struggle for better wages and more desirable jobs, a real struggle on the streets, and not mere legal reform negotiated in back room deals that too many of us are shut out from?
Homophobia and Transphobia is also Class phobia
For all its talk of fostering creativity through competiton, the capitalist system is the most repressive in stifling the creativity and motivation of its workers. It insists on seeing us merely as cogs in a system, devoid of thought, emotions, and desires. When queers are discriminated in the hiring process for being too gender deviant, too campy, too out, it is because we jarringly disrupt the capitalist fantasy of a brainless, emotionless, machine-like worker. We are punished for showing that there really isn’t a division between the public life in the workplace, and our private lives as sexual, emotional, gendered beings. We bring our private lives into our public lives, the workplace, either because we have no intention or no way to hide who we are.
The attack on queer expressions of gender and sexuality in the workplace under capitalism is an attempt to strip us of our agency, creativity, sexuality, intelligence. Yet these same traits are the ones that queer and straight workers alike utilize to get through the grueling workday. We improvise our jobs with lessons learned from years of experience or stories exchanged by reliable co-workers; We hold ourselves to an integrity at the workplace that bosses keep pushing us to betray: we refuse to snitch on our co-workers, we help the slowest and newest workers get through so they get paid like all of us; We also know better than the next new manager where all the safety hazards in the workplace are, or how best to organize the work. All these aspects of labor cannot be found in the employers manuals, but are lessons transmitted through conversations in the break rooms or on the job, or during rants in the clock-in stations. Just as queer workers are seen as too outrageous for our transgressions of what is normal at the workplace, so are these invaluable conversations seen as too bold, too unruly by an inhumane capitalist system.
These demands for our freedom, from gender expression to workplace control, go beyond the contract, or our wages. At their best, these are demands that arise from our desire as workers to see the workplace not merely as sites of alienation, but also as extensions of who we are and our relationships. Currently, it is only the top echelon, the CEOs who get to put their own unique, personalized stamp at their workplace. These desires challenge the fundamental basis of capitalist control over our labor. For that reason, they are beyond the confines of trade union politics and cannot be successfully negotiated through the contract. It is the daily struggles of the rank and file workers where such tension is experienced and so it will be through our daily, independent, and militant action that this tension can be overcome.
Patriarchy
Under capitalism, patriarchy serves the dual functions of devaluing female labor,