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Against Bad Arguments for Terrible Things

A Reply to John Rees

May 6, 2025

Even for a polemic, John Rees’s “Marx’s ontology: a clarification” is logically brittle and historically thin.1John Rees, “Marx’s ontology: a clarification,” Counterfire, April 24, 2025, https://www.counterfire.org/article/marxs-ontology-a-clarification/. It confuses biological capacities with social relations, ignores the complexity of scientific inquiry, and quietly excludes trans and intersex people while claiming universal liberation. The fifteen-point article does little more than restate populist orthodoxies into Marxist diction: labor and reproduction are timeless essences; women are treated poorly in society because childbirth makes them vulnerable; LGBTQI survival is a mere cultural tangent to women’s real material oppression; and anyone who disagrees with the author is a postmodern scourge. Rees’s comments come in response to the UK Supreme Court’s April 16 judgment that redefines woman as “someone born biologically female,” thereby stripping Gender Recognition Certificate holders of legal status and gutting trans rights overnight. Rees’s main point, which I would like to challenge, is that Marx supports the idea that Woman is an eternal biological category that must be preserved and defended. His second point, which I would also like to challenge, is that those who forcefully argue for trans inclusion in everyday life are disrupting more fundamental class solidarities that are necessary; therefore, if we are to…

No. Fuck this. I can’t do it. I can’t pretend that Rees’s regurgitated disconnected set of clichés is an authentic intellectual contribution that deserves a genteel, academic rebuttal. I can’t do it because I’m too tired from struggling to outlive the political violence Rees is apologizing for. I don’t have the energy or inclination to dress myself in the refined and detached tone he demands. I also can’t pretend that his article is an earnest philosophical endeavor that deserves debating, because the entire piece is little more than a rhetorical device—an attempt to posture as a measured intellectual who is merely “pointing out facts” and therefore doesn’t deserve to be taken to task for justifying state and populist violence against marginalized people. There’s an epidemic of this kind of tone-weaseling: “Just asking questions.” “Just making a few points.” Rees’s article is a polite-speak equivalent of the podcast bro’s’“facts don’t care about your feelings.” In this case, the so-called facts are weird interpretations of Marx and the so-called feelings are trans, intersex, and queer people’s ability to exist in public.

To be clear: Rees’s essay isn’t an argument. It’s just scattered sentences shaped like an argument. The question then becomes: how do you respond to an intellectual facade? Since one can’t rebut a facade, the only option is to remove it to see what it obscures. Time to grab the sledgehammer.

The Surface Complaint

Rees names his problem: Marx has a social theory of being that some believe can be abandoned. But who believes this? No data yet. Do we get a summation of their counterargument? We do not. Do we get links to articles making these claims? Nah. All we have to go on is the Fox-News-style insistence that “some people” are saying these things. Rees does, however, attempt to name what he imagines is Marx’s besieged ontology. For brevity’s sake, I will outline the main ideas:

  • Humans are formed naturally.
  • Humans are dependent on the natural world for survival.
  • Humans survive by laboring in their environments.
  • Humans are dependent on their biological capacities to reproduce other humans.
  • Marx says that we must start with the “actual physical nature of man” and “the natural conditions in which man finds himself.”2Rees, “Marx’s ontology.”

 

Marx was writing in the nineteenth century to promote science as an alternative to religious philosophy. It’s 2025. Who is Rees schooling here? What could those who disagree with him possibly be arguing? That we live inside the mind of God? That babies are produced like dolls, capitalistically, on assembly lines?

As for humans reproducing biologically, well, I’ll certainly concede that point: humans are not digital objects replicated via copy and paste. Humans—along with other mammals, amphibians, birds, insects, and starfish—reproduce via sperms and eggs. Sometimes a penis ejaculates into a vagina and reproduction begins. Sometimes turkey basters are involved. Sometimes embryos are frozen. Most of the time they reach viability in a uterus. Other times, blastocysts and embryos are intentionally or unintentionally expelled from a uterus. Currently, artificial gestation bags are being developed for animals, but not for humans. Also—just to clarify—humans DO NOT reproduce through parthenogenesis like aphids, water fleas, and Komodo dragons. Sorry to disappoint.

What does any of this have to do with trans people’s right to exist in public space? What does Marx pointing out that humans are dependent on biological reproduction necessarily entail for Rees? Maybe we just haven’t gotten to that part of the argument. But before we continue, let’s pause to name what Rees’s argument-shaped word flow appears to be: a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Based on medieval architecture, motte and bailey is a manipulative strategy where someone defends a controversial claim by shifting to a more easily defensible claim, and then insists that the more difficult claim has been proven, despite the fact that the difficult claim was never addressed. The above section was the motte: humans come from the natural world and reproduce biologically. Hard to disagree with that. But what is the bailey here? What is he asserting? Nothing yet. But we know he’s going to assert something, because he is here to defend Marx’s ontology against some people.

Wait, the Piece Is Called “Marx’s Ontology.” Where’s the Ontology?

Ontology is a branch of philosophy that seeks to analyze existence through categories in order to determine how reality works. Is the universe made of substances? Are attributes things that entities possess, fundamental aspects of their being, or relational phenomena? How do we assess particulars and universals, parts and wholes? Since Rees’s argument is a defense of Marx’s ontology, we would imagine that he would, at minimum, describe the elements or criteria of Marx’s ontology. But we don’t get anything like that. The closest we get is Rees saying Marx has “a social theory of being” that is under attack and must be defended. Descriptions of those attacks are not given, but we can reconstruct what they might be. For example, we might imagine that Rees would oppose a nonsocial theory of being: for example, that existence consists of eternal truths that transcend social, historical, and experiential fact; or a theory that rejects Marxian laws of change and transformation. When Marxists talk about social relations, we don’t tend to talk about eternal, timeless social relations. Instead, we tend to argue that existence is conditioned by material social relations, rather than inborn essences shaped by gods or immutable genetic code. One might expect the latter to be a good candidate for something that would raise a Marxist’s hackles. But nope. That’s exactly what Rees claims Marx’s ontology is: “Labour, and therefore the reproduction of labour, is a timeless, universal property of being human.”3Rees, “Marx’s ontology.”

There are Books on These Things, You Know…

In Rees’s last few bullet points, the enemy is finally named: subjectivists and postmodernists: “Against modern subjectivists and postmodernists, Marxists insist that women’s oppression is not only an ideology that can be abolished by criticism or transcended by personal choice. It is a social structure which shapes the lives of biological females in a way which it does not do to men.”4Rees, “Marx’s ontology.”

 

…solidarity means taking sides. If you’re a Zionist, you do not get to claim solidarity with Gaza. If you oppose abortion, you have not sided with feminism. If you’re a far-right Christian who loves gay people but “hates the sin,” you’re lying to yourself and everyone around you. If you write a muddled piece about the conceptual importance of “biological women” days after a ruling that erases trans people from public life, you don’t support trans liberation…

Had Rees read so much as a sentence of Marxist-feminist writing from anytime in the last two decades, he’d know that queer, trans, and feminist Marxist SRT thinkers have been saying exactly that: capital uses our biological capacities for its own purposes. In fact, it creates hardened social identities for us based on biological criteria useful only to it. It brutalizes intersex and trans bodies to maintain its illusion, while simultaneously brutalizing all women.

But instead of reading Marxist writings on the subject, Rees has chosen to quote some Engels and repeat the words natural, biological, and reproduction near Marx’s name repeatedly in order to suggest that “biological women” is an ahistorical ontological category denoting consistent human populations throughout history. But it’s not true because of biology, John. Sex development doesn’t always arrange the organs and cells of human babies into the neat dichotomy that is so precious to capital, TERFs, and other assorted bullies; there are more chromosomal configurations than XX and XY, gene variations and hormonal shifts affect chromosomal alignment as well as the placement and shape of genitals. And while capital profits from segregating humans into categories for discipline and efficiency, trans, intersex, and queer people participate in both the biological and social reproduction of the world. Antitrans reactionaries are attempting to fight traditional sexism (violence against women) by adopting oppositional sexism (violence against those whose existence shows that the world is not neatly partitioned into two sexes). Funny how the antitrans mob claims that they’re against identity politics. Insisting that the universe is and ought to be divided into stable, state-codifiable categories of people can only be a particularly violent form of identity politics.

The Naturalistic Fallacy and Its Consequences

If you’re going to take Marx’s comments about nature and reproduction out of context to tacitly support the repeal of laws allowing trans people to exist in public, why stop there? Why not bemoan how nonprocreative gays violate the fundamental natural laws of human society? Why not harp on childless cat ladies? Why not oppose abortion?

For those who may not be sympathetic to Rees’s claims but who find me uncharitable to his scattered sentences, please look to the meanness of his conclusion: “Those seeking to polarise debate on the left, or demonise their opponents, are not tribunes of the oppressed but sowers of discord. The violence of their rhetoric is in inverse proportion to their usefulness to the working-class movement.”5Rees, “Marx’s ontology,” emphasis added. Do you know who else is accused of polarizing debates, demonizing opponents, and sowing discord? Strikers, union organizers. And, um, uh, Marx himself. Solidarity is not built from telling your most endangered members to shut the fuck up. Solidarity is built on the principle of an injury to one is an injury to all.

Let me be blunt: Rees is attempting to shore up Marx for far-right pseudoscience days after UK courts deactivated trans people’s identification cards and outlawed trans people in public restrooms. If you can’t use public restrooms, you can’t hold a job. Which section of the working-class movement is it that thinks some workers shouldn’t be permitted to hold jobs? What “tribune of the oppressed” thinks trans people should be punished by having to choose between public erasure and public diarrhea? In some parts of the United States, violence has led trans and nonbinary people to put camping toilets in the back of their cars to stay safe. And let’s not pretend that these laws only harm trans people. A cis woman was fired from Walmart after being attacked for being too tall.6Dani Davis, “Walmart fires woman who reported anti-trans threats from man in bathroom,” Washington Post, March 27, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/03/27/walmart-fires-woman-trans-hate-bathroom/. Another woman was accosted by police while changing her tampon because someone thought she looked like a man.7Chris Wiggins, “Cis woman confronted by police officers in Arizona Walmart restroom for looking too masculine (exclusive),” yahoo!news, February 28, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/cis-woman-confronted-police-officers-115522988.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAC17dGSo_r9_BF3WtxJzZoXjX_0ghh4RWts9LXcxZTUY3kCKfujIREVyBJLsR0DJhB4BJ-Io2wz74fNa0pWN6a9VoUiW_4QL1sWzjy-zVDMjaByp4xDx9VhI8SdtrVKO3RCDKxrOTyQgYhjbIXpkaje_HYdP7-ls55VClj8cOzBt. Bathroom “transvestigators” are vigilantes on the hunt for masculine haircuts, bold and bright working-class Black femininity, anyone too tall, with a jawline too sharp, breasts too small, or a vulva too rounded. Are you waking up yet? Do you see what you’ve been standing for? Do you see who stands beside you? Tories. Fascists. J. K. Rowling literally smoking a cigar on a yacht bragging about how her scheme panned out. But at least you’ve owned the…*checks notes*…postmodernists.

Solidarity

Rees ends his piece with a surprising machination: “We are unequivocally for the liberation of women, trans people, and all other oppressed groups. But…”

In 2015, I wrote a book on Marxism, feminism, queer and trans politics called The Politics of Everybody.8Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Marxism, and Queer Theory at the Intersections: Revised Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2022 [2015]). I said then and still maintain that solidarity means taking sides. If you’re a Zionist, you do not get to claim solidarity with Gaza. If you oppose abortion, you have not sided with feminism. If you’re a far-right Christian who loves gay people but “hates the sin,” you’re lying to yourself and everyone around you. If you write a muddled piece about the conceptual importance of “biological women” days after a ruling that erases trans people from public life, you don’t support trans liberation—hell, you don’t even support trans survival. Claiming support while advocating destruction is not solidarity; it is self-serving manipulation. It is covert bullying. It is demanding, in dulcet tones, that oppressed people pat you on the back while you slit their throats.

If Marx were alive today, I have no doubt whose side he’d be on. Solidarity forever to those in the United Kingdom who have been and who will be harmed by this act of right-wing state violence.

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