If, amongst the complicated labyrinth of contradictory and tangled sexual norms, you want to find the beginnings of more healthy relationships between the sexes - relationships that promise to lead humanity out of the sexual crisis - you have to leave the ‘cultured quarters’ of the bourgeoisie with their refined individualistic psyche, and take a look at the huddled dwelling-places of the working class. There, amidst the horror and squalor of capitalism, amidst tears and curses, the springs of life are welling up.

Alexandra Kollontai, Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle (1921)

With these words, Kollontai expressed the potentiality held by the working class to create a new sexual morality in accordance with the communist project. The new sexual morality is not much closer now than it was when Kollontai first wrote about it, as the current reactionary turn in culture and polítics has led to an attack on the rights of queer people, best exemplified through the wave of anti-trans rhetoric coming from right-wing parties globally, as well as the willingness of many liberal left parties to leave trans issues behind to strengthen their odds in future elections. While the right-wing attack against trans rights marches on, the Labour Party in the UK has turned its back on trans people, denying trans women access to the Labour Women’s Conference, while Sinn Féin in Ireland have not denied support to the ban on puberty blockers nor to the exclusion of trans women from the definition of “women”.^[1]

Communist spaces, however, are not free from queerphobic ideas either, and in the last decades we have seen how different organisations and parties have associated the liberation proposed by communism with a defence of heterosexuality, binary “biological sex” and the sexual practices prescribed by conservative morality. The positions of the KKE in Greece on issues related to homosexuality^[2] or the statements of the Frente Obrero in Spain on transsexuality as opposed to women’s rights and workers’ material needs^[3] have created a fragmentation among groups of politicised workers that has set them against each other and has led many to participate in reactionary projects.^[4] These positions can be understood as part of a history of organisations that have espoused queerphobic beliefs and workerist, reactionary ideals. Some examples of this are the Revolutionary Union and their position on homosexuality as a result of male chauvinism and male supremacy, or the decision of the Venceremos Brigade to not recruit homosexuals and their thoughts on homosexuality as bourgeois decadence.^[5] In the face of descriptions of queer people as bourgeois deviants who are enemies of the working class, what does history say about the development of sexuality?

The Industrial Revolution was a time of great changes in the nature of labour that allowed for a new form of organisation of work for humanity, the capitalist mode of production. However, these changes also inevitably took place in cultural and ideological forms. During this period, the Western states that were experiencing great economic growth carried out strong campaigns to reinforce the model of heterosexual monogamy as the only valid sexual and relational model, turning the heterosexual nuclear family into the sexual bourgeois ideal and the main unit of wealth accumulation. As Thomas Lacqueur illustrates in Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution (2012), revisions were made to works of art to eliminate lewd or “deviant” content. New releases of Shakespeare removed all instances of words such as “body” and criticised plays in which a female character was not narratively punished for eloping from her family or living unmarried.

At the same time as this cultural imaginary was created, the medical, legal and religious fields were instrumental in the persecution of homosexual relations, masturbation and female lasciviousness through police and judicial repression, pathologisation and the use of the Christian ideal as a weapon against the working class. With the arrival of the 20th century, working-class autobiographies such as that of Francis Place, a well-known radical reformer, began to be promoted. These autobiographies recounted how heterosexual marriage had saved the authors from an indecent and dirty life, usually plagued by substance abuse and depraved sexual experiences; an imaginary was constructed according to which the dispossessed class was also a faithful follower of the bourgeois family ideal.

During this period, the economic position of many artists became downwardly mobile and women started to enter the profession, which resulted in a tendency towards masculinisation in art through different figures, among them the worker. Painters like Augustus John or Wyndham Lewis used the figures of workers and soldiers as emblems of masculinity. The case of Lewis and the futurist currents is especially relevant, as their new modernist aesthetics were often paired with associations between workers, industrial technology, and masculinity, and with their rejection of homosexuality and effeminacy. Working-class men became a vehicle for artists to create a renewed masculine ideal, one that fit the changes in the way production was carried out and organised. The association between masculinity and industrial work was also reproduced in trade unions, which attempted to construct the ideal masculine heteronormative worker partly as a response to women entering some sectors of the labour market, resulting in lower salaries.

But was this the reality of the working class? In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels portrays a proletariat for which immorality and sexual deviation were very much a common occurrence. Prostitution was a way for many working-class women to increase their income and feed their families, which was not only a sign of the indecency of these women for bourgeois society, but also highlighted constant escapes from monogamous faithfulness by both working-class and bourgeois men, a faithfulness that was maintained only as an image, but not as a practice.^[6] On the other hand, young working-class women tended to have a sex life far removed from the celibacy promoted by the church, which gave rise to books like Richard Carlile's Everywoman's Book, a guide to contraception aimed at protecting women from the scorn and various other punishments that a premarital pregnancy could entail. The ideal of the nuclear monogamous family was made impossible by the material realities of many working-class families, living in houses occupied by more than one family and rooms that accommodated people of different sexes and generations, a situation considered reprehensible by the morals of the time.

In terms of gender identities and dissident sexualities, the last two centuries also contain a rich working-class history that was, at the time, censored and persecuted by the bourgeoisie. In Pederasts and Others, William Peniston recounts the stories of many of the men arrested or investigated by the police forces in Paris during the 19th century.^[7] During this century, men who showed attraction to the same sex were called pederasts, and this sexual orientation was typified as a crime against public decency, which led to arrests and prison sentences; the conditions of homosexuality during this century led to the creation of underground urban communities in which the “criminals” watched over their own safety and did not make their sexual attraction visible. The situation was similar in England, where homosexuality was considered an “unnatural crime”, and was first punished with death and later with jail time.^[8] Cases of extortion were also documented often, with men threatening to accuse other men of homosexuality unless they provided them with money or other resources.

Policemen also participated in similar strategies by posing as homosexual men to entrap others into being charged with homosexuality, and would also accuse other men of being homosexuals if their own sexuality was put into question.^[9] The use of accusations of homosexuality as a threat and the entrapment tactics of policemen contributed to the clandestine conditions of homosexuality during the 19th century. This was also motivated by the monitoring that Chartist unions carried out on workers’ sexuality, promoting the heterosexual family as the only legitimate model of sexual and romantic relations.^[10] The persecution of homosexuality also extended to the colonies controlled by European countries, where the prohibitions and punishments for homosexuality were enforced.^[11] In Australia, the occurrence of homosexual relations between men grew throughout the 19th century, and during its first decades, many men were tried for homosexuality and executed, following British law. In India, the British Empire used brothels and female sex workers as a way to motivate soldiers in their colonial pursuit, but made homosexuality illegal and used cases of homosexuality among Indians as a way to chastise them and attack Indian culture. In Algeria, the French created an image of Arab men as especially inclined towards homosexuality, then used this construction as a way to fetishise and abuse many young Algerians. It was not until 1886, with the publication of the Psychopathia Sexualis that the term “homosexual” appeared to public recognition as a pathology, and it was not until 1973 that it was depathologised and considered a valid sexual identity in the eyes of civil capitalist society.

The history of transsexuality shares some similarities with that of homosexuality in the dawn of capitalism. The working class in different countries also presented underground groups of men and women who were (or desired to be) socially referred to as of the opposite sex, even dressing according to that designation. Alongside the persecution of homosexuals, people who dressed in public as the opposite sex were criminalised and imprisoned under crimes against public decency. Many reports of “unnatural crimes” during the 19th century included cross-dressing individuals, who tended not to be differentiated from homosexuals.

In the early 20th century, the criminalisation and discrimination against trans individuals continued. This was the experience of Dora Richter, a German working-class trans woman whose case was popularised by the investigations of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.^[12] Hirschfeld was the founder of the Institute for the Study of Sexuality in the Weimar Republic, where he sought to research and support homosexuals and trans people, and was an important activist for their civil rights. Dora came to Hirschfeld in the 1920s after being arrested and imprisoned on several occasions for wearing dresses on the street and treating herself as a woman. Dora’s story was not an uncommon one for trans women in the 20th century, as she had been dismissed twice from being drafted into the army due to her feminine presentation and her inability to undergo military training, and she faced many difficulties in getting hired, as most businesses would not hire trans individuals. Hirschfeld's research with Dora was instrumental in developing medical transition options for trans women, as well as Hirschfeld's establishment in the early 20th century of the term “transvestite” to denote the condition of those we now know as trans people. Dora was one among the trans women who underwent bottom surgery procedures in Hirschfeld’s Institute, working there as a maid for some time alongside Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel. These women had also been through Hirschfeld’s treatment and became involved in communist activism and agitation.

While it was extremely advanced for its time in its treatment of transsexual individuals’ needs, Hirschfeld’s work was not devoid of flaws, as it was also influenced by his racist beliefs, which affected the way he constructed queer identities in it.^[13] While Hirschfeld’s work on race rejected inherent biological racial hierarchies, he believed that historical developments had resulted in white people being civilised and cultured, and people of colour being natural, primitive people. His conceptualisation of race naturalised the existence of different races and ignored the material conditions for the creation of race as a category under capitalism in the first place, thus perpetuating racism in its own way. Hirschfeld’s construction of homosexuality as natural and identical across races was supported by his theories of racial difference, ultimately posing the struggles of queer people and people of colour as completely independent of one another.

It was not until 1949 that the word “transsexual” began to be used, and not until 1956 that the term “transgenderism” was coined by John F. Oliven to refer to this condition and then popularised in the 1960s by Virginia Prince, an American trans activist.^[14] At the present time, the DSM still categorises gender dysphoria (and transsexuality itself, since it is not considered a dissociable phenomenon in the eyes of medical institutions) as a disorder. During the 20th century, many working-class transsexual and homosexual individuals were relegated to hiding their sexual identity or subjected to the impossibility of finding work, leading many to prostitution and other forms of informal economy. There is a variety of evidence on this, like the work of Richard Linsert, a communist doctor and key figure in German Sex Liberation movements, who documented the lives of male sex workers and explained how material conditions created by economic crisis drove men towards working in prostitution.^[15] There have also been different communities of working-class trans women, such as the sex workers of the Canary Islands, who formed communities during the Francoist regime and had no option but to turn to sex work.^[16] Another example of trans sex worker communities is the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) group in the United States. The STAR group was founded in the 1970s by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans sex workers who had been part of the Stonewall riots and the beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement (GLM). As the GLM advanced, however, assimilationist currents became more relevant within the homosexual community, especially among those who belonged to the bourgeoisie and the middle class.^[17] The influence of those currents resulted in the search for a new, more “respectable” image for the GLM, which involved detaching from radical politics and from fringe communities within the Movement, such as working-class transsexuals. Johnson and Rivera were greatly affected by the GLM turning their back on them, and created the STAR group first as a way to provide housing and necessary resources to working-class queer youth (mostly financed through the founder’s sex work) and later as a way to organise them. The STAR group were involved with communist organisations of their time, mainly with the Young Lords, an anti-colonial Marxist organisation from Chicago. During their time as an active organisation, the STAR group denounced the deradicalisation of the GLM and highlighted the need for unity among oppressed people of the working class, fighting for the liberation of queer and racialised people.

The process of creation and discovery of sexual possibilities by the working class shows a contradiction in the development of human relations under the capitalist mode of production. In Filosofía de la praxis, Adolfo Sánchez Vásquez draws on Hegel's master-slave dialectic to illustrate the process by which the working class recognises and advances itself through its material labor. As Hegel explains, desire is always desire for recognition, but to establish the relation of recognition requires a recogniser and a recognised, with these positions being exclusive, that is, one cannot simultaneously be both. For this reason, the different consciousnesses involved in the relation must be in conflict in order to impose the conditions of recognition. However, the recognised must remain alive in order to establish the aforementioned relation. Thus, the conflict cannot end with a victorious recogniser and a destroyed or eliminated recognised, but with a subjugated recognised (from here arises the relation of exploitation). Those who end up victorious (master) are those who can impose recognition on the defeated (slave), keeping them alive in exchange for the recognition of the victory.

This dialectic is concretised in the class conflict of capital, in which it is the bourgeois class that imposes its recognition and victory on the working class, which is subjected to the extraction of surplus value from its labour in exchange for its recognition. However, the working class is the only class that participates in the material work of the world that leads to an advancement of the world through its knowledge by developing its potentials, thus creating the possibility of self-recognition and reaching the revolutionary consciousness necessary to abolish the current system of subjugation. This material work includes the relations between workers and the reproductive tasks to maintain themselves available as sellers of their workforce. It is in this process that the working class has historically developed its sexual possibilities, albeit without recognition (as evidenced by the imposition of terms by bourgeois medicine and justice). It has not been until the progressive dissolution or weakening of family structures by capital has allowed (or forced) the bourgeoisie to adapt to these sexual conditions that they have been recognised as valid, first through pathology and later through legal recognition.

This historical process is completely opposed to the workerist narrative according to which sexual diversity is an import made by the working class of bourgeois ideas that fragment the working class by transforming queer people into traitors. The reactionary position that depicts people outside the cisheterosexual standard as bourgeois is an anti-materialist narrative that only divides the working class into different fronts and hinders the liberation of the class by postulating specific working-class communities that have been dispossessed and marginalised by capital as enemies. Breaking down the norms imposed by capital’s sexual standards has been seen as a necessary step of revolution for many communists throughout history. Kollontai, Zetkin, and other socialist women denounced the conditions of oppression that women suffer under the capitalist nuclear family, and the dangers of bourgeois marriage and kinship relations.^[18] Mario Mieli spoke of the need for homosexuals to organise politically against capitalism, and critiqued assimilationist positions that proposed a compromise between gay people and capitalist sexual norms.^[19]Mieli argued against assimilationist politics and the way they leaned into respectability, as he saw them as a way for the bourgeoisie to co-opt queer working-class movements and a taming of queerness by making it fit heteronormative standards. His thoughts on gay liberation did not stop at legal rights or a reform of the system so that it would accept gay people, but rather he only saw gay liberation possible alongside the abolition of the capitalist system. Trans marxists like M.E. O’Brien and Jules Joanne Gleeson have critiqued the institution of the family as a tool for capitalist control over sexual subjective experience and desire, and they have brought back the abolition of the family as a communist demand around which to articulate the struggle against the oppression of queer individuals.^[20] Highlighting the coercive nature of the institution of the family under capitalism and its role in the reproduction of the oppression of queer people, these authors have re-taken the task of studying the history of the family and the need for freeing care and reproduction from the private and domestic spaces to which they have been relegated, and therefore from the capitalist mode of production. These are all part of the same history of working-class sexual politics that those who were criminalised, persecuted and abused for being queer represent. Communism must engage with the struggle against queerphobic oppression and, more generally, the sexual norms of the capitalist system as a way to create a new proletarian culture.

To free us all from capital, we must understand how sexuality develops as the division of labour and the structure of the family change under the system, not forgetting that it was the working class that developed these potentialities in the first place, first under persecution and then under the scrutiny of the capitalist state. This is not to say that sexual dissidence is exclusive to the working class or revolutionary in itself, but that communists must fight against the fragmentation of workers and identitarian accusations. The Hirschfeld Institute was burned by the Nazis, who considered its studies a degenerate practice and its subjects an impurity to be purged. It is a task for all communists to ensure that the next fire will burn the foundations of the capitalist system to the ground, and not our queer comrades.

1. Dalton, Eoghan, ‘Sinn Féin Banned from Trans Pride March Following Last-Minute Meeting with Mary Lou McDonald’, The Journal, 16 May 2025 <https://www.thejournal.ie/sinn-fein-trans-2-6706549-May2025/>; ‘Trans Women Will Not Be Allowed to Attend Main Labour Women’s Conference Events’, BBC, 6 December 2025 <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c773vm4n3n0o>

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2. ‘Las posiciones del KKE sobre el matrimonio civil de parejas del mismo sexo y su impacto en los derechos de los niños’, n.d. <http://inter.kke.gr/es/m-article/86cc2962-bb2b-11f0-b1e1-be037ce642f9/>

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3. Frente Obrero, Nuestro Programa - Frente Obrero, 12 June 2023 <https://frenteobrero.es/nuestro-programa-2/>

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4. The use of the terms "sex" and "transsexual" in this text, as opposed to the terms "gender" and "transgender," reflects an analysis of sex as a result of the social division of labor, making it as mutable and historically constructed as gender. This usage is derived from Marxist political analysis and opposes its use for transphobic or transmedicalist rhetoric.

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5. Smith, Lee, ‘A Contribution to the Discussion’, Socialist Workers Party Discussion Bulletin, 30.1 (1972), pp. 10–13; ‘Toward A Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question, RU Position Paper’, 1975 <https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/gay-question/ru.htm>

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6. Homosexuality also posed a challenge to monogamous faithfulness, as many homosexual men married women but maintained relationships with other men in secret.

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7. This text focuses on male homosexuality as it was much more persecuted and criminalized than female homosexuality. Female homosexuality was not considered a possibility in many cases. Same-sex relationships between women were often disguised as friendships and were also closely related to female cross-dressing (as well as to transmasculinity), both in their legal and medical descriptions as well as in the communities they formed.

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8. ‘Homosexuality in 19th-Cent. England: Policemen as Entrappers and as Participants, 1840s’, n.d. <https://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1840spol.htm>

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9. ‘Homosexuality in 19th-Cent. England: Newspaper Reports, 1841’, n.d. <https://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1841news.htm>

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10. Carlin, Nora, ‘The Roots of Gay Oppression’, International Socialism Journal, 42 (1989)

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11. Aldrich, Robert, Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge, 2008)

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12. Tigers, Leah, ‘On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin’, Tricky Mother Nature, 2022 <https://archive.org/details/inside-out-part-1>

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13. Marhoefer, Laurie, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (University of Toronto Press, 2022)

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14. Oliven, John F., Sexual Hygiene and Pathology: A Manual for the Physician and the Professions (Lippincott, 1965); Erkins, Richard, and Dave King, ‘Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 8.4 (2008), doi:https://doi.org/10.1300/J485v08n04_02

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15. Halifax, Noel, ‘Richard Linsert and the First Sexual Liberation Movement’, Socialist Worker, 2017 <https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/richard-linsert-and-first-sexual-liberation-movement/>; Marhoefer, Laurie, ‘Degeneration, Sexual Freedom, and the Politics of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933’, German Studies Review, 34.3 (2011), pp. 529–49

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16. Alayón Galindo, Carlos, Daniasa Martín Curbelo, and Sara Beatriz Tejera Galindo, Vidas Cruzadas: Memoria de Personas Trans Desde El Franquismo Hasta Los Noventa En Canarias (Instituto Canario de Desarrollo Cultural, 2022)

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17. Rivera, Sylvia, and Marsha P. Johnson, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle, ed. by Ehn Nothing (Untorelli Press, 2013)

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18. Kollontai, Alexandra, ‘The Social Basis of the Woman Question’, 1909 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm>; Luxemburg, Rosa, ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’, 1912 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1976/women/4-luxemburg.html>; Zetkin, Clara, ‘Proletarian Woman and Socialism’, 1896 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1896/10/women.htm>

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19. Mieli, Mario, Tim Dean, and Massimo Prearo. 2018. Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique. London.

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20. Griffiths, Kate Doyle, and Jules Joanne Gleeson. n.d. ‘Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition’. A New Institute for Social Research.https://www.isr.press/Griffiths_Gleeson_Kinderkommunismus/index.html; O’Brien, M. E. 2023. Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. London Las Vegas, NV.

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