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As you said.
Some other people might say that transgender movement is radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma that works to achive final frontier of commodification - turning even your own body into consumer product of choice.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
https://archive.ph/XH5v5
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Pritzker_family
In capitalism, I can choose my food, my clothing, my place of dwelling, my job, my hobbies etc... why cannot I pick and select my gender identity?
YMMV.
edit: link fixed
You could even posit some offshoot of Marxism that applies Marx's conflict-heavy take on the economic drivers of society and applies it to the cultural ones; thus becoming completely orthogonal to the economic left-right compass.
There must be some pithy name for this; it's on the tip of my tongue.
I chuckled, but I'm going to defend Tru Marxism on this one.
Progressive movements often use non-economic-class analysis to shield themselves from criticism, but there is another class of arguments that is more neoliberalish: Anything goes between consenting adults, people have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and if someone wants to embark on a journey through the Garden of Earthly Delights all the way to the man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, who are you to stop them?
This is the logic of dating sites, OnlyFans, and, at least to some extent, trans issues as well. In my opinion it has a distinctly capitalist feel to it.
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I know you're not directly claiming that the "transgender movement is [a] radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma" merely saying that "[s]ome other people might say" that, but I do want to reply to the archived Medium article you linked.
It questions whether a group that has support from billionaires can really be an oppressed, marginalized minority.
But it ignores that even during the 1960's civil rights movement, there were millionaires supporting certain figures in the movement like Martin Luther King Jr. (someone had to keep bailing him out of prison!) and Malcolm X even criticized this form of selling out in his Message to the Grassroots speech. Other posters may disagree, but I do think that black people during the 1960's civil rights era were a marginalized minority with legitimate grievances, and I don't think the fact that MLK Jr. was funded by white millionaires undermines his sincerity or authenticity, or paints him as a form of astroturfing.
Scott Alexander's libertarian defense of billionaires (here and here) is partially based on the fact that having a class of billionaires in society reduces the concentration of power in any one person or institution, instead creating a multipolar system where projects that aren't supported by (or even opposed by) current power structures can still get off the ground.
The fact that Jennifer Pritzker, a transwoman and heir to one of the ten wealthiest families in America, is donating money to pro-trans causes isn't suspicious or "astroturfing." This is a multipolar power system working as intended. The Right gets the Koch Brothers, and the Left gets George Soros and the Pritzker family - with plenty more examples on all sides of politics.
Now personally, I'll admit to having some misgivings over the "multipolar power" defense of billionaires, but the MLK Jr. example makes me think that sometimes this can be a legitimate argument. If the combination of a genuine grassroots, plus the money of rich people is what is necessary to end segregation, then so be it.
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I think this is where the distinction of socialism/capitalism breaks, given that in the original Marxist literature socialism and ultimately communism was supposed as an ideal against the reality of "capitalism".
In practice basically all radical left regimes collapsed into some form of what is called "state capitalism" - basically bigshots with political power call the shots and various corporations do their bidding. Of course there is also an incest with different "czars" of different parts of economy or bureaucracy using their influence or even direct ownership for political power struggle. But the state and politics have primacy, if powers at be decide to run "anticorruption" raid against your corporation or they decide to cut the corporations out of financial markets or regulate it to oblivion that is their prerogative.
The key understanding is that radicals do not have a positive plan, they have revolutionary zeal and faith that it pays off in the end. If corporations "wokewash" their revolution, that only means that "true revolution was never tried" and repeat. Filthy reactionaries won again, but only temporarily. To evaluate radical leftism by an outcome like "capitalism strong vs communism enacted" means adopting their own irrational logic. To many people with experience in such a situation across the world it is clear that these ideologies are unworkable and that having a new crop of cynical power brokers like nomenklatura is inevitable. Corrupt Chinese multibilionaires tied to political clans such as those of Xi Jinping or Jiang Zemin are a feature and inevitable result of Maoist revolution, not a bug.
In that sense rich and powerful using the new radicalism to get ahead and get wealth or power is nothing new.
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I mean, in a world where socialism realism is dead and planned economy is deader then ever and a failure, we can expect to see an infusion of leftism with capitalist values.
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