It's no secret among communists that among the mainstream politics of our era there is a pandemic of false progressivism and false social tolerance. Politicians pay lip service to the defense of individual liberties on a purely ideological level while making decisions that betray the material requirements to secure one's existence. Extending from that, it is often that the liberal will take stances that paint a veneer of social tolerance to social outsider groups while both actively working against material gains for such groups and also hiding an intolerance that guides these material decisions. However in this false tolerance the liberal will look to those who chose to forgo the veneer with deep critical blows as if they themselves are miles above them in development. In the same vein however, they require this blatant reactionary elements to secure social capital from that veneer without having to address material way in which they fall short to aid the groups they claim to be in aid of.

This liberalism, however, like many other liberal tendencies doesn't just disintegrate itself from the psyche the second one entertains marx. It is an internal contradiction that must continue to be struggled on both within members of the marginalized group itself but also, especially, to people that exist on the outside of these groups. Yet what we constantly find is naive marxists who, oftentimes even proud of their lack of study, have come to the conclusion that by mere virtue of not being one of those neoliberals over there, come to the very same error as the liberal that points to the ignorant republican and proclaims "surely I have no dramatic error in my ways, compared to that troglodyte over their I am the epidemy of social development". This is in great disservice to both the marginalized people and to the socialist movement as a whole, for on a fundamental level it is a failure to look further into the contradictions at play and by extension can only result in action that would fail to address the roots in capitalism's contradictions. This is a course that is more likely than not bound towards ultimate failure.

This is very much a issue that continues to effect the trans community and our relation to the socialist left. The sphere this is most evident in is the class reductionist and "anti-idpol" left. A circle which arbitrarily demarcates issues of economic class and issues of social identity in ways that are entirely unscientific and by extension unworkable towards achieving any real material gain for the proletariat in whole. This is not what I am aiming to address here. What needs to be brought to the forefront are the leftists that, like the "tolerant" liberal, take on veneers of acceptance while stopping short of addressing their internal misogyny, chauvinism, and general contradiction when it comes to properly addressing the issues of their trans comrades.

It is at this point in the conversation that it is expedient that i pivot from the abstract into my experience in this community in particular to better illustrate the point I'm trying to make. This isn't a recent development, either. This tracks back to the days we were still on reddit, where brocialist types had an occasion claimed i wasn't a real part of the community after giving my opinion as a trans person. An alienating experience, and a experience that other trans people in the community have expressed meeting a common spirit. This shared sentiment fell into the general understanding that the community being better than other communities didn't automatically make it free of it's own contradictions. It was the community being banned from reddit and consolidated into a discord server that raised these contradictions to unavoidable heights. What once would have been a comment if not entirely unseen, easily avoided, became through the nature of the medium an unavoidable aspect of the ongoing conversation. More and more common it became clear that these contradictions, the blatant transmisogyny present in the community, were not incidental one off occurrences, but instead a result of the material conditions inherent to the community itself. It is my belief that the contradiction at the root of this problem is the ideological meme of the 'big-tent' and 'left unity'. An ideology that in every iteration strains itself to make explicit room for reactionary elements while at the same time expelling people in marginalize groups for acting out against these reactionary elements for the grave crime of breaking the illusion of unity and revealing what is actually taking place - opportunism and the platforming of reactionary politics. One of the most prominent examples of a 'big tent' political space that proves this point in the extreme is the reddit community "political race memes". Where so called 'leftists' share space with outright fascists, white supremacists, and nazis in the 'spirit of open debate'. These 'leftists' and 'centrists' involved failing to realize that the main result of the collaborationism is the platforming and legitimization of the most harmful views in modern political discourse. There is no net positive from platforming and legitimizing the reactionary, especially for those of us who are socially marginalized who face the effects of reactionary forces more acutely in any iteration. So why, in our own leftist communities do we explicitly allow a great deal of contradiction to run rampant with no attempt made to go through proper struggle, synthesis, or resolution to what is clearly still reactionary, unscientific views within pervasive still in our community. The naive or the opportunist will say that this is because by comparison the incorrect lines held in this space are 'less acute' and therefor more acceptable. To that I'll say that the presence of the 'mild bigot' is still acutely felt by the marginalized perhaps even more so in this context as they allowed to invade these spaces and take their root, while the marginalized are expelled or ignored as the bigotry is of a 'polite, friendly' variety while the natural defensive response is more often than not considered 'uncivilized' and generative of disunity where there 'was none before'. It is in this way that on a material level, the 'big tent' consistently stands to platform the 'civil' reactionary while reliably ridding itself of the marginalized, who in bringing forth the contradictions present 'promote disunity', when what they've really done is cast aside the curtain to find that the whole time this unity was only ever a clever illusion. All too often even in this very community have me or a comrade stood up to all manners of racism, misogyny, chauvinism, and general bigotry in the service of creating a better, healthier community for everyone to exist in. Only to be met with responses of scorn and disturbance of the peace- of breaking a unity that is all to often extended to perpetrators of inequality but denied to the marginalized. It is in these conditions we have no other option but to choose a real unity to ourselves and our own principles, instead of this false unity held at our expense. It is in these facts that we plead for a true unity - not for our own sakes as we find ourselves fully capable of supporting ourselves - we plead like a mother watching their child about to touch a hot stove, like a friend telling a friend not to get back with that one ex, like a teacher telling a promising student not to hang with the trouble makers. We plead not for ourselves, but for you not to continue going down this flawed path for it's in your own interest.