Men are Men and Women are Women

Men are men and women are women. So claims The Militant. Sort of. Somehow.

A feature article in this week's paper written by the Editors, entitled A working-class road to expand rights for all the oppressed, leads with this paragraph (link and emphasis mine).

An article in last week’s issue of the Militant — under the headline “Supreme Court: Job Discrimination for Being Gay, Transgender Is Illegal. Ruling Includes ‘Poison Pill’ Against Women’s Rights Fight” — was wrong. It erroneously implied that the June 15 court decision, though flawed, should be welcomed by the working class and others fighting to eradicate prejudice, bigotry and discrimination in employment and other areas.

"Implied" really is a weasel word--apparently the offending article, by Emma Johnson, never actually said anything wrong. Indeed, after reading both articles, wrong seems much too strong a word. At worst it's slightly unclear. Surely no reason for Ms. Johnson to be rendered an unperson.

The articles concern the recent 6-3 Supreme Court ruling stating that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” The decision--authored by Justice Gorsuch--was based on an interpretation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The surprising ruling has drawn much conservative ire.

The Militant isn't precisely against the outcome, as the second paragraph of the Editors' article makes clear.

The stakes for the working class and our allies in opposing each of the three separate firings at issue in the court case are indisputable. The bosses themselves readily acknowledged they had fired the workers only upon learning they were gay or transsexual, without the pretense of any work-related reason. If employers get away with arbitrarily singling out a worker for firing or other penalties, then any fighting capacity of the workforce and unions for unity in protecting one another is set back, irreparably so if not combated and reversed.

The problem isn't the decision, but rather the way it was reached. Gay and transgender rights are to be won by working class activism following a debate within the working class itself. Instead the rights were awarded on a silver platter, offered up rather arbitrarily by the Supreme Court.

The analogy Ms. Johnson offers is Roe v. Wade, which preempted any discussion of abortion in this country. In her telling, American workers would have reached a consensus guaranteeing a woman's right to choose, and instead of it being hopelessly controversial, abortion would have been widely available. The result of Roe v. Wade is paradoxically not more abortion, but rather less as the working class can't speak with one voice on the issue.

The Editors, meanwhile, cite the 1979 Weber case, where a white worker sued on grounds that an affirmative action program resulted in "reverse discrimination." The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Weber, which the Editors claim was "a victory for working people."

That is the kind of working-class action needed to defeat arbitrary and discriminatory hiring, firing or promotion practices of any kind by private or government employers. Changing attitudes about countless forms of discrimination and bigotry are not the product of either legislation or court rulings but of unity forged in struggle by working people, the oppressed, and our class organizations.

So let's try to figure this out.

• The Gorsuch decision, while nominally correct in guaranteeing gay rights, nevertheless preempted working class action. Both Ms. Johnson and the Editors agree with that.
• Roe v. Wade, mentioned by Ms. Johnson, and also nominally correct, has also preempted working class action, paradoxically making abortion less available.
• The Weber case, cited by the Editors, is still nominally correct, but in this case it is a reflection of working class sentiment rather than an arbitrary Court ruling.

Huh?

Honestly, I'm stumped. I can't make head or tail of this. Where did Ms. Johnson go wrong?

The problem isn't really anything that Ms. Johnson says. It's rather that she's succumbed to reactionary petty bourgeois thinking--nothing that a good dose of humiliation self-criticism won't solve.

Because--while the outcome of Gorsuch's ruling is correct--the reasoning is straight from the reactionary, petty bourgeois Left. The Editors write:

The court’s contorted ruling as to what constitutes discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” is a blow to working people and the oppressed. It lends credence to the utterly anti-scientific notion promoted by many who consider themselves enlightened, progressive, that human beings (unlike almost all other animal species) are not born as either female or male. ...

Those holding this unscientific view demand that “gender” — solely a grammatical term until only several decades ago — instead be left open at birth, to be “chosen” by the individual sometime later in life from literally dozens of possible options. Anyone can supposedly be a woman or a man, or virtually any variant in between, merely by declaring themselves so.

And true enough--men are men and women are women. Vive la différence! The Editors accurately mock the ridiculous opinion common in academic circles. It's easy to do--we conservatives do it all the time. That Ms. Johnson fell for the academic BS shows her lack of proletarian sensibilities.

But wait! Turns out she's just as sensible as the Editors, perhaps even more so. She writes,

But the fact is, the court’s way of handling the case assures that years of litigation will follow. Reactionary forces that advance a gender-over-sex agenda will weaken the fight for women’s emancipation. They will seek to use the ruling to demand admittance to women’s bathrooms, sports competitions, locker rooms and other sex-separate spaces, and to attack freedom of speech and health care.

So I count Ms. Johnson not guilty. Her article is actually a clearer statement of what I (sort of) understand to be The Militant's true position. She does not deserve her walk of shame.

So why does The Militant retract an article that doesn't need to be retracted? This is like Tweedledum retracting a piece written by Tweedledee. It makes no sense.

So I count three possible reasons:

1. Ms. Johnson is about to be expelled from the Party.
2. There is some very subtle point that I missed, but which nevertheless is of profound importance. In which case they need a third article to tell us what it is.
3. It's just clickbait. It did, after all, inspire me to write this post.

I vote for option three. I should probably retract this post--but I won't.

Further Reading:

• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Sex and the Alpha Male
• The SWP Defends Civilization