By Cameron Kaufman

“…Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life in its entirety.” At CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), which occurred in March 2023, far-right commentator Michael Knowles announced this.

If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will. No, Michael Knowles is not exactly a household name, but there has been an increasingly frightening amount of transphobic hate gaining traction in the past several years. In the UK alone, the number of transphobic hate crime reports has quadrupled over the last six years.

And yes, Knowles’ statement IS genocidal in nature. Expressing a belief in the eradication of “transgenderism” (i.e. being transgender) is, in fact, a call to eradicate all trans people. We should be concerned, especially when things seemed to be looking up for one of our most vulnerable populations, with increased acceptance and visibility of transgender people. So why now are we seeing such an increase in transphobia, especially in popular discourse?

A major contributor to this current hysteria about trans people, particularly trans youth, is the media. Both social media and the press have been massive factors to this wave of transphobia.

The effect of social media on trans youth is complicated. Social media can be a savior for many trans youth, who can use social media to receive validation, meet other transgender people, and find information and resources about coming out, accessing gender-affirming healthcare, or coping with transphobia that they may not have been able to otherwise. But it can also be a major source of antagonism towards this already marginalized population. There are a plethora of transphobic hate accounts on several different social media platforms, and they are dangerous. Although most of them do not outright physically harm trans people, they can be debilitating to their mental health, and can often influence people such as parents or teachers to dismiss their identity.

There has been a growing social media presence of transphobic accounts that exist solely to spew hatred under the guise of being “gender critical” or against “gender ideology.” Gender ideology, however, is not a “woke” movement or an organized campaign to make everyone trans, like many of these accounts claim, rather it is a term used in sociology to describe ideas and beliefs of the majority that define masculinity and femininity, identifies people in terms of sex and sexuality, and evaluates forms of sexual expression. Dominant gender ideology in the West believes that human beings are either biologically female or male, heterosexuality is the default orientation, and men are more naturally suited to possess power and assume leadership positions in public spheres of society.

Often, these people who antagonize trans youth on social media are considered TERFs, or trans exclusive radical “feminists,” even though many of their views are deeply misogynistic (claiming that in order to be a woman, one must be able to give birth, for example). Probably the best known of these is the author of Harry Potter and avowed transphobe J.K. Rowling. But there are many more, including organizations with sizable followings like 4thwavenow, which openly associates with TERFs and reposts transphobic tweets on the daily to its 19 thousand followers on Twitter.

But it’s not just social media where this transphobia is rampant. Many news outlets, including liberal and centrist publications, have increased publication of dehumanizing, critical, and often transphobic articles about trans youth that stir controversy. These articles often have an intensely skeptical and overly dramatic tone while generally privileging the voices of cisgender (not transgender) parents over those of their trans children.

This year, BBC has apologized (twice) to JK Rowling over calling her transphobic. The Atlantic published an article (accompanied by a photograph of a 22 year old model who uses he/him pronouns) entitled “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.″ Recently, the New York Times published an article entitled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.”

The New York Times, which has 100 million registered readers, has been particularly susceptible to publishing transphobic articles. There are numerous articles about trans women unfairly dominating sport, gender neutral language going too far, gender dysphoria, puberty blockers and other medical treatment being drastic measures, high rates of detransition (even though the data suggests otherwise), how difficult and confusing it is to deal with gender identity, the increase in people identifying as trans, and children using different names at school. These articles fearmonger, claiming that care and support for trans people, especially youth, is happening too fast and going too far.

But why now, why has there been such a push in the past few years to stir up a controversy about trans kids?

One factor is the increased visibility of trans people, and the increased amount of people coming out as trans. Often, this is because it is now safer for trans people to come out, and there are more resources available to help people better understand their identities. However, many people cannot comprehend this and believe that there’s been a massive explosion of trans youth due to a myriad of reasons: LGBTQ+ organizations, the internet, the media, misogyny (some people think that trans men decided to be men due to internalized misogyny and trans women are trying to take over women’s spaces), et cetera.

A lot of this controversy is also based in the societally ingrained fear of trans people. Much of mainstream society thinks trans people are sexually perverted, mentally disturbed, want to mutilate themselves, and have a tendency to commit sexual assault in public bathrooms. They also think that youth are being brainwashed into being trans and so we need to protect our children from this evil. Still others hide behind outdated religious beliefs to claim that being trans is sinful and wrong. This phenomenon is nothing new — people said and still say the same things about being gay.

Perhaps surprisingly, much of this transphobia comes from not only conservatives but even from some self-proclaimed liberals or leftists. Transphobia can come from cisgender lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, who feel that trans people don’t belong in the queer community. A prominent example of this is the LGB Alliance, which fights against homophobia while excluding transgender people from the community. Many cisgender queer people find trans people overly abnormal and use us as a scapegoat — trying to gain acceptance from the straight community by putting us down. Sometimes it’s just a case of internalized transphobia. Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter — bigots want to get rid of all of us in the LGBTQ community, whether we are trans or not. Transphobia and homophobia are two sides of the same shitty, hateful coin.

Many people who generally have liberal or leftist beliefs abandon such values as tolerance, bodily autonomy, and even feminism when it comes to trans people. For example, with trans care, many liberals simply don’t believe that we deserve bodily autonomy. Many people doubt if we are truly trans, or just faking it. Or maybe it’s just a phase. Just like the anti-gay craze of the past, conservatives are using the same exact phrases weaponized against gay people. Many liberals buy into them now, with trans people, despite knowing they are wrong when used against gay people.

Ultimately, the current trans hysteria that our media is trying to create is an effort to prevent people from fighting against actual societal problems like climate change, homelessness, imperialism, and systemic racism. Trans youth have become a scapegoat, a group of people to place the blame on instead of capitalism. By fueling this culture war, the mainstream media seeks to divide us even further.

This culture war on trans people has had far reaching, devastating impacts: increasing violence against trans people (particularly trans women of color), continuously high rates of suicide in the trans community due to harassment, lack of ability to transition, or lack of acceptance. Nationwide, over 350 explicitly transphobic (and homophobic) pieces of legislation, including bans on certain book titles, teaching about LGBTQ+ issues, trans youth participation in sports, trans healthcare for both adults and children, and drag performances (which are often so vaguely worded that they also ban trans people from existing in public and anyone from even wearing Halloween costumes).

In our political climate, with many states controlled by Republicans, a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and an extreme conservative majority in the Supreme Court, the fight for trans rights often feels hopeless. But there are things we can do to fight for the trans community. We can support legislation that protects trans rights — including the rights to live without facing discrimination, easily access gender-affirming healthcare, and be able to change name and gender markers without excess hassle and cost. We also must vocally oppose the increasingly extreme legislation being proposed and passed. We can materially and socially support trans people, especially those most at risk who have the least support, as well as organizations that aid them like Affirmations, Trans Lifeline, or the Trevor Project. We can educate ourselves and those around us about trans people, trans issues, and how to support trans rights. We can refuse to tolerate transphobia from family or friends. And we can boycott transphobes — refuse to read their articles, buy their books, or play their video games. No matter what, we cannot lose hope, or we’re all fucked.

The Trans Hysteria was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Partisanship, it seems, is tearing America apart. President Joe Biden himself said the United States has “never been as divided as it is today since the Civil War.” Biden has taken it upon himself to mend this divide, while other political figures have promoted slightly more radical solutions. All the while, concerning numbers of Americans see civil war on the horizon.

A more literal fuel was thrown on this fire when a 150-car train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio in February, releasing poisonous and carcinogenic chemicals amongst the town’s 4,700 residents as well as the Ohio River Basin, home to millions of people. If authorities had not carried out a controlled burn of the hazardous cargo, an explosion powerful enough to send shrapnel flying over a mile away could have occurred, but the situation looks bad as it is. The soil in East Palestine shows dioxin levels hundreds of times greater than those considered potentially carcinogenic by Environmental Protection Agency scientists. Fish are dying in the tens of thousands while headaches, coughing, and other symptoms are being widely reported by East Palestine residents and CDC investigators.. There is also no way to be sure exactly what the effects of the toxic chemicals released into the atmosphere by the burn will be.

Soon after the disaster, partisan lines were immediately drawn, with both Republicans and Democrats using the derailment — and the potential poisoning of huge numbers of people — to “own” their political opponents. Former President Donald Trump wasted no time visiting East Palestine following the disaster, delivering bottles of “Trump Water” and other goods as he criticized the Biden administration and FEMA, claiming that “they would not send federal aid to East Palestine under any circumstance.” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, facing heavy criticism, also visited the town and blamed President Trump, despite having control of the Department of Transportation for over two years by the time of the derailment. Political commentators, no matter which side they are on, seem to agree that their priority coming out of this derailment is to place the blame on their political rivals. The fact is, however, that there’s no individual answer for what caused this derailment, and the problem is systemic.

Train derailments are a big problem in the United States. Over the past decade, the US has seen roughly 1,300 train derailments per year, while its trains have traveled a total of approximately 800 million kilometers. Meanwhile, in the European Union, trains have traveled closer to 4.5 billion kilometers and have seen derailments in the low hundreds, and while these estimates do vary depending on the source, derailments simply do not occur as often in Europe. Japan, with some 2 billion train-kilometers in 2019, saw only nine derailments, with the number generally not rising above single digits per year.

Why is our train system so dangerous? Private ownership is one attribute that sets our trains apart. In the European Union, most countries’ train systems are controlled by their national governments(In the United Kingdom, privatization resulted in its rails being owned by the European Union’s national train companies). In Japan, local and national governments control a large part of their train network and their private train lines are highly regulated.

Perhaps this is not an entirely fair comparison, especially when looking at the United States and Japan, two countries with massively different population densities. However, a more straightforward comparison is available when we look at Norfolk Southern’s own actions and those of other railway companies. It is often assumed that endangering employees and bystanders will cause companies to suffer financially; this has not been true in Norfolk’s case.

Railway workers have been subjected to top-down pressure to avoid delays, even at the cost of public safety. Accidents have been steadily increasing over the last four years, with five significant incidents taking place since December 2021, killing three Norfolk employees. Meanwhile, profits have risen in recent years as Norfolk and other railroad companies continue to cut their workforce, skimp on inspections, and run longer and heavier trains, allowing them to pay out billions to their shareholders and beat the wider stock market.

Where was the government on this? For the most part, they were doing exactly what the railroads told them to do. In 2014, in response to a train crash involving some of the same chemicals spilled in East Palestine, the Obama Administration proposed improvements to safety regulations for trains carrying various hazardous materials. After industry pressure, however, the final version of the safety measure focused only on crude oil and exempted trains carrying many other combustible materials — including the chemicals involved in last month’s disaster. President Trump, his party backed by millions of dollars from the railroads, further gutted the rule, specifically removing a section that would make better braking systems more widespread. He also decreased EPA staffing and appointed people tied to the chemical industry to run it. Despite having plenty of time to improve train regulations, Biden has done practically nothing towards this end, not even to bring things back to where they were under Obama. In fact, the Federal Railroad Administration, under Biden and Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation, has proposed a rule reducing the frequency of brake testing on certain freight cars, backed by the railroad lobby. Obama, Trump, Biden, and their subordinates have all had a hand in this lax regulatory framework, and they’ve used that fact to deflect criticism onto their partisan opponents, avoiding blame for the outcomes of rules they created and policies they enforce.

With the government failing to protect the workers who keep the trains running, those railroad workers prepared to take matters into their own hands. The share of railroad revenue going to labor has dropped over the past 20 years, and cost-cutting measures have left the remaining workers with longer hours and less time off. More than 100,000 railway workers get no paid sick days, facing punitive and convoluted attendance policies that leave many without weekends or much time off. At Warren Buffett’s BNSF, for example, workers start with a point balance and lose points if they’re unavailable to work, whether the reason is sickness, family emergency, or anything else. When they run out of points, they get an automatic suspension for over a week, and get fired if they reach zero points three times in two years. Railway workers have to be on call more or less around the clock, reporting for 80-hour shifts on less than 2 hours notice, with their work shift times constantly changing. Their pay, while better than most, can be heavily cut into by necessary expenses — one worker reported spending 190 days in hotels in a year. The main issue is not pay, however, but the ability to live some semblance of a normal life. As one railroad engineer put it, workers are “just fighting for the basic right to be able to be people outside of the railroad.” Social isolation, disruptive schedules, and a lack of sick days are wreaking havoc on railway workers’ physical and mental health, placing further stress on the system that completely relies on their labor.

Late last year, negotiations between railway unions and companies ground to a halt. Workers were seeking more pay for their dangerous and stressful jobs and, fundamentally, sick days to take care of themselves such that they could then perform their jobs safely. The rail companies refused to budge on the matter of sick days, leading workers to reject the offer and prepare for a strike. Joe Biden and congressional leaders, once again caving to the demands of organized capital, crushed the potential strike and imposed a contract with no sick days for the workers.

The struggle between railway workers and railroad companies — backed by a government ready to do their bidding — feels like a problem out of another time. As the US Chamber of Commerce said in their letter to the federal government, asking them to stop the strike, “Congress has intervened 18 times since 1926 in labor negotiations that threaten interstate commerce.” These are the same battles fought by the likes of Eugene Debs and his union comrades, facing death and imprisonment in their struggle to win better lives for themselves and their families.

We are fighting the same fights today because capitalism cannot change its basic incentive structures. Corporations exist to generate profits for their owners. Hiring less workers, cutting spending on safety, and lobbying to weaken regulations allows railroads to increase profits. If this results in an increased rate of derailments, worker deaths, and poisoned towns, it isn’t the railroad companies’ problem, so long as they cut costs more than they spent on lobbying and damage control. Investors and financial institutions, even further disconnected from the actual functioning of railroads, will direct investment to the companies with the highest profits, no matter how they got them. The incentives of capital are fundamentally opposed to our interests, not just as workers, but as human beings. The deaths, injuries, and ruined social lives that railroad workers face affect their families and communities. Lost jobs mean more competition in the labor market and subsequently downward pressure on wages. Derailments and crashes endanger people across the country and damage our already strained biosphere. In Michigan, we’ve already received shipments of toxic waste from East Palestine, and other waste has been sent around the country for processing, presenting more risks to public health and the environment.

Inadequate regulation and union-busting are just a few examples of the political agenda our government maintains regardless of which party is in charge. Whether the issue is foreign policy, the targeting of whistleblowers, or the state’s needless cruelty toward migrants, the fact is that certain outcomes are all but assured no matter who you vote for.

The current political situation surrounding our railroads lays bare the actual political conflicts that divide our society. Political parties are not entirely without their differences, but in many ways, partisan concerns are a distraction from the divergent material interests of capital and labor, of capital and human beings. To genuinely improve things, we cannot rely on either major political party to help us, but we must also reject the politics of bipartisan cooperation. We must go beyond this framework and pursue a politics that challenges the current economic and political order and recognizes our collective interests as workers and human beings.

The East Palestine Derailment: Proof That Bipartisanship Won’t Save Us was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Aniket Dixit

There’s no shortage of classical nostalgia in the Western world today. The influence of the Ancient Greeks and Romans has been deeply embedded into modern political culture, often to the point of distorting historical reality. Articles such as “America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall” and “No, Really, Are We Rome?” reveal how Ancient Rome has become a goldmine for armchair historians. This obsession tends to follow a similar trajectory, too: Rome was a great democracy — equal and just — until its excesses gave rise to wealth inequality and dangerous populist tyrants who tore it down. It is this vacuous perception of the Republic as some bastion of democracy that makes such comparisons so unfortunate. The Roman Republic, for all its apparent stability and fairness, was a society built on genocidal settler-colonialism, by slaves, for landed senators from the very beginning. In the end, the Republic’s collapse spoke to its enduring role as the bodyguard for landed classes. The Western attempt to recreate a “lost ideal” of the Roman Republic, requires remaking the very underlying conditions that allowed it to exist in the first place.

The Roman model of imperialism was very specific, one molded by the deeply rooted principles of Roman society. Violence was a tool used with discipline, as was punishment and intimidation. Rome was not resource-rich, of course; colonial powers rarely are. Their rise from an early agrarian city-state in a pocket of Italy to the most powerful empire in the world was a result of near constant warfare and resource plunder. The resource drain from the Roman colonies, particularly in Greece and Egypt, was great enough to tank local economies while enriching the governments of both. Early Roman wars, considered “necessary” defensive actions, were recognized even by many at the time to be the exact opposite. The conquest of Carthage and Hispania in particular have been frequently emulated and praised across the global military-industrial complex. Threats of Carthaginian economic expansion as well as the lure of resource-rich Spain did more to spur the Punic Wars than any notion of “self-defense”. The 146 B.C genocide of Carthage — encouraged by wholly unsupported rumors of brutality and cannibalism — was followed by the equally brutal razing of the Spanish town of Illurgia decades later. It was this strange discipline of violence that American military leaders later latched on to. David Petraeus’ 2006 counterinsurgency manual cites the subjugation of Hispania as a model for modern counterinsurgency. Even the growth of foreign military bases can be traced to Roman imperialism. It was the development of a “military community” abroad that gave Rome the power to keep rebellions in check. Again, the creation of a similar “community” in American foreign policy is necessary to uphold the government we’ve created.

The rampant subjugation of the Mediterranean world was only possible in conjunction with more of the same at home. The inequalities of the early Roman Republic were not an unfortunate side effect of growing corruption, as many contemporary columnists like to imagine. The movement to create the Republic and the eventual overthrow of the tyrant king Tarquinius Superbus were more a result of aristocratic frustration with his growing power than any genuinely popular interest. The comitia centuriata, the precursor to the Curia, was nothing more than an effort to gain popular ground. The same patrician clans (gentes) that had run Tarqiunius out of the city were now the ones in comfortable control. Over the nearly 5 centuries of the Roman Republic, these structures rarely changed. The creation of debt and property laws were geared towards allowing the landed aristocracy as much control over the fates of the farming classes as possible. When upward mobility became a possibility for Romans, forced conscriptions and land seizure took it back out. What’s more, when Tiberius Gracchus, as tribune of the plebs, proposed land reform to limit the property owned by the senatorial elites, they funded a mob to hunt him and his followers down, massacring them outside the Forum.

This was the vision of Rome that sustained its economic development. The relentless plunder from the periphery of the Republic — which ceased to be a true republic long ago — and the permanent fixture of a slave underclass was the heart that kept the Republic running. The collapse into empire and the steady rise of Julius Caesar in the late 1st century was an inevitable manifestation of popular anger and internal weakness. It was a government set up to benefit the few, thus destined to fail. It was this government that our so-called Founding Fathers idolized. As members of their own landed aristocracy, they recognized, much as the gentes of the early Republic did, that slavery and constant expansion were necessary to support their style of government. They were viscerally aware of the contradictions inherent in their moral and economic philosophies, but under early-stage capitalism, a working class of farmers and slaves leads to growth.

Thus, we cannot emulate a system of government without emulating the conditions that allowed it to thrive. The Roman Republic grew out of a slave society, dependent on foreign resources and constant war. The West has modeled many of its governments after this Republic, bringing everything else back with it.

The New Roman Republic was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Confronting the Far Right Recording April 3rd 2023

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, but the forces he represented and the ideas he furthered – the contemporary US right – have not gone away. These forces are continuing their efforts to push the US – both at in the electoral and the extra-parliamentary terrains – further towards their anti-democratic vision for the U.S. NPEC is sponsoring an upcoming zoom session, Confronting the Threat of the Far Right. Session date: April 3, 2023 Session time: 5 PM PT/8 PM ET Three sets of questions will be addressed in this session: (1) Who is the right, both electorally and in the larger cultural front? What groups are the most active? What are the historical roots of the U.S. right? How are these groups organized? (2) The “right” has several ideological strand and beliefs. What are these differences? Is it possible to exploit potential divisions between libertarians, white evangelical Christian nationalists, para-militarists, white supremacists, etc. and other segments the right? (3) What should the broad left do to counter today’s right? How should we organize and with what goals? Where does DSA fit into in the effort to create a progressive counter-offensive to the right? We will hear from and ask questions of Bill Fletcher, John Huntington, and Nancy McLean. These three presenters have engaged with the US far right as analysts, organizers, or both. The presentations and discussion will help DSA members in our day-to-day organizing and will provide important context for our political thinking and work through the 2023 convention and beyond.