“I probably was designated as the first Terf,” Janice Raymond tells me from her home in Massachusetts. A renowned academic and feminist campaigner, her highly controversial classic, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, turned her into a pariah among trans activists when it was published in 1979.
“I wanted to highlight the fact that transsexualism was not a feminist-friendly issue but rather reinforces sex role stereotypes even as it claims to be progressive,” she says. “I wanted to insert a critical voice into the discussion.” She certainly achieved that — and more. In the four decades since its publication, many modern activists, albeit grossly unjustly, still view her as a bigoted monster.
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Raymond was studying medical ethics when she wrote Empire, and much of her research focused on the use of technologies that were destructive to women’s bodies and minds, in particular modification technologies such as psychosurgery (formerly called lobotomy) and electroshock therapy. “My early research and activism led me to question the medical consequences of the bodily mutilations inherent in transsexual surgery and the detrimental effects of taking life-long hormones. I was a radical feminist, but feminists were not paying much attention to the emergence of transsexualism as an issue that presented a regressive challenge to women and to feminism.”
More than four decades later, Raymond’s life continues to be dogged by allegations that she is motivated by a desire to harm trans people — and her latest book will add only fuel to an already raging inferno. In Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, Raymond forensically explores how the ideology has captured much of society.
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What motivated her to return to the gender swamp?
“Before I began writing Doublethink, I thought long and hard, knowing that the swarm of trans detractors would gleefully sting me again, only this time it would be more venomous. But I felt that since 1994, when The Transsexual Empire was reprinted and I wrote a new preface for it, I hadn’t really written anything that addressed the takeover of transgenderism and especially the rise in young women who were declaring themselves male. I wrote this book to dispel the myths of transgenderism and to take on the consequences of a runaway ideology whose reach is influencing medical care, legislation, government policies, women’s sports, childhood and university education.”
Raymond traces the progress of trans ideology over the past five decades. She looks at the shift from transsexualism to transgenderism, with a particular focus on the increasing numbers of young women who transition but later desist.
The huge rise in girls and young women who declare themselves male contrasts sharply with the picture in the Seventies, when the vast majority of those seeking sex change treatment were adult men. “Reasons why women transition are radically different from those of the men,” Raymond tells me. “A substantial number of female survivors of transgenderism report that they shifted identities from female to male because of the misogyny they had experienced.”
But, she explains, a significant portion of women who have transitioned were reluctant, because of external negativity, to admit they are actually lesbians, or did but were uncomfortable with their identity: “A number of the women also cited the social pressure to transition in a society where becoming a self-declared man is often more accepted than being a natal woman, especially a lesbian.”
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Nowhere in Doublethink does Raymond claim that trans misogynists represent the views of all trans people. As she is at pains to point out, a number of trans-identified persons and their allies have criticised the misogyny in their own communities. However, the increasing number of cyber and physical attacks by trans activists on women and lesbians, and the evolving trans ideology that supports these attacks, has come to define the movement’s political goals.
“In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, the ‘doublethink’ of a transgender movement that is able to define men as women, women as men, dissent as heresy, science as sham, and critics as fascists has become widely accepted,” she tells me. “The current rise of treating young children with puberty blockers and hormones is a widespread scandal that has been named a medical experiment on children.”
In an effort to cover this up, Raymond explains, activists have framed rapid transgender treatment for children as emergency health care. “Labelling the campaign as a health issue and an emergency was a clever strategy that promoted peoples’ sympathy and support and generated the increased establishment of gender identity clinics also called gender health centres.
“The suicide threat has also been influential in compelling parents to accept rapid gender affirmation for their children. Parents who question these treatments are often subjected to emotional blackmail when cruelly asked, ‘Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?’”
Raymond has long been accused of trying to shut down “medically necessary healthcare” for trans people, which is a very clever ruse by trans activists to frame surgery and hormones as medical as opposed to cosmetic treatment. Her book recounts harrowing stories from young women who were groomed into transitioning, partly by being told that if they didn't, they would kill themselves.
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The use of disingenuous tactics is, of course, nothing new. “In the US, most influential were the strategic early alliances trans activists made with the mainstream corporate LGB organisations such as the Human Rights Campaign,” Raymond says. “When the T was forcibly married to these organisations without any discussion involving many lesbians and gays, it helped to push the legal envelope in various countries to achieve legal changes benefiting trans priorities, such allowing young children to change their ‘gender’ without parental approval.”
Doublethink aims to cover the full force of the transgender juggernaut. But Raymond is at pains to emphasise that her new book also “exposes the violence against women in LGBT affinity groups where young women have been subjected to rape and other forms of sexual abuse and silenced for speaking out about it". This violence is also being ignored and silenced by mainstream LGBT organisations that "keep track of only the violence experienced by men who identify as women”.
To illustrate this, she points to the growing number of trans activists who also campaign for the decriminalisation of prostitution and the sex industry. “There are many alliances between activists who are pro-prostitution and those who are pro-transgender. By demeaning feminists who oppose the sex trade as ‘Swerfs’ [sex worker exclusionary radical feminists], a term that derives from the branding of gender critical women as Terfs, trans activists and pro-sex work advocates have joined at the hip.”
Yet in the face of such hate-filled opposition, Raymond remains hopeful. Her book largely focuses on the ‘survivor movement’. The detransitioners, the young lesbians who have been there, done that and had the double mastectomies, are the truth tellers. They are given a voice, and what important voices they are.
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I first met Raymond in the Nineties when our work to combat the global sex trade and other forms of violence against women and girls collided. In the decades since, I have seen her enter the lion’s den countless times, refusing to back down amid hostility from men's rights activists.
But this is a battle, as many of us have come to learn, that takes its toll; for the simple reason that transgenderism has persuaded vast swathes of well-meaning liberals into thinking that trans activists are following in the footsteps of the lesbians and gay men who fought for liberation in Seventies and Eighties. Doublethink, perhaps even more than its predecessor The Transsexual Empire, could well be the perfect tool to help those deluded individuals finally see the light.
Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism is published by Spinifex Press.
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SubscribeMaybe it would help if people ditched the whole “inevitable progress” mentality and stopped assuming that things are better now because it’s the current year. We have no difficulty raging against the eugenicists of the Edwardian age who made the confinement in institutions for decades of people they decided were subnormal a routine thing. Ditto the forced sterilizations, often surreptitiously — the “Virginia appendectomy” — of those deemed to be a threat to the bloodlines. But then our next, unspoken thought is always, “but of course, things like that couldn’t happen nowadays”. Well take a good look people, because nothing any Catholic priest ever did to a minor comes within roaring distance of what is being passed off as today as “emergency medical treatment”. Wickedness is present in the world and it doesn’t go away. It has to be fought every day anew, and the idea that it stopped in 1963 is the greatest camouflage ever invented.
This is a good point. Most horrible things done by society were done by people who believed they were doing good – or at least claimed to be doing good. I think treating young people for gender dysphoria before they are old enough to understand the consequences (for example – losing the ability to have children) borders on criminal. But many many progressives believe they are on the side of the angels by aggressively support it. I am confident we will look back in horror at many of the excesses of this new social media driven moralizing.
Excellent point. Didn’t Hitler shout “I am not an animal”. He probably believed he was doing good
Exactly. This distortion has been taking place since at least -well, when JB was a young thing.
Absolutely!
“A number of the women also cited the social pressure to transition in a society where becoming a self-declared man is often more accepted than being a natal woman, especially a lesbian.”
Does anybody seriously believe that it is now more acceptable for a woman to identify as a man than simply to be – well, just a woman! Leaving aside a few of the more unhinged Guardian readers, who would actually prefer having a troubled daughter who thinks she’s a boy rather than well – a girl.
This is paranoid radical feminist fantasy.
No it isn’t. Read about Keira Bell.
David this is becoming more and more widespread and is truly an issue of huge importance to women. If some women don’t know about it, they soon will.
Lesley – thanks for your polite reply as always.
I don’t doubt there are issues. For example, when a young girl is directed toward some sort of gender realignment when she expresses what may be an entirely transitory wish to be a boy. Indeed, I’m being too kind. It’s madness, seems to be fed by social contagion and in any case is a false promise. No one can make her a boy, only a poor simulacrum of one.
My objection is this being fed through the same tired old radfem nonsense in which everything has to be interpreted as anti women in its motivation (even as the outcome of some dastardly plot).
it is clearly utter nonsense to describe our society as one in which “becoming a self-declared man is often more accepted than being a natal woman, especially a lesbian.”
That’s as much as to say that ordinary women make us in some way more socially uncomfortable than do trans people. Everybody knows that that is simply not true.
I hope that makes sense.
Among adolescents in schools identifying as transgender may be quite trendy . So there may be advantages in claiming to be a boy among teenage girls .
Julie Bindel is trying to bring, what is to her an important issue, to my attention. But if I am being frank I have to say that I am not interested in matters that affect only a tiny number of self-proclaimed “radicals” who seem to live their lives on social media, (interesting fact: Most of us don’t have a twitter account) and I will not be dragged into their interminable disputes. Do I know any “terfs” or transgendered folk? Maybe I do (apparently they are everywhere) but if so, they do not feel inclined to bring to my attention matters that are of vital import to them but not to me, any more than I beat them over the head with the problems encountered by a straight white guy living in a hostile, multi-diverse, economically failing country. They and I just live our lives as best we can secure in the knowledge that most other people are content that we do so. In short, we treat other people as we find them and leave it at that.
The proposed changes in legislation and the changes to crime recording, language, sports, prisons, schools, hospitals affect women (51% of U.K. population)very profoundly.
I’m assuming you’re a male Terry?? Because I think that’s relevant in this context.
I am indeed a male. I don’t think this fact invalidates anything that I have said.
It just explains your lack of concern as you speak of “the tiny number this affects”. Your daughters,wife, aunts, grandmas and of course your mother (now redefined as birthing person) we all have one of those even if no other significant women in our lives.
Exactly how many million of these trans women are there that they present such a universal threat to all of woman kind? And how many of those are actually dangerous.
I’m not saying there isn’t an issue, on matters of privacy alone, apart from anything else; and I no more believe a man can turn into a woman than you do; but could we just reign back the hyperbole a bit.
When an 80 year old woman is having to use a bed pan, vomit and cry in pain with a 6’ male in the next bed it is. We exclude males from women only spaces for the very good reason that a proportion of them are likely to be unpleasant or criminal. Good men understand and respect that. Trans identified males have exactly the same patterns of offending and sex crimes quite probably more in proportion. Women in prison should not have the extra punishment of being forced to share with mostly intact males. There’s so much more in this but it’s not been in the mainstream media as they were captured by Stonewall. Listen to the Nolan podcasts if you doubt me.
Alison – I’ve read your comment several times, and I still can’t make head nor tail of it.
There are many men of a perverted and/or criminal bent who are using the loose gender self identity rules to prey on women.
How many though? What are the stats? And in comparison to other social harms?
And we sometimes seem to forget that a man can walk into a ladies toilet currently. There are no locks or armed guards to protect the women inside. The only thing that keeps men out is taboo and social convention.
Let me help, Mr Morley, with some examples taken from the US.
a) California state law forbids discrimination on grounds of “gender identity” based on self-ID alone—males need not have had any surgery whatsoever to qualify for protection.
b) Under this law, a bio man who identifies as a woman must be admitted to female hospital wards, battered women’s shelters, rape counseling centers, and prison cells, solely on self-ID.
c) In California alone, hundreds of incarcerated male felons have applied for transfer to female prisons. Rapes and unwanted pregnancies have already resulted.
Because no surgery is required, and as the upsides are obvious, a great many more males take advantage of the law allowing trans self-ID than you might think.
Men, including bio men identifying as women, pose a statistical risk to women. In public loos, women have used the pointed side-eye since forever, to police who’s coming in, for their own & other women’s safety—but allowing bio males to enter women’s facilities muddies the automatic suspicion otherwise raised.
Recommended listening: BBC’s Nolan Investigates on how Stonewall, Inc., has affected UK politics, public agencies, corporate employers, and so forth, to bring this issue to a crisis.
As a man, who is not criminal, and I think, not unpleasant, I have no complaints about being excluded from spaces reserved for women, reservations that I consider sensible and civilised. I have no wish to embarrass, or disquiet any woman by intruding into such spaces.
My numerous female relatives are doing well. Thankyou for asking.
Agreed. Fair comment.
Nope it doesn’t invalidate the insight your comment provides on the fact that you either don’t care about the human rights of half the population or that you’re ignorant that this trans ideology is destroying womens hard earned rights.
Either way, thanks for the insight into a mindset that I thought we’d largely left behind.
Oh well, thanks to your supercilious and sarcastic comment I’m sure Terry is now completely onboard.
Oh dear. The twitterati have arrived. You demand that I am with you or I am against you. I am neither.
Terry Needham initiated this sub thread but making reasonable points. Indeed, I felt he was not running away from the issue but taking part in the discussion. Your facetious, passive aggressive input is a model of the Woke reversal victimology. It does nothing to take the issue forward. To insult TN with your either /or limiting comment is juvenile, 5th form playground name calling. And for good measure, if you really think TN demonstrates a mindset ‘we’d largely left behind’, you should get out more, or train yourself into valuing what others think, especially those who do not conform to the drumbeat of your march.
I remember watching a South Park episode set in the future. Instead of fighting religious wars, Earth was embroiled in ‘wars of science’, with each faction declaring their ideology to be ‘the science’. I appreciated it, but found it a little far-fetched, never for one second believing I would experience this daft phenomenon in my lifetime.
Can I just point out to commenters that this was the authors motivation for writing in 1979, back when transsexuals were just a few sad blokes in dresses, with or without pen-ses. It is not a response to what is going on now.
Radfem anti trans feeling has a long history. It has not just emerged recently. It is opportunist, building on, and arguably exaggerating, the genuine concerns that the rest of us have.
A lot of its opposition seems to stem from the attraction of trans women to more stereotypical forms of female dress which radfems were deeply opposed to (but were rehabilitated later for women as part of “post feminism”). And perhaps from the very fact that some men preferred the traditional female role to their own, finding it attractive, when to the radfems it could only be seen as abhorrent
Preferring traditional dress as “attractive” is something of a misnomer: in fact, autogynephiles (about 50% of trans-identified males) derive sexual excitement from dressing and thinking of themselves as women—thus these males’ fashion style perforce tends towards obviously female ensembles, complete with pearls.
Preferring traditional dress as “attractive” is something of a misnomer: in fact, autogynephiles (about 50% of trans-identified males) derive sexual excitement from dressing and thinking of themselves as women—thus these males’ fashion style perforce tends towards obviously female ensembles, complete with pearls.
Can I just point out to commenters that this was the authors motivation for writing in 1979, back when transsexuals were just a few sad blokes in dresses, with or without pen-ses. It is not a response to what is going on now.
Radfem anti trans feeling has a long history. It has not just emerged recently. It is opportunist, building on, and arguably exaggerating, the genuine concerns that the rest of us have.
A lot of its opposition seems to stem from the attraction of trans women to more stereotypical forms of female dress which radfems were deeply opposed to (but were rehabilitated later for women as part of “post feminism”). And perhaps from the very fact that some men preferred the traditional female role to their own, finding it attractive, when to the radfems it could only be seen as abhorrent
Can I just point out to commenters that this was the authors motivation for writing in 1979, back when transsexuals were just a few sad blokes in dresses, with or without pen-she’s. It is not a response to what is going on now.
Radfem anti trans feeling has a long history. It has not just emerged recently. It is opportunist, building on, and arguably exaggerating the genuine concerns that the rest of us have.
A lot of its opposition seems to stem from the attraction of trans women to more stereotypical forms of female dress which radfems were deeply opposed to (but were rehabilitated later for women as part of “post feminism”). And perhaps from the very fact that some men preferred the traditional female role to their own, finding it attractive, when to the radfems it could only be seen as abhorrent.
Can I just point out to commenters that this was the authors motivation for writing in 1979, back when transsexuals were just a few sad blokes in dresses, with or without pen-she’s. It is not a response to what is going on now.
Radfem anti trans feeling has a long history. It has not just emerged recently. It is opportunist, building on, and arguably exaggerating the genuine concerns that the rest of us have.
A lot of its opposition seems to stem from the attraction of trans women to more stereotypical forms of female dress which radfems were deeply opposed to (but were rehabilitated later for women as part of “post feminism”). And perhaps from the very fact that some men preferred the traditional female role to their own, finding it attractive, when to the radfems it could only be seen as abhorrent.
Which is the whole problem.
Her main concern may not have been to actively harm transsexuals, but it wasn’t really to help or understand them either. Rather, it was to view them through an ideological lens which supported her already established political positions and prejudices. Arguably it was a product of her own psychology.
For crying out loud – we need some honest attempts to be objective here, not research by people whose biases are already firmly lodged in their heads, and whose time might better be spent on self reflection.
I’ve been drawing a few down votes on this one, so I’ll just clarify.
I’m no more sympathetic to trans activists than I am to radical feminist ones. Bluntly we need to get these rival bands of n-t jobs out of the debate so that saner heads can start to figure out what is going on. And we need to stop people with more hate than sense influencing public policy and social attitudes.
If you still think I deserve a down vote for not being on board with team radfem/tory, go for it.
Most radical feminists were firmly on the left until the Labour Party betrayed us. Only the Tories are sticking up for women in this, unfortunately. Apart from Rosie Duffield who is being vilified by transactivists. This is the biggest issue for women since forever. It’s only now in the whole of history that we are being told a woman is anyone who says they’re one irrespective of actual and unchangeable sex. Affects everything we have ever fought for. And I read and understood “The Transexual Empire “ in 1980….
But you said that about the pink tax, and the wage gap, and the glass ceiling, and high heeled shoes, oh and the glass cliff (or was it waterfall) etc etc.
There’s a serious issue here which needs unclouded heads to deal with it. It’s not a recruiting opportunity for a moribund and now unnecessary social movement.
I’ve never commented about any of that. I thought this was UNherd ie we think for ourselves!!
Betrayed YOU?! The Labour Party was founded to defend the interests of working class families. It is these people that the Labour Party has betrayed. I walked away a long time ago, leaving various middle class pressure groups to fight over the carcass.
Spot on!
Them too, of course. Poverty is also feminised in this country. Think of all those care workers who will be sacked without even checking if they are naturally immune to Covid before insisting on vaccination.
Do you know any care workers? Did you care about them before? I am inclined to scepticism. Feminism is a middle class movement that caters for the promotion of middle class women. All power to your elbow, but do not insult my intelligence by claiming to care about the welfare of your cleaning lady.
The ‘just be kind ‘ gambit. Your aversion to Tories is a dead give away . The tory party is suffused with people who have bought in to trans ideology and self -identification . The Lady with the Sword being just one example .