“Not Negotiable” – The Feminist Red Line Sultana’s New Party Can’t Ignore
Zara Sultana’s recent interview with New Left Review was, in many ways, inspiring. Her call for a genuinely member-led party, one that rejects top-down control, cronyism, and internal stitch-ups, will resonate with anyone sick of Westminster politics as usual. She’s right that if this new project is to mean anything, it must empower people at the grassroots, not replicate the hollow hierarchies of Labour or the other parties.
But here’s the rub. Sultana also pledged to “resolutely” advocate for a pro-trans socialist programme. She insists these discussions must happen openly and democratically.
That sounds fine in theory. In practice, the left has already shown itself utterly incapable of having this conversation without collapsing into authoritarian cancel culture.
Can the Left Have an Honest Trans Debate Without Cancelling Women?
For years, women who raise legitimate questions about the impact of gender self-ID on female-only spaces, or about the safeguarding implications highlighted by the Cass Review, have been branded as bigots and driven out of the movement. “Demonising trans people” is often code for “asking difficult but necessary questions.” If Your Party repeats this mistake, it will bleed support from countless socialist women before it even begins.
The truth is, many women will not get involved in this project precisely because of the Corbyn–Sultana line on trans issues. Others may hope the problem quietly goes away. It won’t. Nor is this a side issue: women’s rights are not negotiable add-ons to socialism; they are foundational. To ignore them is to build on sand.
Sturgeon’s Ghost: Will Sultana’s Party Face the Same Gender Self-ID Backlash?
We’ve seen where this road leads. Nicola Sturgeon staked her career on pushing through gender self-ID, only to collide headlong with public reality. The political wreckage should be lesson enough.
Sultana speaks of a “socialist pro-trans policy.” But what does that mean in practice? If it means dissolving the reality of sex in law and policy, then the outcome is already clear, just look at Sturgeon’s collapse in Scotland. It would be a bitter tragedy if a new left-wing project fell at the same hurdle. The deeper issue, though, is that I have yet to see how trans ideology can be described as socialist at all. At its core, it is liberalism, not socialism, rooted in the primacy of individual self-identification over material conditions. Socialism is based on class and the realities of social being, not the imaginings of people. As Karl Marx put it: “It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are.”
Reality Check: Can a Member-Led Party Survive the Left’s Trans Culture War?
The left needs a reset on how it deals with this issue. Women’s concerns cannot be cancelled away. Shouting “transphobe” as a substitute for debate won’t cut it. If Your Party is serious about doing politics differently, then it must prove it by facing this elephant in the room head-on.
Zara Sultana’s vision for a member-led party is exciting, but her pledge to push a “pro-trans policy” risks sinking it before launch. The left has failed to have this debate honestly: women’s concerns on sex-based rights are smeared as “transphobia” and silenced. Ignore the elephant in the room, and Your Party could very well go the way of Sturgeon’s SNP. If this project really wants to do politics differently, it must start by allowing women to speak.
If socialism cannot defend material reality, then it is not socialism at all, it is liberalism in disguise and here’s the sobering truth…The left will not be rebuilt on illusions, only on reality, class, and the courage to speak the truth…
By Michael Wayne and…
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