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Sunday, August 16, 2026

A Transgender Gospel Against Western Civilization


 August 14, 2026

They say that the arch of history bends towards progress but as a trans person in the midst of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find myself torn at the crossroads of an increasingly bewildering age. On the one hand, transgender and gender diverse people in the West have never experienced a greater level of exposure and popular acceptance. On the other hand, these same trans people, my people, have also never faced a greater threat of state-sanctioned violence and outright erasure.

The Human Rights Campaign has found in recent polls that 41% of American adults report to personally know at least one person who openly identifies as transgender and another 85% of Americans claim that they accept that trans people should be afforded the same rights and protections as anyone else. This includes a full 76% of Republicans and the pop-cultural zeitgeist seems to concur.

Flipping through any random barrage of TV channels and/or streaming services, you will certainly find more than your fair share of programming presenting transgender people in a positive if exceedingly narrow light.

With all that being said, it can be a little hard to feel the love of statistical bromides and cultural tokenism beneath the flame of a state-fueled blowtorch.

The Republican Party has been on the warpath for some time now, openly seeking to annihilate all things trans for at least a decade, and the Trump Administration seems to represent the zenith of this campaign. A litany of executive orders signed by Trump since 2025 have directed the Federal Government to define gender as an immutable binary determined exclusively by a single document inked at birth while also commanding the most powerful government on earth to use every piece of regulatory and penal machinery at its disposal to erase anything and anyone who defies this edict.

Compulsory schools have been ordered to deprive trans children of even the most basic human dignity. Prisons and juvenile detention centers have been ordered to forcibly detransition inmates in what can only be legally described as medical experimentation. And foster homes and other related youth services have been given the green light to use all manner of religious quackery to torment the trans youth grossly overrepresented under their so-called care.

It shouldn’t take a goddamn human rights organization to tell you that this concerted campaign of forced erasure from public life qualifies as nothing less than genocide, but the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has done just that, warning that such policies and rhetoric as mentioned above match the early stages of a genocidal process based on what has been historically documented across the globe over the last century.

How in the hell is this kind of disconnect between governance and popular sentiment even possible and how did we get to such an absurdly dichotomous place as a nation, actively seeking to eradicate a people the majority of the country shows very little outward animosity towards?

The reason for the violence is fairly simple, at least to any committed student of historical collapse. The American Empire is in the early stages of the kind of long, slow disintegration that ultimately befalls all imperial hegemons. Our nation is not only rapidly losing the faith of its own citizenry, it is losing the faith of many of its own proxies who are showing increasingly bold signs of going rogue with the barbarians at the gates.

Traditionally, under such dyer circumstance, collapsing empires frequently appeal to small but fanatical death cults within the upper echelons of their polluted societies. For Pax-Americana under the reign of Imperator Trump this means riling up the Christo-Zionist Millenarians of the Evangelical Movement.

In order to keep this powerful minority engaged and committed to a series of increasingly pointless and unwinnable wars, the Empire needs to feed them a juicy scapegoat now and then and thus they rally the doom seekers around the spook of the evil, mincing, transgender groomer lurking in a women’s room near you.

On multiple occasions, I have seen Donald Trump cornered in the Oval Office with offensively polite questions about his abject failure to reign in a thrice decapitated third world nation in the Persian Gulf only to witness that soiled Ceasar bark incoherently about ‘men in women’s sports’ and some conspiracy to ‘trans all the children.’ This rhetoric isn’t for the general public; it’s for a very specific moneyed faithful amongst the petite bourgeoisie. The kind of people willing to drop nukes on Gaza just to see Jesus ride back to earth on a dinosaur.

But what of the silent tolerant majority? What happened to all that glorious acceptance we soaked up under Imperator Biden?

Sadly, regardless of popular sentiment, it was all little more than worthless rhetorical platitudes; the desperate byproduct of a rival attempt to save the bad name of the same empire now busy erasing us.

Every empire consists of a constant contest between competing elites. These elites tend to share virtually identical goals. They tend to struggle to protect the same institutions that empower all of them. They just don’t always agree on the best strategy to do this. Some of them will even go so far as to vigorously compete for the highest position on their mountain of skulls and that is what we are witnessing here with this facetious war over trans rights.

In spite of their hollow rhetoric, the Democrats do not support Queer people. They fund the exact same prisons and compulsory school system that serve to enslave and marginalize us as their Republican rivals do. The Democrats simply seek to use the spook of ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to prove that the Empire which thrashes us is capable of humanitarian inclusion. After all, how can the Devil be a monster while he’s petting a kitten?

This kind of imperial inclusion has done nothing to serve my people. Quite the contrary, it has only made us appear complicit in the corruption of our tormentors. Transgender people have become associated with a morally bankrupt society by conservatives in the same fashion that many Christians have by those on the left.

We have all become human shields in a culture war between different factions of elite imperial casualties and that is a revolting shame. Your average redneck Jesus freak cares far more about Palestine, Ohio than Jerusalem and your average tranny lunatic cares far more about the gulags of their own local wing of the Prison Industrial Complex than Putin’s Russia. But we are all compelled to warfare, both with each other and the world, in the name of strikingly similar concepts of Western cultural universalism.

I myself inhabit a decidedly vexing space in this manufactured cataclysm as I happen to be something of a Christian as well as something of a transwoman. In fact, both of these disciplines are inspired by the same commitment I owe to Gnostic Sophiology and both of those seemingly divergent phenomena predate what we now know as Western Civilization.

Christianity was just one of many schools of ancient Gnostic mysticism to spring from the battlefields of the Levant onto the streets of Rome before that Empire, the very same empire that crucified Christianity’s namesake, decided to use that particular school popular among the urban Roman working class to justify their struggling empire’s continued existence and endless expansion.

In the process of assimilation, entire Gospels were purged from the Bible while others were censored and manipulated beyond recognition and from this manipulation modern Western Civilization was born.

In spite of the fact that Christ made zero reference to the third genders which existed both in Europe and the Levant during his lifetime, the newly Roman Catholic Church and its colonial Protestant progeny in England blasphemously used the name of Christ to erase all trace of any form of gender expression that existed outside the binary.

As Christian law gelled into a single dictum across Medieval Europe, rigid gender norms were enforced that essentially rendered women into breeding stock and viewed all forms of fluidity between male and female as a threat to an order designed to reduce the womb into a glorified soldier factory to populate the battlefields of an endless crusade for more church property.

The Enlightenment only served to reinforce this rigid gender binary by declaring that construct be a science and rendering it to a distinction that could only be determined by the state. Thus, the tyranny of the birth certificate became sanctified by liberal secularism.

The Enlightenment also fostered the rise of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide with its similar breakthroughs in scientific racism, opening the door for missionaries to erase even more ancient third genders from the face of multiple continents. Be they two spirit or hijra, they were all sentenced to the same fate as the so-called eunuchs of the Gospels; marginalization to the point of erasure.

But both wings of the West failed and we are still here, fighting yet another wave of imperial subjugation on our own, while the elites compete over their kingdom of skulls in another pointless midterm election circus.

And here I stand with you today, during what has been declared Transgender History Month by some corporate monolith or another, as a devout Marian witch, a post-civ genderqueer anarchist, and perhaps above all else, living, spitting, hissing proof of the failures of Western Civilization in all its secular cabals and devout renditions.

They all failed. They failed to contain the Holy Spirit beneath the jar of a single tyrannical church, and they failed to contain the human spirit beneath the jar of a manufactured gender binary, just as they have failed to contain the Axis of Resistance beneath their bombs.

My message to you, my dearest motherfuckers, and to any agent of imperial bureaucracy surveilling this screed, is that the Christo-Zionist horde is right about one thing and that is that gender outlaws like me are the bane of Western Civilization.

To this slur I proudly shout, ‘your goddamn right we are and we’re here to finish the job that the third world started!’ You can pass all the laws and royal edicts you want. The writing is already scrawled in Venus Extravaganza’s blood all over the temple walls; your stadium church is a massive tomb of material emptiness and your empire’s days of rape and honey are numbered.

Death to the old gods! Long live the ancient gods! And long live those of us compelled to transgress in their honor, for we shall inherit the ruins of a blasphemous era and bring forth a new age of tribal diversity in stiletto heels and smeared lipstick.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.



Tuesday, August 04, 2026

South Africa

The 1976 Uprising and its enduring significance

Saturday 1 August 2026, by Salim Vally




The 
1976 uprising, often know as the Soweto uprising, was a significant moment in the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa and in the extension of the solidarity movement worldwide. The wide-ranging solidarity movement actions included campaign for the boycott of importation of goods from and sporting contacts from South Africa. This lasted until 1993 when the first non-racial elections were programmed, taking place in April 1994. The ANC won 62% of the vote for the National Assembly. Its first act was to elect Nelson Mandela as president.


The South African socialist magazine Amandal! carried a special feature on 1976 in its June issue under the title "They rose so we dare rise again! 50 years of the ’76 uprising”. We republish the opening article.[IVP]

OVER TIME, JUNE 16 1976 HAS come to be celebrated primarily as a moment of resistance against the forced imposition of Afrikaans in schools in Soweto. That injustice was undoubtedly one catalyst for the uprising. Yet to reduce this watershed moment to a single cause is to miss its deeper meaning, its true contributions to the liberation struggle, and its lasting relevance for our own time. [1]

No event of historical importance can be understood apart from its wider context. In this brief reflection, I merely point to several key and yet neglected dimensions of the uprising: its internationalism; its engagement with the national question; its reinforcement of worker struggles; its embrace of collective leadership and rejection of personality cults; its nonsectarian character; and its emphasis on praxis.

A globally conscious youth

The Black Consciousness organisations and the youth of 1976 were deeply influenced by other liberation struggles. They drew inspiration from the independence struggles in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique, as well as from popular resistance against US imperialism in South America and Asia. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed were widely circulated and read in the townships. Students were also keenly aware of the struggles of African Americans and other oppressed peoples around the world.

This internationalist consciousness found explicit expression in protests against the visit of US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in 1976. On September 18, 1976, the New York Times reported that students in Soweto had demonstrated against Kissinger’s three-day visit, during which he held talks with Prime Minister John Vorster. The newspaper noted that many young protesters were killed: “The shooting began after students carrying placards denouncing Mr. Kissinger gathered in schoolyards in the black township, singing black protest songs.” One placard called Kissinger “a murderer”; another read: “Kissinger, get out of Azania—don’t bring your disguised American oppression into Azania”.

Unity beyond apartheid’s racial categories

The apartheid regime sought to divide the oppressed majority through the Bantustan policy, the Group Areas Act, and even the spatial segregation of townships such as Soweto into so-called ‘Zulu’ and ‘Sotho’ sections. Yet the students of 1976 mounted a determined challenge to these divisions. The slogan “One Azania, One Nation”—baptised in blood—resonated as a revolutionary cry. Consider the names of the young people and the places where they fell: not only Soweto, but also Manenberg, Elsies River, Montagu, Mamelodi, Alexandra, Gugulethu, Mossel Bay and Athlone. Unlike the crass racial and tribalistic identity politics of today, the youth of 1976 refused to see themselves through apartheid’s imposed categories. They were not ‘minorities’, nor ‘Zulu’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian’ or ‘Xhosa’. They were simply the oppressed united in struggle.

Moreover, though many township residents had arrived from neighbouring countries and lived ‘illegally’ in South Africa, they were accepted and respected by their communities. For instance, Sibongile Mkhabela (née Mthembu), one of eleven young people accused of leading the uprising, was the daughter of a Mozambican father who was a pillar of strength in the community; as were many others from Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi and elsewhere.

Strengthening worker struggles

The 1976 uprising followed closely on the heels of massive urban worker strikes that had begun in Durban in 1973, and spread across the country; similar strikes even took place in Namibia before that. By 1979, the apartheid regime was forced to amend labour legislation to grant Black workers the legal right to form and register trade unions. Crucially, many of the key shop stewards who built that union movement had been active participants in the 1976 uprising.

The students who confronted the apartheid state, together with the workers of 1973, ushered in an unprecedented wave of struggle against racial capitalism. They demonstrated that the system was not impregnable and could be challenged. They showed that resistance could be conducted in a non-sectarian way. They proved that even schoolgoing youth could join the fight, and that the struggle was never confined to Soweto alone, despite what some accounts of June 16 suggest.

The events of 1976 laid the foundations for a far broader challenge to the racial capitalist state; it reached even greater heights in the 1980s as workers and community organisations joined forces.

Collective leadership and the defeat of fear

The students of 1976 broke the climate of fear that had subdued older generations after the violent persecutions of the 1960s. They succeeded in bringing organisations together, especially through collaboration with their families and the worker organisations to which those families belonged. They cultivated a new corps of radical organic intellectuals rooted in grassroots organisations, and they placed a premium on collective learning and shared leadership.

We remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice. The most fitting memorial is neither statues nor empty rhetoric, but the urgent work of building a better country than the one we inhabit today. For many young people, 32 years into democracy has become a nightmare.

Post-apartheid capitalism has failed to deliver on its promises—and, by its very nature, it cannot. Too often, young people are blamed for being undisciplined, lazy or lacking in the ‘right skills’ or entrepreneurial spirit. We seldom blame the system itself: the structural unemployment that forecloses any prospect of gainful employment for so many; the billboards, television screens and print media that bombard the youth with the seductive elixir of consumer goods; a social order in which human relations mean nothing unless they are commodified. All in a climate where corruption has embraced those once lionised by the makers of official history, and where struggle ‘icons’ have become affluent overnight.

A polycrisis born of racial capitalism

Who can deny that the country is in the grip of a polycrisis engendered by racial capitalism? The evidence is everywhere: levels of inequality, unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, ecological degradation, poor quality education, inadequate healthcare, soaring energy, transport and food costs, and the crushing burden of debt that most people must endure daily, through no fault of their own. Even the middle classes are not spared. Who can argue that narrow elitist and corporate interests and their corruption do not rule the day? Who can ignore the utter desperation that fuels the psychosocial trauma, genderbased violence and other forms of social dysfunction we witness daily?

Lessons for today: xenophobia and internationalism

The lessons of June 1976 are also vital for the struggle against contemporary xenophobia. Opportunistic politicians exploit the current crises to blame, scapegoat and attack ‘foreigners’, rather than confronting the real causes of inequality, poverty and unemployment.

The uprising reminds us of the importance of internationalism and the linking of struggles. The same crude oil extracted from the Niger Delta, the minerals of the Congo and the coal of South Africa fuel the machinery of Israeli occupation and genocide. This connects the dispossession of Palestinian lives and land directly to the exploitation of African resources by big corporations, African elites and warlords.

The logic and violence of racial capitalism, colonialism and extraction are not confined to any single place or time. They operate across borders, binding Africa, Palestine and other sites of struggle into a shared history of resistance.

Palestine stands today as a global front against colonialism, imperialism, fossil-fuel capitalism and white supremacy. It is incumbent upon all of us—solidarity activists, climate justice advocates, anti-racist and anti-imperialist organisations, and faith-based groups—to actively support the Palestinian liberation struggle and their right to resist. The genocide in Gaza is a harbinger of worse to come if we do not organise and fight back vigorously, including through the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against apartheid Israel. The empire and its global ruling classes are willing to sacrifice millions of Black and Brown bodies, and working-class people everywhere, so that they can continue accumulating capital, amassing wealth and maintaining their domination.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro recently observed:

Genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those in the Global South. What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.

The youth of 1976 understood that freedom is indivisible. They risked everything, not for statues or hollow commemorations, but for a world in which human beings are no longer reduced to commodities, ethnic labels or disposable labour. Their legacy demands nothing less from us today: to see our struggles as linked, to reject the divisions that power imposes, and to build a genuine liberation for all.

That is the true significance of 1976—and the unfinished business before us now.

Steve Biko understood this when he argued:

The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look but the great gift still has to come from Africa — giving the world a more human face.

4 June 2026

Source: Amandla.

Footnotes

[1] Photo: March and March protest in Joburg, April 30 2026. The lessons of June 1976 are also vital for the struggle against contemporary xenophobia. Opportunistic politicians exploit the current crises to blame, scapegoat and attack ‘foreigners’, rather than confronting the real causes of inequality, poverty and unemployment. VS (© Ihsaan Haffejee/GroundUp).