America is a dangerous place if you’re transgender. For example, a trans person is at least four times as likely to be a victim of violent crime as their cisgender equivalent. Meanwhile in 2015, a survey found that 12% of trans people had experienced homelessness within the last year, 30% had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, 29% lived in poverty, 15% were unemployed, and 19% had to resort to sex work for survival at least once. The average trans person must contend with both precarious economic circumstances and the hostility of the state which sees them as a convenient and disposable scapegoat. The existing political system, where power is shared between one party which increasingly embraces an openly exterminationist stance towards trans people and another which only opportunistically provides shallow, inconsequential support while effectively enabling the former’s actions, is so unconducive to the well-being of trans people that the dissolution of this social order and its replacement with a new one become a necessity for survival. These struggles faced by trans people in the United States, that is to say widespread poverty, state-sanctioned violence, and political marginalization, are shared by other peoples, not defined by their relation to gender identity but instead to ethnicity and nationality: black descendants of freedmen, Spanish speaking Chicanos, and members of the many American Indian tribes for example. So, considering the commonalities between these struggles, perhaps the revolutionary projects to address the struggles of the latter should inform the form a project of trans liberation takes.
Here we must consider the concept of national liberation, and understand what this entails in the context of the United States. One of Stalin’s main theoretical contributions to Marxism was his 1913 essay “Marxism and the National Question,” defining what constitutes a “nation” at a given moment in material terms. The four characteristics which he identifies as composing a nation are a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common culture or psychological make-up. In America, this framework is widely accepted within Marxist circles as demonstrating how black people in the United States constitute a distinct nation, sometimes called “New Africa.” New Africans have a common language in English: for Marxists, this is not invalidated by the fact that some are primarily French or Spanish speakers. Similarly, they have a common territory, the “Black Belt” in the American South where a significant plurality of the New African population is concentrated: for Marxists, this is not invalidated by the existence of a black diaspora spread across most of America’s major cities. New Africans also have a common economic life, a concept which in Stalin’s definition is characterized by the existence of a cohesive whole in production, united by a capitalist division of labor and means of communication. Going beyond these minimum qualifications for common economic life, New Africa is distinguished from the rest of America by its unique material position: the legacies of slavery and other policies are responsible for the continued disproporionate impoverishment and proletarianization of black people. Finally these factors have contributed to the existence of a common psychological make-up and culture among New Africans which persists even in the broader diaspora outside the South, a “national character” which binds them together even when geographically separated.
The interests of the people that compose a nation are obviously not universal, with class conflict remaining present within said nation. Nonetheless the cause of national liberation often becomes a necessary struggle for a nation’s working class before proletarian dictatorship becomes conceivable. Lenin, in his polemic “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” distinguishes between how revolutionaries should approach “oppressor” and “oppressed” nations, providing the “Great Russians” as an example of an oppressor nation in relation to Ukraine and Poland as oppressed nations within the Russian Empire. In instances of bourgeois nationalist resistance against the former on the part of the latter, Lenin asserts there is “a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support,” even if bourgeois nationalism on its own should be opposed. As New Africa is an internal colony of the United States, communists are expected to support its national liberation from American hegemony and its ability to secure self-determination, but where possible the nation’s workers should take the lead in this struggle so that when liberation is achieved the battle against the nation’s capitalists can proceed from an advantageous position.
Here we come to the controversial proposition of this essay: do trans people in the United States constitute a nation? Let’s consider those four attributes which Stalin listed earlier. The most obvious factor is a common “psychological make-up” that trans people have: there is a common character of transness, something effectively everyone can agree on even if they do not recognize that it is a “national” character, considering the universal experience among trans people of incongruence with the sex they were assigned at their birth. Beyond this, trans people tend to share a varying involvement in queer culture and distinct trans subcultures. As much as the French, Koreans, or New Africans, generations of the specific material circumstances of trans people in America have resulted in a distinct cultural experience for them which sets them apart from other Americans. In addition, like New Africans, trans people within the United States have a common language in English: even if a number of them primarily speak other languages or don’t speak English at all, it is overwhelmingly the main language spoken by them. There is even slang and vernacular particular to trans people which distinguishes some casual conversation from that of others. Trans people are also distinguished by their common economic life: they are a part of modern capitalism with division of labor among their number and have a common means of communication, but they are also disproportionately pauperized and proletarianized when compared to a typical “American,” with poverty, homelessness, and unemployment being rampant. Some might also point to the anecdotal evidence of trans people being overrepresented in information technology and programming, which does have some hard data to back it up: the portion of queer people in the tech industry is twice that of the general population. However, even with this disproportionate presence in the technology sector, those trans people within the industry are shuffled to the bottom rungs and subject to workplace discrimination.
The “common territory” of the Trans Nation is likely the most contentious aspect of this assertion of nationhood, but the factors of their economic life do mean that despite the fact that Trans people are widespread and disparate, they have disproportionate representation in the Seattle and Portland metropolitan areas just west of the Cascadian Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Multiple factors might contribute to this: technology work is disportionately concentrated in this region, and that kind of work does attract a somewhat disproportionate number of trans people, even if they are largely relegated to the bottom of workplace hierarchies. Another factor might be the typical way in which many American cities deal with their homeless is to threaten them to head west or go to jail: this is why homelessness is so endemic to the west coast, and since chronic homelessness is so common among trans people, it makes sense many of them would be pushed west. While trans people live throughout the United States, their disproportionate concentration in this area makes “Transcascadia” effectively their common territory. It should be noted that this conception of a transgender autonomous republic in this region should not be mistaken for a call for a “queer Israel” there, repeating the problems of settler-colonialism or forcing the wider trans diaspora to only inhabit a specific territory. Political autonomy for trans people can coexist with indigenous land rights and governance, and indigenous leftists in South America have been pioneering models for how this might work in ways that are still evolving. The work of plurinationalists in Bolivia and the enshrinement of indigenous land custodianship in the constitution of Ecuador provide places to start in developing a framework for multiple nations sharing a common territory. Nor should this be considered a demand for separatism, or some mandatory exodus to this designated homeland. Many trans people are members of multiple nations, ranging from New Africa to Aztlan, in addition to the Trans Nation. I also assume whoever is reading this is doing in enough good faith that they don’t read this as “expel every cis person from the region” - not only because this is an unfeasible prospect given the number of cis people there, but also because the purpose of the national liberation model isn’t to create a homogenous state - it’s to safeguard the ability of trans people to preserve their rights and autonomy, something which can be achieved in conjunction with safeguarding the rights and autonomy of other peoples.
Furthermore though, it would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the fact that trans people are widely distributed throughout the United States - a territorial aspect which black nationalists have also had to contend with as a result of the Great Migration. At this point, you can probably tell that I have to face the facts that Stalin’s definition of a nation requires some modification to apply to trans people or even to black people in the United States because of this internal diaspora. In this diasporic context, let’s consider how the Black Panther Party’s chief theoretician, Huey P. Newton, approached the subject of black liberation. In a 1974 speech on “Intercommunalism,” Newton characterized black people as a “dispersed colony,” having all the characteristics of a colonized nation but concentrated in scattered metropolitan pockets rather than in a single territory - similar circumstances to those experienced by trans people. At this point in his ideological development, Newton had moved on from the Marxist-Leninist model of nations, arguing that by the 1970s the developments in technology and means of communication were effectively collapsing those distinctions: instead there exist “communities,” dispersed groups of people defined by shared institutions. Other Black Panthers were critical of Newton’s rejection of the orthodox understanding of nations, but considering how central means of communication were to Stalin’s definition, and how drastically communication technologies had advanced since the dawn of the twentieth century, some degree of adjustment is necessary in approaching the concept. At least for trans people, this “communities” model is likely more applicable than the emphasis on a single territory even if the national liberation framework is otherwise relevant.
It is also necessary to acknowledge that trans liberation would be nigh impossible to achieve in isolation from other national liberation and revolutionary movements with similar goals. It is imperative that a trans liberation movement operates in conjunction with the other national liberation movements with which it would inevitably overlap, as well as with the broader movement for queer liberation, and the radical labor movement, even if these other movements are similarly in disadvantaged positions, because of the clear intersecting interests of these groups and the fact that the threats to survival and obstacles to freedom faced by all of them are found in the same sources of capital and empire. It would be an egregious mistake for the trans liberation movement to stand apart from its natural allies and to not take advantage of the strength afforded by numbers where it can.
As part of a larger revolutionary project in North America encompassing all working people, it is necessary to secure the enshrinement of self-determination for trans people, including the right to secede if necessary, as well as the resources to secure guaranteed housing and healthcare. However, the immediate threats facing trans people demand that this liberation project begin with the establishment of self-defense associations prepared to provide tools and training for survival and intervene when individual trans people are harassed or threatened, as well as real life social spaces where trans people can safely interact and develop bonds of authentic camaraderie and consciousness of their common cause with each other. Beyond this, the effort should entail solidarity networks which can provide temporary material relief for trans people facing their common economic struggles and can provide safe passage for trans people out of states with hostile governments, or in case of a worst case scenario out of the United States entirely if necessary, as well as laying the foundations for political mass organizations that can drive issue-based campaigns when the need arises, taking cues from the works of past organizations like the Queens Liberation Front and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries that successfully drove the rescission of New York City’s anti-”crossdressing” ordinance. Obviously these are broad foundational outlines of a massive political project, but the mounting threats to the rights and lives of trans people makes creating these spaces and organizations, operating in conjunction with each other, no matter how rudimentary or experimental, a pressing concern.