Lesbian Separatism and the “Transsexual Empire”
Janice Raymond: The Transsexual Empire
(1) These days, it is perhaps surprising to find that (some) feminist attitudes toward trans folks were (and sometimes still are) anything but friendly. Don’t feminist politics and trans politics work against gender oppression? So isn’t there common ground? And given that some trans people are women, while others were women (or lived lives assigned as ‘women’), aren’t there also points of intersection between feminist politics and trans politics?
It is easy to treat these issues anachronistically. Since the nineties, trans studies and transgender politics have emerged in the U.S. However, prior to this the Transgender Paradigm is not in play. So when feminist such as Janice Raymond are writing, there are no visible trans politics to speak of (as there are now). Indeed, it is a very perverse fact that the Transgender Paradigm owes its origin, in part, to the transphobic work of Raymond.
(2) Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of The She-Male (1979) is generally considered (by many trans folk) a classic example of transphobic hate literature. Why did she write it? What explains it?
It is tempting to represent Raymond as having “personal issues” with trans folk. This may be true for all we know. However, the transphobia manifested in her work also comes from two larger sources: (A) Mainstream society’s transphobic attitudes; (B) Key tenets of a Lesbian-Separatist feminist framework. By focusing only on “personal issues” we lose sight of the larger social and political issues.
So it’s worth noting that Raymond’s book was enthusiastically endorsed by feminist writers such as Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and Robin Morgan. Moreover, Raymond’s book is not the first example of transphobia in feminist politics and writing. For example, in 1973, Robin Morgan expelled transwoman Beth Elliot from the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles. Here already, we see the classic accusation of trans deception (which is equated with rape). Again, Mary Daly accuses trans women of deception and equates it with rape in Gyn/Ecology.
In Empire, Raymond explicitly attacks Sandy Stone (who was working as an engineer at the feminist collective, Olivia Records). This resulted in considerable controversy. Feminists who supported Raymond’s views put pressure on Olivia Records to have Stone expelled. However, those feminists at Olivia (those who actually knew Stone and had experience working with her) supported her presence there. Finally, for the good of the collective, Stone left. (After studying with Donna Haraway, she writes the foundational piece for Trans Studies – “The Empire Strikes Back – A Posttranssexual Manifesto”)
Some Observations: It is an error to contrast “second wave feminists” with trans folk. While prominent writers and activists such as Morgan, Daley, and Raymond are clearly hostile to trans folk, we better not forget all of the feminists at Olivia, for example, who supported Stone’s presence there. Moreover, it is clear that there were already trans women working as feminists within the movement (such as Beth Elliot, Sandy Stone, and Carol Riddell). The simplistic representation of second wave feminism as transphobic erases these people.
Also: The issues here are not just “theoretical”. They are hugely political.
Raymond’s book leads to Stone being forced to leave Olivia Records. Stone
comes back, years later, with her reply to Raymond – “The Empire Strikes Back.”
(3) What is the main idea in Raymond’s Empire? While the chapter you read (“Sappho by Surgery”) attacks transsexual women (in particular, lesbian-identified transsexual women), most of the book is actually a criticism of the medical establishment, which Raymond sees as promoting patriarchal interests. Indeed, the very title (The Transsexual Empire) is a play on Harry Benjamin’s classic book, The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966).
According to Raymond, the first cause of transsexuality is societal sexism which mandates strict societal roles (masculine and feminine). However, there are people who are unhappy with these roles. The medical establishment serves the societal interests of further enforcing these rigid social roles. Thus, men who cannot conform to their assigned role are surgically altered (to appear as women).
According to Raymond, transsexual men (whom she would call transsexual women) are merely tokens used to show that transsexuality is universal (thereby disguising the patriarchal nature of it). Furthermore, these “women” are turned into stereotypical men instead of having the opportunity to become woman-identified feminists (and thereby free from the gender role which makes them unhappy).
According to Raymond, the “final solution” of transsexuality is to socially
mandate it out of existence by mandating against sexist social role assignments. Instead, she recommends consciousness-raising techniques designed to help those unhappy with role-assignment to find a true integrity.
(4) In what ways is the book transphobic? Here’s a few:
(A) No voices of trans people are really heard. Instead, “experts” are cited, and a very few examples of trans women are trotted out and then used as representative of the whole. In general, there is no room for any expressions of trans subjectivity in this book.
(B) Gender/Sex is identified with karyotype (chromosomal configuration). Raymond also endorses a sharp divide between male and female – dismissing intersexuals as unimportant. As a consequence, there is no room for the possibility of taking trans self-identities seriously.
(C) Raymond tends to “double-bind” trans people. For example, she claims that trans women who take up stereotypical roles are masculine in their support for negative stereotypes about women. She then claims that trans women who do not take up these stereotypes (such as woman-identified lesbian-separatist trans women) in fact exhibit oppressive masculine traits.
(D) Raymond follows the main-stream representation of trans folk as deceivers. She also identifies this “deception” with a form of rape.
In a more political vein . . .
(E) No distinct modality of “trans oppression” is allowed for. In other words: All gender oppression is explained in terms of sexist gender role assignment. She does not, for example, see her own dismissal of intersex folk as a different form of gender-based oppression. As a consequence, trans women are represented as men who are unhappy with their assigned social role – a role that is determined by a sexist society. In this way, there is no distinct modality of trans oppression.
(5) Yet while Raymond’s book contains a transphobia that merely derives from more general societal forms of it, she is also deploying a specific theoretical/political framework. This feminist framework also makes it hard for her to understand trans folk in a way that is anything but transphobic.
This framework (The Women Identified Women) underlies lesbian-separatist politics. It emerged in 1970 when the group Radicalesbians rushed the stage at the Second Congress to Unite Women (which has also sometimes between known as the Congress to Divide Women). Tired of the homophobia and classicism (at the time much lesbian culture was connected to “lower-class” butch-femme dynamics), a new framework emerged in which lesbianism became a kind of political stance. In this paradigm, “men-identified” women have had a man-centered view of the world imposed upon them (and inscribed into their very self-identifies). In this man-centered view, women are nothing but objects for men. The solution is to move away from this self-identify, to a woman-centered one. This is only possible through relations with other women. Through relations with other women, and through consciousness-raising, women can undo the violence done to their self-identities, and begin to understand themselves in a way that is free from the man-centered. In this way, there is a kind of “returning to” or at least reconstructing an undamaged female self-identity.
Somebody who accepted this view would obviously view the medical model notion of “trapped in the wrong body” with suspicion. For in this medical model, one has a gender self-identity at a very young age which cannot be changed. The solution is to change the body to accord with the gender self-identity. A defender of the women-identified-woman paradigm would have at least the following two concerns. (1) This medical account maintains that gender self-identity cannot be changed. Yet the very project of the women-identified-women is to change their own self-identities so that it is no longer based on a man-centered view of the world. (2) The medical account presupposed that self-identities are fundamentally (at bottom, to the core) gendered according to prevailing social-role stereotypes. Obviously this view would be anathema to somebody who recognized the possibility of transcending the assigned social roles (and the problematic gender self-identities that go along with those roles). For the woman-identified-woman, there is a self that outstrips the damage of man-centeredness that can be discovered.
In effect: The medical model of transsexuality adopts a view of gender self-identity that is in complete contrast to the view endorsed in a lesbian-separatist paradigm. It goes against its very raison d’etre.