Transgender Marxism: From Dysphoria To Dystopia
Editors Note: Dr. Andrew Bostom is a medical and academic data researcher. The research piece below is a summary of his findings on the recent and past history of transgenderism and Marxism in America. This article with citations originally appeared on andrewbostom.org
Angela Davis is an American Marxist “intellectual,” and 1979 Lenin “Peace Prize” recipient, who was the Communist Party USA Vice-Presidential candidate in 1980, and 1984. Speaking at a virtual conference, June 14, 2020, entitled, “Unlock Us: Abolition in Our Lifetime,” Davis, now an eminence grise Communist, opined,
“[T]he trans community has taught us how to challenge that which is totally accepted as normal…that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary then we can effectively resist prisons and jails and police.”
Some 18-months later, last December, 2021, Princeton Marxists protested Abigail Shrier’s appearance discussing her 2019 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Princeton’s campus was besmeared by the protesters with flyers proclaiming,
“LGBT oppression has a central role in maintaining the capitalist means of production…LGBT lives disrupt the heteronormative relationship and domestic labor structure…The liberation of the working class is liberation from gender oppression! Fight for an end to oppression! Fight for a socialist future!”
During May, 2021, ~6-months before the Princeton Marxist protest, a full throated, celebratory manifesto for the Marxist-Socialist transmogrification of (residually) capitalist societies, “Transgender Marxism,” was published. Transgender Marxism is a 305pp. collection of 14 essays, bookended by an extended editors’ Introduction, and Afterward. All the contributors self-identify as Marxists-Socialists, and LGBTQ, particularly transgender persons. While the authors note “transgender culture” has already “appeared as a mass culture,” and “Transgender Marxism is already a flourishing field…to hear ‘trans’ and ‘communist’ in the same breath has become quite routine,” they summarize the book’s rationale, affirming Angela Davis’ observation:
“Through collecting these essays as a mass-marketed book, we aim to capture the recent proliferation of gender-deviant Marxist thought in a more lasting and accessible form; to move us…towards social revolution…We believe the existing breakthroughs achieved by transgender Marxists will transform the scope of revolutionary action in the coming years.”
It is tempting to dismiss Transgender Marxism as a tiresome onslaught of non-stop grievance mongering, and irrationality. What passes for content is most often conveyed angrily, in turgid, vacuous, pseudo-academic Marxist jargon. Dismissing this excruciating collection of tracts, and tract commentaries, however, would be a mistake. The book’s introductory essay crows about an evident truth: “For the most part, left wing circles worldwide are coming to accept the call for ‘trans rights’ as a basic principle.” But a baleful warning immediately follows that statement: “[W]hat if the emancipation of trans people cannot be won through the securing of ‘rights’? What if, however smoothed-over the process of state validation were to become, a meaningful liberation remained out of view? What if even the most thoroughgoing defeat of fascism would not be guaranteed to achieve our social liberation?” Indeed, what then? Apparently, what ensues then is endless strife until the establishment of global Marxist/Communist dystopia for those with gender dysphoria (pp. 452-59), and everyone else, “never allowing ourselves to be deterred from the path of internationalist revolution.”
Two salient discussions from Transgender Marxism illustrate the shameless dishonesty of its Marxist contributors, fanatic votaries of what ex-Communist propagandist, philosopher, and poet, Max Eastman dubbed, aptly, the Communist “religion of immoralism.” The first example is found in editors Jules Joanne Gleeson’s and Elle O’Rourke’s Introduction which maintains that Communism’s founding “Dr. Crankley,” Karl Marx, in his early work On the Jewish Question, implicitly championed the Jews by refusing, “to set aside the fate of minority groups from the structuring of society as a whole.” Gleeson and Rourke further conclude, regarding On the Jewish Question, “In other words, we find in Marx’s writings and political concerns still much of relevance to our [transgender] struggles.” Contra such mendacious hagiography, Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question reveals him to be an annihilationist Jew-hater. Marx wished to extinguish Judaism, and its Jewish adepts—mere embodiments of “usury and money”— actions which would achieve his dystopian vision of “the emancipation of society from Jewry.” Additional statements of Karl Marx’s reflexive, day-to-day Jew-hatred, include the following:
“It is the circumvention of law that makes the religious Jew a religious Jew.” (Die Deutsche Ideologie, MEGA V, 162); “The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 29, 1849); He called Ferdinand Lassalle, “Judel Itzig—Jewish Nigger.” (Der Judische Nigger, MEKOR III, 82, July 30, 1862); “Ramsgate [British coastal resort] is full of Jews and fleas.” (MEKOR IV, 490, August 25, 1879)
A second example is the medical mendacity—and ignorance—of Johns Hopkins University Professor Jules-Gill Peterson, who provided a gushing blurb for Transgender Marxism. A History Professor, with no training in biology, Peterson teaches a course entitled, “The Gender Binary and American Empire.” The course’s thesis is that binary sex—male and female—is somehow an imperialistic, “racialized” construct foisted upon the world by irredeemably evil Western colonial powers, particularly, the United States. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Professor Jordy Rosenberg’s Afterward to Transgender Marxism summarizes the conclusions from Peterson’s so-called “pivotal book,” Histories of the Transgender Child, riveting on Peterson’s study of 1950s era Johns Hopkins Hospital case records of patients with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Rosenberg accurately recapitulates Peterson’s claims from the analysis of these CAH cases: “doctors found themselves forced to conclude that biological sex is far less stable and fixed than they might have liked to presume. Sex in other words, is not an autonomous property of the body, rather it—and the body—exist in a tangled metabolic flux.” Peterson’s own ancillary arguments, it should be emphasized, devolved into what can only be characterized as a jargon junkyard of thought disordered lunacy. To Peterson, the attempted management of CAH during the 1950s in XX genetic females, congruent with their female genotype, represented “a racialized plasticity,” and “an abstract whiteness.”
Rosenberg and Peterson, rigid, lying, uninformed transgender Marxist ideologues, take utmost license with actual CAH. They deliberately ignore how our medical understanding of this rare syndrome has evolved over the past 7 decades to “validate” their equal parts idiotic, and dishonest contentions. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a cluster of inherited enzymatic disorders which result in defective steroid synthesis, and derangements of salt/water, and glucose metabolism, as well as sexual function. Genetic XY biological males with CAH show no sexual developmental, or functional incongruence. Genetic XX females with CAH may develop “virilizing” malformations of their external genitalia, rendering sexual intercourse unpleasant, or occasionally prohibitive, thereby reducing the chance of pregnancy. Simple, compassionate medical steroid replacement therapy, and if required, rehabilitative surgical treatment of “ambiguous” genitalia can provide these natal, genetic CAH females functions adequate for menstruation, pleasurable intromission (sexual intercourse), and birthing.
In an August, 2022 interview, 1995 Nobel Prize winning developmental biologist Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard demolished the anti-scientific, modern Lysenkoism of Marxist pseudo-academics Rosenberg and Peterson, and their ilk. Nüsslein-Volhard elucidated the fixed biological determinants of mammalian sex, and the distinction between sex and gender, while warning of the dangers (and futility) of hormonal and surgical “re-assignment” treatments. Her apposite comments are extracted, below:
“With all mammals there are two sexes, and the human being is a mammal. There’s the one sex that produces the eggs, (and) has two X chromosomes. That is called female. And there’s the other one that produces the sperm, has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. That’s called male. And when an egg unites with a sperm, a new being is created… Of course, with gender, the social sex, there is a range, while with biological sex there is only female or male. There are very ‘feminine’ men and very ‘masculine’ women, which has to do not only with cultural factors, but also with different hormone levels, among other things… There are people who want to change their sex, but they cannot. They remain XY or XX. The crucial thing is that the fact whether one has a Y-chromosome already affects the development of the embryo during pregnancy and of course also in the adolescent. Boys therefore have different sex characteristics than girls and this cannot be reversed. People retain their sex for life. Of course, it is possible through hormone administration that, for example, a girl who takes testosterone gets a deep voice and beard growth. But from this the girl will not grow testicles and will not produce sperm. And biological males also do not produce eggs and cannot bear children due to hormone doses. The problem with this arises when it comes to irreversible interventions. With the surgeries anyway. But also with the hormones you add something to the body that is not intended there. Hormones cause a great deal in the body – on a wide variety of levels, both physically and psychologically. To dose that properly and to take it all the time, I think is extraordinarily daring. The body can’t handle it well in the long run. Every hormone you take has side effects. Taking hormones is dangerous in principle.”
Pediatrician Michelle Cretella, MD, former President of the American College of Pediatricians, previously stated Nobel Laureate developmental biologist Nüsslein-Volhard’s biological axioms from the perspective of a clinician-scientist:
“Sex chromosome pairs ‘XY’ and ‘XX’ are genetic markers of sex, male and female, respectively. They are not genetic markers of a disordered body or birth defect. Human sexuality is binary by design with the purpose being the reproduction of our species. This principle is self-evident. Barring one of the rare disorders of sex development (DSD), no infant is “assigned” a sex at birth; rather birth sex declares itself anatomically in utero and is acknowledged at birth…The norm for human development is for one’s thoughts to align with physical reality, and for one’s gender identity to align with one’s biologic sex. People who identify as ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ or ‘somewhere in between’ do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.”
Ex-Communist and ex-Daily Worker editor, Louis Budenz, in 1954, described the “transmission belt method,” whereby Communist talking points and themes, as ordered then, for example, by American Communist leader Gus Hall, were soon, “being repeated by outstanding public figures, certain leading newspapers, and television and radio commentators.” Budenz, who returned to Catholicism, taught at Providence College, and spent his last years in Rhode Island, would have readily identified that dynamic in action, again, before, during, and in the aftermath of an event entitled, “What Your Kids Learn About Gender in School,” Monday, 9/19/22, at the Cranston Rhode Island Public Library. Event organizer Nicole Solas was sprayed with false and defamatory charges of “transphobia” by local “community transgender activists,” their political allies, and lazy, morally cretinous amplifiers in the Rhode Island media. Ms. Solas also received violent threats prior to the event which necessitated a large police presence.
I attended “What Your Kids Learn About Gender in School,” and witnessed the same sympathetic, informative presentation Erica Stanzi described so thoroughly. Key medical data highlighted at the event can be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5; p. 455), and a seminal peer reviewed analysis by Dhejne and colleagues, published in the high impact journal PLOS One. DSM-5 notes that gender dysphoria may persist from childhood into adolescence in as few as 12% of natal biological females, and 2% of natal biological males. Moreover, also per DSM-5, only 0.005% (1/20,000) of adult natal males, and 0.002% (1/50,000) of adult natal females, exhibit gender dysphoria. Finally, Dhejne and colleagues, conducted an average follow-up of over 10 years among all 324 sex-reassigned persons (191 male-to-females, 133 female-to-males) in Sweden, 1973–2003. Compared to controls of the same birth sex, the sex-reassigned persons experienced a ~19-fold increased death risk from suicide, as well as a 5-fold increased risk for suicide attempts. The authors concluded, with understatement, that such surgery was, “not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity and mortality found among transsexual persons.”
Negating biology, freedom, and human compassion and decency, transgender Marxist fanatics exploit gender dysphoria—their own, and that of hapless others—incessantly striving to forge a totalitarian “anti-capitalist” dystopia.
Dr. Andrew Bostom, a Brown University credentialed epidemiologist, is a medical reporter for The Ocean State Current and adjunct scholar to the RI Center for Freedom & Properity.