October 27, 2026
In defence of the trans civil rights struggle and revolutionary feminism
Melbourne Radical Women statement
“The Woman Question is a decisive issue in the unfolding international revolution, because the exploitation of women has created a specially oppressed sex whose potential for revolt and capacity for leadership are second to none.”
The Radical Women Manifesto
In June 2026, Melbourne Radical Women (RW) was invited by Communist Unity (CU) to speak at its Talking Reds forum, “Liberalism or Liberation? Which Way Forward for the Transgender Movement.” We welcomed this opportunity to talk alongside Trans Feminists Unite! (TFU!) and CU about a struggle so pivotal to all women’s liberation. But the discussion turned into a barrage of political smears from CU, which we answer in this document.
Cast of characters
Trans Feminists Unite! is a recently formed, dynamic, autonomous group of young trans Marxist feminists. It was represented by Indigo.
Communist Unity originated from the May 2026 merger of the Spartacist League of Australia and the Revolutionary Communist Organisation. CU’s aim is to grow into a broad communist party of many socialist tendencies. Its speaker was Mila Volkova, a trans woman.
Radical Women is an autonomous socialist feminist organisation of cis- and trans-women and non-binary folks. It has been organising in Melbourne since 1983 and is affiliated with the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP). Melbourne RW organiser Debbie Brennan spoke for that group. (Brennan’s talk is available here.).
What could have been a respectful and productive exchange over important political differences ended up with a harangue by Communist Unity directed at RW and our sister organisation, Freedom Socialist Party. Volkova persistently referred to RW as “FSP” and attacked Brennan’s key political points. She ended by challenging both TFU! and RW to dissolve our organisations and join CU as factions if we’re to be taken seriously within the Left.
Volkova then continued the attack in the pages of CU’s online publication, Partisan. Denied equal time in their publication, this is Radical Women’s answer.
In praise of activism
At Talking Reds, RW speaker Brennan described the trans movement’s inspiring and militant tenacity, so stunningly displayed on Melbourne’s Trans Day of Visibility in 2023. Five thousand trans, unionist, feminist, First Nations, queer and multi-racial people came out to show the touring British TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) Posie Parker and her Nazi friends that they were united and angry. Brennan called this “an inspiring start to building a powerful force” for trans liberation, which tightly binds everyone’s liberation together.
By contrast, Volkova, despite being a trans woman, dismissed the whole LGBTIQ movement for civil rights as “queer liberalism.” Fighting for equal access to the rights of “citizenship conforms to the interests of the capitalists,” she asserted. This extreme ultraleft view is essentially a rejection of all struggles for human rights. Everything has to wait until after the revolution. Such an arrogant repudiation of the fight for equality has alienated many potential revolutionaries from the Left. By restraining the fight against bigotry, this position upholds transphobia, even when mouthed by a trans person.
Volkova dismissed Brennan’s enthusiasm about the 2023 protest as “self-congratulatory.” The high numbers that turned out “is of no concern to me,” she said. “The working class demands results.” Apparently, nothing short of full-blown revolution matters, and certainly not the tenacious struggles that build the forces of collective action.
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky taught that every groundswell of resistance matters. Depending on conditions and timing, a pulsing ember can erupt into a raging fire, as it did in 1917 Russia. To bring protest to the next step requires leadership with revolutionary vision, not one that drenches the impulse to resist.
Support independent organising by the oppressed
Volkova slanders autonomous organising as “identity politics” — a single-issue orientation to one’s own community that ignores internal class differences. It is true that some groups that organise exclusively around a specific oppression may reject any connection with other oppressed peoples or workers. An example are the radical feminists, who vilify trans people and blame men, not capitalism, for women’s oppression. Other identity-based groups are little more than social or cultural clubs.
But not every group that brings people together around the experience of shared oppression has these politics – for example, Radical Women and TFU!
Autonomous groups exist to defend their communities and make their voices and needs heard in the broader movements. They help people confront internalised oppression and become self-confident leaders. Many groups of oppressed people understand that all oppressions are interconnected. They are conscious of their super-exploitation as workers, and solidarise with all liberation struggles. This in no way equates to identity politics. Quite the opposite.
RW and TFU! are Marxist feminist, class-conscious, leadership-building organisations of specially oppressed people. To accuse us of identity politics is deeply sexist and transphobic, and would be racist when applied to independent organisations of people of colour.
Compelled to be leaders
Volkova slams RW’s belief that leadership comes from society’s most oppressed, calling it a “fetish.” She claims that by pushing this concept, RW (which she obstinately misnames as “FSP”) is relegated to being “a separate organisation from the rest of the socialist movement.” It’s true that many straight, white male socialists still have trouble with the idea, but we don’t change our ideas to become popular with sexists.
A supposed Marxist, Volkova boosts her claim with an assertion that is the antithesis of Marxism: “Leading cadres of almost all revolutionary struggles in the history of capitalism have not been the most oppressed, but downwardly mobile petty bourgeois.”
Does she believe in the Great Man theory of history, rather than recognising class struggle as the motor force in history? The facts on the ground overwhelmingly refute her. For example, in his history of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky paid tribute to the striking women textile workers on International Women’s Day 1917, who ignited the world’s first socialist revolution:
Thus the fact is that the February revolution was begun from below … the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat [emphasis added]— the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives. The overgrown breadlines had provided the last stimulus.
Trotsky’s conclusion: look to the woman worker.
In the genocidal settler state of Australia, First Nations women are the most oppressed of the oppressed. They are the largest, and growing, imprisoned population in the country. Eighty-percent of the prisoners are mothers. Not surprisingly, they are their people’s frontline defence. They are unrelenting leaders in the fights to stop deaths in custody and to prevent child removals from their communities. They are fearless in First People’s unwavering assertion of sovereignty and enduring survival, which threaten capitalism’s very core.
This leadership, steeled by the hard everyday conditions of life, inspires resistance, here and across the world. Women — including First Nations, refugee, unionist, trans, queer, young, homeless, disabled, Afghan, Palestinian, Iranian, Sudanese, Kurdish, Syrian, African American, and more — are challenging patriarchal capitalist power. With nothing to lose and everything to win from fighting for liberation, they break down divisions among the oppressed. And they lift everyone.
United front for working-class defence
Brennan’s speech raised the united front as a movement-building strategy. She characterised the united front as “a collection of divergent organisations coming together around a common goal,” such as fighting for trans liberation or defeating fascists. Essential to its success are principles of agreement, democratic decision-making, and collective accountability for carrying out decisions. While socialists have a critical role, the united front can’t comprise only the Left; it must be open to all targets of attack. This would include reformist organisations, but the united front must be working-class led. Union involvement is key — spearheaded by members when officials drag their feet — because unions are where workers organise as a class. Not all participants need to identify as socialists, but a democratic united front is a school for revolutionary ideas.
History taught us this. So did Radical Women’s decades of working in united fronts with organisations of different political stripes, organising against recurring fascist threats or fighting for reproductive rights. We learned that democratic, respectful debate is crucial to resolving differences, and commonly agreed principles are necessary to maintaining unity.
Not so, says Volkova. She claims that “single-issue united front campaign groups” — defining RW this way — reduce the terms of unity to “the lowest common denominator” and engage only to recruit. She goes on: they “avoid serious political disagreement,” because this “brings the risk of being proven wrong and embarrassed in front of potential recruits.”
CU knows not of what it speaks. Its predecessors in the Spartacists and Revolutionary Communist Organisation do not have RW’s decades’ experience of building anti-fascist united fronts, along with our sister organisation the Freedom Socialist Party. These experiences were informed by the analysis of Trotsky and his Marxist contemporaries who were deeply involved in the struggle against fascism.
It is hard to visualise CU participating in a united front because of its deep sectarianism. This is defined as “a narrow or intolerant adherence to one’s own opinions, prejudices, or a specific sect, denomination, party, or school of thought… characterised by exclusive or narrow-minded attachment to a particular group … an ‘us vs. them’ mentality that can prevent cooperation and understanding between different groups.” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/sectarianism)
Communist Unity’s sectarianism is exposed in its vision of “unity,” which requires all socialist organisations to disappear into CU. Each organisation would then invest its whole being into political debates within that enclosed milieu. We decline.
Such an inward existence would disconnect an organisation from the working class, the only class, as Marxists know, that is capable of overthrowing capitalism. By contrast, working in a democratic united front allows participants to weigh the effectiveness of each other’s ideas in the context of work on the key issues of the day.
Answering the “woman question”
What is the source of women’s, trans and queer people’s oppression? CU says accurately that it’s the patriarchal nuclear family and that this is the bedrock of capitalism’s survival. But CU objects to well-documented insights into the social structure that existed before the introduction of private property.
In RW’s presentation at Talking Reds, Brennan said that prior to the rule of property, all means of survival were socialised and organised collectively. Gender roles were very different from today’s. In matriarchal communism, there was no reason or basis for controlling people’s gender or sexual identity. There were no opposing classes. Female and male labour had equal value in providing for everyone’s needs and ensuring society’s survival. Because of their capacity to reproduce society, both biologically and socially, women were respected leaders, not domestic workhorses. Ultimately, women were subjugated by the victory of private property and the rule of the wealthy.
Knowing this history is crucial to visualising humanity’s liberation and the kind of society we can make. It means understanding that women’s liberation is fundamental to a socialist future.
To this day, many indigenous cultures still hold legacies of this common past in their respect for women and resistance to genocide and dispossession — from Kurdish women of Western Asia to First Nations of this continent.
This vital historical analysis and contemporary evidence of women’s social leadership is not “romanticising,” as Volkova claims.
To answer the age-old question of “what do women want?,” a minimum reply is respect and recognition of personhood. Volkova seems incapable of providing this. From beginning to end of this debate, she has stubbornly refused to recognise Radical Women as an organisation independent from the Freedom Socialist Party. Her vitriolic online article in Partisan was titled, “Does the FSP[!] have a right to defend itself?” In it, she continues to speak past RW to FSP, arguing that the party established RW as an FSP front ((a manipulated political appendage). Her proof? RW’s representatives to the Talking Reds forum were also members of the FSP! As if a woman cannot choose to be a member of two revolutionary feminist organisations, as some RW members do. And vice versa.
Radical Women is a microcosm of the working class, spanning generations, races and ethnicities, abilities, sexualities, occupations, life experiences and circumstances. What binds us together is RW’s revolutionary feminist program, which reflects the hopes and experiences that radicalised us.
RW is a mass organisation of women and non-binary people with the goal of being a revolutionary voice in the feminist movement and a feminist voice on the Left. FSP is a political party open to all genders. Each has its own leadership and infrastructure and respects the other’s autonomy. Because we share a socialist feminist program, we describe ourselves as “sister organisations.” Neither is a front for the other. In our history of nearly 60 years, the relationship has been a mutually beneficial collaboration.
Keep on marching forward
These ideas form the essence of RW’s optimistic socialist feminism. We hope to connect with revolutionary feminists across Australia, the US and around the world, so that we can learn from each other and unite in a common, urgent task of bringing down the corrupt and brutal capitalist system. We have a world to win!