The Union of Workers Welcomes Author Michael Zimmerman for a Second Time

My Daughter Exists: A Post Mortem

Article by Michael Zimmerman
Edited by David Rowlands

I recently lost a friend, one with whom I served in the military. To me he was “Doc,” and he was like a brother to me. We deployed together to Iraq, with Doc serving as the company medic. I suffered from delusions of bourgeois ideology and so did he, in his case as an anarchist and vegetarian. Even then, I perceived a wide gap in terms of ideological positions; none of this, however, prevented us from becoming good, trusting, and loving friends.

When we returned from Iraq, he entered a turbulent domestic situation which made his soldiering impossible, and his inability to focus on his duties earned him the wrath of the officers. He was tormented over questions concerning his mental health, and was made the object of ridicule at every turn, as he was publicly shamed in the company meetings. I could tell this was coming to a head when we passed each other in the hall one day and he was crying. I hugged him and assured him that I would try to help in any way I could.

He was placed on suicide watch, and we would talk about his situation until the morning hours. Breakfast for him was a smoothie with raw eggs. “Only 1 in 20,000 eggs has salmonella, so what do I have to worry about?”, he would joke. For a young man who was made miserable by every social relation he had and who was reduced to an overnight watch for fear that some big-shot would have to explain why one of their soldiers killed themselves, I considered his ability to laugh to be a positive sign.

Doc on the eve of deployment showing me his unexpected medic gear: tampons for ready-made emergency bullet wound packing. Facial edit for privacy considerations.

His contract with the Army was terminated and he moved on to other things. I went to Germany, but we stayed in touch via social media. He continued to struggle, with little support on the outside. At one point he was living in his car. I found out about this when a GoFundMe campaign was set up to assist him to get back on his feet. My wife and I contributed what we could.

I had a profound sense of responsibility for his condition because I was a member of the non-commissioned officer leadership that targeted him for harassment. Though I had no personal involvement in his harassment, and tried desperately to stop it, I was powerless to do so. I took military leadership seriously and I am still of the view that once you become a military leader, you are one for life. That is not a pack you get to take off your back and set down. There is something about being responsible for men and women in war that changes you, fundamentally and forever. When I meet my soldier’s parents, I’d always joke with them that we have a lot in common, that we both lay awake at night worrying about their child’s safety.

I was always busy with mission planning, debriefs and organizational work during my deployment in Iraq. I barely had time to eat. My soldiers made sure I did not go without food. They helped me help them get home alive.

So when Doc reached out to me for a job reference, I was happy to help and proud to see him moving towards positive aspirations. When he got the job, I celebrated with him, toasting his success. Doc was minding his social health too, having found a community of faith to which he could belong and to which he could find peaceful social relations. When he converted to Judaism, I celebrated with him again and encouraged him in his new faith. 

Seeing this young man go from being suicidal to living a productive and happy life was something I needed. It was more than bringing a young man back from war alive, it was seeing a man pull through some of the worst conditions workers in uniform face. His story represented so much of the hope I have for all of the young men and women that I deployed with. I was elated! I very much wanted to see him after more than a decade of being apart, and thus we arranged to meet in Chicago. When I saw him we hugged, as I struggled to maintain my composure in the courtyard of a bar and grill. We talked for a couple of hours, catching up and sharing memories. 

When it came time for me to go, we sat in my car and shared an emotional moment. How far we’d come! What hope we had for each other!

Doc and I in Chicago. Facial editing for privacy concerns.

Having had a career in the military, when you hear of someone losing a friend, it’s almost always a consequence of war. Even the alcohol related incidents “back home” that result in the death of a soldier can be traced back, in a causal chain, to the brutality of what workers in uniform go through while carrying out the demands of the imperialists.

Thus when you hear of someone losing a friend, we oft times think about “enemy” gunfire, IEDs, overdoses and suicides. I have lost my friend and brother, but not to any of these things; nay, he has decided that I am no longer welcome in his life because of an ideological difference.

In a million years, I would have never imagined that my friendship with Doc could be shattered by such a thing. What kind of question could possibly come between two people who shared such a bonding experience? The answer? The question of the existence of women.

While an expository on the nuances of queer theory is not the purpose of this piece, I do recommend one that has already been written, that devotes a level of attention to the matter that I believe is warranted. It comes from the International Marxist Tendency and provides a detailed background of the genesis of idealistic conceptions of gender; it is to this article that I will refer the reader. However, it should be noted that gender ideologists posit that there is no material basis for gender, that it is wholly distinct from biological sex. Gender, in this view, is something that can change day by day.

The concept of gender being taught in public schools is represented by this graphic. Even here gender and sex are conflated to the degree that the terms hold no discernible meaning.

There is no agreement, however, on whether or not one can choose their gender. Some idealists argue that gender is performed and to the degree that we choose our behaviors, we choose to perform our gender.

One can immediately see a problem with this conception of gender, for what behaviors constitute gendered behaviors? One might argue that maintaining long finger nails and wearing dresses are behaviors common to a woman. But why these?

In answering this question we must discuss the stereotypes concerning women. While it’s true that women wear dresses and have long fingernails (something of an annoyance to a female factory worker), it’s also true that women generally are responsible for the domestic work. Why isn’t doing the dishes or folding laundry gendered behavior? As soon as the idealists attempt to escape harmful notions of gender, they find themselves arriving at that very thing.

And not just harm, but misogynistic harm. So misogynistic that they deny the existence of women as a material reality. If you can’t define what a woman is, how are you going to defend the rights of women and girls, something that is absolutely strategic when it comes to the line of march of the working-class towards power.

Yola Kipcak writes, “In critiquing one crude philosophy, Queer Theory goes to the other extreme and adopts its mirror image. No phenomenon coincides directly with the general categories by which we know them. No man or woman fits perfectly with the universal category that we know them by. Nevertheless, men and women exist. Nature expresses itself in patterns that we as humans can learn to recognize. Our ideas of a man or a woman, stripped away from all the accidental and inessential attributes, are crucial for our understanding of any individual man or woman. Queer Theorists, like their postmodern brethren, however, deny the existence of any form of category or patterns in nature. Instead of understanding the dialectical relationship between the individual and the universal, they renounce the universal and raise the individual and accidental to the level of principle.”

A concept of gender with no material basis is not just cause for philosophical skepticism regarding the category of “women,” it dissolves it entirely.

From the dawn of class-divided society, at the point when humankind began to produce surplus goods, the oppression of women commenced, including monogamy for the purpose of securing property rights through inheritance. That women’s oppression is rooted in control of the reproduction of humanity is completely thrown overboard by the idealists. This is gross historical revisionism, and is a denial of the material reality of cause for women’s oppression today, i.e., their immutable biological reality.

This denial of women’s existence is a denial also of women’s oppression. The dictatorship of capital sustains itself on the reproduction of exploited labor. The labor that goes into rearing children, in producing laborers, has been performed exclusively by the female sex, working women who are doubly exploited, both by the capitalist class through wage slavery and by society at large by being responsible for the rearing of children and caring for the elderly. The system depends on the latter as much as the former.

And how convenient for the bourgeoisie that gender ideology changes nothing for women in terms of the labor they must provide, while at the same time denying that such laborers and exploitation exist!

Women were reduced to domestic slaves after the second imperialist war for the purposes of making room for men returning to the labor market. Women became so immiserated that it was not uncommon for women to be on antipsychotic drugs, suffering such social isolation in their own homes that many reported hallucinating. The trauma women experienced is something a military veteran can relate to: the sudden upending of social support systems followed by forced isolation.

Marxists take the study of ideology very seriously. The fate of humanity rests on being able to identify social tendencies which have disoriented the march of the working-class towards socialism. At this point in history, in the epoch of late capitalism, progress can only be found from within the political and economic struggles of the working-class. 

History has proven this assertion to be correct, and even after the overturning of bourgeois property relations through the defeat of the capitalist class, the middle-class degeneration of the 20th century workers movements gave us Stalinism and Maoism. So when Marxists postulate that social reforms should be treated with disdain if they originate from classes outside of the working class, it is because experience has proven that such reforms disorient the working class and result in horrific and deadly defeats. Idealistic conceptions of gender are a product of petty bourgeois intellectualism and reforms based on it are a tool for class rule.

The notion that we should support bourgeois governments as they legislate ideas has been tried and the results are disastrous, and Roe V. Wade is the perfect example of the precarity of “progress” not won through working class struggle. 

The Supreme Court was politically motivated in Roe, and for that reason they could not represent the interests of workers and other producers, such as farmers. Their decision cut short the struggle to win the masses to the side of working women. It was because the issue had been left unsettled, that Roe could be so easily repealed. The issue of trans rights will be the same. Without mass support the “rights” forced on the body politic will become political leverage, and trans people will be used as pawns in a way they are now being used by the Democrats and middle class “radicals.”

For these radicals, there is no debate. If you do not comply with their ideological commitments, you are a bigot that denies the existence of trans people. Workers in the United States are already under serious threat due to this affront to democratic rights and the open exchange of ideas. For example, the FBI, which serves as the political police of the ruling-class, has recently been caught spying on Catholics and one of the reasons given to justify this egregious targeting of working people is their opposition to LGBTQ ideology. When the target of government harassment is so vague that anyone can be a justifiable target, workers will suffer. There is no ambiguity here. The ideology of gender is being used as a tool by the bourgeoisie against working people.

Doc unceremoniously severed ties with me pertaining to questions involving his transgender child. He exited our friendship with these words, “I have the same amount of space in my life for somebody willing to entertain ‘The Transgender Question’ as I would somebody willing to entertain The Jewish Question. That amount is fucking zero. My kid’s existence is not an ideological position.”

He, wittingly or not, was doing exactly what he was accusing me of. He was denying the existence of my daughter and demanding that I join him in this denial or face social isolation. He was demanding from me compliance with his ideology. I won’t ignore millennia of oppression of the female sex and the mechanisms by which the females in my life are oppressed in order to comply with the reactionary demands of the petty bourgeoisie.

My daughter exists, and the oppression of women is a material reality.