‘We transsexuals … confuse ourselves and other people by trying to adopt a false identity, and pretending that we are real women’. These were the words of Rachael Webb (1940–2009) to the journalist Liz Hodgkinson in 1987. Trans people, Webb argued, should instead agree with Janice Raymond, author of infamous anti-trans manifesto The Transsexual Empire (1979), ‘when she writes that we are not women’.
With quotes like these, one needn’t reach far to explain why Webb, a prominent trans Marxist from the 1980s to the 2000s and an advocate of class-based coalition-building between trans people and other downtrodden groups, is seldom celebrated today, even by other trans Marxists. However, as we navigate the worst anti-trans backlash in recent memory and a barrage of legal setbacks, it would be a contemptible waste to dismiss her entirely. With the conditions that made trans law reform possible in the 2000s lying in tatters, the ‘radicals’ and outsiders of old gain new significance as guides to the paths not taken.
Born in 1940 and raised as a boy in working-class London, Webb cut her teeth reading Marx and Engels and spent her youth frequenting Soho gay clubs, partaking in drugs and sex, talking philosophy, and protesting with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Through all this, she carried a deep discomfort with her body. ‘I remember playing with a friend [when I was six] and getting the overwhelming desire that my body was wrong’, she told the Eastern Daily Press in 1986. ‘Thinking about the prejudice I would meet [if I talked about it], I would do anything rather than face up to who I was’. Hence, she pushed on as a man, marrying twice and having five children in Norfolk, until finally committing to hormone therapy under Dr James Randell at Charing Cross in 1978. She began presenting full-time as a woman in 1982, moved back to London, and had a vaginoplasty in 1983.
Class solidarity is the key to Webb’s entire system of thought. As a lorry driver, she helped organise the national haulage strike in Britain during the Winter of Discontent, a prolonged period of labour unrest and economic disruption in 1978-9. She then led a successful campaign as secretary for the King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Trades Council to establish a centre for unemployed workers. The council president hailed her as a paragon of ‘the three main virtues of trade unionists – honesty, dedication and hard work’. In 1980, she joined the picket lines at King’s Lynn Docks during the national steel strike.
Once back in the capital, Webb joined the Self-Help Association for Transsexuals (SHAFT) and Militant Tendency, a Marxist-Trotskyist group with a foothold in the Labour Party. Both memberships ended poorly. She criticised SHAFT’s respectable image and argued that trans people should work ‘within the traditional organisations of the working class and not outside them’. Eventually, she claimed, SHAFT ‘expelled [her] for [her] left wing feminist views’. Meanwhile, rankling at Militant’s ‘right-wing policies on issues such as the position of blacks within the Labour Party, feminism, and gays’, she was expelled in 1983. She nevertheless won election as a left-wing Labour councillor in Lambeth’s Ferndale ward in May 1986 and pushed for better access to housing and work for Black, disabled, and gay people. The British National Party accused her of being anti-white and called her ‘he/she/it’ and ‘half man, half-woman’, while the Evening Standard attacked her for funding her 1983 surgery with £2,000 in loans from the London Tenants’ Organisation, a public body.
Exhausted, Webb retired from electoral politics in 1994, moved to Brighton, and returned to lorry driving. She again dedicated herself to union organising in the Transport & General Workers’ Union (T&GWU) and was secretary of the Sussex T&GWU. In 2004, she helped organise a memorial for a Shoreham dockworker killed by heavy machinery, and in 2006 she forced the Folkestone harbourmaster to install ladies’ loos for HGV drivers. I mention these things to emphasise that Webb possessed a depth of experience pursuing workers’ causes and achieving real, tangible advances via trade unions. This is a vital preface to her class-oriented approach to trans politics.
At first, in the early 1980s, Webb’s activism was largely in line with ‘mainstream’ trans advocacy groups like SHAFT and the Beaumont Society. She argued in 1982that the ‘restrictions on alterations to birth certificates provided one of the biggest problems for those changing sex’, stopping them from blending back into society, so she hoped for a legal solution to remedy this problem. However, when she moved to London and started attending radical feminist meetings, she found that most women in these spaces refused to see her as anything but a man masquerading as a woman. She ultimately accepted Janice Raymond’s argument: that transsexuals are patriarchal intruders into womanhood who reinforce traditional gender roles. Webb stopped claiming to be a woman and instead adopted Raymond’s label, ‘male-to-constructed-female’. This coloured her perspective on trans people’s place in the world for much of the 1980s and 1990s, though it was never the be-all and end-all of her politics.
At this point, we could run through a long list of Webb’s statements which read as standard anti-trans invective – calling trans identity a ‘fantasy’ and a ‘lie’, for example – but it is more revealing to explore her three core political prescriptions. First, she wanted trans activists to join with other social justice causes like gay rights, anti-racism, and feminism. As she put it in 1996: ‘There is not one single demand made by transsexuals and our supporters which would not be better dealt with by fighting for equal rights generally and by fighting against sexism’. Her belief in the connection between anti-racism and trans freedom, she claimed, proved particularly unpopular, receiving a ‘generally racist reaction’ and causing her to ponder why the trans community was ‘in such a reactionary backwater’.
Second, trans activism should be directed through working-class organs, especially trade unions, to form a united front against a dying capitalist system. ‘At some point in the near future’, she said,‘there must be a revolutionary change so that the means of production will be owned by the community rather than by a small number of people’. Since the new world was coming, hitching one’s wagons to the old world by trying to gain the capitalist state’s acceptance for trans people was pointless.
Third, trans people should stop living in a ‘twilight world’ – trying to pass as ‘real’ men or women – because this means fearing exposure and conforming to ‘iniquitous’ (that is, immoral) misogynistic beliefs. In Liz Hodgkinson’s words summarising Webb’s views, ‘transsexuals should never play down what they are, any more than a black or gay person should pretend to be, respectively, white or straight’, for only with this transparency would society ‘accept the uniqueness of the transsexual experience and make it meaningful’. Webb is here circling the same waters as one of the founders of transfeminism, Sandy Stone, whose influential ‘Posttranssexual Manifesto’ (1987) demanded that instead of trying to ‘pass’, trans people should ‘rearticulate their lives … as a political action’ aimed at undermining the very norms that make ‘passing’ feel important. In different ways, then, Webb and Stone both advised letting go of the drive to be ‘normal’.
Of course, the difficulty is that positioning oneself so far outside the norm can be extremely draining, and sometimes we prefer to live without the weight of that expectation. At some point, Webb recognised this, because once she was out of the pressure-cooker of London radical feminism, her rhetoric softened and she ceased to perform the role of the piously repentant transsexual. In a newspaper profile celebrating women HGV drivers in 2006, Webb said nothing about being trans and subtly implied that she was a cis woman. She said: ‘When I first started [trucking], I thought no one would employ me because I’m a woman so I bought my own lorry’. She was trucking for 15 years before coming out, so this story is, to put it mildly, a truncation of the truth. It is curious to see that after years of lambasting trans people for wanting to be regarded simply as men or women, here she was, enjoying the protection of the ‘twilight world’ so that she could talk about her passions without having to preface everything with an explanation of her transness.
Webb ended her own life in January 2009. In the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, I found a suicide note that she sent to the researcher Richard Ekins, though I did not take any pictures or notes. It felt wrong, somehow, to violate that confidence, even though Ekins placed it in an archive folder. That kind of blind-siding rawness is rare, but when it finds me I am snapped violently out of the abstractions of ‘scholarship’ and back to the reality of what bigotry does to our world. What it is doing right now.
Webb’s activism raises difficult questions about coalition-building in what we tend to call ‘social justice’ causes. Her words, forthright to the point of intemperance, often make her difficult to like, especially in the context of today’s coordinated anti-trans moral panic. How much disagreement is tolerable within a coalition? Are some people simply too out there to be considered allies? These are ultimately subjective issues, but there is much in Webb’s approach that is worth recovering, most of all her ruthless focus on big structural problems like wealth inequality, housing insecurity, and the erosion of collective bargaining rights. Her single-minded emphasis on class still feels cogent today, as ultra-wealthy companies dance merrily on the grave of the social contract that once promised a decent life in exchange for labour. However, we should remember that one can think about the bigger picture and fight for practical reforms like anti-discrimination laws and improved access to gender-related medical care at the same time. AsNew York trans Marxist Leslie Feinberg argued in their book Transgender Warriors (1996), dreaming of the end of capitalism is all well and good, but ‘trans people need basic civil rights, and we need them right now’.
For all the fire in her belly, Webb knew that any effective movement is formed from many disparate parties coming together, and that the perfect ally does not exist. As she wrote in an email to her friend and fellow trans activist Fiona Fox: ‘I agree with you on a lot of points and disagree with you on some, but on the important issues we are totally together and have everything to gain and nothing to lose by organising together’.