Almost all states, organisations and large businesses in the West have now adopted gender identity ideology, also known as transgenderism. This new theory redefines the word woman from meaning “adult human female” to “anyone who says they have a gender identity of woman or female”. This dangerous and regressive step is strongly opposed by many: feminists, authors, scientists, comedians, academics and conservatives, but supported wholeheartedly by the Left.  This essay looks at why the supposed champion of the underdog, the Left, has not sprung to defend women or material reality in this clash of rights. Could it be that the Left loves transgenderism because it is the new Socialism? 

In the last five years, left-wing governments and organisations have jumped on the bandwagon of gender identity ideology. Indeed, in many countries the most enthusiastic promoters of replacing sex with gender identity are the socialist parties or unions. This is true in the United Kingdom where the Labour Party and large unions such as Unite, UNISON and the GMB are strongly in favour of transgenderism. Similarly, in Australia, India, some of SE Asia, the Americas and the European Union the Left is strongly pro transgenderism. The more conservative nations in Africa, the Middle East and Russia states have not adopted transgenderism. 

The enthusiasm in left-wing circles for gender identity is a paradox. Socialist and marxist parties come from a tradition of materialism, in which the objective, material conditions of people influence their class position and politics. As a philosophy, materialism holds that matter and all things, including how we think and feel, are the products of material interactions. Consciousness develops from real life events. In the nineteenth century left-wing thinkers rejected spiritualism (in which god is said to create and guide events), and idealism (in which thoughts and ideas are supposed to drive reality). They developed the political philosophy of historical materialism which was the basis of marxism and socialism. However, since 2015, the Left has jumped philosophical camps by rejecting the material reality of male and female bodies and prioritising ideas – the ideas of identity. The Left has switched from a materialist analysis of class to championing individualistic identity politics. To many this seems weird, inexplicable and illogical.  

It is also bemusing that the Left, the supposed champion of women’s rights, has now chosen the support the demands of men who say they are women over the rights of women who say transgenderism undermines our rights. In fact, they go further - they are actively attacking feminists. Some of the most vehement protests against women contesting gender identity ideology are against feminists in the Labour Party, the Green Party and the trade unions.  

So, if the Left is not materialist and not feminist, what then is it? Could it be that the Left are actually an interest group for oppressed, beta males?  Beta males are defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a subordinate male animal in a particular group”, or “a man tending to assume a passive or subservient role in social or professional situation”. The male working class were the beta males of the industrial era and the Left parties and unions represented them. The story was that under capitalism, working class men, dispossessed from ownership of capital and the means of production, had only their labour to sell in order to make a living and were in general exploited by the rich. The Left’s trick was to convince a whole lot of people that what was good for the working-class men was good also for working class women, the unemployed and the oppressed in general. They had a coherent political philosophy to justify it.  

Before continuing, I must stress that radical feminists want to abolish the hierarchical class system that creates alpha and beta people, rich and poor, ruling and working class. This is an analysis of today’s oppressive structures, not a support of them.

The twentieth century offer by left-wing political parties was to big up the brotherhood, the unions, the organised ranks of the working men and indeed individual brothers. The Left was not just offering to serve the brotherhood’s interests. They put the brotherhood centre stage in the struggle for a brave new world. Marx and others argued that it was the organised, conscious, unions of working men that would usher in a better world. Indeed, in long books and treatises, male political theorists argued that the real road to liberation was via collective workplace struggle and in an era when most full-time contracted workers were male, this meant men. This was very attractive to men, who were thus prioritised and made into the saviours. All hope was placed on them. Their groups would prevail, and everyone else (the women, the children, the lumpenproletariat – the communities) should back them. We should support them, they would represent us and once they won what they called “our” fight, they assured us that we would all win. Socialist theory developed to underpin this and was taught in universities. The kingpin, the lynchpin was the male unionised worker, the labouring man. Women’s relegation to the private sphere was overlooked and deprioritised by marxism. If it was acknowledged, women were argued to be impotent because the only way to bring down the real enemy was via strike action.  

Marxism was not popular because it worked, or was true, or logical. There was plenty of evidence in the twentieth century indicating flaws in both the theory and practice.  Marxism was popular because it centred a large group of poorer men and advised the rest of us to help these men in their fight against the richer more powerful men. Everything depended on us helping and supporting the workers, the poorer men. This was attractive to the men who were centred. It took attention away from the men’s relations with women, children, the environment. All that mattered was their battle with the richer men. When feminists criticised Marx for treating women appallingly, socialists would shut them up saying that we shouldn’t undermine the most important struggle, the class struggle of workers against capitalists. Socialism was popular not because it worked, but because it worked for men. It centred them. While the socialist brothers told women to make cakes to raise money for the strike fund which would bring on the revolution and a better future, the men were getting what they wanted there and then, which was to be the hero, he who must be supported in the struggle. The women were to focus on, look to, dream of a future paradise. The poor men on strike were both victims of capitalism and our hope of salvation (the spearhead of the revolution). The trick was that while we women were told to think to the future and help victimised men, many of these men were having their cake there and then, screwing around, enjoying the limelight, being top dogs in their families or communities. They never actually wanted the socialist revolution tomorrow, they wanted power today. The beta males were given a taste of alpha maleness in their communities, families and that was enough for them. These men were loved as victims (of capitalism) and heroes (of the socialist revolution).  

This socialist brotherhood story fell apart with globalisation, de-industrialisation in the West and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. It crumbled as the Berlin Wall came down. The West had won the Cold War and the western patriarchs spent the 1990’s divvying up control of the former Soviet bloc – privatising production, getting control of markets and resources. At home, they broke the unions and their political wings the socialist parties at home and with it the social contract between the alpha and beta males that had given a fiefdom to the poorer men. It was unlike after the 1998 Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland when the ruling males knew they had to give jobs, something to do and some status to have, to the former paramilitary men. After the fall of Soviet communism, the broken Left militants were left floundering. This led to a lot of angry young men looking around for a new offer. From 1990 to 2015 there was a range of failed trials – populist left wing parties, incels, lone male shooters attacking women or comedians or religious groups. Men took to watching violent porn at home and sublimated sexual violence in brother gangs at football but there was nothing on offer from political parties. The beta males were lacking an organisation, a way to get status in their communities, a girlfriend and above all else, a way to be special and more important than women. Meanwhile, in the West, which is mostly Christian, people were leaving the church in droves partly due to more atheism and partly the loss of respect following the paedophile scandals. In contrast in Muslim countries, religion has managed to be attractive to young men. 

In 1989, the big seventy-year Cold War was over, and the Western patriarchs no longer felt the need to free up women for that war effort. They turned back to put their own house in order and their women back in their place. The end of the Cold War meant the victorious Western men had more time to fight the domestic war on women. At the same time, the deal made by the West’s patriarchs (the Right) and the beta males (the Left) fell apart. 

The key point is that for society to function as a patriarchy, which a lot of people want, there has to be something in it for the beta males. It would of course be preferable to move to a post patriarchal society but that isn’t what’s happening. Young beta males in patriarchy want their own piece of the pie, their own fiefdom over some females, a community to dominate. Gone was the brotherhood of the unions, the socialist parties, the ego boosting marxist ideology used so young men could woo the girls with their heroicism. What would take its place? With globalisation and the internet, the new offer would have to be decentralised, post-modern, individualist and give beta males status, authority, jobs and crucially access to sex. 

Part of the new offer for beta males is more football (soccer) (and other sports such as golf), which gives men an almost 24/7 access to brotherhood bonding. Males globally and some misguided females construct and reconstruct their masculinity in a weekly or in some cases daily ritual of sublimated sexism. I’ve written about how golf is sublimated sex and sexism on the feminist website 4W and football is much the same. This leisure activity supports male class solidarity and masculine identities. It is notoriously sexist and promotes violence against women. In the UK police forces put more officers on duty on match nights because there is an increase in male violence against women in the home by both the winning and losing team’s supporters.  

A second offer for men is increased access to porn via the internet. Provided by private companies, porn is enabled by big banks and internet providers and supported by the mainstream media by their gateway content of soft porn in almost every show.  

The third offer, and the big political breakthrough for the beta males is transgenderism which had been developing since the 1980s but exploded into the mainstream after 2015. Transgenderism is the new marxism. It is the new socialism. It even purports to be the new feminism. Transgenderism is the new ism. Transgenderism is popular because it works for a class of men. Just as marxism was not popular because it worked, or was true, or logical, the attraction of transgenderism is not that it works or is true or logical. There is already plentiful evidence indicating the flaws in the theory of transgenderism and its practice. The theory is leaky as a sieve. Proponents shy away from public debate, change their story and refuse to define their terms. They use the terms woman and gender interchangeably and they shift meaning. Even its architects such as Judith Butler back track, zig zag and obfuscate.    

But this illogicality doesn’t matter. Certainly not to the men who it centres. Just as Marxism was popular because it worked for underdog men, transgenderism is popular because it works for a group of underdog men. It centres them in a new story in which they are victim and hero. Marxism focussed on economic oppression (by capitalism) and offered an answer that made men the most important victim, and unions of men, brotherhoods, the most potent, viable agents of change. By pinpointing the paid industrial workers as the agents most able to overthrow capitalism, they glorified and centred these male workers. Transgenderism focusses on social oppression (by society, by the social contract, by political norms). Where the baddie according to marxism was capitalism, the baddie according to transgenderism is conservative society and TERFS (trans exclusionary radical feminists). By making conservative attitudes and radical feminists the baddies, transgenderism neatly lets capitalism off the hook. This is good for business and might be one reason why businesses have been so quick to embrace transgenderism.  

It allows young men to be victims of oppressive conservative families and to be heroes in breaking free. They are sons fighting the father patriarchs. It also allows young men to be victims of what they see as oppressive older women matriarchs who are in positions of authority in the workplace, public life and the home. Some of what the young beta males want is more sex with young women and they see older women as a barrier to that. Some of what they want is male privilege, which they see as having been undermined by these older women.  

The Left have a tradition of attacking both the Right and feminists. They often conflate these enemies and call feminists right wing, Nazi oppressors. They wilfully misrepresent us as right wing and conservative. Despite any amount of evidence that we are poor, progressive, unionists, lesbians, the Left insists that we are right wing, conservative Nazi bigots. This accusation is particularly upsetting for the many women who have spent decades in the labour movement fighting the class struggle as good comrades. It’s a betrayal of our work and history to slur us as right wing.  

Transgenderism is a different offer for beta males than the old Left, in which men had to be brotherly, workers in arms, materialist, salt of the earth. They had their place, and they had their women. This story illustrates this point of fiefdom. When I was arguing in my local Labour Party in the UK that men should not be allowed in women’s prisons I said “men should not be allowed in our prisons” which prompted a man to stand up and shout “what do you mean our prisons? They are not yours”. He was livid that I was claiming that women can be a word that links females to the extent that we can claim they are “our prisons”. His point was that I, and indeed no woman, has the right to use the word to imply that we have a collective class interest as women and speak for our incarcerated sisters. He felt he should be the one to speak about women in prison because that was his fiefdom – his class – which overruled my authority to speak. And of course, he assumed that as a feminist I was not working class.  

Since the end of the Cold War the Left have been looking around for a new ideology and they’ve found it. For it to really work for men, the ideology needs to properly centre them. And since women entered the workforce, and globalisation has scattered jobs hither and thither, and unions of working men can be undercut at the click of a button, Marxism has withered away. It is powerless against capital, and it no longer centres men.   

Added to the historical mix, many believe the feminists had gone too far by 2015. Safeguarding changes after paedophile scandals had blocked men’s access to sex with children via the church, the schools, the care system, the celebrity system etc.  

In conclusion, there are many ways transgenderism works for beta males. It centres them. It silences women. It makes them victim/hero. It reinvents, rejuvenates the argument that puts feminists on the right. It justifies the exclusion of older women from the public sphere and create spaces for males to get access to younger women and children. It gives an opportunity for young women and men to be self-righteous – to channel socially sanctioned anger. Righteous anger goes hand in hand with religion and this is like a religion. The victim/hero link between Jesus and Che Guevara has been much written about. It works for a class of underdog males that the Left left behind so can help win votes, of course that’s important to them. It gives the Left a raison d’etre that actually puts it in line with capitalism for once and they can more confidently argue that they are on the right side of history this time. They bet on the wrong horse in 1917 and aren’t about to do that again. It gives the Left a job to do, it puts them back at the table as useful players. It provides jobs for the faithful and a route to sex for the incels and paedophiles. It seems unimaginable but transgenderism is the new socialism. And as ever, the answer is radical feminism.