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]
Transphobia[edit]
Her attacks on transgender people began with her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male,[3] 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.[4]
Her 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. 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.[5] Stone has responded in The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto.[6]
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.
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,[7] forgetting that many copies of her book are still in circulation in libraries across the world.[8] 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).
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.
See also[edit]
- Abigail Shrier, author of the anti-transmasc Bible Irreversible Damage
- SWERF, something else Raymond is
- Transmisogyny
References[edit]
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner (1975). "Dictionary of American Slang", Second Supplemented Edition. Page 465. Thomas Y. Crowell Company. ISBN 978-0690006704.
- ↑ Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Teachers College Press, 1994. ISBN 0807762725.
- ↑ Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- ↑ The Dispute Between Radical Feminists and Trans People
- ↑ Stone, Sandy "The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto"
- ↑ Raymond, Janice "Fictions and Facts about the Transsexual Empire"
- ↑ The transsexual empire : the making of the she-male. WorldCat library search.