When “the trans question” meets “the Jewish question”: on the dangers of a nature essentialist material world

Abstract

This paper advances a Marxist approach to the idea of “human nature” - bound not to a fixed essence, but to sensuous human activity and social transformation - to expose the static materialism and nature essentialism of gender critical feminism. Moreover, it is shown that a longstanding intersectionality of racist, nationalist, gendered, and sexualised imaginations of abnormality and threat to society and nature easily merges with gender critical feminism’s fixed and essentialist material world. From this basis, the paper critiques an ideological current in the gender critical feminist milieu which fuses transphobia with anti-Jewish racism: specifically, the conspiratorial idea that rich and powerful Jews are behind a capitalist transgender lobby and transhumanism agenda to profit from the destruction of the natural essence of human beings.