of bills that are being pushed on this really shows you how concerted this effort is. And so the thing I want to say

upfront is this isn't an organic thing that's occurring, right? This is a specific political strategy that's being implemented by the right in the United States. And it's really a manufactured political question. I think it's really important for us to kind of emphasize that. So I think the right has gotten better at this game that they play of manufacturing culture war questions. So I'm like a strong believer in like knowing your enemy and what they think. And so one of the people on the right who I think is like pretty smart in a way that terrifies me is Christopher Ruffo. And Christopher Ruffo is kind of the person who really started to push the critical race theory discussion, right? And what, you know, scares the shit out of me about Christopher Ruffo is that he's made these statements basically saying, yeah, I know we're lying about what critical race theory means.

I don't care. It's politically useful, right? Yeah, it's functional. Exactly. And that's a level of like, real politic that I think needs to be taken seriously, right? Like there's something to be gained from them doing this regardless of the question of truth. And I think that, you know, from the Marxist perspective, what we always come back to is the right wants us to not think about labor struggles, they want us to not question the material conditions of capitalism. So they scapegoat like you got it, they push it on to something else. And cultural issues are a super good way of doing that. So in the last week, right, Mother Jones published this article because they

got access to 2600 released emails from various anti trans groups that are pushing this legislation. Some of that was openly right-wing groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom or the Family Policy Alliance, but also radical feminist groups like WOLF, the Women's Liberation Front, were in these email chains. And one of the things that was like really interesting about this leak is I think it shows you this manufacturing that's going on here, right? You have these people who are explicitly planning, here's how we can get these bills into place, who are talking to state level Republican politicians to refine their bills to be more likely to pass and who are very openly, you know, trying to construct a cultural crisis around this.

And I think it is an extension of what the right solve a critical race theory, which is that if they make this concerted effort, they can create these distractions. And one of the things that I think is like really worth pointing out in this correspondence that happened is that it's very clear that this is cynical for them too, right? Like some of them are true believers, no doubt, they genuinely want this. But they also are like acknowledging in their communication that they're not being honest. One of the interesting things is that one of the leaders of the Family Policy Alliance straight up told the New York Times, like, hey, our goal isn't just to stop with banning transition care for trans youth, right? But there's a possibility for consensus on that. So we're

rallying from there, and we're going to push to a broader anti-trans and anti-LGBT goal from there. So you can see this like very strategic thinking that's going on politically on the right around this to try to make this an issue. And again, it's because in a world where inflation is a real concern that's hurting people, where the Federal Reserve is taking actions that absolutely hurt working people by depressing wages and driving down, you know, the position of labor within the economy, you need to distract people from starting to think as a class. And this is really useful for them. And this is really useful for them. And then kind of the last thing that I think is like worth thinking about here is that I think a big part of this is that the right is experimenting with how much it can like

be illiberal and push back against liberalism in some interesting ways. For a long time in the United States, I think the right often articulated its politics through a very liberal framework. So for those of us who grew up like during the war on terror, right, like one of the most horrific, kind of fascist things you could imagine this mobilization of the surveillance state domestically, and then the military internationally, the justifications for that were always kind of framed through liberal values, right? Like we need to go liberate women in Afghanistan was this kind of talking point that came out. So the right was pushing these really very far right policies, while also justifying them through liberal rhetoric. And an interesting thing that's changed, I think, is now the right is experimenting with, well, what if we don't use a liberal

justification, right? Like, what if we just are outright illiberal? So in the Trump base, you saw people using like the slogan, fuck your feelings as a very common refrain, right? And that's what that's getting at is I don't need to justify my politics through your value framework anymore. There's a fundamental opposition here. And I think now with LGBT issues and trans issues in particular, they're trying to push back with this more, right? Denying transgender people access to gender affirming healthcare is a way of pushing back against like fundamental liberal ideas like bodily autonomy and the freedom of expression and privacy in healthcare. And so it's allowing the right to kind of be more brazen, I think, and experiment with

pushing a far-right politics that is articulated in far-right anti-liberal terms. So I think that's the other strategic thing that they're getting out of that. Yeah, super fascinating. Thanks for laying that out. And like talking a little bit about, you know, how you talked about this is a distractive, one of the strategies is distraction. I'm just thinking like, you know, can we regulate the banks and railroads? Best I can do is ban drag performances you know it's it's almost like um it's just it's very absurd and like yeah i totally think that a lot of this the deep cynicism that exists among these ghouls who are doing this uh is so noticeable when you even like just peek beneath the surface even slightly

and yeah like it's it's completely being used cyn cynically as a functional way for them to distract from collapsing heard about the sort of recent events at the New York Times. But if not, I'm wondering if you can talk about them a little bit and sort of, you know, around their overall trans coverage, the backlash to that, and the backlash to the backlash, and maybe just unpack what happened there. And yeah, if you could just maybe give us your thoughts on also how that is related to sort of this labor issue that we've been talking about as well. Yeah, so the New York Times case is kind of interesting for a number of reasons, because I think there's a hidden labor story there that you got at, which is important. But broadly, to give the context, the New York Times, you know, in many ways is like the forefront of

kind of middling, I'm just asking questions, liberalism in the United States, right? Like, that is kind of what defines the paper's political outlook in a lot of ways. And we've really seen that about trans issues. So the New York Times coverage of trans issues has been pretty bad, honestly. It has kind of played into some of these right wing fears about trans issues as social contagion among children, like our children being peer pressured into this. It's also kind of played into like the parental rights framework of do parents have a right to know about their child identifying as trans and really fear mongering around these questions in a way that has echoed a lot of right wing sentiments. And the New York Times in its way that it always does has said like, we don't agree with these perspectives, right? Like,

we're just framing these questions because they need to be asked, and they need to be, you know, honestly interrogated. And that is not great coverage when you're dealing with a dishonest right wing, right? Like, again, if the right is being cynical about this, as they clearly are, then treating these as honest questions is a fundamental mistake. And that's really how the New York Times has treated it. And one of the things that I think has been particularly horrific about it is that New York Times coverage of trans issues has been cited in affidavits backing anti-trans laws as an example of like, look, even the liberals are starting to agree with us on this question. And that shows you how that framework that they're employing causes some real issues. So one of the things that happened in response to that was that was really

awesome to see was a open letter signed by many, many, many contributors to the New York Times that condemned and questioned the paper's sort of, you know, position on trans issues. And one of the things that I think gets lost in this conversation is that these contributors were coming together in the context of organized labor, right? The discussion that led to this letter getting signed was largely a discussion that happened among members of the Writers Guild, who were kind of thinking about their experiences, and several trans contributors who weren't just saying, like, the New York Times is, you know, wrong about trans issues, but also the New York Times has created a hostile work environment to be a trans contributor because

of the way that this is all getting framed. And like the vast majority of the coverage around this letter, I think this is that labor dimension which occurs there in the first place and is very important. And so that pushback, I think, was good. I loved seeing it, having these contributors come forward in an organized manner, kind of flexing their muscle as the people who write for the New York Times in a way that's really good to see. Obviously, there was a backlash to that. And the backlash actually kind of also took note of the labor side of things. Some higher-ups at the New York Times tweeted out like, hey, I need to be careful talking about this because I'm a boss

and the Writers Guild is kind of involved here. But here's why I condemn that letter, right? So there we started to see that. And there was another letter that was signed by other New York Times contributors who were more or less siding with the paper itself, who condemned the Writers Guild actually fairly explicitly and said the Writers Guild was out of line to raise this question, and that the Writers Guild can't really step in and discuss whether or not, you know, this coverage is fair, which misconstrues what these contributors were saying. not, you know, this coverage is fair, which misconstrues what these contributors were saying.

It's not just that this coverage is unfair. It's also that there's a hostile work environment being created, right? And that gets kind of obscured there. But I think in the New York Times example, we see again, why like a just asking questions framework enables the right, they're citing the paper to justify their policies. And we also see the way that like, again, trans issues become labor issues very quickly, because, gosh, it turns out that transgender people are also part of the working class, right? Who could have guessed that? And we see here a very clear way that organized labor can actually play a role in that struggle for

trans liberation, and where that struggle has overlap with broader interests for labor organizing. So I think it's an important story to focus in on there. And again, I think people often really miss that angle, maybe because it's kind of a threatening angle to acknowledge that there is a labor and a gender dimension happening there. And yeah, again, I really appreciate you bringing in the super important labor angle to this issues as well. And just to underscore, though, like, I think it's super important to say that the New York Times has devoted something like 15,000 words, probably more than 15,000 words to the issue of like, presenting transness as some kind of issue, right? Like, focusing specifically on trans youth too and like the dangers quote unquote that

they represent and like you know these words that are just completely divorced from reality presenting information and opinions about like medical treatment and hormones and hormone blockers right presenting like super inaccurate information that serves to like scaremonger and is rejected by like the vast, vast majority of the medical community. And like, you know, if you just read the New York Times, you'd think that people are like sneaking estrogen pills into Halloween candy, you know, like their reporting on this has just been, you know, it's bordered on journalistic malpractice really, and just completely divorced from the medical consensus, from empirical analysis, from data, just a whole lot of decontextualized question asking like this, you know, sort of,

you know, just asking questions, industrial complex, which is absolutely it like, you know, liberalism is absolutely complicit in the reaction of the right and even bolsters and supports it. implicit in the reaction of the right and even bolsters and supports it. So I mean, yeah, it's just a lot of really terrible coverage. And thank you for also bringing in the labor issue too, right? Because not only does the New York Times need to get their shit together around their trans coverage, but also like do a much better job of respecting the rights and treating their trans employees well. And yeah, I guess just sort of as we begin to sort of wrap up here, I just had a couple more questions for you. Specifically, I'm wondering, and we've, you know, touched on this many, many times throughout this conversation, but maybe just to have it all in sort of one place in one response from you

explicitly, I'm wondering if you could talk about why anti-trans and transphobic reaction and analysis, if you can call it analysis, are harmful to the left more broadly and like how and why these impulses limit us from actually building socialism. Yeah. So yeah, to kind of recap a little bit what we've talked about, I mean, I think one big part is the scapegoating and distraction aspect, right? Which is that like these cultural scapegoats are a way of pushing the working class away from seeing who their real enemy is, right? And in the United States, this has taken a lot of forms, like there's the critical race theory. Historically, it's been immigrants, right? Like trying to find some group you can

blame for the labor woes of society or distract from those woes. And that's obviously just going to get in the way of building socialism, because if you have a working class who's distracted, focused on these cultural issues, and not seeing who their actual class enemies are, how are you ever going to build a movement for socialism, which could oppose those class enemies. So there's kind of that simple level, which is just like it ideologically serves capitalism, right, in a way that capitalism has always been really good at constructing these scapegoating ideologies. But also the question of like how it's harmful to the left more broadly that maybe we haven't quite gotten into yet, is that I also think it's a way that the far right recruits from the left. So one interesting thing that I think you can see over and over again, is that this is a way that far right groups like

the Alliance Defending Freedom, who are, you know, not progressive on a single thing, are pulling in groups like the Women's Liberation Front into a coalition with them. And so there's a way of taking groups which have ostensibly progressive goals, right, the Women's Liberation Front claims to be feminist, and then bringing them into a coalition with people who are not just anti-feminist, but who are like, Christian nationalist fundamentalists about questions of gender, essentially. And so there's this way of pulling people into that. And I think over and over again, we can see people on the center left or the left, for whom trans issues, they kind of start with this, I'm just asking questions approach. And that's like a kind of entryway that takes them down a path to broader right wing politics, right? So I think that's the other

threat that we need to think about here is that it's a recruiting method by which the right pulls in leftists as well. Because one of the things that's difficult is like the left as socialists, we have a critique of liberalism as well, right? We obviously have a very strong critique of liberalism. And the right sees that and gives us their own cultural critique of liberalism and wants to use that for recruiting as well. So I think that's an issue. And the other thing is it fractures the left, right? Like, one reality is that if a huge amount of the organized left is buying into anti-trans reactionary ideology, they're not going to work with the other half of the left who is not and who is opposing that,

and it weakens the left on the whole. It creates these camps that are at odds with each other and causes some serious issues. And then kind of the last thing that I'll say, because again, I think this is like actually one of the most important points with this topic, is like this anti-trans stuff is not organic, right? The vast majority of people in the United States, of the most important points with this topic, is like, this anti-trans stuff is not organic, right? The vast majority of people in the United States, of the masses that we want to reach, don't hate trans people. They're not a bunch of culture-warring fascist freaks, right? And I think the ultimate proof of that is that even in the electoral kind of realm of electoral politics, this strategy did not work well for the GOP in the midterms, right? Like, they doubled down on culture war

issues, and they didn't get the red wave that they were saying they were going to get. And I think that shows that actually, like, this is about pandering to a specific far-right base of social conservatives, but that's not the average person. So if Marxists start pandering to those far-right social conservatives, they're actually going to alienate everyday people who I'm not saying have, like, super progressive views about trans people people necessarily, but definitely don't have this like culture war mindset about it. So it would be tailing really the wrong people and causing us to lose sight of who it is we're trying to organize, who are workers who have real problems in their life, and by and large are not worried about these dumb distracting questions that the

right is trying to push forward. And I think that's like a real harm that needs to be emphasized absolutely yeah thank you so much for that and yeah i think my last question for you is sort of my attempt to think about some inspirational maybe moments and think about inspiration that we can take in terms of fighting against this kind of stuff. And I thought an interesting way of doing that might be to look back on some, you know, like important moments in the history of struggle in the United States by LGBTQ and particularly trans people, and what we can learn from them. And so I don't know much about this, but you brought it up in the episode that we've been

referring to. I'm thinking of the Compton cafeteria riots, for example. And maybe if you could talk a little bit more about what happened there and any other sort of like important historical struggles that you find inspirational. And yeah, at the same time, just lump this into the question, And yeah, at the same time, just lump this into the question, like any final thoughts or like any like invitations for our listeners as we close out and as we sort of try to move forward and fight against this rising manufactured reaction on the right and a lot of the liberal side of things? Yeah. So in terms of, you know, we can start with the Compton cafeteria, right? Because I think it's this historical moment that is often really forgotten. When we talk about like LGBT uprisings in the United States, everything is like focused on Stonewall, which makes sense.

Stonewall is this very important moment. But I think we lose sight of the fact that like Stonewall was one incident among several where LGBT people rose up and pushed back against the state and police repression. And the Compton Cafeteria riot is another example of that that matters. So the Compton Cafeteria was in the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, and it was frequented by drag queens and trans women a lot. And one interesting thing is that the establishment didn't particularly like their presence there. So the owners of the restaurant and the workers of the restaurant would regularly call the police on them and the police would regularly come and raid it and usually with charges of female impersonation, which was illegal at the time. And interestingly, sounds very similar to the anti-drag law coming back in Tennessee today.

So you can see some through lines that are going there. Absolutely. one of the important things is that in response to this, at a certain point in the Compton cafeteria, what we saw was actually the drag queens and trans women who were there fighting back against the police. An actual riot broke out and an uprising occurred there that had also kind of emerged with some picketing that had occurred as well, pushing for trans and LGBT rights in the area. And again, I think shows the way that these moments of uprisings are also often connected to other forms of organizing which exist around them, right? So I think that this is also true of Stonewall, right? Where Stonewall, we all think about that night, but we don't often talk about the connections that were

created by people there that would eventually form the basis for activist networks like ACT UP, who could then respond rather militantly when things like the AIDS epidemic occurred. So we have these moments of uprisings, but these uprisings are also often contextualized within more traditional networks of organizing and activism that are really important. And I think the reason we need to think about the Compton cafeteria riot is it tells us, hey, Stonewall wasn't the only instance of this throughout the country. There were LGBT people pushing back, fighting back and demanding basic rights. And that laid the foundation for really the advances that we've seen today, even within terms of just like bourgeois rights. Another thing I'd like to point to that I think is important, and I hope that we got to in our

Rev Left episode is the international aspect of this, right? One of our guests on the Rev Left episode was Ray, who's from the Philippines and is a part of the National Democratic Movement there, right? And within the National Democratic Movement, actually, LGBT people have formed their own organizations that are able to play an important role in agitating against sort of US neocolonialism and the puppet state that has been put there to serve that interest. And I think it's another example of how trans people don't exist as a separate history from broader struggles for national democracy or for socialism, but are often integrated and within those struggles to begin with. So I think that's really important for us to point to.

Liberalism, when it talks about like the progress that trans people have made, likes to point to like cultural things as well, right? It points to trans celebrities who have come out or the famous Time magazine trans tipping point about how we reach this cultural moment. And those things are important. But I think what's more important is trans histories of resistance that go way, way back and are continuing today. And in many ways, I think, again, the New York Times article is a shining example of this. This is labor activism that is occurring with trans people at the forefront and center of it agitating for broader strength for workers within the Writers Guild, but also connecting that to struggles for trans liberation and pushing back

there. So I want to say that like, we are seeing an overwhelming onslaught from the right in terms of legislation in terms of them targeting this and manufacturing this. But trans people are not a group of people who have ever taken this kind of oppression sitting down. And there's reason to hope that we will continue to see these. And if you're in the left, and you're not trans, what I want to say is that what's super important is that you start to make these connections yourself, you start to think about how trans issues are also labor issues, how they are also issues that are relevant for the struggle of socialism, and build those connections. And that's really the task that's at hand and paying attention to those histories of trans resistance, I think allows us to kind of start to build those connections. If there's anything I want to end on, it is just like, it's easy to be hopeless about this. I think

like I often fall into like kind of despair about what the state of things are. But there is resistance that's happening. And there is room for growth and organizing there and really ending on that note, I think is the most important thing. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Alison Escalante of Red Menace. Thank you to Against Me for the intermission music and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. To find links to any of the resources we've mentioned in this interview, please check the show notes.

Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make from the U.S. are tax exempt. Upstream is

also made possible with support from the incredible folks at Resist Foundation. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears.

Thank you.