We know that at a time when the imperialist-capitalist-patriarchal system is dominating the peoples of the world by the fascist male-dominated powers, both the ideology and knowledge of the oppressed advance in this monopoly, while simeltaneously carrying the dirt and rust of this dominating system.
In this case, what we need to do is to liberate knowledge and progressive-revolutionary ideologies from this bondage. However, for us revolutionaries, doing this is a responsibility that is too important to be limited to just making research-analysis or determinations.
To put it in reference to Marx, we are not only interpreters of the world but also those who take it upon ourselves to change it. Therefore, the way to save the knowledge that the sovereigns are trying to monopolize and to save the liberation ideologies of the oppressed peoples is to take action, to examine closely all the popular movements that have emerged through various demands, to take part in these movements and to learn from them, taking into account their mistakes and deficiencies.
We have a very basic tool at our disposal to do this; our organisations. But how strong are these organizations and how can they be strengthened? We can measure the strength and weakness of our organizations by their openness in confronting, reckoning, purification and development, as well as some other parameters. We can re-establish this power with the courage to perpetuate “cultural revolutions” inside and outside of our organisations. Educational studies, awareness raising workshops, criticism-self-criticism mechanisms should be activated to achieve these cultural revolutions. Because the will we put forward to be organized requires being a subject.
So what kind of subject? We should be a militant, assertive and active subject who can combine breakthroughs with rationality, that is, to produce plans-projects rationally for a political purpose, and by providing political vitality without falling into laziness in thought. We need to make an effort to reach accurate and sound information, be free from subjectivism, and increase our ideological level by expanding our theoretical studies. We must break our dogmatic and sectarian stereotypes, and do this by learning from the masses, not just following the spontaneous flow of social movements. We must do this by intervening in the “moment”!
Of course, these are all truths that each of us knows and has argued over and over again. Now, if we see the issue of how to put this truth into practice by gathering for our common cause, we would like to draw attention to a point where we should intervene in the “moment” under this common cause. The struggle to organize all sections of the people around their own contradictions is an inevitable task of our revolutionary and democratic struggle. Likewise, these contradictions also pose serious obstacles to our revolutionary and democratic struggle. One of these contradictions is patriarchy and sexual inequality, sexual oppression…
Before we move on to our tasks related to this contradiction, we would like to draw attention to the following regarding the heterosexist binary gender system: There is no purity in evolution (pure race, pure sexes, pure human genetics, etc.), frankly, this is an anti-scientific fabrication. Evolution is a transformation that has been going on for billions of years, and the secret of life is not in purity, but in mixture, change, transformation, genetic diversity. Therefore, binary definitions of biological sex are extremely rough definitions according to biological reality and diversity.
Today’s definition of “woman” and “man” is the definition of ideal woman and ideal man, and there is no such “ideal” in nature. There are undoubtedly biological factors that determine these definitions here. Various reproductive organs, body structures (which need not be said to remain “pure” due to social systems) bring us closer to various definitions of gender. However, there is another element that is overlooked here, while at the same time being very decisive. Consciousness! It will be a little long on this subject, but we would like to quote from an article:
“Consciousness cannot be left out as a decision maker in the human biological system. It takes the inputs and produces a result as an output, makes a decision in the last step of the system, and the consciousness that evaluates the whole system creates a model and categorizes it and says I am a woman/man or neither. We do not know which variables the consciousness included in the definition of gender when making this decision.
Biology says there are0 no boundaries and definitions for women and men. While the theory of evolution alone is sufficient to show that no sharp boundary can be drawn, many examples set out from this theory and form a practical basis. The issue is freedom of expression. Because when you want to define gender biologically, it is not possible to make a decision by leaving the expression out. An individual’s self-perception and expression are very important for their own orientation and biological gender definition. Because the biological creature whose gender you want to decide on says, ‘I do not fit this definition’, and while saying this, it has much more information than we do (genetic features, genital organs, assumed reproductive behaviors, etc. We do not have more than these, and these data are limited by putting them into numerical values. restricted). This information is in a closed system and we do not yet have the scientific capacity to access, understand and interpret all the biological variables, decision mechanisms and the entire system in that system.
The person has an inner experience about themself, the whole of the biological activities in their body has something to tell them, there is a decision made by their brain and consciousness about their inner balance. We do not have such important information on behalf of others. This is an incredibly important point. Human consciousness cannot be excluded from such a decision, it is scientifically unacceptable to exclude human consciousness.”(Özlem Yalçın, A Darkness of the Middle Ages: The Binary Biological Sex System, Çatlak Zemin, 3 March 2021)
There are various studies on the scientific side of the issue, and they should absolutely be checked. However, since we will focus on both the political side of the issue and our tasks within this, we will reference the scientific side but explore it in depth here.
LGBTI+ people and The “manageable enemy” created by fascism
While organizing the oppressed class, we said that it should be among our duties to unite the unique problems of various segments of this class that arise from sexual inequality, and to unite through these problems. Because the patriarchal system that is the source of this is one of the main problems of the struggle for revolution and democracy.
However, we must draw attention from the beginning that; patriarchy is not a problem or a field of struggle that only women and LGBTI+ organizations specific to this field should struggle with. If we think like this, we will clearly marginalize this contradiction, as well as the people and institutions involved in this contradiction, and open the door to its marginalization in the society.
There are ways fascism takes root among the peoples. Fascism destroys cause-effect relationships. Fascism makes it impossible to establish these relationships in the thought system of peoples and therefore makes people complicit in the systems that maintain unequal societies, oppress and deprive , with their own hands.
One of the ways fascism takes root among the peoples, is by destroying the cause-effect relations and to make this relation in the system of thought of the peoples unable to establish, and to make the systems that oppress, deprive and unequal societies maintain with their own hands. By taking advantage of the artificial divisions and contradictions they have created among the people, they create a perception of an enemy that they can “cope” with, and they turn the masses against each other by getting out of the way.
One of the issues we need to pay attention to when formulating a policy towards LGBTI+ people, an “enemy” segment created by fascism in many European states as well as in the Turkish Republic, is that this is not and will not be easy because of these reasons. Marginalization and hostility are the dangers that we, as policy makers, will get lost in the labyrinth.
However, when we look at our situation in the face of these hostile games that we can cope with with revolutionary vigilance, it is not possible to say very heartwarming things. On the contrary, we have a reality where LGBTI+ people suffer from sexual inequality that is deliberately inflicted by cis-heterosexism. Moreover LGBTI+ people are excluded from politics because of this same cis-heterosexism. In the face of all of this, steps forward have been taken on LGBTI+ issues, unfortunately homophobia publicly works against this progression. So first of all, we have to deal with this situation relentlessly.
If we don’t fight, “prejudice spreads like an infection”
The issue here is about our historical responsibility, but there is a phenomenon that becomes a spontaneous but increasingly organized force when we keep us out of the issue. The LGBTI+ movement, which has certain parallels with the women’s struggle and often progresses together/by getting stronger from each other, has taken serious steps to both secure its existence and become a dynamic on the basis of social struggles around the world. The LGBTI movement has revealed its existence in the face of all segments that ignore it, especially the dynamics and subjects of social struggle.
LGBTI+ people, whose visibility is tried to be squeezed into ghettos and certain streets, came out of these places and told that they have the most ordinary but most vital rights like every other social individual, and they struggled for this.
LGBTI+ people, who became both visible and the target of hate attacks in the country during the Gezi Uprising and its aftermath (recently during the withdrawal process in the Istanbul Convention and the Bosphorus resistance). LGBTI+ people are seen by male-dominated states as a threat to the family structure, the continuity of which is essential for the advancement of the heterosexist system of exploitation. It is true that the attacks of the state, narrowed the institutional LGBTI+ movement’s sphere and scope of influence. This was done through an increased effort of the state to categorize the society with hate speech and to “masculinize” it by taking all the backward sides of the heterosexist and male-dominated social structure. However, despite the state’s best efforts, the denial of the existence of the LGBTI+ movement has turned into an ineffective policy.
The LGBTI+ movement has gained serious visibility since Gezi. This is why the sovereigns’ efforts to target, manipulate and marginalize. Male dominance is different from the artificial polarization tools of right-wing populism which constitute nationality, belief, language etc, male-dominance is more rooted than the populist tools. It is clear that and that while organizing these attacks, states also aim to intimidate and marginalize women and LGBTI+ masses, who have become dynamic force in the struggle for revolution and democracy.
At the same time, it is an effort to gather the sections of the society poisoned by masculinity and to create an easy path for them, that is, to “create an easily and quickly accessible enemy” that steers the the anger of the oppressed to other sections of society that are oppressed.
In other words, it is to strengthen the patriarchal cooperation, to strengthen the masses that it manipulates in the artificial polarization of “national and native”-“Turkish and Sunni” with masculinity, and to render the cooperation with capital invisible within this polarization. We should examine these two situations separately and see how they are intertwined.
On the other hand, the fact that political subjects continue their struggle. They do so in the context where the state attempts to usurp the right that they own. The continued LGBTI+ struggle further removes them from victimization, as in the women’s movement, and this is an indicator of their empowerment despite the aforementioned narrowing of the sphere and scope. The institutionalization, information and solidarity experiences of the movement have a serious effect on this strengthening.
This is an area where there are practices that we need to learn from. The inevitability of women and LGBTI+ dynamics in the struggle for revolution and democracy has been revealed so clearly by the spontaneous mobilization of the masses,. Ignoring this, postponing it, suffocating or hiding this reality with male-dominated approaches, openly or secretly, means opening the door to a new defeat. Neither the glorious days of struggle ahead nor the women and LGBTI+ masses, who are armed with the struggle for gender equality on the way to these days, are any longer in a position to accept this.
We do not want to pass without adding the following: There is also an fear-based argument about the LGBTI+ struggle, which is brought up by some revolutionaries and some feminist politicians; It is said that this struggle is actually a marginal field of activism that does not target patriarchy and capitalism. That it is limited to postmodern theories and that this struggle only cares for and defends the “right to free sex”. If we examine this claim, we must be convinced that there are no bisexual, gay, intersex or transgender people among the impoverished workers and laborers of society. It is argued that even if they exist, they will be liberated through class struggle, so there is no need for them to express their own contradictions.
In other words, we say to a segment; you, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans people, intersex people and all those who distinguish their sexual identity from heterosexuals… Be proletarian and do not put your own contradictions to the forefront and instead limit your fight to that for your basic rights such as the right to life, the right to education, the right to housing. We will look at it at the end of the revolution. Even if you put it on the agenda, we will not address it, we have more important things to do…
American trans writer and activist Julia Serano explains the outcome of such an approach by revolutionaries in an article: “I can tell what will happen if the economic class centrist leftists successfully push the activists who carry out identity politics out of the left movement. Prejudice spreads like a plague, is left unattended, and people are increasingly comfortable expressing their prejudice and discrimination, especially against women and minorities. As a result, women and minorities cannot be accommodated in such environments and they withdraw from these areas, just as radical feminists left leftist organizations in the 1960s or LGBTQ+s stayed away from socialist/communist groups in the 1990s. This would be to the detriment of the entire left movement.” (Left-Leaning Criticisms of Identity Politics)
Are the doors of our organizations closed to LGBTI+ people?
It is our duty to carry the struggle for equality of the oppressed masses with gender identity and sexual orientation to the revolution, and to not side with “power” in the face of historical inequality. In other words, it is our duty to capture and transform these dynamics, as we have emphasized before.
It is clear that we will have difficulties in fulfilling this task. In order to get rid of homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism, we need to enter a period of reckoning. With co-educational studies and awareness raising workshops, first of all, each of us should grasp the issue more clearly and identify our shortcomings and face them.
Of course, we do not have the luxury of leaving this statement to an indefinite time. These studies lead to the responsibility of understanding sexual inequality and producing policies specific to this issue. However, those who produce this policy properly and in a way that is more free from patriarchy must first be the subjects of this contradiction. LGBTI+’s should be able to find safe spaces in our organization and our organizational mechanisms should be arranged in a way that protects the rights of each of our comrades.
As we come to the end of our speech, our question is: Don’t the duties and responsibilities we undertake in the struggle for revolution and democracy include LGBTI+ people? Are the doors of our organizations closed to LGBTI+ people? If we say no, it is among our primary duties to organize this contradiction and its visible anger.
There is a tremendous determination made by Lenin for the revolutionary struggle, it is a very familiar phrase. Lenin says, “The imperfect preparation of most revolutionaries would not have been of particular concern, as this is a perfectly natural phenomenon. Temporary failures could only be minor calamities when tasks were set correctly, when the energy was available to make repeated attempts to accomplish them. Revolutionary experience and organizational mastery are things that can be acquired. As long as there is a desire to acquire the necessary features in a person. As long as you realize human mistakes, in revolutionary matters this means half improvement.” (Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2, Page 63, Inter Publications, 1993)
Flaws, errors and mistakes… These are not really important. When we look at our position regarding the LGBTI+ struggle, the issue we discuss is not making mistakes, or being flawed. The issue is whether we have determined our duties correctly in this regard… Whether we have the will to acquire the necessary qualifications… Whether we want to gain revolutionary experience and mastery in this field… The issue is whether we are trying to organize LGBTI+ people… We need to stop and think about the answer to this question for a moment.
We have more words to say, how much we can say here today is limited. That LGBTI+ masses will continue to utter their words on the streets and in all living spaces and to transform society in this regard. Where we will be in this transformation, that is up to how much we embrace our claim to be a revolutionary and a democrat! (Yazının Türkçesi: LGBTİ+ Kitlelerin Mücadelesinin Neresinde Olacağız?)
