11/2/2020 Tribune (long read) article by the chair of the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights which provides important background & context to the pledge.
'For Trans Liberation'
By
Torr Robinson
(extract)
"In any roadmap to trans liberation, we will require structures and organisations that we can utilise to empower us and carry the fight beyond individuals and even through generations. In Britain, it is most often the Labour Party which has taken this role. Rooted in the organised working class, Labour has the social depth and organisational scale to both build alliances amongst oppressed people and challenge the powerful. There is today no other Party in Britain that can facilitate the creation of organised trans power in our communities, whilst advancing us as part of a collective movement with the ultimate objective of winning power. That it is the best option in Britain’s political landscape is not, however, to say its commitment to liberation is unimpeachable; far from it.
All too often, rather than standing in its best traditions of human freedom and social good, the Labour Party has sought to manage away marginalised groups when inconvenient, and we have seen that same tendency towards trans people. Though MPs like Dawn Butler have taken a brave stand, transphobes have been able to organise freely throughout the party, in contravention of our own equalities policy, which already demonstrates a lack of commitment or concern in the party structures. Transphobes have taken advantage of this to apply pressure throughout those same structures, trading on the lies that are soaked into Britain’s politics in order to manufacture confusion.
Little effort has been made to counter these advances of transphobia in CLPs and in Parliament, with only a commitment to reforming the GRA – as the Tories once promised – binding party policy to our cause. Even this timid aim was called into question in the otherwise hopeful and inspiring 2019 manifesto, where it was directly accompanied by a commitment to preserve “single-sex spaces” as well as questionable language on the “cultural shift required”. Whilst the preservation of “single-sex spaces” would be meaningless legally, as single-sex spaces already include trans people with the Gender Recognition Certificates that GRA reform would make more accessible, the addition was nonetheless celebrated by transphobes.
The contesting of this pledge between various interpretations followed, as the party and its representatives provided multiple, incompatible readings which fluctuated between transphobic and trans-inclusive versions. Whilst the true meaning intended by those who signed off on the wording may be impossible to know, it is emblematic of the equivocal and contingent regard, or disregard, that party structures hold towards trans rights. Such a situation suggests that the party’s highest bodies may be vulnerable to the growing influence of transphobia, even if it is a transphobia disguised by the alt-right tactics of utilising unclear language and plausible deniability to advance their cause." (continues)
For this to happen, we will need to organise to remove transphobes and transphobia throughout the party. The NEC must be pressured to act against transphobic individuals and incidents, just as it does in other cases of discrimination. Support for organisations like Woman’s Place, which hate us for being trans, can no longer be considered consistent with the values of socialism and liberation. We should strive not only to change the bureaucracy, but to have trans members and allies in every CLP winning the fight for trans rights, and ready to combat lies like the notion that women’s rights and trans rights are in opposition, or that there is any alignment between transphobia and socialism." (continues)
tribunemag.co.uk/2020/02/the-labour-campaign-for-trans-rights