Pride Toronto decided to call off its 2024 march early – rather than break with corporate sponsors that are complicit in Israel’s genocidal siege

But the greatest advances for women’s liberation have not come through independent enlightenment or individual struggles against a systemic evil. They have come through collective, revolutionary struggle to fundamentally change society.

Communist Revolution sat down to interview a frontline shelter worker to discuss how the current economic crisis is disproportionately impacting working class women, particularly the most oppressed layers. 

The Revolutionary Communist Party mobilized for this years’ International Women’s Day (IWD) around the slogan “Down with Genocide Justin! Down with Imperialism!”

International Women’s Day was in fact founded by communists, as International Working Women’s Day, and was intentionally launched as a day to link the fight for women’s liberation and the fight of the working class for communism.

On June 8, the New Brunswick government rolled back protections for trans students in public schools. This is an attack on the rights of trans people which will inevitably harm vulnerable children. 

On June 28, a knife-wielding man burst into a philosophy of gender class at the University of Waterloo, stabbing the professor and two students. This clearly hate-motivated attack comes after months of a delirious media campaign in which right-wing politicians and commentators have sought to foment hatred of trans people.

Canada has been experiencing a growing wave of transphobia. Mirroring events in the United States, a number of conservative politicians have begun attacking legal protections on gender identity and the far right has been pushing transphobic conspiracy theories with increasing vigor. 

The purpose of these attacks is clear: to distract working class people away from their economic conditions and redirect their anger towards trans people. All workers have an interest in rejecting this hysterical hate-mongering and in uniting together against the real enemy—the capitalists.

In the first four months of this year, 541 anti-trans bills have been introduced across the U.S.A. The timing of this transphobic frenzy—ramped up in legislatures and in the media just as a new economic slump threatens to destabilize the country—is no accident.

Fifty years ago, the US Supreme Court passed its famous Roe v Wade ruling, providing abortion rights to women in America. Today, these same rights are being ripped up. The fight to end women’s oppression must be a fight for socialist revolution.