In May, the Struggle for Socialism Party Los Angeles branch discussed the new book, “Against Fascism: Reclaiming Populism’s Legacy for Today’s Class Struggle,” compiled by Louisiana socialist Gregory Williams.
Following is the closing presentation for the series of classes, given by trans activist Melinda Butterfield on May 31.
Since this is the eve of Pride Month, I thought it would be good to start with a little about the convergence of queer lives with the 19th-century Populist movement in the South. We know there were queer people involved in the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, because we have always existed, and today’s queer communities have strong roots throughout the South.
No doubt some of those who joined the movement were closeted, some were stealth, and some were accepted for who they were, as part of their community. But because there was no queer movement as we understand it today, it can be difficult to find direct information on these intersections. We have to suss them out.
This week I’ve been reading a new book by activist and scholar Eli Erlick, “Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950.” In this book, I learned about Sally-Tom and Mollie Wilson, trans women of color who lived in the South during the height of the Populist movement and the People’s Party. I’m going to share a little bit of their stories:
Sally-Tom was a Black woman who lived the first 26 years of her life in slavery. She took the new opportunities opened up by Emancipation to start living more fully and openly as her true feminine self. In 1869, when she came before the Freedmen’s Bureau on an unrelated matter, she was presented with the opportunity to choose her gender for the official records, and she chose to be legally recognized as a woman. According to Erlick, Sally-Tom was probably the first trans person in U.S. history to have her gender officially recognized.
Sally lived in several Georgia towns over the next four decades, working as a cook and household help, as many Black women did. “Sally refused to discuss her life with reporters, so we do not have a single word of her self-narrative,” Erlick writes. “Those who knew her described her to papers at length, however. With a high and crackly voice, Sally reportedly hid behind her straw hat and left events before conflict arose.
“Her decision to avoid media made sense from the perspective of self-preservation; she likely did not want to draw attention to herself during such a violent era of increasing lynchings and attacks on the Black population.” She died on March 4, 1908, in Waycross, Georgia, at around the age of 69. According to a death notice in the local paper, none of her friends and neighbors knew she was trans.
Mollie Wilson was a Two-Spirit trans woman who was Choctaw and Black, born around 1865 in what was then the Choctaw Territory, which included parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Originally, she spoke only her Indigenous language. At the age of 19, she barely escaped a lynching, killing several of her would-be murderers in the process. She fled from home and took the opportunity of her escape from these traumatic events to embrace her womanhood.
Erlick writes: “Eventually, she moved to Kansas City, Missouri. She reportedly had a large group of friends, mostly Black residents of the city. Mollie always wore a dark dress and fascinator, and with a tall and thin frame, passed with ease. Her transition allowed her to blossom into a social butterfly without fear of lynch mobs.” She married a man and later lived with a woman.
As Jim Crow’s noose tightened, Mollie was arrested twice on police claims that she was a sex worker. Shortly after one of these arrests, she died of tuberculosis in 1901.
These long-hidden lives show how trans and queer people found ways to live as their true selves during the same era that the Populist struggles were pushing back against reaction.
Trump attacks trans health care
But let’s move to the here and now. Trump’s “big beautiful” budget bill recently passed in the House and is currently before the Senate. It attacks housing, Social Security and public health care to transfer funds to the war machine, ICE, and the 1%. Some 20% of Medicaid recipients are to be cut – nearly 14 million people.
A rider attached to the House bill would eliminate all Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage for trans health care, both for youth and adults. At least 275,000 trans people currently depend on Medicaid. The likely knock-on effect would be to allow private insurance companies to dump gender-affirming care, affecting many more.
In addition to Sally-Tom and Mollie Wilson, this week I have been thinking about Charlotte Fosgate. Charlotte was a 17-year-old trans girl who lived in Oregon. She disappeared May 1 and jumped from a bridge in Portland the next night. Her death was confirmed last week.
Charlotte’s final social media posts, made from the bridge where she leapt to her death, became a lightning rod for bigots posting hateful memes and messages.
Charlotte represents all the trans youth and adults who are being forced out of public life and losing their hopes for the future because of health care bans, bathroom bans, sports bans, doxxing and violence.
Populism is supposed to represent the interests of those who have been left out, who are marginalized. What kind of “populism” is it that doesn’t include someone like Charlotte Fosgate and other queer youth who are completely stripped of their right to exist, to be themselves, to even dream of a better future?
What the media and politicians term “populism” now is something utterly different. Where populism in the 19th Century represented the desire of people at the margins – small farmers, formerly enslaved people, agricultural workers and all those left behind by the growth of capitalism – to work together to better their futures, now it usually means appealing to the most backward, atomized, anti-social elements that have completely swallowed the small-capitalist, white supremacist mentality.
What they now call “populism” appeals mostly to the social base of fascism – the shock troops of the billionaire class.
Nazis co-opted socialist terms
It’s not the first time this has happened. The classical fascist movements and regimes in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century adopted some of the anti-establishment and even anti-capitalist rhetoric of their enemies, the communists and socialists, to attract people to their cause. Hitler even called his organization “National Socialists.”
But they redirected the righteous anger at capitalism toward Jews, queers, people of color, and the left – much as we see ultra-corrupt capitalists like Donald Trump and Elon Musk railing against the “elites” and “Washington insider corruption” as stand-ins for marginalized communities, migrants, and the working class as a whole.
Like the followers of the Strasser brothers, who formed the “left” wing of the Germany Nazi movement, today we have formations like the so-called American Communist Party (ACP) and the Center for Political Innovation (CPI) that use leftist terminology and symbolism to draw disaffected people and those lacking class consciousness into the orbit of the fascist movement.
While claiming to be socialists or communists, they adopt the exact same racist, misogynist, anti-trans and anti-queer arguments and bigotry as their MAGA inspirations do.
Where is the united movement from the grassroots that will give a voice to people like Charlotte Fosgate or to Sam Nordquist, a Black trans man who was tortured to death in upstate New York earlier this year?
Where is the movement that will give a voice to the children whose parents are ripped away by masked ICE Gestapo at immigration hearings across the country? Or the migrants from Southeast Asia who were kidnapped and sent by the Trump regime to South Sudan?
What about Mahmoud Khalil, who is being held thousands of miles from his wife and newborn child in a Louisiana prison? Or the queer youth who are being thrown away by their families or pushed into state-mandated conversion therapy torture?
Building united movement is our task
This united movement of the dispossessed, of the workers and oppressed, is not going to come from the Democratic Party or the established nonprofits that cling to the broken system. Fighting back in the courts and with other “official” methods, while important, is not going to save us or build the movement we need.
It’s up to us. We have to build this movement, this unity. We have to refuse to be siloed. We have to reach out and find ways to collaborate, even when there is not 100% mutual understanding yet. Working together against our common enemies, in our common interests, is the way to build that understanding.
Queer rights are under attack everywhere, including California. Gruesome Gavin Newsom just this week began the process of excluding trans students from athletic competitions, after months of pandering to the worst anti-trans bigots on his podcast. Trans youth have been under attack in schools throughout Southern California for the past few years. And last month, queer activists had to confront a fascist march in the streets of West Hollywood.
That brings us back to LGBTQIA+ Pride Month. This year especially, it’s important for people from all sectors of the working class, all communities, and all organizations of the real left to come out in support of trans rights, trans lives, and all queer people. This is the time to take good sentiments about being an ally and turn them into contacts, joint work, and real efforts to build a united movement.
In Los Angeles, the Harriet Tubman Center, Struggle for Socialism Party, Trans Rescue Action, and others will be mobilizing for Pride events and queer resistance actions. If you’re not in LA, talk to us, and we can put you in touch with others doing the work in your area.
Let me close with this thought from the conclusion of Vince Copeland’s “Southern Populism and Black Labor,” a classic Marxist work included in the book we’re studying today: “[The Populists’] failure was not due nearly so much to the failure of their ideas, as to the failure to maintain their social position – to hold on to the material base of independent small and especially farming business, from which these ideas originated.
“The new class, the working class, does not yet have the ideas that correspond to its class position. But its class position is innately superior to that of the old Populists from the point of view of having the base to mount a serious and successful struggle. When the new ‘people-ism’ of the workers is born, it will soon grow powerful enough to really lead the people and rule in the name of practically the whole people – something the Populists could not have done, even if they had won.”
Join the Struggle-La Lucha Telegram channel