Chitizraj Gurung

The liberal analysis of contemporary transphobia in democracies like the United Kingdom frames it as a “culture war” driven by conflicting ideas about morality. This paper asserts that a simple narrative of irrational individual or group bigotry is insufficient to describe the full bio-materialist grounding for anti-trans thought within bourgeois capitalist society. The economic base of capitalism necessitates a sexual superstructure able to secure its reproduction. Drawing on Maria Mies’ concept of “housewifization,” this paper argues that capitalism requires a sexual binary of cisgender “man” and “woman” for the creation of “property owners” and “property” to be accepted as natural. The ambiguity of trans bodies threatens to destabilize this binary undergirding capitalist social reproduction. To neutralize this threat, especially in times of instability, bourgeois society deploys clarifying violence to delegitimize the validity of trans lives. Clarifying violence employs the full spectrum of “slow” administrative and legal curtailment of spaces allowed to trans bodies and "spectacular" social and physical death. This paper analyzes For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers and the subsequent interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission as examples of this phenomenon. The retrenchment of trans rights follows a political, economic, and social counterreaction designed to reimpose the faltering prestige of bourgeois authority and capitalism. It does so by attempting to re-secure the biological boundaries upon which capitalist reproduction and accumulation are based.