LGBTQ+ oppression

Until recent times, lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) people were a mostly invisible minority, and many people held prejudiced and distorted ideas about them. Anyone who knew the truth — that LGBTQ+ people are like everyone else, apart from the added oppression they face for whom they love or how they live their gender — had to choose between silence and facing that prejudice themselves.

That oppression has been fought head-on. At the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City in June 1969, LGBTQ+ people — many of them trans women of color — fought back against a police raid and signaled to LGBTQ+ people everywhere that the time had come to challenge a long legacy of oppression. Stonewall is still marked every year with marches and rallies in cities around the world.

LGBTQ+ people keep fighting the discrimination they meet in every part of life. They are discriminated against by bosses and landlords. They face police brutality and are attacked by bigots who count on the cops and the courts to take their side. LGBTQ+ youth are harassed at school and sometimes thrown out of their homes. The right to marry was won in 2015 — not because marriage is some “sacred institution,” but because of the hundreds of economic benefits tied to it — and that right, like the right to abortion, is now under attack.

LGBTQ+ people are also up against false ideas that persist — that they are rare, or exist only in big cities, or only under capitalism, or only in “broken” families. None of it holds up. Same-sex love and gender variance are found in virtually every human society, in every period, whether persecuted or not — and long before the modern family took shape.

So where does the oppression come from? Not from nature, and not from the beginning of time. Like the oppression of women, it has a history — and a root in class society.

For most of human existence there were no classes and no private property. People lived in communal societies organized around mothers and their children, and in them same-sex love and gender variance were widely accepted, often honored. Then, as people learned to produce more than they immediately needed, a surplus arose. A few seized it, classes were born, and with them came private property — and the patriarchal family, built to pass that property from father to son. The rise of this family, what Engels called the overthrow of “mother-right,” was in his words “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

That family form is the taproot of LGBTQ+ oppression. To guard inheritance and turn out the next generation of workers, it channeled sex toward reproduction, fixed rigid roles for women and men, and punished whatever fell outside — same-sex love, and any crossing of the line between “female” and “male.” The sharp division of everyone into two fixed genders is itself a product of class society, not a law of nature. Many earlier societies recognized more than two genders and gave honored places — as healers, shamans and spiritual leaders — to people we would now call transgender or Two-Spirit; in the words of the trans communist Leslie Feinberg, they were “revered, not reviled.” And the oppression only deepened as class rule hardened: wherever the ruling classes grew stronger, the laws against same-sex love and gender variance grew fiercer.

Because this oppression grew up with class society, it can fall with class society. Capitalism keeps the old prejudice alive because it pays — it splits the working class, leans on the unpaid labor of the family, and enforces the gender roles the system runs on. That is why every worker, and all who stand with the oppressed, have a stake in the fight against it. LGBTQ+ and straight, we face the same ruling class — and the struggle to abolish class society is the one that can uproot this oppression for good.

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