The household is a model for analysing labourâs relationship to capital
The multi-person household is a crucial tool for living life under capitalism
Trans women are oppressed in the household by their material incentive to trade reproductive labour for their partnerâs wages
Being unable to access a multi-person household is a mode of oppression for trans women
To build and have just, equitable households, trans women must create active well-organised communities.
The household is an attempt to define in the most general terms an accounting for the material inequity of the modern familial structure without requiring a dip into hetero/mono/cis normativity. Trans women are exceptionally exceptional, and so often imagine ourselves exempt from critique of culturally cisgender domestic structures. The household accounts for critiques of the family in general, material terms which show that transgenderism will not save us, lesbianism will not save us, t4t will not save us, polyamory will not save us and opting out will not save us. Once the material troubles are laid out, Iâll make a case for how and why we must work as trans women to create community structures which support trans women within the household.
The household is a model for analysing labourâs relationship to capital
Succinctly, for the Marxists: The household is here defined as the enclave in which reproductive labour is done habitually outwith waged market relations. When the conditions outside are sufficiently miserable, a shelter is indistinguishable from a prison.
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Reproductive labour is the labour required to keep humanity going from day to day. No matter how good the profit margins may be on producing plastic sprockets, if everyone were solely engaged in plastic-sprocket-manufacturing, theyâd starve to death very quickly. Before anyone can make any money in the future, everyone needs to be born, raised, fed, clothed, housed, bathed, cared for and comforted. The household is where this labour is done for free (or at least done without a price tag).
The logic of the commodity structures our lives, itâs the basic unit of Marxist analysis, the basic unit of economic planning, and the point at which our relationship with capital becomes real. A commodity is, Marxistly, a good or service with both a use value and an exchange value. A use value (an apple can be eaten and it tastes sweet and tart) and an exchange value (a braeburn apple can be bought for 55p from Tesco). Within one class of commodity quality becomes fungible, in a real human sense we lose the ability to see beyond the transaction. An apple ceases to be a particular fruit of a particular tree in a particular orchard, we have no way of engaging with the picker or the planter, on the shelf an apple loses some sense of particularity. The apple becomes an apple, 52p at Tesco. Itâs not a real apple youâre thinking of now, itâs a shadow on the cave wall, itâs a commodity.
The fact that labour is ultimately required to reproduce humanity does not, alone, make it the target of this analysis. This analysis is centred only on unwaged reproductive labour. As mentioned, feeding people so that they can work tomorrow is an important facet of reproductive labour, the woman who picks and sells apples isnât part of the household of whoever she sells apples to. But she is part of the household who she takes a bag home to every night and makes an apple pie. The difference is the mediation of the market (or lack thereof).
Not all unwaged reproductive labour is the target of this analysis. Having a friend around for dinner constitutes unwaged reproductive labour, but if they never take for granted that youâll be cooking dinner, theyâre not a part of your household. The household is the sphere in which there is some arrangement, explicit or implicit, for the long-term habitual handling of reproductive labour.
Likewise, living in the same address doesnât necessarily make a âhouseholdâ for the purpose of this analysis. Two people who live at the same address but always cook their own dinner, pay their own rent, change their own sheets, clean and tidy up after themselves, and take responsibility for their own rooms. They might, but if the whole arrangement is a tit-for-tat arrangement between people who ultimately live entirely separate lives and just happen to co-habit for a while, then itâs not a household. However if they share reproductive work freely and consider themselves connected, to rise-and-fall together and to be one unit, then two people may be a household even living apart. A daughter who considers it a given that sheâll stop off at her elderly motherâs home to cook her dinner and look after the house, is part of one household with her.
As an illustration, imagine the network of work that happens day-to-day to keep you functional flowing out from you, the walk to the shops and the slicing of onions and the washing of clothes, through to the stocking of the shelves and the harvesting of the onions and the industrial production of laundry detergent, through to all of those people getting to work, through to their bus drivers and their bike mechanics, through to the cook at the restaurant where their bus driver got dinner last night, and on and on, all of this is work done to reproduce you directly or indirectly â to keep you there tomorrow. Now imagine this network flowing out of you was cut at the point you buy a good or a service, because on the market that commodity relationship breaks the human relationship, it might as well have been fabricated ex nihilo in the commodity-making-machine. You might be alone, in a little network of one, or you might be in a little network where the laundry gets washed together and the food gets cooked by one person and the flat gets cleaned by the other, maybe this is a partner, maybe a parent, maybe a close friend. Maybe thereâs a few people, maybe a multigenerational family all doing this together. Not just one shared dinner, but dinner every day. Thatâs a household.
The multi-person household is a crucial tool for living life under capitalism
To live in a household of one is both lonely and inefficient.
The effect of the commodity is to snip the chain of relationships culminating in a transaction. The supermarkets price-match apples as if apples were one thing. A happy picker or a sad picker, a beautiful farm or a dreary one, an old tree or a young tree, all creates a handy, price-matchable apple. The last woman on earth might go to a robot-stocked Tesco and buy a robot-grown, robot-picked apple at a self-checkout machine and eat alone. The inhumanity of the commodity form is that in this world of billions of living human beings a woman among billions might have exactly the same relationship to a human-picked, human-delivered, human-stocked apple and its production.
To be clear, we could purchase every aspect of our reproduction in the form of commodities: meals bought ready-to-eat from restaurants, clothes bought ready-to-wear from dropshippers, clothes and home cleaned on-demand by cleaning companies. We could structure every interaction by capital: if our food became cheaper by the replacement of cooks with machines, if our clothes became cheaper by the replacement of one factory with another, if our cleaning became cheaper by the replacement of a citizen with a precaritised immigrant we could allow these changes to have no effect on us. We could live efficiently by seeing exactly as far as our money does. We might ignore the dread and the numbness and know that this really is a sensible decision, if we factor in the time it would take to cook and clothe and clean ourselves it would work out more expensive: âItâs such a chore to cook for oneâ. We could spend every spare moment working for the highest attainable income to keep the number going up. We could die lonely.
This turns us into cattle, our will and desires co-opted by the will and desire of our bank account. Itâs not even manageable, the human soul goes on strike if you ask it to live on 16 hours of work and yellow-sticker sandwiches. Something has to give.
We can take small satisfaction in spending some leisure time resting and maintaining ourselves, but an hour in front of the TV, an hour at the gym, a meal cooked for one, it wonât cure the loneliness. The cure for loneliness is real, human connection, thatâs the way out, but talk without touch misses something, touch without familiarity misses something. We are each containerised â made internally irrelevant â by the commodity transaction. The Solution is to do some work for nothing, for love, in the ways we still can. As a Household.
When we tuck together into this one unit (the household) inside which the work is for love â that is to say, for free â thatâs communion, literally the state of acting communally. Thatâs closeness on a human level. Inside the household the qualities of the things we do matter, how we do them matter. Inside the Household it matters that itâs made with love, that itâs done the way you like it, that it was made by someone, because inside the household those choices arenât about money.
The household gives material benefits, as well as spiritual, it also gives efficiencies of scale. Most food is sold in quantities for two or four, most recipes similarly. It hopefully gives us someone else to pick up our slack if weâre sick, it might give us some ability to trade and specialise in the work we do, doing the dishes in exchange for someone else scrubbing the toilet, if we can make it multigenerational we can hope it will take care of us in our old age in return for our work in our prime. In truth, itâs the model our society was built around. Without a household life is more expensive and more work (not to mention how repetitive dinner gets).
Trans women are oppressed in the household by their material incentive to trade reproductive labour for their partnerâs wages
Starting with a consideration of a two-person household we can imagine a couple consisting of person A and person B. For whatever reason, the potential income of B is less than that of A, and the amount of work they would have to do would be higher in order to take home the same money. The household offers an attractive bargain since everything is purchased together anyway, B can do more of the household work in order for A to do more waged labour! This way, rather than Person B working for an hour and earning 60p and Person A earning a pound and then each of them spending an hour cleaning, B can do two hours of cleaning, A can do waged work for one more hour, and because B enables this by taking up Aâs unwaged work they can âearnâ more money! Where once they had ÂŁ1.60, now they have ÂŁ2 for the same time worked!
The normative model for the multi-person household is the heterosexual couple, B being a woman, A being a man. The discrepancy in earning potential may be imagined to initiate in the possibility of childbirth, however, the logic of the bargain is not predicated on heterosexuality, merely heterogeneity. Any difference between two people in earning power can lead to this bargain being made, heterosexuality merely has a head start in culturally naturalising the bargain along male/female lines. Het T4T isnât exempt here, Trans menâs earning power rises as they transition, while womenâs fall. Where women have significant power, the bargain can be made the other way round, where couples are same sex, the bargain may be made on the basis of other potential earning discrepancies, race, class, or simply who has a higher-paid career may be used to justify this bargain. In households with more than two adults, generalisations of the bargain can justify multiple housewives, or one housewife to many partners. While the bargain persists across relationship forms, itâs in the heterosexual world that its impact has been the most profound.
The effect of this bargain â the bargain â on the heterosexual world has been to separate women and men into the household sphere and waged work respectively. In order to maximise extraction, capital will employ workers for as much of their time as it can manage and pay them for not a second more; the inflexibility is necessary to keep workers âinterchangeableâ, the recognition that workers are not fully âinterchangeableâ gives capital an aversion to rotating them out too quickly. In all it becomes hard to negotiate fine grained changes based on household circumstance and actual labour time, the bargain collapses into all-or-nothing, and as it is repeatedly made the bargain reinforces itself, naturalises itself, and ceases to be opt-in. The bargain becomes the simulacra of itself. The bargain becomes the waged/domestic split.
We understand as feminists the pitfalls of the bargain, a housewife has her eggs very solidly in one basket where her partner has more opportunity to switch jobs, she gives up direct access to much of the household finances, quite probably takes on more work (Childcare isnât a 9-5, neither is 3 meals a day), and given the historic subjugation of women we understand that all this might still be happening while she works as many waged hours as her partner. Because of the forces of culture, the bargain is often not up for discussion in heterosexual relationships, he goes to work, she keeps the house, this much is necessary even if she goes to work too. We can also understand as feminists the particular relationship between access to waged work (and to well-waged work) and oneâs vulnerability within the home, it is difficult to say no to unfair, exploitative, and even violent environments of domestic work when the alternative is the crushing unfairness, exploitation and violence of abject poverty. We see this precarisation within the home across modes of oppression, making it difficult or impossible for particularly women, disabled people, children and trans people to leave acutely unjust situations.
Indeed to maintain some semblance of an arbiter here, a great deal of marriage and divorce law is predicted on the idea of the bargain, the âmarital assetâ and the 50/50 split in the case of divorce exist to give a woman in the bargain at least some recourse to what she has âearned.â
As feminists we may understand this and abhor the bargain and promise never to make it, however, we must bear in mind that taking the bargain is often the de facto highest wage available to a woman, because the wage of the bargain is her husbandâs wage. Even nominally âfeministâ couples make this bargain because of the inarguable material benefits (though the effect of cultural heteronormativity means that the material benefit will only justify the bargain unidirectionally, men will often refuse to take the bargain for their own pride). Rather than rail against the bargain, we must understand that there is always the theoretical option of refusing it and its pursuit, the fact that itâs nonetheless taken tells us that itâs clearly often the best option available from a bad position. The bargain is instead a working condition available to women. Itâs no contradiction for the poor to fight simultaneously for dignity in unemployment, access to work, and improved working conditions. So trans women are oppressed both in the household, and by lack of access to the household.
Being unable to access a multi-person household is a mode of oppression of trans women
Weâve discussed the pitfalls of the bargain, however, itâs worth remembering it as a potentially desirable deal for trans women. Work in the household can be both de facto well-paid, stable and fulfilling for a segment of society which is notoriously underpaid, unstably employed, and alienated. The effect of the specific stigma and issues that trans women face however, lead to trans women being excluded from households, held at arms-length to prevent the formation of households, and kept in a position to be easily excised from households.
Starting in childhood, trans girls are disproportionately made homeless, or made to face the no-transition-or-homelessness ultimatum. The position of children as reliant on the household leaves them incredibly vulnerable to this, but the protections typically offered to children are often denied to trans girls due to their place as âbad investmentsâ.
Children are, materially, long-term maturing investments. While families tend to shoulder the costs of their rearing, the community around them takes an interest in their continued care, due to their own interest in the reproduction of the community. While love and duty come in for parents, material analysis requires we look past these intangibles, towards the material reasons for childrearing, which are principally as a sort of pension and social-care plan. Care given to children in the present is expected to be reciprocated as parents grow frail and children take their place in the workforce. A child coming out as a trans girl then, is a moment of extreme challenge to the material basis of the parent-child relationship, as a childâs decision to transition âthrows awayâ a great deal of their potential future earning potential, and so denies a parent their rightful share of future proceeds.
Many children, however, have strained relationships with their parents on the basis of their choice of poorly paid careers or breaks with their parents values and arenât nearly so likely to be made homeless. Trans girls also face homelessness due to the lack of support and often the hostility from their communities. Communities and society require reproduction to continue to exist, and so heavily stigmatise parental abandonment, both codifying it into law, and punishing the behaviour socially. Trans girls, however, face stigma themselves for the disruption they pose to cisheterosexual reproduction as it tries to make examples of those girls who betray patriarchyâs intended place for them. The conflict between these stigmas can incentivise incredible violence by families against their daughters on an ongoing basis, and we see an exceptional level of violence posed particularly in particularly cisheterosexually reproduced communities, such as religious communities. Ultimately, this leads to trans girls losing access to households in childhood at a disproportionate rate.
If trans women come out later, the act of transition has the opportunity to force them out of any romantic multi-person households they were in before. As romantic relationships tend towards some form of âthe bargainâ, trans women who might have taken high-earning role coming out and plummeting their potential income can come as a betrayal to a relationshipâs foundations, not to mention the issue of crossing out of a partnerâs sexuality. Trans women come into themselves as women as disproportionately single women.
And itâs tough for trans women to get into relationships. Stigma has constructed us as outside of acceptable dating. The social stigma faced by trans women and the stigma-by-association faced by those close to them makes forming a household with a trans woman a daunting option, particularly for straight men who, at the top of the kyriarchy, have the furthest to fall. Trans womenâs incapacity to bear children does a great deal to lock us out of the heterosexual bargain, we cannot provide one large aspect of reproductive labour and so are locked out of most of the conventional mechanisms for household formation. Particularly trans women are locked out from the conventional mechanisms for multigenerational household formation. Multigenerational households provide particular benefits in terms of security in old age, and as men in heterosexual relationships with trans women grow older and more acutely aware of this, they are incentivised to leave trans women high and dry, and those of us lucky enough to grow old are often left without support.
Lesbian households necessarily must face the fact that both women are women, and so the household is liable to have lower earning potential, but do give a more achievable option for household formation to many trans women. The forces of transmisogyny in the workplace push the economic bargain in a cis/trans woman household favour the trans women staying preferentially at home and being relegated to the domestic sphere â particularly if she has no pre-existing job. Again, âthe bargainâ does not mean that she will not work a waged job also, simply that given her precarity she will be liable to âmake upâ for her underpay or precarity by also taking on disproportionate domestic burden. While it may be more possible for a trans woman to have biological children in a cis/trans lesbian household, she would need access to fertility preservation and IVF (a real financial burden or else an infinite wait for NHS provision), the household would also need to sustain both a pregnant woman and a trans woman for a while (not a massively employable duo). Trans/Trans lesbian households may offer somewhat more equitable, less exploitable divisions, but do so at a lower equilibrium. With less slack all round the accumulation of some advantage by one woman over the other still has the capacity to create injustice within a household.
It is no surprise that as trans women are denied financial security from the domestic sphere and the formal waged economy, we are massively overrepresented in the informal economy. It is a cruel joke that participation in the informal economy socially and legally bars one from participation in the household, as civilians face added stigma for association with sex workers, cohabiting and co-working can lead to charges of running brothels, and such professions are grounds to separate trans women from children.
As conditions deteriorate and precarity increases, âflexibilityâ becomes a fig leaf and a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the waged economy this looks like a move to gig work, multiple jobs and zero-hours contracts, in reproductive labour this looks like a move to casualised dating, polyamory and no-strings-attached. This isnât a condemnation of flexibility, but a recognition that âflexibilityâ is a great salve for instability. Rather than the rigid, one-to-one nature of monogamous relationships, a network of partners, metamours and FWBs provides a longer list of people to call if you need a couch. Poly can be a committed relationship form; flexible jobs can offer minimum hours, but as Trans women find themselves small parts of large networks the questions of âam I getting anything from thisâ, and âam I in this long term?â occur to her partners. The bargain with three or four starts to take on a different character, one income can provide for two at a stretch these days, itâs hard to financially organise three, whoâs paying? Whoâs housewife? How long can we rely on each other? Who gets access to a marriage contract to secure that, and who gets left with nothing if it explodes? As the âscene becomes dominated by zero-hours gig-dating, where does that leave dolls who never wanted âflexibilityâ?
Each of these routes, straight or gay, poly or monogamous, is built off of the modern norm of the sexual-romantic relationship as the site of household formation, and the requisite for household existence. The absence of this in our analysis up to this point hopefully shows adequately that sex is not necessary to create the injustices we see in the relationship form. Non romantic, non sexual households can, will and do reproduce transmisogyny, however our analysis is incomplete without an analysis of the relationship of the household to sex.
Sexuality is an expression of human desire for connection and trans women as humans (exceptionally disconnected humans) are naturally going to be involved. The modern romantic sexual relationship is however about more than the simple incidence of sex, dating and sex is a ritual to establish compatibility to the end of establishing lasting households. While drinks and dinner and casual sex can be about as fun as anything else you could get up to on a Friday night, each time, each second and third and twentieth date, is an interview for a little more trust, a tightening of economic knots, two people establishing whether a household of each other will satisfy all of their needs. Trans women get a lot of interviews but we donât get the job.
The disproportionate desire for trans women sexually, compared with a disproportionately low desire for trans women as partners in a household means in social situations trans women are a priori judged for their sexual value, and not judged for their value as members of households or communities. Trans women understand this on some level, they see that they win very little social approval, respect or friendship by showing that they might be a good long term friend, shared interests and connections donât seem to get them as far as they get other people. What seems to get people in any way invested in them (often the only recourse to get people invested in them) is to show themselves as a sexual prospect to people who might take a sexual interest. This of course has its downsides, but itâs hard to lose respect from people who donât respect you in the first place. Trans women find themselves with a tough dilemma, then, as they attempt to convert interest won by sexual performance into community axnd connection: any withdrawal of sexual attention, any faltering of consent, can undermine the value others see in them. Not unique among women for this, trans women nonetheless feel sharply the demand to acquiesce to sexual advances, agree to uncomfortable situations, and allow development in sexual relationships else see their entire social lives, community, and households rescinded. Consent gets tricky when itâs hard to say no, but when can a trans woman say no easily?
To build and have just, equitable households, we need active, well-organised communities.
As Iâve shown, the dynamics of the position of trans women put us between a rock and a hard place, isolation or exploitation. We donât need a destructive revolution. To âabolish the householdâ would leave us in the same isolated state that weâre clearly fighting to avoid. We need a constructive revolution, we need new models for reproductive labour to catch us if we fall.
Short of our complete liberation, our greatest tool to build equitable households is the construction of robust community and social networks. The household is where we do share labour and resources habitually, but a community around us is where we can share labour, where we share it more occasionally. Given the hostility of the outside world, itâs easy as a trans woman to retreat inside the walls of a household, allowing our friendships and network to atrophy, but when the conditions outside are sufficiently miserable, a shelter is indistinguishable from a prison, and the relationship can worsen significantly for women with nowhere to land. Given our distinctly vulnerable position, itâs critical that we take active steps to build our own communities, not just to catch each other when we fall, but to build readiness to catch each other, and to keep each other aware that weâre standing ready.
Strong, engaged communities are the well-trod counterbalance to power in the household, but as well as escape, community has also traditionally enforced adherence to âthe bargainâ through judgement and enforced social roles. This is a double-edged sword, itâs helpful to have people around whoâll notice and respond if a relationship starts to appear abusive but traditionally strong nuclei for communities like religion and extended families will use these same mechanisms to shun trans women out for breaking their place in âthe bargainâ or providing a visible contradiction to the heteropatriarchal assignment of labour. Even superficially âacceptingâ communities will often exceptionalise trans girls, placing them in separate but equal categories for the satisfaction of the unsatisfiable bigots within the ranks.
The supposed counter-community to which we belong-by-default, the âqueer communityâ as it exists, is in fact a fragmented set of dating scenes, social-media-bubbles and networks of mutual ex-lovers. The fact that one apparently joins the âqueer communityâ at (birth? A moment of internal identification?) rather than actually talking to anybody demonstrates that itâs more of an idea than political reality. In the past, Iâve considered myself to be in community with girls who I never saw again after they deleted their profile, or went monogamous, or just fell through the cracks.
Transfeminist organising must be centred around actively creating communities where weâre welcome, actively bringing trans women into community, and actively maintaining community contact so that we all have people outside of the house to watch our backs. Trans women will fall through the cracks if we donât have mechanisms to make sure the community is checking in, so organised communities need to make mechanisms to remember each other when we get busy, because we will.
Organising our communities like this is possible. From one perspective itâs pretty good fun, Creating organised communities is in part simply a matter of taking seriously the life-or-death work of throwing parties and social hanging out with our friends. On the other hand itâs challenging, as trans women it means taking seriously the work of throwing parties and hanging out with our enemies (or at least making sure someone is).
The power and potential of serious, well-organised work here is significant.If trans women are connected to discuss their treatment at the hands of their partners they can identify where things are wrong and unjust. Where individual trans women rarely have serious capital to throw around, organised communities can pool resources to undertake formidable ventures, to care for those in tough straits, to uphold each other in business ventures, to create community infrastructure. The household is our last refuge in a world that doesnât care about us, but it doesnât have to be our only refuge, we can have layers of protection from the hard vacuum of the market.
I hope Iâll see you for dinner?
this was originally published in Writing Badly, an excellent collection of transfeminist writing. You can buy issue one, and you can submit for issue two before the new year by emailing the [email protected] sheâs very nice,â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸ âââ
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