As the Trump administration unleashes attack after attack on trans people and the wider LGBTQ community, he’s emboldening the right wing around the world to do the same. For LGBTQ people in the US, this adds urgency to their situation, with many asking themselves if they really want to stay in the country. Unfortunately, there are few places in the world untouched by this far-right transphobic and homophobic offensive.

The UK was seen by many as a beacon of hope when the Conservative Party (Tories), in power since 2010, were overwhelmingly rejected in last year’s general election. But on April 16, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on “biological sex” assigned at birth and not gender identity. Keir Starmer, the UK’s Labour prime minister, shamefully backed this attack.

This came two days after a more severe move in Hungary, when the country’s parliament passed a constitutional amendment allowing the government to ban public LGBTQ events. This was justified under the nonsensical grounds that LGBTQ people threaten “children’s rights to moral, physical, and spiritual development.” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a Trumpian self-proclaimed champion of “Christian illiberal democracy,” insists this right supersedes other rights like freedom of assembly.

In the neocolonial world, Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which makes “aggravated homosexuality” a crime punishable by death, has inspired copycat legislation from Ghana to Kenya.

The attacks on LGBTQ rights are a global phenomenon: from right-wing authoritarians in Russia, Turkey, and Argentina, to supposed bastions of “liberal values” like Canada, France, and New Zealand. But resistance is also a global phenomenon. By understanding the forces driving the attacks, we can beat them back and win genuine LGBTQ liberation.

Why are these attacks happening?

The rise of these attacks is rooted in capitalism’s current era. The crisis of neoliberalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis discredited capitalism’s ruling institutions. With growing imperialist tensions, the ruling class globally is preparing for heightened conflict by ramping up nationalism and reorganizing society for war. The past period saw the growth of anti-capitalist struggle, including LGBTQ struggle. The ruling class is relying on an anti-“woke” backlash to reassert its control.

This has also seen a significant shift toward authoritarianism and growth in the far right. Orbán’s constitutional amendment is using homophobia to crack down on democratic rights in general while ramping up national unity behind him and his capitalist cronies. In spite of their anti-imperialist posturing, the attacks of the Ugandan government and its imitators are acting for the same reason.

This understanding helps cut through the contradictory reasons given by anti-LGBTQ forces for their actions. For the Institute of Economic Affairs, a transphobic UK-based think tank, “transgender ideology is an ideological assault against the philosophical and pluralist political traditions of the Western world.” For Orbán, the “pluralist political traditions of the Western world” are the problem. He famously declared “‘Western values’ mean three things: migration, LGBTQ, and war.” The politicians peddling anti-LGBTQ legislation across Africa portray homosexuality as a Western invention imposed on the continent by colonialism, even though their efforts are funded by American evangelicals.

Western or otherwise, the ruling class is using attacks on LGBTQ people to drive down the resources and strength of working-class people in general. Capitalism relies on the nuclear family, with its rigid gender norms, to shoulder the burden of bringing each new generation of workers into being. Scapegoating those who fall outside those norms is a convenient way to whip the working class into shape.

One of Javier Milei’s first acts as president of Argentina was to shut down the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity as well as the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism. This was directly using the idea of a war on “wokeness” as a wedge to ram through his wider agenda of “taking a chainsaw” to social services.

All this shows that the fight for LGBTQ rights has to be seen as part of a common struggle against austerity, war, imperialism, and capitalism.

“Less bad” capitalists won’t save us 

With so little independent working-class political representation internationally, most elections are dominated by capitalist parties. But the “less bad” capitalist parties aren’t genuine allies. The role played by these politicians shows why the LGBTQ struggle needs independent working-class politics.

In Hungary, many are looking to opposition figure Péter Magyar to unseat Orbán in next year’s elections. But on Orbán’s attack, Magyar has avoided mentioning LGBTQ rights and focused exclusively on freedom of assembly, portraying the amendment as a “trap” by Orbán to goad him into taking up social issues at the expense of the cost-of-living crisis.

We’ve seen this before with the Democrats and the fight against Trump. The Democrats were fine with pressuring the trans community into voting for them to defeat Trump. But once Trump came back to power they threw trans people under the bus, blaming the supposed unpopularity of trans rights for their own embarrassing defeat. 

The same thing happened in the UK, where many hoped that the Labour Party would free them from Tory reaction. But Starmer’s backing of the anti-trans Supreme Court ruling has brought inevitable disappointment. Just as we can’t rely on the Democrats to fight for LGBTQ people, we can’t rely on Péter Magyar or Keir Starmer. Left-wing independent Jeremy Corbyn’s support for initiatives that are calling for a new left party provides initial steps forward. Socialist Alternative’s co-thinkers in England, Wales, and Scotland have been actively involved in these developments through the PACE campaign.

The unreliability of capitalist institutions to defend LGBTQ rights is sharper in the neocolonial world. The anti-LGBTQ laws across Africa have provoked reprisals from the IMF and World Bank. The pro-capitalist LGBTQ charity Open for Business embraced these reprisals as “the economic case” to oppose the recent legislation in Kenya. But, regardless of this pro-LGBTQ posturing, the IMF and World Bank are justifiably hated in Africa as the worst enforcers of neocolonial austerity. It was just such policies in Kenya that provoked the mass protests in the country last year. Those sorts of protests, when linked up with the fight for LGBTQ liberation, show what’s actually necessary to win. To succeed, we need to build a working-class alternative to the capitalist parties that dominate global politics, one that fights for all the oppressed as part of an international working-class struggle.

Unite the struggles

Working people can’t take these attacks lying down. The passage of the amendment in Hungary banning public LGBTQ events was met with an outpouring of protests, blocking highways and bridges. The stage is set for highly confrontational Pride events in defiance of the constitutional amendment.

Right-wing politicians around the world are facing similar protests over a wide range of issues. Neighboring Serbia is undergoing the biggest protests in the country’s history against the corrupt presidency of Trump ally Aleksandar Vučić. This was spurred by the collapse of a railway canopy. Meanwhile, Germany has seen protests against the anti-immigrant policies of the far-right AfD and the establishment parties who mimic them. And Turkey has seen millions take to the streets against president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on democratic rights.

It’s the working class moving into action, not the goodwill of capitalist politicians, that can bring about victories for LGBTQ people. In Sudan, previous legislation that instituted flogging and the death penalty as punishments for gay sex was repealed in 2020. That victory was a product of the revolutionary insurrection beginning the previous year that overthrew dictator Omar Al-Bashir. Sudan has faced serious setbacks in subsequent years but the legacy of the 2019 revolution shows what can be done.

LGBTQ rights are not a distraction from “the real issues”—an injury to one is an injury to all. The anti-LGBTQ legislation around the world is being used to attack the working class more generally. Stopping such legislation is in the interests of the whole working class.

This makes it vital that the labor movement takes up the fight for LGBTQ liberation. The power of labor was seen in the multiple general strikes organized against Milei’s “chainsaw massacre” in Argentina. The country has also seen demonstrations in the hundreds of thousands specifically taking on Milei’s attacks on LGBTQ people. Every politician who wants to wage similar attacks needs to be met with this scale of struggle.

A broad struggle for LGBTQ liberation, when linked up with the far-reaching demands of working people moving into struggle around the world, could shake the foundations of the capitalist system. It could do away with the imperialist war drive, the endemic corruption of capitalism, and oppressive gender norms. Oppression is rooted in capitalism, so we need to do away with it. We need socialism, and a world free of capitalists scapegoating the oppressed for the crises they created.