ONCE the golden ticket to public office and personal fortune, the job of Conservative leader has become markedly less glamorous. Shepherding the obliterated party through its wilderness years is nowhere near as much fun as plundering the ship of state while merrily throwing wastrels overboard.

Not surprising, then, that Suella Braverman ruled herself out of the contest as rumours swirled about her defection to Reform UK. Braverman’s strategy has been obvious since the Conservative Party conference last year, when her rousing and poisonous address contained a phrase — “gender ideology” — often heard at the rallies of Georgia Meloni, Viktor Orban and, of course, Donald Trump. But these populist chancers are not this article’s primary concern, because the phrase has also been employed in the pages of the Morning Star.

Gender ideology is a pejorative term for gender self-identification (self-ID), the principle that a person’s legal sex be determined by their gender identity, how they live in the world, rather than the sex assigned to them at birth, and should be made possible without the need for invasive medical diagnosis or humiliating legal procedures. Though implemented in 20 countries so far, its introduction in Britain has been fiercely opposed by those who think it a harmful conflation of biological sex and gender identity, and that material reality is being erased in favour of make-believe.

Braverman and her ilk maintain that self-ID is a dangerous assault upon the normative family and class-based status quo. That is not the criticism levelled in this paper. Rather, it is seen as a Trojan horse, designed to undermine class consciousness by hampering the “collective and unified struggle to challenge the exploitation and oppression which is central to the maintenance of capitalist class society,” to quote Professor Mary Davis.

If self-ID is an existential threat, then does it seem likely that both critiques are true? Why would a ruling elite enthusiastically and loudly torpedo gender ideology, if that ideology is a weapon of its own dominance?

Left critics of self-ID must explain why the Tories haven’t enthusiastically promoted it as a means to vanquish class struggle. Have these ambassadors for the ruling class been engaged in a charade of bravura complexity? Such a claim would sit uneasily with a cardinal respect for material reality.

When positively reviewing Alice Sullivan and Selina Todd’s book Sex and Gender — a clarion call against gender recognition — Professor Davis employs the words materialist (twice), biological (twice), scientific and scientifically as if they alone settle the matter. The book itself contains a chapter written by two biologists including culture warrior Dr Colin Wright, whose scientific wisdom (some would say grifting opportunism) has been lauded by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, no less. Facts are simply truths independent of politics, it seems we are being told.

Claiming the authority of science is a common rhetorical tactic. For those of us who respect trans identities, it is disappointing to have to counter the claim that we deny biological reality, and tedious to have to state the obvious: it exists. Gender recognition is a political debate, not a scientific one, just as gender is political, and left critics of self-ID must contend with the inconvenient fact of political reality. The Tories and their media outriders actively resisted gender recognition; but what about the present government?

Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour was willing to stand up for the trans community. The party offered unconditional solidarity and a pledge in its 2017 manifesto to reform the Gender Recognition Act to make it easier for trans people to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate. But in July 2023, the party officially returned to its pre-Corbyn stance on sex and gender, part of Keir Starmer’s wholesale repudiation of everything he claimed to stand for during the leadership election, the party now happy to do pretty much anything to appease Establishment interests.

The media class has taken up the cause against self-ID with cheerful abandon, and some trans-exclusionary feminists have been happy to support the endeavour. Kathleen Stock, Victoria Smith, Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel (to name but a few) enjoy significant prominence in the Critic magazine, funded by asset management tycoon and major Tory and Reform UK donor Jeremy Hosking (net worth: £375 million), and/or in UnHerd, plaything of hedge fund magnate Paul Marshall (net worth: £630m), who generously gave £500,000 to help secure Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019 and to whom GB News — brave and frequent flayer of gender ideology — owes its continued existence. Are these plutocrats interested in women’s rights? Or could there perhaps be another motivation at stake?

To answer this question, we should look to the Establishment’s vilification of migrants. “The Tory government at Westminster, the far right and the corporate media are using every weapon at their disposal to stigmatise migrants and asylum-seekers instead of addressing the real economic and social problems facing working people and their families,” observed the Communist Party’s political committee in March of last year.

Alas, some on the left have been reluctant to admit that the above statement applies to trans people too. That very same month, the CPB’s executive committee issued a statement in defence of the Tories’ decision to block the Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed by the Scottish Parliament. It concluded: “Gender identity ideology is well-suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as opposed to collective rights, enabling and supporting the super-exploitation of women.”

There is no mention of the fact that the political wing of the capitalist class has explicitly prosecuted a culture war against trans rights, not in favour of them. Nor is there an attempt to explain why the Tories — our class enemy, the last time I checked — blocked the very legislation that advanced, according to some, their insidious plot to undermine class consciousness with identity politics. But let us focus on collective rights.

The statement recognises cis women as a distinct and oppressed group, but rejects a similar acknowledgement of trans people, whose campaign for gender recognition apparently embodies a misguided quest for individual rights, itself a result of “the growth and ascendancy of neoliberalism and its accompanying ideological attack on collective identity and unified class struggle,” to quote Professor Davis.

The implication seems to be: trans people do not form a distinct group, but are rather a collection of individuals; if they dare to reject such analysis and organise for gender recognition, they can only do so under the banner of identity politics, thereby undermining women’s collective rights.

Yet the Communist Party of Ireland has no such qualms rejecting individualism, acknowledging the super-exploitation of women and “the central role of the working class … in the revolutionary struggle” while at the same time supporting gender identities. Besides, far from being adjacent to an “ideological attack” on unified class struggle, the vast majority of trans people suffer under capitalist class society.

Trans people endure high rates of poverty; trans women suffer sexual violence and transmisogyny; too often they are killed or take their own lives; their very existence subverts the gender-based norms that underpin and perpetuate the dominance of the ruling class.

“Refusing binaries means challenging the harmful systems that keep them in place and make our lives miserable by dictating what we can and cannot do,” says feminist writer Lola Olufemi, “refusing the world as it is also means refusing racism, capitalism and a whole host of associated violences.”

Why have some on the left made trans liberation the one exception to a proud tradition of the labour movement? When the powerful demonise a particular group, we stand with that minority, shoulder to shoulder, rather than imposing limits and conditions on our support.

Precious little can be achieved together if the emancipation of a community that endures relentless hostility is deemed to be a distraction from, or an impediment to, our collective struggle against capitalism. For many of us, the subjugations are inextricably linked — the fight to overcome them is the very definition of solidarity.