Queer Politics and Class War

Dani Joslyn

April 22, 2025

Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement

by Joanna Wuest

University of Chicago Press

2023

On April 3, 2025, a day after crashing the global economy through the unilateral imposition of sweeping tariffs, Donald Trump declared April National Child Abuse Protection Month. The administration, whose head had spent much of his adult life as best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps the most famous child rapist of the century, declared “the sinister threat of gender ideology” the “most prevalent” form of child abuse in the nation.¹ He then promised to rid the nation of “transgenderism.” All children are, Trump declared, “perfect exactly the way God made you.”² And surely, God made none of them trans. What are we on the left to make of this proclamation? What is the relationship between capitalism and the fight against so-called “gender ideology”? And why would Trump insist that no one is born trans?

Joanna Wuests’s 2023 Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement gets us quite a ways toward answering these questions. Wuest’s work explores the over seventy-year-long history of the idea that there is something biologically hard-wired that makes us gay or trans. This hypothesis, the author compellingly demonstrates, became a vital tool of class warfare which a well-capitalized, educated elite of “donor-dependent nonprofits, civil rights litigation groups, and well-intentioned self-styled radicals” used to define themselves as the leaders of an ostensibly unified LGBTQ community.³ This elite then steered that community towards particularistic reforms that have repeatedly failed to address, and have even exacerbated, economic inequality.⁴ Born This Way thus offers a uniquely powerful and interesting answer to the questions why and how queer politics became so central to what Nancy Fraser has aptly termed “progressive neoliberalism.”⁵ Wuests’s work is a brilliant and important contribution to queer history and the history of science.

Wuest’s work, however, also represents an ascendent discourse on the social-democratic left that both misunderstands the cause and remedy for fascist attacks on queer life. This way of thinking and organizing views attacks on trans people not as political economic forms of violence in and of themselves (à la Trump’s promise that by banning transgenderism, he will restore the happiness of traditional “parents and families”), but rather as cultural “masks” for unpopular economic agendas.⁶ Thus, Wuest rejects many of the foundational critiques offered by queer and social reproduction theory, turning instead to the writings of her mentor Adolph Reed to “expose the class character of identitarianism.”⁷This idea represents a troubling convergence between the social democrats around Jacobin magazine and the right wing of the Democratic Party. Much like Republicans, both blame the ostensibly outsized power of nonprofits and social movements for the electoral failures of the Democratic Party. This left-wing antiwoke interpretation of queer history has real implications, leading, for example, Wuest to set up an ahistorical and unproductive conflict between trade unions and social movements. Worse still, in a moment when social movements’ rights to free speech and assembly are under unprecedented attack, Wuest’s stance leads to rejecting social movements as useful organizing vehicles out of hand.

The Rise of “Born This Way”

Across the twentieth century, different people posited an array of explanations for the emergence and development of homosexuality and transsexuality. Psychoanalysts blamed bad childhoods. Marxist-Leninists sometimes saw queer people as an oppressed nation. Marxian historians preferred to understand the categories as contingent outgrowths of modernity.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, Wuest shows, that “major shifts in political economy and social relations” pushed an increasingly “professionalize[d]” world of gay and lesbian nonprofits to first develop and then wholesale adopt “born this way” framings.⁸ Deindustrialization accompanied a “bipartisan reemphasis on the family and the sacred place of the private sphere,” while neoliberals and neoconservatives united in fearmongering over the ostensible threats posted by social welfare policies to “traditional values and ways of life.”⁹ Within this context, the notion that sexual attraction was an immutable factor of life, baked into one’s genome, allowed nonprofits and policymakers to argue that gay and lesbian people were a protected category, who could be assimilated into “traditional” formations of social reproduction.

In the 1990s, “born this way” ideology reached an apogee, “grounding gay and lesbian personhood in a nonthreatening logic, rendering queer couples as assimilable rather than a menace.”¹⁰ During the decade, nonprofits definitively shifted from queerness as a set of practices and way of life to an in-built “orientation.”¹¹ To its advocates, “born this way” thinking proved that queer people were perfectly compatible with capitalism and just needed to be accommodated into the marketplace and public sphere. Yet, as Wuest readily acknowledges, “born this way” did serve an important function, providing at least one class of queer people a means of claiming recognition and taking positions in both the public and private sphere.

As Wuest points out, however, this scientism had many oppressive implications. From the right, the search for a biological basis for queerness has often led to the reinscription of precisely the harmful stereotypes it promised to remedy. Thus, Michael Bailey, the scientist who “discovered” the biological basis of homosexuality in the 1990s, has recently made a name for himself by ostensibly discovering a biological basis for queer people’s disproportionate mental health struggles (thereby helping revive, as Wuest puts it, “one of sexology’s most odious myths”).¹²

The Political Economy of Queerness

More importantly, Wuest contends that “born this way” ideology underwrites dead-end left wing identity politics. Thus, in an article drawn from the second chapter of this work, she indicts the whole New Left and its theorists as having “fundamentally misunderstood” and overestimated “the anti-capitalist potential” of movements advocating for the remaking of sex, gender, and sexuality.¹³ In parallel with the editorial line of the magazines Jacobin and Catalyst, Wuest contends that New Leftists (and queer liberationists in particular) mistakenly took “capitalism and patriarchy to be tightly bound together” and thus failed to realize that “a capitalist political order appears neither to require nor generate an unwavering mandate for heterosexuality or gender normativity.”¹⁴ Instead, Wuest follows John D’Emilio in understanding homosexual identity as emerging as an outgrowth of the “progressive tendencies” of capitalism.¹⁵ A relaxing of restraints on individuals, together with mass migration into cities and the decreasing power of traditional family structures, led to the emergence of urban “homosexual” communities for the first time in human history.

We must remember, especially in a moment of increased repression, that there was never as clear-cut a line or singular a conflict between social movements and trade unions as Wuest (and her compatriots) would have us believe.

Yet, as numerous scholars have argued (including in edited collections to which Wuest has contributed), the development of capitalism was at best selectively progressive, yoking the development of some queer subcultures to the eradication of large swaths of nonheterosexual, noncisnormative lifeways, particularly among colonized people.¹⁶ After the Civil War, just as homosexuality became an increasingly available identity marker for urbanites, the state poured money into eradicating indigenous kinship structures and imposing monogamous heterosexuality on the grounds that this was the one path to civilization.¹⁷

Similarly, in recent years, the cauterizing of the categories of “transgender” and “transsexual” occurred in spaces dominated by disproportionately white petite-bourgeois middle-aged (trans) women.¹⁸ These people overwhelmingly defined themselves in often explicitly racist terms against the “uncertainty” (to borrow Wuest’s term) of gendered embodiment represented by “fairies” and “queens” who often saw themselves as gay men who lived as women, and who, like Marsha P. Johnson, were disproportionately Black and brown urbanites.¹⁹ The erasure of these alternative formations of noncisness, as Dean Spade has pointed out, helped lead liberal transgender politics to demand little more than “legal recognition and inclusion” instead of the fundamental remaking of political economy.²⁰

Her conception of capitalism as not, at base, particularly oppressive of queer (and, we could say, nonwhite) people leads Wuest to impugn all queer political organizing over the past half century and reject the dominant queer materialist interpretation of neoliberal capitalism. Just as Adolph Reed has denounced parallel movements claiming to speak for Black people, Wuest holds queer movements at least partially responsible for the death of labor’s power. As she argues, “rising rates of gay civil rights and social tolerance have been, for half a century now, essentially the inverse of rates of economic equality and labor power.”²¹ Social movements and their organizations, she tells us, are “not only ideologically averse to a labor-centric approach with the requisite leverage to achieve public goods reforms…but they have also evolved in the neoliberal era as dependent upon wealthy individual and corporate donors which actively thwart such aims.”²²

These positions further lead Wuest to rejecting a world of queer materialist scholarship—the very world within which Born This Way would seem to be located. Wuest denounces the interpretive frame of “homonormativity,” a term coined by Lisa Duggan to delineate queer organizations’ abandonment of progressive politics and 1990s turn towards vast privatization, ultimately prioritizing campaigns for gay marriage over universal public goods.²³ According to Wuest, “The homonormative distinction falsely casts the racial character of the late twentieth-century gay gene discourse as endemic, rather than a reflection of the class composition of the advocacy movement’s wealthiest, most politically powerful leaders and donors of that moment.”²⁴

This is a reductive, bad-faith argument.²⁵ Lisa Duggan says nothing about race in her piece coining the term, focusing instead on right-wing abrogations of “broad democratic” (or in Wuest’s words, “universalistic”) queer politics. More recent works that do discuss race view it as both constituted by and a constitutive element of class and capital relations. Thus, Myrl Beam in Gay Inc., a work with a very similar goal of critically interrogating donor-dependent nonprofits’ failures to take transformative political positions, holds that nonprofits are forced to make queer homeless people seem deserving and exceptional, when, of course, “racialized poverty, not homophobia, is the root cause of homelessness, including queer youth homelessness.”²⁶ Beam, like Wuest, points out that following the money shows us the limitations of a particular organization’s politics.²⁷ It is peculiar, then, that Wuest makes no attempt to engage or respond to contrary and, by now, well-developed paths for thinking through her own central problematic.

Wuest’s Social Democratic Reductionism

Wuest’s theoretical commitments lead her to an idealistic misreading of the power of trade unions. Instead of framing social movements and traditional vehicles for mobilizing the working class as potential allies, she posits them as inherently opposed, and sides with the latter over the former. This position is not even supported by the example that she cites, namely, the struggle against the 1978 Briggs Initiative banning lesbian and gay people from teaching in public schools. Far from a trade union specific action, “self-styled radicals” and professional organizers as Harvey Milk, David Benjamin Mixner, and Torie Osborn were in fact central to the No On Six campaign.²⁸

To be fair, there are many examples of social movements undermining labor organizing. In fact, Clement Petitjean and Erik Baker have both pointed out how community organizers often worked to privatize public works projects and undermined unions through promises of toothless class harmony.²⁹ Yet, we must remember, especially in a moment of increased repression, that there was never as clear-cut a line or singular a conflict between social movements and trade unions as Wuest (and her compatriots) would have us believe. Nonetheless, Wuest insists on portraying trade unions as the only path towards universal goods, idealistically looking past these institutions’ own (often legally enshrined and structural) shortcomings.

By the end of the work, she seems to have fallen into a parallel social-democratic reductionism, one which punches left, conflating social movements with nonprofit advocacy groups, and dismissing all of these, against the historical record and ongoing live possibilities, as little more than vehicles for woke capture.

Across the past two centuries, trade unions played central roles in arbitrating the class compromise that gave us the nuclear-familycentric “straight state” and in supporting Chinese exclusion and hierarchies of skilled and unskilled labor. Within unions, undemocratic hierarchies can incentivize sexual abuse, while most feminized laborers, due often to the concessions of twentieth-century social democrats, lack any union protections at all. The solution is not to pit social movements (often plagued with parallel issues) against unions, or to advocate for a secret third thing as the only path to liberation, but to recognize that unions, just like any other institution, must be won over to principled anticapitalism through democratic organizing. Often, as is the case in the contemporary struggle of Labor for Palestine, this organizing has and can occur in coalition with or even sometimes follow the lead of social movements.

At the same time, many radical queer groups of the type that Wuest dismisses have, for decades, shared her vision of a social-democratic America in which public goods including “single-payer healthcare with trans healthcare coverage and public housing with built-in anti-discrimination principles” are available to all.³⁰ ACT UP, the largest and most vocal queer outgrowth of 1970s struggles for queer liberation, has for at least twenty years advocated for universal public healthcare, often cultivating close ties to the labor movement.³¹ Radical groups like ACT UP and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, for example, were central to a coalition, alongside tenant unions that won the redefinition of New York City’s rental laws to allow people beyond the nuclear family to inherit apartments – a universalistic social democratic win extracted in the midst of neoliberal fiscal panic and austerity.³²

Queer social movements, in other words, have long opposed neoliberalism and called for the universalistic “politics of redistribution, social welfare policies, and a systemic shift of power away from capital” that Wuest applauds.³³ In fact, the last major presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate before Bernie Sanders to make the case for universal public goods in the face of disinvestment was Jesse Jackson, whose “rainbow coalition” successfully organized labor, civil rights, feminist, and queer movements under the banner of social democracy.

In the introduction to Born This Way, Wuest denounces “paranoid left-wing” misreadings of “bio-tinged ideologies” as “distractions” from other nefarious dealings “or the products of sheer conspiratorial machinations.”³⁴ Yet, by the end of the work, she seems to have fallen into a parallel social-democratic reductionism, one which punches left, conflating social movements with nonprofit advocacy groups, and dismissing all of these, against the historical record and ongoing live possibilities, as little more than vehicles for woke capture.³⁵

Surely the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class. While Black and queer civil rights movements bear some of the blame, the problem, ultimately, are capitalists: their stranglehold over liberal democracy, their successful gutting of welfare states around the world in the past half century, and their shrewd obliteration of labor’s power at the same time. A left open to queer struggle and liberation can agree with Wuest this far.

Wuest’s work can also help us understand Trump’s National Child Abuse Prevention Month statement, to an extent. Clearly, Trump seeks to reject the “born this way” narrative, while deflecting from the economic collapse he is single-handedly causing. Yet, he is doing so by selling a promise of a particular organization of sex and social reproduction, a return to a fantasy of the racially segregated and gender conforming suburbs of the 1950s. For contemporary fascists, the eradication of transgender people, the abolition of abortion, and the outlawing of gay marriage (all of which are relatively unpopular policies), are central components of their promise of restoring an ostensibly lost, ostensibly harmonious political and economic order. Put another way, we must recognize the contradiction that while capitalism absolutely can successfully integrate (at least some) queer ways of being, the global right wing is increasingly defining itself by the belief that it cannot.

As a meditation on contemporary politics and a reflection of broader trends on the social-democratic left, then, Joanna Wuest’s Born this Way is at turns brilliant and frustrating. It is an accessible, compelling history of science and capitalism that at the same time rests on an ungenerous dismissal of social movements and an idealistic conception of the liberating potential of capital’s infinite malleability on one side and unions in some way opposed to it on the other. Its dismissal of social movements feels particularly ill-timed in a world where groups like ACT UP sit on the frontline of coalitions demanding universal medical care while fighting for the rights of trans children. Yet, for all of its ideological shortcomings, Wuest’s work is an important reminder of the dangerous allure and ultimately reactionary nature of scientism amidst a deluge of disinvestment and hate.

To move beyond the dangerous ideological shortcomings of both Wuest’s work and our own moment, radicals today need to reject false dichotomies and build fighting institutions at the contradictions of capital wherever they manifest. Recognizing social reproduction as a vital site of class struggle also means understanding the organization of gender and sexuality as fundamental to the organization of political economy. It is absurd in a country where the left is as disempowered and the working class as pacified as the United States, to claim one tool as the only path to power. To defend queer proletarian lifea—as all proletarian life—we need to build close alliances between unions and social movements that push both towards becoming powerful weapons of class struggle.³⁶ We need rank-and-file unions, we need mutual aid, we need fighting tenant unions, and we need anti-imperialist, antiracist, climate justice, indigenous, feminist, and queer social movements. In short, to win the world, we need everyone.

Anti-capitalism, LGBTQ Liberation, Queer politics, Science, Social Movements, Strategy, USA

Dani Joslyn

Dani Joslyn is a historian of sex and social movements. They recently received their PhD in History from NYU, where their dissertation, “Social Reform and the Orgasm in the Long Nineteenth Century,” explores nineteenth-century abolitionists’, feminists’, anarchists’, and socialists’ surprisingly influential efforts to remake the act of sex. Their writings have appeared in the Encyclopedia of the American Left, the Revealer, and Religion Dispatches. You can find them on Instagram and Bluesky at @fvckinghistory.

Queer Politics and Class War

Dani Joslyn

The Rise of “Born This Way”

The Political Economy of Queerness

Wuest’s Social Democratic Reductionism

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