Janice Raymond

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Janice Raymond is a TERF well-known for her virulent transphobia. She was a nun with the Sisters of Mercy before she came out as a lesbian and began writing radical feminist literature. Her book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979) helped popularize the term she-male as a slur against transgender women, which while striking enough on its own, becomes more-so when the fact is considered that the term was previously a sexist slur used like a synonym for bitch.[1][2]

She was once the "Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women" (CATW), an anti-prostitution group. Her 2010 biography for CATW informs that she received grant money from various institutions, including the American intelligence agency USIA, or United States Information Agency,[3] a now-defunct agency that was "devoted to propaganda", particularly for foreign audiences.[4]

Works[edit]

The Transsexual Empire (1979)[edit]

Janice Raymond - The Transsexual Empire.jpg

Her attacks on trans people began with her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male,[5] which includes the infamous line:

All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.[6]

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy politely described this "thesis" as "difficult to assess since no arguments seem to have been given in its defense."[6]

In Transsexual Empire, Raymond includes sections that viciously attack Sandy Stone, a trans woman who had worked as a sound engineer for Olivia Records, and Christy Barsky. As a result, Stone and Olivia Records were deluged with hate mail and death threats.[7] Stone responded with The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto (1991[note 1]), which criticized both Raymond's point of view as well as the relatively conservative medicalization of trans identities that Raymond had fixated on.[9][10]

Raymond also stated:

"The problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence."

Which can quite fairly be interpreted as a call for the gender identity equivalent of genocide (or gendercide)

Of course, like any bigot trying to backpedal in a world that has become more accepting of transgender women and much less amenable to the hate speech she has to offer, Raymond now tries to backpedal. On her official website, she is trying to rewrite her transphobia and walk it back,[11] forgetting that many copies of her book are still in circulation in libraries across the world.[12] Her "walkback" consists of her clarifying that she wants to mandate "transsexualism" out of existence, not trans people themselves. It's unclear why she seems to think the two positions are substantially different (perhaps she hopes to harness the old evangelical trope of "hate the sin, love the sinner", even though that doesn't fool anyone nowadays). This is strikingly similar to conservative Christian pundit Michael Knowles' rhetoric several decades later.[13][14]

She asserts that she is "in the company of" fellow transphobes such as "author Sheila Jeffreys, journalist [sic] Julie Bindel, [...and] deceased writer Mary Daly" forgetting the fact that, like her, all of these people have definitively defined themselves as transphobes by their words and deeds. Raymond's hate speech against trans people almost completely ignores the existence of transgender men, focusing her hate almost exclusively upon transgender women—just like most men who rail against trans people. Huh.

Women as Wombs (1993)[edit]

In 1993, Raymond decided to have a book published about reproductive technology such as IVF or ova cryopreservation. She says there is a belief that infertility is a disease that can be helped by these kinds of technologies, and this is secretly an ideology called "reproductive fundamentalism" and not really feminist. She calls these technologies, along with surrogacy, "unsafe, experimental, and demeaning".[15]:vii–xi Raymond acknowledges that many historical feminists, including both socialist feminists in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, did not share her views.[15]:88–90 It nearly leaves one wondering whether Raymond's writings contain remnants of her "previous" socially conservative Catholicism rather than "radical feminism".

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. The essay was written in 1987 and first displayed at a conference in 1988, but first widely distributed in a 1991 book.[8]

References[edit]

  1. Richard A. Spears (1991). "Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo, and Related Matters", 2nd revised edition. Page 393. Signet (Penguin Group). ISBN 978-0451165541.
  2. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner (1975). "Dictionary of American Slang", Second Supplemented Edition. Page 465. Thomas Y. Crowell Company. ISBN 978-0690006704.
  3. "Biography of Janice Raymond". Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, via the Wayback Machine (2010).
  4. See the Wikipedia article on United States Information Agency.
  5. Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Teachers College Press, 1994. ISBN 0807762725.
  6. 6.0 6.1 Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  7. The Dispute Between Radical Feminists and Trans People
  8. See the Wikipedia article on The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.
  9. Stone, Sandy "The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto"
  10. Matthew Steven Carlos (2022). "Stone Publishes 'A Posttranssexual Manifesto'". EBSCO.
  11. Raymond, Janice "Fictions and Facts about the Transsexual Empire"
  12. The transsexual empire : the making of the she-male. WorldCat library search.
  13. Mathew Rodriguez (March 6, 2023). "CPAC Speaker Michael Knowles Says 'Transgenderism Must Be Eradicated'". Them.
  14. Ari Paul (March 10, 2023). "A Taste of What’s in Store if Right-Wing Zealots Get Green Light to Sue Media". Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
  15. 15.0 15.1 Raymond, Janice (1993). Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women's Freedom. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 9780062508997.