A Eulogy for Avril
or; A Case Study of Social Murder
Content Warning: Suicide
A few days ago, a trans student in France, whose name was Avril, died after being harassed and humiliated by staff at her school, Lycée Fénelon in Lille. I did not know Avril. Perhaps it is inappropriate, then, for me to respond in writing to her death. But I think it is entirely appropriate, because Avril’s death was not an isolated occurrence but a manifestation of the oppression faced by every queer person in bourgeois society. In this way it is a very personal event to all of us, including me, and an event I find I must analyze and promote a correct understanding of.
One must understand, while Avril’s death came by her own hand, it cannot really be called “suicide.” Very few people commit suicide, really. To think she simply died randomly of her own accord is to observe the event in a nonexistent metaphysical vacuum. In fact it occurred in material reality, and like all events it arose out of preexisting material circumstances. Avril did not just die one day. First, she was attacked and dehumanized by those with power over her to such an extent that it caused her to kill herself. We may therefore say that the real truth is this: Avril was murdered.
Friedrich Engels in “The Condition of the Working Class in England” said that when one is not directly killed by another, but is forced into circumstances leading to their death by society, then they have been “socially murdered” by those with power over society. This is what happened to Avril. The powers-that-be in the societal environment in which she existed would not allow her to live without pretending to be something she was not and so, faced with the absurd demand to live in a form which was not her own and never could be, she died. People like the school employees who harassed and bullied Avril MURDERED her.
More broadly, the whole system of bourgeois society murdered her. Being dependent on the gender binary and repressive gender roles to maintain the family unit which maintains its property relations and control over reproduction of labourers, capital has created around itself a cultural superstructure which rejects and defames those who challenge such things. When someone struggles against the fundamental contradiction between capitalist society’s rigid constructs of gender and the fluid nature of actual human identity, capitalist society immediately attacks them with all of its psychosocial armaments of hate and alienation. Make no mistake, the higher rates of so-called suicide amongst queer people are more accurately understood as a case of social mass-murder.
Avril was an innocent young woman, abused and murdered by bourgeois society as countless other young queer people have been. This is the long and short of it. Justice must be done for her and all other victims of such social murder. We must, through socialist revolution, move into a society where such social murder no longer occurs and queer people are free to exist as we are. All queer people must commit ourselves to this cause, for the sake of ourselves and our fallen siblings, for it is the only way we can be freed of the murderous nature of bourgeois society. Some, no doubt, will say it is crude of me to “politicize" a death. Such people are the very stupidest of fools. This is a political event to begin with. It is a product of the political-economic system of capitalism, and events like it in the future can only be prevented by the replacement of that system with a better one. To deny this is not respectful, it is the very opposite. Denial will lead only to further death. We must be brutally honest: capitalism is murdering queer people, and we must murder it in exchange.
