Trans Liberation or Socialism: You Can’t Have Both

Socialism or Ultra-Liberalism? The Left’s Defining Choice

The entire trans debate is coming to a head, and the left is fracturing along predictable lines. The Girl Guides have reversed their 2017 policy and banned males who identify as women from their ranks. The Women’s Institute, which has welcomed women since the 1970s, has followed suit. Meanwhile, Your Party, the newly formed outfit claiming to be a socialist alternative, has overwhelmingly voted to enshrine “trans liberation” in its founding documents. These demands, backed enthusiastically by Zarah Sultana, come from the Trans Liberation Group, an extremist faction that wants to defy the Supreme Court, unwind women’s rights, and rewrite the Equality Act itself.

Here is what you are left with: socialism or ultra-liberalism. You cannot have both.

Let us be clear about what the Supreme Court actually ruled. In April 2025, the UK’s highest court delivered a unanimous judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. It confirmed what most people already knew: that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex. A woman is an adult human female. A man is an adult human male. A Gender Recognition Certificate does not change this legal reality. The ruling did not strip trans people of protections. They remain protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment. What it did was clarify that women’s sex-based rights, fought for over generations, cannot simply be wished away by ministerial guidance or ideological capture.

The Trans Liberation Group’s response? Overturn it. Their demands are explicit: amend the Equality Act to make “sex” mean “current lived sex”, ban “gender-critical” beliefs from protection, allow self-identification for all purposes including prisons, abolish the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and legally enshrine the right not to disclose one’s trans status to sexual partners. They want children to access cross-sex hormones without parental consent, puberty blockers for minors, and hormone replacement therapy available over the counter. They want gender ideology taught in schools as fact, not debate.

This is not socialism. This is not materialism. This is ultra-liberal individualism dressed in rainbow colours.

Here is the uncomfortable truth the left keeps dodging: a lot of socialists are going along with transgender ideology not because they truly believe it fits within a socialist framework, but because they have been convinced that rejecting it makes them bigots. This is how liberal moral blackmail works. You are told that unless you accept that men can become women through declaration alone, you are a reactionary, a fascist, indistinguishable from the far right. Never mind that this belief system has nothing to do with class struggle, nothing to do with collective ownership, nothing to do with the material conditions that shape working people’s lives.

Sultana's Purity Politics
This is not socialism, it's liberalism in a red dress?
So much for grass roots democracy… #YourParty @zarahsultana #WomensRights pic.twitter.com/IGm8rsDT12

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) September 9, 2025

Transgenderism-as-ideology, the kind being pushed by groups like the Trans Liberation Group, is rooted in hyper-individualism: “I am what I say I am, and society must reorganise around my feelings.” That is not socialism. That is neoliberalism wearing a rainbow badge.

Ultra-liberalism elevates the individual above the collective, personal identity above material reality, and feelings above facts. It is the logical endpoint of consumer capitalism applied to the self: you can be whatever you choose to be, reality be damned, and anyone who refuses to affirm your self-conception is oppressing you. Socialism, by contrast, is about collective struggle rooted in material conditions. It recognises that our liberation comes not from declaring ourselves into new categories, but from organising together based on our shared relationship to capital and labour. Where ultra-liberalism says “I define my own reality,” socialism says “our reality is shaped by who owns what, who works for whom, and who profits from our exploitation.” These are incompatible worldviews. One is about the self. The other is about the class. One demands that society validate individual identity. The other demands that society be restructured to serve collective need. You can build a political movement on one or the other. You cannot build it on both.

Socialism is concerned with material reality, with class power, with exploitation. It asks: who owns the means of production? Who profits from our labour? How do we build collective power to challenge capital?

Gender ideology asks: do you validate my internal sense of self? It replaces class solidarity with identity performance. It turns comrades into enemies over pronouns. It fractures the working class along lines of cultural purity rather than uniting them around shared economic interests. And the ruling class loves it. They can keep looting the country while the left, infiltrated by ultra-liberals, argues about who can use which toilet.

The damage this does to socialism is profound. Instead of uniting workers around wages, housing, energy bills, public ownership, and workplace power, it drags the movement into endless moral purity spirals. It pulls focus from the exploitation that actually shapes people’s lives and redirects it toward metaphysical questions about gender souls invented in university seminar rooms. Working-class people need housing, security, dignity, and power. They do not need lectures on why biological sex does not exist.

Even the Communist Party of Britain, at its 2025 Congress, has recognised what many on the left still refuse to admit. The CPB declared that communists will fight for recognition of women’s sex-based rights across trade unions. When even the communists are drawing a line between materialism and liberal identity politics, when even they are saying that women’s rights cannot be sacrificed on the altar of gender ideology, the message is clear: the time for silence is over.

And here is where Your Party has made its fatal error. By voting to enshrine “trans liberation” alongside Palestine solidarity and anti-racism, it has collapsed the distinction between material struggle and liberal identity politics. Palestine is about land, about colonialism, about resources and power. Anti-racism is about material inequality, about how capitalism divides workers along racial lines to prevent solidarity. These are class questions.

Trans liberation, as defined by the Trans Liberation Group, is not. It is a demand that society reorganise itself around individual identity claims, that women’s sex-based rights be subordinated to men’s feelings, that the state enforce validation of internal gender identities through law. It is, at its core, a liberal project. And socialists who sign up to it are not advancing the cause of the working class. They are advancing the cause of a small, vocal, overwhelmingly middle-class lobby that has captured institutions through funding, pressure, and moral panic.

None of this is about hatred. It is about refusing to let ultra-liberal identity politics drown out the class politics we desperately need. You can create as many bogeymen as you like and pretend there is a far-right conspiracy lurking behind every question. But the real damage is not coming from Reform voters or Tommy Robinson supporters. It is coming from within, from a left that has abandoned materialism for moralism, class for culture war, and collective struggle for individual identity.

If you still want to advocate for trans liberation after understanding that it is not socialism, that is your choice. Do it under your own flag, not the banner of socialism. Do not ask workers to subordinate their class interests to your boutique concerns. Do not demand that women give up their hard-won rights so that men can access their spaces. Do not tell socialists that validating gender identity is more important than fighting exploitation.

The lesson is free: transgender ideology does not strengthen socialism. It undermines it. By replacing class struggle with identity theatre, it pulls the movement away from material politics and straight into the liberal cul-de-sac where nothing ever changes except the language. That is the difference between socialism and liberalism. One fights class power. The other performs a morality play.

If the left cannot tell the difference between fighting capitalism and fighting for pronoun validation, it deserves the irrelevance it is courting.