New York University Faculty Member: Trans Activism Part of ‘Communist Revolution’

A transgender New York University faculty member said in a recent video trans activism is part of an overall effort to bring about a “communist revolution” in America.

In a video from May, focused on “trans liberation,” Kay Gabriel, together with Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, were part of a series called “Rabbles of the World,” which features “talks with radical thinkers and agitators who are pushing the boundaries of revolutionary queer praxis.”

Gabriel, a part-time faculty member with New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, is a “poet and essayist,” according to a bio, with some research centered on “trans studies.”

Gabriel co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics in 2020 with Andrea Abi-Karam, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle award.

“Ira” from Spain, who self-describes as a “revolutionary trans feminist and a queer Marxist,” began this video:

We have come together for transnational voices of transgender communist politics in order to share our own insights on how transliberation can foster communist will-making and what the under-variant communities within the proletariat have to win in engaging the struggle to abolish the present state of things further. We aim to dialectically grasp the trans-feminist debate on the abolition of gender and how it can shape both our bodily economy and our political practices as revolutionaries.

Gabriel then exclaimed it is “so important for Marxists to actually claim” they are political economists.

“Many of us just shy away from saying, like, no, we actually have … so many things to say about the structure of the world,” Gabriel continued:

What do trans people in our particularity have to … say or to offer that expands the universalism of a communist … society … one that would be achieved … through processes and events … that we would have to call revolutionary because they would require the abolition of society as it currently is.

“When we demand … society be rearranged in certain ways, this is a part of the project and it … involves … it touches on lives that are not just ones that go through medical transition,” Gabriel stated.