Fame Will Kill Us All

a criticism-self-criticism

Preface: I wrote this in fits and starts over the last few months while completely disengaged from transfeminist spaces online. Having spent the better part of two years putting an essay out every month or so it felt important to me to take a minute and rest, that if i was going to put something out it would be something i took my time with. There were moments that it felt like i should jump back into my old rhythm. When the Epstein files were released and the discourse shifted to "the Epstein class," or when CNN broke the story about the rape academy, or any of the most recent femicides of Black trans women, i felt the familiar urge to put out another essay demanding separatism from my sisters. Another two thousand word screed filled with all my rage and nothing to back it up. But the truth is i am tired of spending more time writing than doing, and further than that i feel none of the certainty that makes revolution imaginable that i used to feel. In regards to the movement i have mostly felt disillusioned.

So i did what any trained Maoist would do and i wrote a self criticism. Every time i felt furious with my transfeminist sisters for what i perceived to be vapid, self aggrandizing arrogance or out of touch careerism i looked at my own work and found these flaws there also. If i want radical transfeminism to change in order to survive and actually matter then i have to take those steps myself, first. Glass houses and thrown stones and all that.

I sent a draft to Zoe to get someone else's eyes on it. She surprised me and responded with her own 2500 word draft, a self criticism by response to my own. I think this kind of introspection and evaluation is necessary for any movement to not only win but to be taken seriously at all. I asked her if she would be open to publishing them together and she agreed. We are putting these out in the hopes of encouraging other sisters to measure their work not by its popularity or by the names that it attracts or by how lucrative the publishing deals are but by how it inspires sisters to serious action. Does your work make life more tolerable for your sisters? Does it give them the tools that they need to take up the fight against patriarchal civilization? Does it make our most isolated and vulnerable sisters feel less alone? At bare minimum but most importantly of all, does it tell the truth?

No matter how bitter or disillusioned i felt while writing this i kept doing so because, at my core, i believe in trans women. It is a fairly obvious observation to note that we are a small enough population that we are in desperate need of allies. Trans women's liberation is inseparable from women's liberation more broadly, but i believe that the actions of a revolutionary minority (trans women in this instance) could be the spark that lights another prairie fire for women's autonomy and the destruction of the settler nation. As much despair as i feel about our current conditions, i still believe this in my bones. 

I will keep writing, that much is certain. I will be putting that writing online much less. The sisters at Writing Badly and Transfeminist Notes have been a few among many to point the way out of the current alienation of social media based writing and into a more analog, grounded mode of communication with our sisters who are doing real work. I have hopes that this small movement away from the algorithm continues to build into something formidable, and even if it doesn't, i would rather try at that and fail than continue down the current road that radical transfeminism finds itself on. That way lies reconciliation with patriarchy, lies neocolonialism, lies revolutionary death.

Thanks for everything, see you soon.

-sarah

Fame

Where does a movement come from? What does a movement do? On first consideration you'd think "these are stupid, obvious questions, sarah, what the fuck are you talking about?" And that would be fair. If you though, like me, have been paying any kind of attention to what i'm loosely calling the "transfeminist online influencer sphere" for the last few years you might reasonably be confused. The transfeminist upsurge that many of us are experiencing is, as of now, mostly limited to a handful of self-described theorists posting online, usually while also acting as general content creators and influencers. The work that has come out of this narrow band of online randoms is occasionally useful, mostly ignorable, and every so often profoundly embarrassing. In nearly every instance though it is doing nothing to build anything real.

Liberation movements are born out of common oppression, a shared material suffering that groups a population together as a class or outgroup. Notably this shared oppression is not enough to carry a movement through to its own liberation on its own, but we'll get into the messy dialectics in a little bit. Trans women have this, mountains of it, and it has birthed a handful of movement attempts throughout the last 60 years. Racial and class differences and a general political weakness have limited the strength and efficacy of our movements so far, usually relegating us to a small and spurned worker-bee group within the movements of others. The current transfeminist wave, broadly, seeks to change this, to really a develop a movement by us and for us.

That's where liberation movements come from. What a liberation movement does is less obvious. Often different factions of the movement will argue bitterly about strategy and tactics and even end goals. In a general sense though a liberation movement turns this grouping-by-oppression into on the ground organization that mobilizes an oppressed population towards specific goals. Whether that's electing a new mayor or building a commune in the woods or waging people's war is up to the political development of the specific movements. In all of these contexts the aggrandizement of individual leaders is both common and, less obviously, deadly to the movements themselves.

The New Afrikan civil rights movement here in the usa contained and birthed both strong revolutionary currents (represented by the Nation of Islam, Revolutionary Action Movement, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, amongst others) and more reformist strains (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Congress Of Racial Equality, most notably). These movements fed and interpenetrated each other, and both strains had charismatic leaders. In the best case they were represented by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King jr., and Fred Hampton. All strongly condemned using the movement for personal gain, and all were assassinated by the state for their organizational efficacy.

In the worst case these charismatic leaders were represented by Eldridge Cleaver and, more controversially, Huey P. Newton. Cleaver, a rapist in his early life, moved from militant Black nationalist to social democrat to Mormon reactionary, operating as a misogynistic grifter the whole time. Huey P. Newton, still a powerful name in revolutionary politics, went from genuine revolutionary to becoming so obsessed with his own cult of personality that he both attempted to have the leaders of different Black Panther Party factions assassinated and covered up his own brutalization of Panther women. The FBI was certainly involved in sowing the distrust that drove Newton to extreme paranoia, but his cult of personality even further opened the movement up to imperialist meddling.

I'm breaking things down this simply because unfortunately it seems like a large number of trans women who consider themselves to be transfeminists need the lesson. Transfeminism, as one editor of Writing Badly reminded me, is little more than an umbrella term for a disparate collection of women with no connection to each other besides the fact of our transsexuality. The influencers i am ostensibly criticizing and the women trying to, mostly anonymously, build shelters and communes and organizations for trans women are not the same people and can't meaningfully be considered members of the same movement.

And yet they are, both by many self described transfeminists and people on the outside looking in. This is in spite of the fact that the transfeminist online influencer sphere is, to put it frankly, a fucking embarrassment. What was maybe initially a scattered collection of sisters coming into consciousness together online has become a scene comprised mostly of trans women taking shots at each other via short form video or substack blog posts (yes I am aware that I post most of my work on substack, no that will not continue to be the case. Buy the next issue of Writing Badly, print out issue #1 of Transfeminist Notes, or head over to kersplebedeb.com to find other work i've published). These videos and essays do little to raise the general consciousness or, goddess forbid, build a movement capable of wielding power. Mostly they're for the purpose of what we used to call (quoting the old chairman) "striking an intimidating pose." That is to say, making oneself out to be the smartest in the room.

I will not be citing specific creators here (sorry to Sara Moiseff. She is right, we do need to cite our sources better) because there are simply too many to count at this point and i don't think there's a single one who isn't guilty of this at least some of the time. I am going to say that i think taking this genre of transfeminist seriously is a waste of our time. I am writing this in part as a self criticism, for doing exactly that. It is no secret, to anyone who has read my work, that politically i come out of Maoism. Specifically a wing of Maoism that took tremendous influence from and organized in solidarity with the New Afrikan Independence Movement. While i have very few warm feelings left for male communism in general, i think the practice of criticism-self criticism can be very useful when it isn't being weaponized by some inevitably male cult leader (sorry, general secretary).

The second to last piece i published, "Towards a Dialectics of Sex Change," was an attempt at prompting, via engagement with two very different authors, a more thorough thinking of the process of sex change in our movement. This was mere days before, by miserable coincidence, one of those authors (not Thalia Vacha, whose work i personally enjoy and respect, the other one) was outed as having used generative AI to fake a letter from the FBI telling her to cease publication of her book. There are also credible accusations that she used the plagiarism machine chatgpt to write large swathes of her work. Having just taken her seriously enough to criticize her in a sisterly fashion, imagine my embarrassment when her whole grift was revealed extremely publicly within the week. Not only that, had i done even a cursory read-through of her work outside of the single piece i was criticizing it would have been extremely obvious that engaging with her work just wasn't worth my time.

I thought it would be worth doing this because this author had a considerable following, as far as transfeminists are concerned. If i could get a segment of her audience to look at things a little differently maybe something positive could come of it. This was an opportunistic lapse on my part. I have always maintained that transfeminism is a revolutionary project and that anyone attempting to make a career out of revolutionary politics is suspect at best. I have mostly avoided engaging with the influencer wings of the political movements i have been a part of, until recently. That was a mistake, one i will not be repeating.

I have not and will not name the author i am talking about currently because i would rather criticize ideas and systems than individuals. I frankly could not give one fuck what someone does in her personal life and i do think we could all benefit from knowing less about one another. If she had not been caught in a grifter scandal then someone else would have, and someone else inevitably will be. What we as a movement need to avoid is the urge to capitulate to the algorithmic economy and become, or even engage with, influencers instead of militants. You cannot be both.

For all of our rhetorical bluster and online acrimony transfeminism has yet to show up in the real world with any kind of force. While our work as radical transfeminists has certainly shaped the consciousnesses of numerous trans women there has yet to be a large scale initiation of transfeminist organizing. This is unremarkable considering our current circumstances. The left in general is stagnant and out-organized by a bragging male right on the one hand and by a revitalized social democracy on the other. Radical transfeminism is no different, and worse off for being fairly new and made up predominately of young women with little to no organizational experience.

I have innumerable criticisms and not a small amount of disdain for the movement that i came out of, namely the Marxist-Leninist and then Maoist party building groups that popped up after the New Afrikan nation reasserted its ability to shake the settler colony in 2012. The extrajudicial and police killings of Trayvon Martin and then, two years later, Mike Brown sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and mobilized millions of young people, culminating in the 2020 uprising and laying the foundation for the current resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and across the country. I was one of innumerable angry young women desperate for change, and i joined up with the people i thought were the most serious. We ultimately failed at what we set out to do, but we learned first hand what it's like to try to put your shoulder to the wheels of history and push.

The next generation of radical women are learning this lesson now, but they are not learning it in transfeminist groups. They are learning it in groups that follow ICE agents, that hide immigrants, protect school children from the state, protest zionist land sales, and picket or outright attack detention centers, server farms, and warehouses. Even work that is being done to try and hinder the state's current attack on trans people, mostly trans women, is not being done by groups that are organized explicitly as transfeminist groups. These groups, especially the big name "anti-imperialist" ones, are frequently male dominated and have cultures of rampant sexual violence. The recent expose of tolerated sexual harassment on the Palestine solidarity flotilla is illustrative.

How can a woman do anything but become radicalized right now? When CNN exposes an online rape academy with over 62 million hits in a single month, when a recent survey by the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in Canada found that 95.1% of men surveyed have attempted to coerce women into sex, when the Epstein files are released to much attention but no action, how can a woman in this society not lose her mind? It's the only reasonable thing to do, and the male left is doing fuck all about it. They don't even like to talk about it. Too messy, wouldn't want the women getting ideas.

The second wave of women's liberation, what now gets termed radical feminism, largely kicked off when a critical mass of women who had been active in the civil rights movement and the new left became fed up with the misogyny of these groups and abandoned them for feminist organizations. Big liberal groups like the National Organization of Women were founded this way (Betty Friedan herself had been a journalist with the Communist aligned Federated Press in the 1940's and another labor newspaper into the 50's) as were numerous smaller radical groups such as Cell 16, the Redstockings, The Furies, and Chicago's underground Jane Collective. We should recognize parts of this picture.

History doesn't always repeat though, and there is no guarantee that the misogyny of the male left will again shove women at large out of the nest and into a new radical transfeminist movement. The neocolonizing of women's liberation in the late 70's-early 80's produced a class of loyal white women keen on preserving amerikkkan patriarchy. This neocolonial petty bourgeois gender-class has largely been stripped of the systemic influence it had in the previous 40 years. Nobody is bothering to pretend amerikkka is bombing Iranian girl-children in order to liberate them anymore. Still, the political weight of system-loyal (if currently regime-critical) petty bourgeois women is heavy enough to draw even the most radical women into its orbit at times. This both manages to safely sanitize radical women and gives the male left a witch in the woods to warn its children away from. So radical women, when they are pushed out of the male left, either deradicalize or wind up isolated and alone. I know because it happened to me.

Given these heads of the patriarchal hydra it should be no surprise that radical transfeminism is currently made up largely of women who have little to no background in radical organizing. Our sisters are inexperienced in precisely the thing we need to have started doing yesterday: organizing. So plenty of us resort to what's easiest in this parasitic culture. We use social media and algorithmic consumerism to try and sell our movement rather than building it in a way that impacts people's lives. We try to convince sisters to buy us rather than reaching out in any way that helps them. We develop online personas and try to use humor, sex, derision, combativeness and cruelty to try and replace relating to one another on a sisterly level.

As with militants in previous waves of struggle, many radical transfeminists are currently trying to turn a handful of dubiously charismatic personalities into a mass movement. I began this essay by naming off a handful of examples of prominent leaders and personality cults from the New Afrikan civil rights and independence movements. What many settler radicals failed to learn from these figures and from others like Lenin or Mao was that the cults of personality around them grew out of their successes as revolutionary organizers, not the other way around. No one would have cared who Malcolm was if he had not electrified and mobilized the Nation of Islam and spoken directly to the heart of the Black nation. We would have no idea who Lenin or Mao or any of these guys were had they not managed to put together organizations that overthrew their governments and attempted to build entire new societies. That's why radicals still try to engage, for better or worse, with those historic figures but poor Bob Avakian is little more than a crank somewhere in the Bay Area.

If any of these influencers had actually earned the attention they currently have through successful organizing or ideological influence over organizations doing something materially relevant to our lives then they might be worth dealing with seriously. Even then though, history has taught us time and time again that putting weight behind powerful leaders is inevitably part of what condemns a movement to failure and collapse. Malcolm's Organization for Afro-American Unity could not hold itself together after his assassination. Neither could the Black Panthers overcome the increased paranoia and erratic behavior of Huey P. Newton. The Chinese revolution, long fraught with internal contradictions and weighed down by Mao's cult of personality through the cultural revolution, was finally defeated after his death when the right wing of the Communist Party deposed the leftist faction, the so-called gang of four, in 1976. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso) both had promising revolutionary wars completely undone by the wavering of singular male leaders that each party was deathly loyal to. The former became your standard social democratic government, the latter narco-warlords.

These lessons have all been learned at a scale that should make us blush. Radical transfeminism has come nowhere near the world historic victories and failures of the liberation movements of the 20th century. Which is why this period of floundering around different influencers feels so pathetic. We have no interest in the kind of humility or willingness to learn from one another that is required to build a mass movement. Instead we pick a preferred champion and watch her duke it out in comment sections or on tiktok or substack with other women. All while the horizon of trans women's liberation, of women's liberation period, gets further and further away.

Thus far i've written around 2600 words begging my sisters to touch grass. Truthfully i have felt profoundly disillusioned over the last few months, not that i was feeling great about all this before then. The world has changed in extreme ways since the last major wave of struggle (around 1945-75). Yet none of us seem ready to internalize that. Anti-imperialists and communist party builders and feminists and New Afrikan nationalists and everyone else seeking some kind of liberation from patriarchal capitalism are stuck repeating dead forms of struggle. What hope is there in any of that? In the face of accelerating environmental destruction and global trans/femicide and genocides mounting on top of genocides how are we supposed to look at our unconditional failure to prevent or hinder a single atrocity here in the imperial core and feel any kind of hope? Even the third world people's armies that my old comrades told me to put my faith in 15 years ago are coming apart at the seams.

In light of this complete unraveling of the movements that catapulted the world's oppressed to tremendous highs and then pulled them back down to crushing lows in the 20th century the very least we can do now is admit that we are starting over. There's much to learn, and none of us has the answers yet. If we had them we would have done something with them. We need the kind of searching humility that builds real leadership and real movements, not for personal aggrandizement but for the long and difficult work of overturning patriarchal civilization. If we want to be partisans of a movement that has a hand in that then a lot has to change very quickly. Whether or not it happens is up to us.

I should have known better than to try and engage with the transfeminist influencer sphere. I have some of the experience that i am lamenting the absence of in my sisters, learned some of these same lessons five or ten years ago. Yet i too am a lone crank throwing my thoughts out into the ether, hoping that someone finds use in them enough to do something real. Thing is that we never stop learning hard lessons, and all i am certain of is that i know less now in my 30's than i thought i did as a younger woman trying to build the party in the middle of roving street fights with the police or late night clashes with neo-fascists. Admitting that is step one, and we can't figure out the rest of these steps on our own.

What remains true is that women need our own revolutionary politics and strategies. The development of revolutionary women's autonomy continues to be herstorically necessary, and i believe is the key to derailing patriarchal civilization and pulling our species off the fast track to extinction. Radical transfeminism, whatever you want to call it, at one point had the glowing embers of potential to help ignite this monumental task. Whether it still does or has fully become a minor literary scene for wannabe Andrea Dworkins and Sophie Lewises to take shots at each other (pick a side or don't, neither are ever going to respect you as a woman) for online clout remains to be seen. Regardless, the responsibilities for revolutionary minded women remain the same. Step off, disappear, do damage. There can be no more progress until we leave men's nations, empires, armies, and world behind.

Until next time.