Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

After reading the theories Janice Raymond presents in this book I'm not sure which is worse, the almost total lack in logic of her arguments or the down right nastiness she directs at gender variant people. She apparently believes that transsexuals are willing to risk loss of family, friends, income and life just to undermine the women's movement! Ms. Raymond has come up with a theory worthy only of Dr. Evil. Save your money or better yet spend it on "Sex Changes : The Politics of Transgenderism" by Pat Califia.

What to think of somebody that writes "all transsexuals rape women" and more such nonsense? Ms. Raymond has no clue what gender and sex are, much less what it means to be transsexual. But she is quick to spread nonsense, lies, and hatred. A shameful book to be used only as an example of horrible bigotry.

Poorly written, illogical, circular arguments (if a m2F TS rises to a position of respect or responsibility in the women's movement, then it was because they were male(?) Oh, and if they don't, what is the cause of that, Ms. Raymond?) The women's movement was fragmented for many years because of this and other books of its ilk, serving the patriarchy by fragmenting us and keeping us in-fighting.

This book if you can call it that is a prime example of a manuscript that should have never gone to print. The author believes that Male to Female transsexuals are nothing more than a plot by a male society to infiltrate the womens movement and somehow take control. Pat Califia cover the ravings of Ms. Raymond quite well in her book "Sex Changes, The Politics of Transgenderism". To quote Ms Califia, "It takes a monumental amount of arrogance for her to seriously suggest such a self-hating and self destructivee program. But her hatred and fear of transsexuals is so great that she would rather have them suffer, even die, as long as she doesn't have to run the risk of seeing them, sitting next to them, talking to them, working with them, or sleeping with them. This is transphobia, pure and simple and it is as dangerous a social disease as the fear of homosexuality or unapolegetic racism. Raymond is a gender supermacist." Originally written as her dissertation it just goes to show that an education doesn't necessarily mean one is educated. Don't waste your money on this one. And don't think that all lesbian feminists are like Ms. Raymond. Most are very friendly and caring people. Thankfully they didn't buy into Ms. Raymonds line of BS.

I read Raymond's "Transsexual Empire" just before I transitioned, and I wish that "Sex Changes : The Politics of Transgenderism" (by Pat Califia, also available via Amazon) had been available and I'd read it instead. Califia "deconstructs" Raymond's self serving arguments quite well.

Raymond talks about integrity, but does not display any when interviewing subjects for the book.

This sophomoric rant is pure bigotry disguised as a "serious thought-provoking look at transsexualism". The idea of transsexuals as a construct of male surgeons who have designed them in order to subvert the women's movement would be laughable if so many misguided souls had not actually BELIEVED this tripe to be the truth! Ms. Raymond does an extreme disservice to the gender rights movement and to queer people everywhere, and sets back the women's movement 20 years by pitting us against each other. "Gender rights are human rights" - we need to stick togethor to fight the oppression of society, not get derailed into bickering that is generated by texts such as this. If anyone want's to read a book that SERIOUSLY examines transsexuality in the light of gender rights, then read Riki Anne Wilchen's "Read My Lips - Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender". Don't waste your money on this junk!

Pure poison. As a transsexual, reading this in the '80s set me back ten years. I'm just glad that the rise of Queer Theory, the gradual subsidence of separatism, and the arrival on the scene of a new generation of lesbians who aren't consumed by fear, has rendered this pathetically vicious screed into an ideological fossil. Only reason I'm even bothering with this is it came up on a word search for "transsexual"; only reason I gave it one star is I can't give it none. They should handcuff Raymond to RuPaul and force her to shoot a remake of "The Defiant Ones".