This lurching new normal imposed by the UK apparat upon trans people’s legal status is, undoubtedly, a shocking and depraved turn of events - and one of the worst of its type that I have witnessed in my lifetime. It is right to understand it as belonging to the succession of curtailments and enclosures of basic freedoms implemented since the late 70s within the state’s general strategy of disinvestment and withdrawal from the social pact. The Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act should be seen as a further impoverishment of social life and considered alongside the anti-trade union legislation from the 1980 employment act onwards, and the existential horror that was section 28. It is also demonstrative of the vulnerability of institutionalised rights based political campaigns to sudden reversals. Where invisibility had fostered an organic patchwork underground of hidden and autonomous resilience, recognised legal status becomes the condition and vector both of a vulnerability to endless interrogation and litigation, and of the ever present threat of an absolute reversal event such as the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act.
I am strongly skeptical of discourse driven neo-essentialism, of the idealist ontology of self-identification, and of identitarianism of every kind. However, it is the ethical duty of communists to engage all projects of self-emancipation and personal realisation with empathy and encouragement; and to criticise such projects only at the level of their collective intersection with the legalism of the bourgeois state and with the class war undertaken by corporate HR against collective bargaining, whilst at the same time gently pointing to the potential for a fully articulated universalism incorporating all possible modes of emancipated individuality that might be set in an environment of radically transformed and self-reflective social relations.
The rainbow reductionism of woke politics to sets of abstract identity categories and quotas is one thing, where its deadening and banal influence upon recent ideations of freedom should be understood as wholly recuperative, but the biological reduction by feminists of the identification of women with their reproductive organs is at a completely different level. The naive relation of radicals to their own principles, never imagining that their speaking truth to power might really be power speaking through them, perpetually ends with the deployment of such principles as the rationale for both intensifying expropriating measures and incorporating ever expanding areas of life within the toll-extracting apparatus. However, all that is a problem for the liberals - for us, it is more a question of how to conceive emancipation in material terms as a reversal of reversals. How is the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act to be metabolised? The legalistic and rights based project of self-transition is defeated - and should no longer be considered viable evee when at the level if it having appeared previously within the representational institutions that sustained it.
The idea of transition is now returned from its naive neo-essentialist and idealist formulations to the social furnace from which we can be confident it will once again re-emerge with a more thorough concept of what transition is (real transition not only has not yet been tried, it has not even been conceived objectively), and how it has to be generalised as a society-wide subject operating principle. In other words, at the most basic level: the neo-essentialist slogan, trans women are women, is eclipsed where gender itself has been exceeded.
The confluence of self and social forces, the emancipatory project of endless becoming, cannot be limited, and will not be limited, by legal rights for commodified identities - we are entering the age in which we shall see an epochal transformation where bodies with a carbon base to bodies are changed into bodies with a crystalline light base! Subjective engagement with the appearance of wider societal forces within and upon the self’s body and its subject relations is the very definition of revolutionary self-theory - it is this engagement, inside and against the spirit of the whirling, which metabolises general conditions and derealises them in the first place as an escape from institutional representations.
The societal component of these transitions cannot be seen simply as ‘reassignment’ but of objectively cohering new forms of existence for which, as yet, there are no designations - are we not all becoming lemurian? The world does not, and will not, allow us to ‘be’. It will not leave us alone - we are forced objectively to move on, to become something else. That has always been the cost of existence - only the speed of becoming, and its direction, changes. As existents, we are presented with a problematic that is not constituted merely as one of ‘use’ (which is the problem of being - how might we be authentic) but of our self-reflexive ‘use of use’ (which is the recursive nesting of our self’s becoming in relation to ever-transforming material forces).
In the meantime, as communising approaches continue too languish, eclipsed during this era of the americanising left’s defensive orientation around banalising legal rights and reductive sentimentalising representations, so we shall renew our love and support for those individuals in our lives, veritably Rabbit’s Friends and Relations, who, Samsa-like, are birthing themselves into new forms of subjectivity.
Make the endless revolutionising of the relations of production a fetter again!
*In the text, Fragments of Night 5 I made an ebb-tide argument for embracing the ruins of Woke as a way forward for continued moving against the flow of things. This is my first effort in that direction (it attempts to include reference to current horoscope-derived preoccupations with ‘the new paradigm’ as this appears within the context of the Age of Aquarius). https://thetheologicalturn.blogspot.com/2025/05/fragments-of-night-5.html
