Editor’s note: The following text is based on remarks delivered at Fierté Fredericton Pride’s anti-fascism panel discussion on July 16, 2023.
Outside of impending anthropocentric climate apocalypse, there is really no more urgent issue at hand in this particular historical juncture than the escalating fascist campaign to delegitimize the very existence of trans and non-binary people. I say this as someone whose professional, which is to say scholarly, focus is on Marxist social theory and the sociology of sport — not fascism or trans rights per se. Yet, political transphobia has become such a potent force for the fascist right that it is now impossible to ignore how it is increasingly colonizing public political discourse.
In what follows, I will try to connect themes related to my scholarly concerns with political economy and sport both to current events in our province of New Brunswick, and most importantly, to the proto-genocidal movement against trans, queer, and non-binary people unfolding across North America (and beyond) today, a movement being more than enabled by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFists). That is, I will explain 1) how political transphobia functions as a feature of fascism, 2) the TERFist campaign against trans participation in sport, and finally, 3) Policy 713 and New Brunswick politics as a site of confluence.
The most important starting point here, because it is the most urgent and dangerous concern, is the insurgent nature of fascism in North America today. I don’t mean to get caught up in a technical debate over what fascism is, because that is beyond the scope of this discussion. But, to be as straightforward as possible, when I say fascism, what I mean is a political movement in defence of elites comprised of a capitalist and political class that operates on a principle of misdirection: it is an ideological project to mobilize very real material dissatisfactions against minorities whose minimal but visible increase in social agency is framed as the root cause of all social ills.
Thus, in the paradigmatic example, the German Nazi party in the 1930s mobilized the privation caused by WWI reparations and a global depression by demonizing Jewish people, gender non-conforming people, those with disabilities, Roma people, and so on. Crucially, the German Nazi party of the 1930s was locked in an ideological and political struggle with actual socialists who responded to the same social conditions with what might be characterized as a genuinely emancipatory project. There is a reason why the Nazi party stands for National Socialism: fascist (or, in an alternatively more palatable formulation today, populist) politics disingenuously thieves the compelling and seductive capacity of socialism to diagnose the real and obvious problems with capitalism: its relentless exploitation, alienation, and dehumanization. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, there is a reason why it is logical that Margaret Thatcher might have tasked her ministers with reading Capital: there is no better analysis of how capitalism works than what Karl Marx offered us. That truthiness offered by systematic socialist analysis is seized upon by the fascist project.
Thus, today, we have Jordan Peterson and his ilk blathering about ‘woke capitalism’ as the defining problem of our moment. Again, it is notable that although Peterson and his fellow ideologists are aligned with actually-existing capital and its political compradors in the U.S. Republican and Canadian ‘Progressive’ (again we have faux-left cosplay) Conservative parties, they are able, through what amounts to a fascist Big Lie, to claim that capitalism (or at least so-called woke capitalism) is the problem. This is how they are able to engender mass appeal for a movement that in fact benefits and enriches only an elite few. Unlike the small ‘l’ liberal, which is to say neoliberal, ‘centre,’ which steadfastly defends the free market against all available evidence, the genuine and understandable if deeply insidious appeal of MAGA/fascism is that it does not require its adherents to pretend that all is right in a world of greedflation, inaccessible housing, unaffordable health care, stagnant wages, and precarious employment.
But, and this is where it should become clear that there can be no ethically defensible red-brown alliance, we must be equally attentive to the term ‘woke’ as ‘capitalism.’ The reason why actual elites who in fact directly benefit from all the depredations of capitalism are comfortable naming it is that they know that in a fascist politics, all responsibility for the problems caused by the system that enriches them are in fact placed upon already vulnerable populations — that is, the ‘woke.’
The discursive project of fascism is to convince you that power dynamics are upside-down. Dominant groups and people are ‘oppressed.’ Marginalized people are in fact dominant ‘oppressors.’ The fascist ploy to blame the ‘woke’ (actually marginalized people and their advocates) for the depravaties of capitalism is most effective on social media where some marginalized people do have some non-economic forms of social and cultural capital (what we might also call clout). Thus, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and owner of a space that should be a publicly shared communicative commons (Twitter), can claim that he and his fascist collaborators are being ‘cancelled’ and that the term ‘cis’ must be banned as a ‘slur.’ Capitalism has deftly been elided from the conversation.
If ‘capitalism’ has been emptied of all meaning — the systematic exploitation of a working class by the holders of capital — ‘woke’ has been overdetermined with what can only be characterized as an excess. We have seen via the ‘critical race theory’ moral panic that much of this excess signification pertains to race and the perception that non-white people have become privileged by a world of affirmative action (now not-coincidentally banned by the US Supreme Court, at least as a factor in college admissions). Again, this is an inversion of reality, as measures like affirmative action are nothing more than a heavily diluted stand-in for the robust system of reparations required to even begin to ameliorate the manifold harms of chattel slavery. But, this is precisely the purpose of the moral panic or Big Lie: to deceive, misdirect, and invert.
Today, it is the very existence of trans and non-binary people, and especially children, that has become the principle moral panic or big lie of MAGA fascism. In Donald Trump’s United States, this has already had very real political consequences, including state-level legislation prohibiting gender-affirming care for children in 19 states. The project of scapegoating trans and non-binary people is well underway and shows no signs of abating. This fervour can be felt especially in online spaces, where it is now customary for those who defend justice for trans people to be indiscriminately labeled ‘groomers,’ ‘pedophiles,’ and ‘child abusers.’ (Go ahead and name-search me on Twitter in conjunction with these terms.)
So, where do TERFs fit into this story? What I am going to contend is that the virulently transphobic politics that has taken root in the United States did not appear overnight, for a fascist logic is not just a natural inclination of human nature — it requires a groundwork of plausibility.
This is precisely where TERFs and where sport come into the conversation. What I want to argue here is that the TERFist campaign to illegitimize the existence of trans and non-binary people in the spaces that align with who they are has served the fascist project, and in no arena has that been more successful than sport.
My assertion is that the TERF fight to prohibit trans people from participating in the sporting spaces that align with their gender identities has become a vanguard position of a fascist project to demonize and scapegoat trans people. There is, in fact, a way in which the sport participation argument is a kind of Trojan Horse for political transphobia: it appears more ‘reasonable’ and ‘objective’ and ‘fair’ than other anti-trans positions, so the right has gleefully seized upon it as a discursive entry point.
And so, under the guise of ‘protecting female athletes,’ a crusade has been waged by sporting world feminists like Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Martina Navratilova, once rightly understood as fierce advocates against abuse in women’s sport, to keep trans women out of the sporting spaces with which they identify. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this in the past few years has been the case of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who was vilified by so-called feminists for ostensibly stealing opportunities from cis women. It is not a coincidence that the campaigns against Thomas were largely prosecuted on platforms such as Fox News precisely because the fascist right gleefully seized upon this more ‘mainstream’ opportunity to demonize trans folk. Lo and behold, some 22 states have passed legislation barring trans women from participation in women’s sport. And political transphobia is more prevalent than ever.
What this means is that whether or not the TERFs who have conducted these anti-trans participation in sport campaigns are full-on collaborators or merely dupes, there is no question that they are doing the spadework for the fascists.
Finally, that brings me home to right here in New Brunswick, because, rather amazingly and certainly deeply disturbingly, we have become the frontlines of the fascist campaign to scapegoat (and I fear worse) trans and non-binary people in Canada.
Although much of the attention paid to the recent attempts of the Blaine Higgs Conservative government to roll back the basic protections for 2LGBTQIA+ children in the province enshrined in Policy 713 has been to the very significant issue of whether parents must be informed of a change to the name of their kids, I argue that perhaps not enough focus has been paid to another no less significant change, and one, I believe, designed to capitalize upon the fascist-TERF alliance’s success in weaponizing sport.
The original language of Policy 713 states that “All students will be able to participate in curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities that are safe, welcoming, and consistent with their gender identity.” Such activities, of course, self-evidently include sport. Yet, in a revision dated June 8, 2023, this section now reads, “All students will be able to participate in curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities that are safe and welcoming.” This change explicitly removes the protection for sports participation based on gender identity, creating what can only be understood as deliberately too much room for interpretation amid a cultural climate rife with anti-trans sentiment.
In an interview I conducted with New Brunswick Liberal leader Susan Holt, she told me in response to my question that the province, is “more than teetering” over the edge of fascism under the stewardship of Premier Blaine Higgs. I believe she is exactly right. It has become clear through his weaponized approach to trans issues on social media that Higgs is deploying precisely the brand of political transphobia cultivated by Trump, Musk, Peterson, and so many others.
Sport is on the table right now because, as elsewhere, it is the entry point that allows an Irving-aligned ‘Progressive’ Conservative to inveigh against ‘woke’ capitalism. It is the appetizer for what I fear is going to be a worsening campaign right here in New Brunswick to demonize and scapegoat 2LGBTQIA+ people.
However, although it is not my tendency, I do want to offer a more upbeat note. Because, even as we all observe a rapidly deteriorating slide into fascism on the backs of an anti-trans (and anti-critical race theory) moral panic in the United States, I am heartened by the amount of resistance I have already observed here in New Brunswick. My sense is that New Brunswickers, as a whole, are not being fooled by the subterfuge of political transphobia and the attempt to obfuscate the very real material problems caused by capitalism in this province.
We must stay that course. Do not be fooled by rhetoric that reduces the demonization of trans people to ‘just’ a ‘culture war’ issue. That is nothing more than liberal pablum. The culture war over the right of trans people to exist and the political economic material struggle to survive in a quite literally ever-deteriorating capitalist hellscape are part of the same struggle.
The fascists and their allies, the TERFs, have made sure of that.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick and co-host of The End of Sport podcast.
