Transgender Marxism

Edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, Transgender Marxism brings fourteen essays into conversation across social reproduction, employment, workplace discipline, identity development, psychoanalysis, disability, organizing, and histories of trans movements. The collection begins from a material question: what does it mean to survive as trans under capitalism? Housing, wages, healthcare, family dependence, criminalization, and the organization of work shape whether transition and gender freedom are livable. Recognition matters, but a politics confined to recognition leaves the economic conditions of recognition untouched.

The anthology is not merely Marxism applied to a new minority. Its stronger claim is that trans experience can revise Marxist accounts of labor, class formation, the family, and social reproduction. Gender is produced through workplaces, households, clinics, communities, and developmental narratives; it is neither a private identity floating above material life nor a mechanical reflection of economic structure. Essays draw on queer and trans organizing, Black struggle, workerism, psychoanalysis, and international examples to debate how collective power might form among people whose labor and bodies are differently disciplined.

As an anthology, the book contains several transgender Marxisms rather than one settled program. Its theoretical density and uneven geographic reach mean that readers should not treat the concluding anti-capitalism as a substitute for concrete strategy or community-specific analysis. That plurality is also its value. For FemRes, the collection creates a productive encounter between trans feminism and socialist feminism, asking each to confront its omissions. It shows why liberation must transform the institutions that distribute work, care, property, and risk, while insisting that class politics unable to understand gendered embodiment will misunderstand the working class it claims to organize.