WORLD WORLDWIDE AUSTRALIA MELBOURNE - news journal UPDATE - (en) Australia, Melbourne MACG: Mobilising for Trans Rights and Organising for Trans Liberation by Vesper (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 On February 8 2025, rallies were held across Australia in defence of

trans people's access to gender affirming care. In Queensland, anyone
under the age of 18 is now no longer legally able to medically
transition, forcing trans kids to go through a traumatic first puberty.
This was a direct attack on the rights of trans people by the
Liberal-National state government. But we should understand that these
attacks will not stop in Queensland. We need to significantly build up
our class power for us to be able to fight back against the ongoing
dismantling of trans rights.
As a trans person in the crowd in Melbourne on February 8, it was
inspiring to see so many in our community turn out to demonstrate.
However, there wasn't anywhere near the kind of critical mass we needed
to have our demands heard. Nor was there visible organising at the rally
to build a fighting movement which protesters could get involved in.

Despite the enthusiasm in chanting for trans power shown at the rallies,
we should understand that our power is severely limited when restricted
to A to B marches on the streets. A demonstration is meant to be a
demonstration of social force. The crowd should represent the broiling
anger of the working class, who should be willing to escalate and take
further action in order to make their demands heard. This builds a mass
movement.

As it stands, the movement for trans liberation in Melbourne is largely
reliant on reactive, spontaneous and ephemeral displays of solidarity.
These actions mobilise people, but they do not build up our class power
to contend with the ongoing assaults on trans people. If we don't get
more organised, we will continue to succumb to the assaults of the
ruling class against trans rights.

For us to begin to turn the tide, we need to push the trade unions to
take a stand. Workers need to take these issues from the streets back to
their workplaces. We need protesters to become organisers who agitate
around trans and feminist demands to their co-workers such as: gender
transition leave, equal pay, period and parental leave and so on. Trans
and intersex workers need to use our protests as a means for spreading
organising in the trade unions, beyond the introspective scope of
securing our own survival and subsistence within the trans community.

As anarchists, we focus on the trade unions because of the unique
position and leverage workers have against the bosses and the State in
the workplace. Capitalists might own everything, but it is workers who
actually do the work. When workers get organised and walk off the job,
things grind to a halt. No group other than workers, organised on the
job, can so effectively cut off the ruling class from their profits or
the ultimate source of their power: control over production. This is why
rebuilding working class organisation is crucial to winning the struggle
for trans liberation.

But cis workers should not just fight for trans workers simply out of
altruism. The fight against transphobia is essential to building
independent working class power. For as long as capitalism is able to
pit segments of the working class against each other, in defence of a
false gender binary, the rule of capital will remain secure. The
workers, divided, will certainly be defeated.

This leads to a two-way conclusion for anarchists. On the one hand, in
order to defeat transphobia, we must build up the power of the trade
union movement. So fighting transphobia requires building up the power
of the unions, and pushing them to defend trans rights. On the other
hand, in order to build the unions, we must fight transphobia. No union
will be effective unless it can unite workers together, regardless of
their gender or sexuality on the basis of 'touch one, touch all'.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has won the demand for
transition leave at multiple universities across Australia. The
Australian Nurses and Midwifery Association (ANMF) supports free and
open access to trans healthcare and have taken a stand against the
transphobic Cass review. These wins must spread to other unions.

Trans people exist in every industry, working and struggling alongside
cis people on the same economic and material terrain. To defend our
rights, trans activists must build working-class power now - or stand by
as the ruling class dismantles our access to gender-affirming care,
piece by piece.

https://melbacg.au/mobilising-for-trans-rights-and-organising-for-trans-liberation/
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