The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Athene Series) [Paperback]

Janice G. Raymond (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994 | Series: Athene Series (Book 39)

Fifteen years ago, when it was first published, "The Transsexual Empire" challenged the medical psychiatric definition of transsexualism as a disease and sex conversion hormones and surgery as the cure. It exposed the antifeminist stereotyping that requires candidates for transsexual surgery to prove themselves by conforming to subjective, outdated and questionable feminine roles and "passing" as women. Then as now, defining and treating transsexualism as a medical problem prevents the person experiencing so-called gender dissatisfaction from seeing it in a gender-challenging or feminist framework. Transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotyping in a role-defined society. In the new introduction to this feminist work, Raymond discusses how these same issues are now debated in the context of transgender. Transgenderism reduces gender resistance to wardrobes, hormones, surgery and posturing - anything but real sexual equality. It assimilates the roles and definitions of masculinity and femininity, often mixing and matching, but never really moving beyond both. In a similar way, transsexualism is thought to be a radical challenge to gender roles, breaking the boundaries of gender and transgressing its rigid lines. But if the transsexual merely exchanges one gender role for another, and if the outcome of such a sex reassignment is to endorse a femininity which, in many transsexuals, becomes a caricature of much that feminists have rejected about many-made femininity, then where is the challenge, the transgression, and the breaking of any real boundaries? This book will be used as a text in women's studies, psychology, sociology, technology and public policy, as well as by medical students, law students, and all who have an interest in feminist issues.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Teachers College Press (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807762725
• ISBN-13: 978-0807762721
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #363,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #89 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Transgender

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

106 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Helpful to transsexuals if only to "know their enemy", May 18, 2001

By 

Rachel Newstead "finder of forgotten animation" (Appleton, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Athene Series) (Paperback)

Would you believe transsexuals are an insidious male plot to undermine the women's movement? So says Janice Raymond, lesbian, feminist, and alleged scholar--who originally wrote this scathing condemnation of transsexuals in as her doctoral thesis. If her professors were addled enough to accept this 200 plus-page diatribe as scholarship, I consider myself fortunate not to have attended the same university as she.

To paraphrase a statement I remember from Jean-Paul Satre's "Anti-Semite and Jew", all bigotry has a grain of truth to it--and that's what makes it dangerous. Bigots take a minor fact and blow it out of proportion, and that is precisely what Raymond does throughout her book. She contends, for example, that male-to-female transsexuals symbolically rape women's bodies by attempting to acquire one for themselves. There is, in fairness to Raymond, a condition which transsexual therapist Anne Lawrence calls "autogynephilia"--people with this condition are aroused by the change itself. But on further examination, this argument falls apart. Post-op transsexuals find themselves as much in danger of ACTUALLY BEING raped as any biological woman--why would transsexuals willingly risk being the victims of real rape merely to degrade women? And what of those who are not aroused by women's bodies at all, but are attracted to MEN? Raymond, as usual, is blind to these Grand Canyon-size holes in her logic.

One might wonder what she thinks of female-to-male transsexuals. Simple--they don't exist. They are, in her view, lesbians in denial, thus exonerating all biological females from the insidious evil of transsexualism. She never asks herself why the numbers of female-to-males are so low. Could it be, perhaps, that a woman can adopt male attire and mannerisms without so much as a raised eyebrow, and therefore disappear into the population? Funny how no one seems to care much when women (including Raymond herself, a butch lesbian in short hair and Birkenstocks) cross gender lines.

I have to admit something--I quit reading this book about two-thirds of the way through, being so angry I couldn't stand to look at it again (as you may have guessed, I am a transsexual myself).I think the proverbial "last straw" was her comparison of sex-change surgeons to Nazi death-camp doctors like Josef Mengele. One knows for sure an argument has broken down when the person making the argument compares opponents to Nazis.

Fair or not, true or not, the book did its job. Johns Hopkins shut down its gender identity program in the early eighties largely because of her "research." Because of the thinking of people like her, transsexuals are denied jobs, schooling, access to restrooms, homeless shelters, and battered women's facilities even today in many parts of the country. Some may have died in part because of her. I wonder how she sleeps nights.

74 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars For Janice Raymond, it's personal, April 13, 2002

By 

Dallas Denny (Pine Lake, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Athene Series) (Paperback)

For Janice Raymond, transsexualism isn't a theoretical issue, it's personal. When The Transsexual Empire first appeared in 1979, she tookd the show on the road, attempting to convince the government and anyone else who would listen to outlaw sex reassignment. According to an interview in the late magazine TransSisters, all this bile and malevolence came from an unrequited romance with a transwoman. Considering the hostility she shows toward transsexuals in Empire, it's difficult to imagine Raymond doesn't have a personal issue, whether with having been attracted to a transsexual or having inclinications in that direction herself.

Raymond's invective is apparent in the first few pages, when she says, of physician and tennis player Renee Richards, "it takes castrated balls to play women's tennis." No bias there. Uh-uh.

Raymond's primary problem with transsexuals is that she expects them to singlehandedly destroy the binary gender system-- while she constructs her own gender identity so as to appear unambiguously female. News flash, Janice Raymond-- transsexuals have no special obligation to fight your fights. Most want only a little personal happiness and have no responsibility to tear down gender barriers for you (although many do).

I could understand Raymond's rant if it were published as opinion-- but it purports to be a scientific study. There's evidence that contrary to her claims, she did no interviews at all.

What's scary isn't that Raymond is so crazy, but that so many people listened to her, that so many have lacked the ability to differentiate vendetta from science.

63 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Malleus Maleficarum for Transsexuals, December 4, 2001

By 

Marcella G. (Vancouver, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Athene Series) (Paperback)

Janice Raymond purports to know the motivations of people like myself better than I do. Pressed by an inflexible society where the gender roles are fixed, me, as a chauvinist male pig either not fitting in the gender-role society prescribes to me, or as a remorseful homosexual, take on the identity of a female because I want to re-inforce the stereotypes.

And, in the process, I become an agent of patriarchal authority by infiltrating the sisterhood to destabilize it: "Transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotypes femininity." [TTE, re-issue 1994, p. 99].

We ARE the enemy. There can be no other motivation but to put things back into their cages, to fit gender-role and biological-fact. Forget the mind, the feelings, the base itself of feminist ethics -namely, that rules shouldn't be applied rigidly to a case but each case is separate and the circumstances influence the rightness/wrongness of the rule applied.

We, transsexuals, are painted with a very broad brush. What is the solution? "I contend that the problem of transsexualism would be best served by morally mandating it out of existence." [TTE, p. 178]. The "moral mandate" is nicely covered by blaming society for our existence: "The prevention of transsexual surgery, and the social conditions that generate it, are not achieved by legislation forbidding surgery [....] Rather, it is more important to regulate, by legal measures, the sexist, social conditions that generate transsexual surgery...." [TTE, p. 179].

But in the end, a "limitting legislative" presence is suggested: "I would favor restricting the number of hospitals and centers where transsexual surgery could be performed." [TTE, p. 180].

This is a book of hate. Like the Malleus or the Protocols, it takes commonly accepted misconceptions and gives them a "sound theoretical base." Like all bigotted thinking, the argument is ultimately circular but in such a way that if you don't understand the phenomenon in depth, you can be taken in by the book.

The problem is that, by and large, the majority of the population do not understand the problem nor care enough about it as to realize how biased this book is. Two transsexuals are not alike, we, like all people, have multiple motivations -many of them remain hidden even to ourselves.

What we know is that, at a crucial point in our lives, we have to take a step that requires a lot of bravery. And the only reason why someone would risk everything (family, work, friends, etc) is *not* to become an infiltrate agent of the establishment into the "feminist sisterhood", but because, at that point in your life, you have either to live as what you are or just stop living.

Seen from that point of view, this book advocates murder: one cannot stop becoming what one already is.