Motion on attacks on transgender/intersexed people

As the document Women and the Crisis of Civilization recognizes, the growth of violence per se, and violence against the specifically oppressed, is an inevitable part of late capitalism and even more of its current systemic crisis. The Fourth International and its sections will raise as part of their general propaganda the need to stop scapegoating of any section of the oppressed for the crisis of the capitalist system.

The 2003 World Congress resolution on lesbian/gay liberation said, “Thousands of transgendered people unable or unwilling to fit into socially recognized families, unable or unwilling to live as ‘proper men’ or ‘proper women’, are [...] faced with general contempt and even violent attacks.” Recent investigation has shown the magnitude of this violence against trans and intersexed people, which is tantamount to a global assault. The Trans Murder Monitoring Project has reported over 200 murders of trans people in 2008 and the first half of 2009 alone, in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The Fourth International and its sections will support campaigns to stop this barbaric violence and will fight for these issues to be taken up by broader parties, trade unions and progressive campaigns. At the same time we will attempt to work more closely with trans and LGBTQ organizations and win militants from those organizations to the fight against the capitalist system as a whole.

In keeping with the support expressed in the 2003 resolution for “campaigns against psychiatric definitions of homosexuality and transgenderism as pathologies”, we will also support the current campaign initiated by the International Trans Depathologization Network to remove “gender identity disorders” from the international diagnostic catalogues.