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12. Invasion of the Gender Snatchers w/ Julia Cameron
89 Plays1 month ago
Sarah and Helen invite a guest to the symposium to talk about a foundational work of transphobia: Janice Raymond's Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, and discover that despite its pretensions to feminism, it is steeped in some pretty classic misogyny.
Our guest, Julia Cameron, is an educator and writer based in Boston.
Check out our patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Odium Symposium' and Janice Raymond's Work
00:00:00
Speaker
So that's something that you notice when reading this book is everything you see, like kind of the anti-trans from like a quote unquote progressive or feminist side, nothing is new. it's It's all just like repeating these ideas from decades ago. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to share with you all our first ever guest episode of Odium Symposium. This episode focuses on Janice Raymond and in particular her foundational transphobic and trans misogynist work, The Transsexual Empire.
Critique of Misogyny in Raymond's Feminist Work
00:00:28
Speaker
We see how this supposedly feminist work is actually steeped in misogyny, and as usual we confront ideas that, despite being obviously wrong decades ago, still very much haunt us today.
00:00:39
Speaker
i hope you all enjoy! There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:57
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:15
Speaker
some level of masochism.
00:01:18
Speaker
Hi everyone, I'm Helen.
Introduction of Guest Julia Cameron and Her Expertise
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm Sarah. Welcome to Odium Symposium, podcast about the production of bigotry. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. Largely the format will be the same, but we actually have our first ever guest.
00:01:31
Speaker
So want to welcome onto the pod Julia Cameron, who's an educator and writer based in Boston. Happy to be here. Thank you Sarah and Helen. Yeah, so we'll get into the topic for today and and all that. But before we do that, we have a little bit of podcast business. We have another patron to thank. So thank you to Chase for subscribing.
00:01:51
Speaker
Thank you for becoming an Odium connoisseur. You can go to the Patreon and subscribe for $5 a month. You'll get early access to episodes. We'll mention your name on the podcast and you can leave a message. We'll read that out. We forgot to mention that that's the thing you can do, but you can do that. Yeah, so today we have, we're going back into books about misogyny written by women, right? We're we're we're continuing our sort of diversity push on the pod to have, you know, women's voices and centering women's voices on Odium Symposium. So i wanted to get our guest Julia on because she's also familiar with this text. She'd also read it before and she's done a lot of other background reading that and knows sort of about the history of this in sort of complementary ways that I do. Like we've both read about stuff related to this.
00:02:36
Speaker
But it felt like, okay, we both have sort of slightly different backgrounds here. And so it'll be helpful to get into really why this text sucks. So... What text are
Focus on 'The Transsexual Empire' and Its Misconceptions
00:02:45
Speaker
we reading? I wasn't actually told. So the text today is The Transsexual Empire, The Making of the She-Mail by Janice Raymond.
00:02:54
Speaker
Oh, lovely. That's so exciting. This is going to be another game of please don't punch your computer, Sarah. I don't want you to have to buy a new computer. Probably at one of the more difficult levels that we've seen before. okay So Sarah, important question. I'm ready.
00:03:11
Speaker
I'm not ready. Do you know what a transsexual is? a transsexual is a person of gender, I would say. Exactly. do you know when transsexuals were invented? Transsexuals were invented? Well, accounts vary.
00:03:22
Speaker
Some say it was in 2014. twenty fourteen I think 2014 was when they invented transgender people, actually. Oh, I see. i see. Okay. Yeah. Which is kind of around the rise of sort of pre-woke, you know, some of the roots of woke. as we This is an intellectual podcast. We like to trace down the intellectual paths that various ideas have come from. And so, you know. My rigorous analysis leads me to conclude that probably about 2012 is good for transgenderism, but transsexuality goes back a little bit further, probably to the invention of the movie Tootsie.
Historical Context and Inaccuracies in Raymond's Work
00:04:01
Speaker
What's funny is that one of the big points of contention here like is this history. And we're joking, but she does place the invention of transsexuals like basically like
00:04:11
Speaker
in the 50s with Christine Jorgensen. Like she really wants to say like, this is the invention of the transsexual. And in fact, this book, so just starting with a little bit of historical context, this book was written in 1979. And very soon after this book came out and already there were some talk, there was people talking about this, but you know, in the next decade, there was a big push to switch over to this word transgender. And there was a lot of things, you know, we'll get into all of that. But like a later publication of this book does have a new introduction to try to like address sort of cultural changes. And it is advertised as like a new introduction about transgender. And it's just like, it's so weak. It's so funny.
00:04:50
Speaker
But anyway, Julia, do you want to do like a brief history of the 20th century transsexuality? Tell us about who like Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin were? yeah so janice raymond actually wasn't off by too far she was only off by about two three decades or so so okay you can look back in history you can find people that today we can recognize as having something that rhymes with the trans experience but trans sexuality is a medical idea originates in the 19 around 1930 or so right so this was you know 1910s 1920s people were scientists were starting to learn what hormones were
00:05:25
Speaker
and so you could do great things like you could have someone implant a monkey testicle onto you to give you extra virility and like extra manliness really right didn't work but what you can do is if you've removed testicles from someone then that will stop the testosterone production right you can produce like synthetic versions of these hormones you can give to people. It turns out the human body is very responsive to these things. And around the same time in the 30s is when these surgeries were invented. So this was done at the Institute for Sexual Science, Institute for Sexual Wissenschaft in Berlin. This was in the nineteen twenty s and thirty s
00:06:00
Speaker
The guy who ran this institute, Magnus Hirschfeld, was a beautiful gay man who was really all about just making a space for all of that. So there's a lot of like, you know, scientific side of things. There's the study of this, a lot of, you know, work trying value to destigmatize these things.
00:06:17
Speaker
Also, it was a place where a lot of gay people, a lot of what we would now call trans people, would hang out. You know, you go to the nightclub, and then you go to the institute. You go to both those. So Helen, Sarah, either of you want to say why the institute no longer exists?
Feminist Ideologies Influencing Raymond
00:06:35
Speaker
What happened? Well, you may have heard of this thing called the 1930s that happened at some point.
00:06:41
Speaker
I'm not sure exactly when. most people Most people date it to pre-'50s. And in the 1930s in Germany, the Nazis, one of the first things they did was they took it upon themselves to efface and obliterate all understanding of what we would describe today as like sexual diversity, gender diversity, that sort of thing.
00:07:07
Speaker
So some of those book burnings, those famous book burnings that you see photos of in histories of the Third Reich, those were of Magnus Hirschfeld's research and books and the collection at his institute. Yeah, so probably in your history textbook, you see the famous like Nazi book burning where the youth groups...
00:07:27
Speaker
had all these books, and what they don't tell you is they had raided the Institute for Sexualwissenschaft and taken all the records, taken all the library, taken all that, and just burned it. Hirschfeld, luckily, was out of the country at the time on a tour, kind of speaking as, you know, intellectuals do.
00:07:43
Speaker
So he survived, a though he died a few years later. Trans sexuality, though, did not die with the Institute. So one thing this Institute was, was very international, like a lot of people would visit. And one of the people who visited it was Harry Benjamin.
00:07:56
Speaker
Harry Benjamin, you know, later ended up in America. And in the nineteen fifty s kind of kept going with this work so you know as kind of mentioned earlier christine jorgensen was like kind of this big first one this you know uh gi from world war ii turned bombshell is i think how the headline puts at the famous headline you know she got her surgery done in europe right but this was kind of also being developed in america in the 50s and 60s and so there were these clinics being developed so you know There was this demand for the surgery for these procedures, as there was at Hirschfeld's Institute.
00:08:32
Speaker
People came, they're like, I want this. I heard i can do you can do this. Will you do this for me? And they wanted to kind of try to like you know study these people. you know They're psychologists. They love studying a deviant population. And they also you know didn't want to get sued, so they had to come up with like diagnostic criteria, things like that. So these clinics became like a way to just kind of like filter who bought this, who didn't, who's the true transsexual versus just someone with the fetish, try to work out that. And it kind of built up this academic study, started going. So it was this hot topic.
Critique of Raymond's Views on Gender Identity and Surgery
00:09:02
Speaker
And if you're a grad student and you're looking for a hot topic for your dissertation, one thing you can do is you can take the ideas of your dissertation advisor and you can apply them to this hot new topic. So that's what Janice Raymond did.
00:09:14
Speaker
She was a PhD student under Mary Daly, the feminist theologian, and her dissertation topic was... What does this have to say about transsexuality? And okay, so that's kind of one strand as to where Janice Raymond is coming from.
00:09:28
Speaker
It's just this kind of academic side. There's this lot of study. It's obviously of interest to feminists. so Let's kind of try to study that as well. There's a second strand and we'll see this towards the end, which is Mary Daly, Janice Raymond. These are both feminists. There's the academic side of this, but there's also like the political activist side of this and trans people are being involved in feminists. So the historian Susan Strykers pointed out that in the 60s and 70s, there were a lot of trans people who are getting active in feminist movements. A lot of these people weren't just like focusing on maybe their own issues, but also working with like gay and lesbian groups or feminist groups and so on. And even though there was a reactionary backlash in the 70s and 80s,
00:10:09
Speaker
you know This is still there. A good example of this would be ah Sandy Stone at Olivia Records. This was a feminist recording studio, you know all women trying to like record music by women for women. so Four non-blondes, Indigo Girls, Chapel Room, things like that. that you know They found a recording engineer, Sandy Stone, the transsexual, and she worked with them. and This was a little bit of a controversy. that This was something that feminists were talking about at time.
00:10:38
Speaker
kind of in this activist political sphere as well. There was completely and ironically, like sort of a campaign to cancel her, right? We'll get to that. Okay. But yeah, let's let's get into the book then. So she opens with kind of scene settings. This is like the very opening of the preface to the the first edition of the book. Transsexualism has taken only 25 years to become a household word.
00:11:02
Speaker
It is likely that most of us were initially made aware of the topic with the publication of the famed Christine Jorgensen case in 1953. A little over a decade later, Johns Hopkins Hospital announced that it would become the first American medical institution to devote itself to the performance of transsexual surgery on a select but serious scale.
00:11:23
Speaker
In 1974, the subject again received notice with the publication of Jan Morris's Conundrum. The latest transsexual notable has been Renee Richards, who has succeeded in hitting the benefits of sex discrimination back into the male half of the court.
00:11:37
Speaker
The public recognition and success that it took Billie Jean King and women's tennis years to get, Renee Richards has achieved in one set. The new bumper stickers might well read, it takes castrated balls to play women's tennis.
00:11:52
Speaker
So you're getting a little bit of the vibe we're going to see here with that. She's so proud of herself all the time in this book. I know, i'm I'm doing like a jerk-off motion to the camera reading that last line. like And you can feel this like grievance, right? this This sense of offense at, oh, they're moving too fast, right? like Yeah, it's very reactionary, like overtly.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah, despite supposedly coming from this radical feminist position. And just the metaphors here, her sort of sustained metaphor, hitting the hitting the benefits of sex discrimination back into the male half of the court is just so so late Yeah, I don't know. And I don't know how revealing this will end up being, but she is kind of framing gender conflict as this game with predefined rules. And there's a way you're supposed to play it. You're supposed to like shoot the advantage back and forth, you know each side trying to get what they want. And here's this person who's breaking the rules, who's cheating.
00:13:01
Speaker
That's very reactionary, that framing. Oh, yeah. Okay, so she said, like, transsexualism. It's only taken 25 years to become household word, and it's like, well, what does that mean? What are you counting from, right? She's counting from Christine Jorgensen to when the publication of this book is?
00:13:17
Speaker
But surely... there's more history there right so it's it's the other sort of big impulse which is like oh these people just showed up a second ago right and it's like well no there's a whole history and there's a whole you know there's 20 years before that and it just doesn't make any sense and it is again a reactionary impulse we've seen again and again to like pick a really convenient moment to start your story and just ignore everything before that for the record raymond does know that the history before this exists she mentions it later in her book so She knows all this and she's going to talk about it. It's just rhetorically she doesn't want to admit it. This book is not only a book about transsexualism.
00:13:55
Speaker
It goes further and considers the context that makes transsexualism possible. Oh, moral decay. Oh, I love it. While various individuals have looked at the issue of transsexualism, very few have ever really seen it.
00:14:08
Speaker
Transsexuals see themselves as women, parentheses, men, end parentheses, quote, trapped in male, parentheses, female, end parentheses, bodies. Doctors fixate on hormonal techniques and constructed genitalia, artificial vaginas, breast implants, and the like.
00:14:27
Speaker
Therapists view transsexualism as a humane solution to the agony of, quote, gender dysphoria, end quote. The public sees the media's image of the talk show Transsexual, which beeps out a benevolent picture of the transsexual experience.
00:14:41
Speaker
Many women see the transsexual who claims to be a lesbian feminist as the man who has paid the ultimate price of manhood in a patriarchal society, giving up his balls. All these perspectives are fragmented and ultimately blur the issue.
00:14:55
Speaker
They are like the vision of a deer at night who, facing an oncoming car, is hypnotized by the headlights and fails to see the approaching automobile. They focus on the foreground of the transsexual phenomenon rather than on its multi-dimensional background.
00:15:10
Speaker
My purpose is to depict the wider environment in which transsexualism is created and to do a truly ecological analysis.
Discussion on Integrity vs Integration in Trans Care
00:15:19
Speaker
How are you feeling, Sarah? Okay, so first off, you know, the thing I highlighted at the beginning, i can really see, like, this moral argument coming.
00:15:28
Speaker
This claim that, like, what's happening is degeneracy on some level. It's interesting that we should start the episode by calling back to Magnus Hirschfeld and what happened to him with the Nazis.
00:15:42
Speaker
little bit of a connection I'm seeing there between the purity politics and the anti-degeneracy politics of the Nazis and like what's going on here. Second, I'm really curious as to whether her background as the advisee of a theologian is going to play into that.
00:15:59
Speaker
Both of those will come out. Okay, great. Mary Daly's like book that she cites a couple times here is called Gyne Ecology. There's like a slash in the middle. And so she's really nu responsible for this kind of this notion of the the ecological analysis, which... But we'll talk about that later. there's yeah you know i have We have some excerpts from Mary Daly to accompany Janice Raymond. I cannot stress enough how many footnotes in this book are just author conversation with Mary Daly. I see. okay But yeah, I mean, a lot of other things to pick apart in this.
00:16:32
Speaker
What is the automobile? what We're deer in the headlights, right? We're about to get smacked by some deadly force. What is the deadly force? What's supposed to happen? This is Enoch Powell talking about how the river is foaming with blood, right? It is, yeah.
00:16:46
Speaker
there's some threat and it's just unclear entirely. And then the description of what's happening, like, I would say that depictions of trans people on talk shows, it was not great for a number of reasons, but for reasons very different, right? Like this picture she's painting, which is... and this is something we're gonna see more of, which is like therapists and the medical establishment and the media are all conspiring to give the public an image of the transsexual, which is a bad image, which doesn't actually portray what the trans experience is. And she can see that, and then she's just totally backwards on what that means. So here's her main argument. She like sets this out in the introduction.
00:17:29
Speaker
under the heading, the ontological argument, for those who get that reference. Okay, I'm Ann Selmfeld. My main conclusion is that transsexualism is basically a social problem, whose cause cannot be explained except in relation to the sex roles and identities that a patriarchal society generates.
00:17:47
Speaker
Through hormonal and surgical means, transsexuals reject their, quote, native, end quote, bodies, especially their sexual organs, in favor of the body and the sexual organs of the opposite sex.
00:18:00
Speaker
They do this mainly because the body and the genitalia especially come to incarnate the essence of their rejected masculinity and desired femininity. Thus, transsexualism is the result of socially prescribed definitions of masculinity and femininity, one of which the transsexual rejects, in order to gravitate toward the other.
00:18:21
Speaker
So basically what she's saying then is transsexualism is a social phenomenon, just coming out of this like patriarchal society and these strict gender roles that produces this. So rather than being like biological or something, it is a social phenomenon.
00:18:37
Speaker
And then a page later she keeps talking. Furthermore, chromosomes are only one defining factor, in the context of the total history of what it means to be a woman or a man, in a society that treats women and men differently on the basis of biological sex.
00:18:53
Speaker
This means that the integrity of the body must also be placed in the context of the integrity of the total person, which includes the realization of such values as choice, awareness, and autonomy.
00:19:04
Speaker
Finally, if the transsexual answer reinforces the foundation of sexual oppression, which is sexual stereotyping, by encouraging the transsexual to conform to those stereotypes, then it is also violating the integrity of the society.
00:19:20
Speaker
Transsexualism is a half-truth that highlights the desperate situation of those individuals in our society who have been uniquely body-bound by gender constrictions. But it is not a whole truth.
00:19:32
Speaker
While transsexualism poses the question of so-called gender agony, it fails to give an answer. I hope to show that it amounts to a solution that only reinforces the society and social norms that produce transsexualism to begin with.
00:19:47
Speaker
Right, so we're getting a little bit of a peek as to what her solution to the transsexual problem is going to be. Have you tried just being a faggot?
00:19:57
Speaker
That's not quite her solution, I would say. Okay, it's at least closely connected. i can see that. It's close. Just a couple days ago, we got another, like, will no one protect effeminate boys? like Thank you, The Atlantic. In The Atlantic, like, 50 years after this was written. So it's kind of like, we're we're still stuck in this, right? and And it is related to that impulse, and we still see that...
00:20:23
Speaker
all over the place. I just love pointing out when these people are also bad writers. Like, it's it's not as much, it's not as important as the as the bigotry, but this phrase, so-called gender agony, is really funny because gender agony is not really, like, a widely used term. Yeah, I've never heard that before.
00:20:40
Speaker
So, saying, like, so-called gender agony, it's like, yeah, you're making up a term, and then you're calling it ridiculous. Yeah. This is pretty standard fare among anti-trans people, right? Is they seize upon someone has some infilicitous turn of phrase and they seize on it as if everyone's using it, right?
00:20:59
Speaker
Right. And just to to amp that up, she actually comes up with a bunch of terms. So, yeah. So we need to talk about terminology. She has a bunch of terms, right? Because she's going to talk about transsexuals, but she doesn't want to cede the ground of calling trans women women, right? Like, obviously she's opposed to that. I saw earlier that she she had such like a strong negative impulse toward calling trans women women that she insisted on like putting these little parentheses and saying men afterward and vice That's a little different. that's I thought that's what that was at first, but she was saying women and she's saying or men. right so She's she saying the claim of transsexuals is that they are women or vice versa, men trapped in male or female bodies.
00:21:42
Speaker
But no, she's actually much, much more awkward because she doesn't want to talk about Right, she she she knows she'll give the game away if she says these are, like, she can't really talk about it she says men, because she needs to actually address the use of gendered language. So she comes up with two terms that are just incredible.
00:22:00
Speaker
Male to constructed female, and female to constructed male transsexuals. Oh my God. Okay. This is just Tim's. Yeah. There's a term TERFs love to use, which is trans identified male, which obviously they intended as a derogatory slur for male to female transsexuals or whatever term you prefer.
00:22:22
Speaker
And yeah, it's just that, but in slightly more sociological language. Yeah, so she has a couple of these other terms. So we have transsexualism we've already seen as opposed like transsexuality. And, you know, she explicitly talks about she picks the ism because she thinks it's an ideology. You know, this is not a natural phenomenon. This is a social phenomenon. There's this ideology that these psychologists and these surgeons are producing.
00:22:48
Speaker
We'll see later, towards the end of this episode, we'll see my favorite term she comes up with, which is the trans sexually constructed lesbian feminist. So she's got a whole bunch of them. She's not going to have her trait on language. There's a beautiful part in the introduction where she explains she's going to use the pronoun he everywhere, not out of this like pseudo universal he as the generic human, but because she wants to call these people men.
00:23:11
Speaker
It's actually even funnier. It's she's I mean, it's because she wants to call these people men, but it's also she's saying because the vision of femininity and what femininity is and like in her feminist analysis, like femininity is a is a patriarchal construct.
00:23:26
Speaker
And so she's saying, I'm using he because all of this is constructed by and for men. And the thing is, that's actually the pseudo, like she's saying, I don't want to use it in the pseudo universal way, but that actually is the pseudo universal way. Like when people use he as a universal, like that's what they're saying. And so it's.
00:23:46
Speaker
That's the whole feminist objection to using he as a universal. And so it's really funny to be like, I'm not doing in this in the misogynist way. Right. And then the other thing to say is that her terminology here, male to constructed female, her point is like, okay, these people are clearly no longer fully male. Like there is something gender happening.
00:24:03
Speaker
but it's not feminine and so I can't she doesn't even want to say male to female she specifically objects to like any kind of calling people female because she's it's constructed right so she kind of is actually describing transsexuals as like people of gender right like people where suddenly the gender is socially constructed as opposed to people who are their natural gender another term that's often used at this time is genetic. And this isn't even in trans communities also later, like people were using this terminology, like instead of saying cis, people would say like genetic males or females. so this is another term we'll see. I'm a little puzzled about the descriptions of the integrity of the body and the integrity of the total person and the integrity of the society and what exactly the relationship between those is supposed to be.
00:24:50
Speaker
Right. So the solution she has for all of this, she titles the name on under the name of an ethic of integrity. And so she's going to get into what integrity is.
00:25:02
Speaker
But in order to understand what integrity is, we have to understand... what causes transsexuality. So the first chapter of this book is just like, it's called Everything You Wanted to Know About Transsexualism, and it's just completely wrong. like There's some basic facts that are correct, and then there's just like a bunch of quick history and then her own obsessions, and it's it's not that illuminating. So we didn't pull much from there.
00:25:26
Speaker
Chapter 2 is then a critique of the sexologists and this biological explanation. Basically, it's a chapter-long explanation of why John Money sucks. Now, John Money does suck. You could make a whole a whole odium episode about John Money and the various ways in which he's terrible, so...
00:25:44
Speaker
Maybe you could give the listeners a quick indication of who John Money is. John Money was ah like a sexologist, a psychologist, and he tried to like give this theory of gender identity, where he said that like gender identity was kind of imprinted, i think it was within the first 18 months.
00:25:59
Speaker
And you know like a lot of these people, he didn't do a good job of like respecting the agency of his patients. And the most notable case is one where there was like one of his patients he did try to like, you know, there was like a surgical mishap or something and they tried to take this young boy and try to raise him as a girl and didn't work. He ended up killing himself, I believe.
00:26:21
Speaker
Just real nasty shit, frankly. Yeah, basically was a botched circumcision and they were like, okay, let's let's just raise him as a girl. And it really didn't go well.
00:26:33
Speaker
And for some reason, this is never used until more recently as like, oh, because people, because because your gender isn't your genitals, right? Like there's actually a lot more going on and and you can't just like decide to raise a kid as a different gender. That's not going to work out.
00:26:48
Speaker
Yeah, your gender actually radiates from your fingernails. It's a question of what color and if you paint them. Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, this guy sucks. Yeah, point is, this there's not really much to kind of say here. It's not really her argument. It's just her saying this is what someone else has said about the cause of transsexualism.
00:27:06
Speaker
And here's why I think it's bad. Which it is bad. So it's it's a bit more interesting in the next chapter because then in chapter three, she starts moving to kind of talking about like the sociological side of things, right? She thinks this is a social phenomenon. This is where she really picks up with her argument.
00:27:22
Speaker
So chapter three, titled Mother's Feminized Phallus or Father's Castrated Femme. Okay, great. I love it. The title of this chapter is meant to suggest the distance between the alleged dominant mothers blamed in the psychological literature for causing transsexualism and the truly dominating medical-psychiatric fathers who create artificial women.
00:27:47
Speaker
parentheses femmes end The distance is great. Blaming the mother and the psychological literature, which presupposes that transsexualism is the result of too much mother and too little father, obscures the real cause of transsexualism, patriarchy, and the legions of therapeutic fathers who create transsexuals according to their man-made designs and specifications.
00:28:13
Speaker
Okay, I see. We're only a few steps away already from the future in which transgenderism is a conspiracy perpetrated by pharma companies. That's already where she's at. And in fact, that's one strand that we didn't bring in from the earlier parts. But I mean, the book is called...
00:28:36
Speaker
the transsexual empire, and she does talk about why she calls it an empire. And her main critique is that it is this construction of, it's not just the pharma companies, but also sociologists and psychologists and doctors and the medical establishment all conspiring together to form an empire that is creating transsexuals. So that is not just like latent in the text, that is pretty explicitly what she's saying. Gotcha.
00:29:05
Speaker
Gotcha. So if the listeners are not aware, the modern trans-exclusive radical feminist movement is... It's gotten a lot more overtly fascist over time. I think we can already see that, like, there's...
00:29:21
Speaker
There's a fascist element to it right at the start here, but um a lot of them are like full-on Nazis, that sort of thing. The ones that like sincerely and full-throatedly consider themselves feminists and are pro-abortion, that sort of thing, they're pretty marginal at this point. And as it happens, this concept of a shadowy cabal of the wealthy, influence in society so as to cause it to degenerate into transsexualism, happens to align very well with all kinds of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And so one of the things we're seeing here is something that is going to grow into a mighty tree of blaming various Jewish people for causing transgenderism.
00:30:11
Speaker
And there's more broadly some pretty bad political analysis. I mean, it's probably worth saying out loud, like using the word empire here and trying to tie this into like a critique of empire is pretty bad. I mean, and this was also both socially and even academically sort of starting to become a hot topic that people were talking about, you know, critique of empire and understanding colonialism as something that's bad. And she's in a way trying to kind of push her work into that,
00:30:39
Speaker
sphere right she's not explicitly saying like oh this is a critique of empire and this is sort of an anti-colonial thing but she is trying to talk about she is trying to say you know this is an empire and this you know it's it's imperial and it and she's trying to like bring this out and throughout the book there's all sorts of different places where she'll make kind of analyses that use our metaphors of race or all these other things that are just quite bad Look, women are being colonized by men. That's what's happening.
00:31:07
Speaker
That's my feminist analysis. That is her analysis. Yeah. yeah Yeah. So there's one thing to point out here, which is she's kind of k nodded to the idea that there's also women who become men. There's not just men who become women.
00:31:24
Speaker
But for some reason, and there's not really good, she doesn't have a good citation for this claim, but she claims it many times and claims that it's obvious in the literature. Most trans people are male to female.
00:31:38
Speaker
So this does match with the psychological literature of the day. So this one I don't think we can blame Janice Raymond for you know She's getting a lot of this information from these sexologists, you know who's seen at these sex clinics, who's allowed to transition, and largely it's male-to-constructed female transsexuals. There are much fewer female-to-male constructed transsexual, trans men, as a normal person would say.
00:32:04
Speaker
there's much fewer trans men coming through these clinics at this time. There's not zero. you know There's some famous people like Eric Erickson, who's like actually provided a lot of the funding for some of these clinics, but it is a big number difference at the time.
00:32:17
Speaker
You look now, 50 years later, that's no longer the case. So this is something we'll see kind of with a lot of her analysis, is she takes what she's getting from these like psychologists and sociologists,
00:32:31
Speaker
And you know she runs with it, and it just ends up not actually being accurate past the seventy s like as the decades go on. And I also think there's reasons to point out that there iss like there's reasons why that's happening in the sociological literature that aren't just having to do with actually the population and what's going on. And if she's going to make this critique of the transsexual empire, but then use all of their data and not try to interrogate, maybe the data collection is bad or maybe the framework they're using is bad. maybe the data is wrong, it's a little lame. i mean, she's in part getting her information from people who are in this business to fuck their patients.
00:33:12
Speaker
I think that's pretty notable. Yeah. Okay. There are many reasons male-to-constructed female transsexualism is more predominant. Most obviously, the surgery is easier, less costly, and more developed and publicized.
00:33:26
Speaker
Second, but perhaps less obvious, is the fact that men have been much freer to experiment than women. Thus, even in the area of transsexual treatment and surgery, it seems that men who desire to become female and to live out the gender role that is culturally prescribed for women are actually, in their assertiveness of seeking out and enduring the surgery, conforming much more to the masculine stereotype.
00:33:49
Speaker
Women, through a cultural conditioning that has generated less impulse to experiment, are likely to be much more reticent. I mean, I think there is kind of a barrier here that's preventing trans men from seeking treatment and I think the primary one is just like class like these are people who are socialized as women and they have less power and less money and so it's more difficult for them to do something that's like risky like this to put themselves in the hands of someone who is likely to be an exploitative creep like
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah. But her ascribing that to just sort of like these gender essentialists, well, she says it's not gender essentialist. She says it's about cultural conditioning.
00:34:41
Speaker
I don't really believe her on that. But she ascribes this to what I think are really like gender essentialist ideas of men as like brave pioneers.
00:34:52
Speaker
And that's bullshit. Third, male transsexualism may well be a graphic expression of the destruction that sex role molding has wrought on men.
00:35:02
Speaker
Thus, it could be perceived as one of the few outlets for men in a rigidly gender-defined society to opt out of their culturally prescribed roles. Women, on the other hand, since the recent rise of feminism, have been able to confront sexual oppression on a sociopolitical as well as personal level.
00:35:21
Speaker
Less women have realized that both masculine and feminine identities and roles are traps. Not what we're called. Anyway, i think... But we're we're seeing here now she's kind of like drawing a contrast between this ideology of transsexualism versus feminism, as these are like contrary opposite sort of ways of understanding and living in the world.
00:35:47
Speaker
Now, to kind of address an earlier thing that was said, you know, she's getting a lot of this data from these sexologists, these clinics themselves, but it's not entirely fair. You know, she does do some actual, like, ethnographic work, so she does go out and talk to some male-to-constructed female transsexuals. Women are just too cool and woke to be trans.
00:36:07
Speaker
How transsexuals think and speak of themselves is very revealing. In preparation for this writing, I personally interviewed a sampling of 15 transsexuals. In the interviews, 13 of which were with pre- and post-operative male-to-constructed female transsexuals, I consistently asked why they wanted to be women.
00:36:27
Speaker
How, in other words, did they define themselves as female? Most of the transsexuals responded in terms of the classic feminine stereotype. Some wanted to be women because all their lives they had, quote, felt, end quote. They were women trapped in men's bodies.
00:36:44
Speaker
One expressed this, quote, feeling, end quote, in terms of absolute knowledge as opposed to mere desire. More specifically, many transsexuals said they viewed themselves as passive, nurturing, emotional, intuitive, and the like.
00:36:59
Speaker
Very often, many expressed a preference for female dress and makeup. Others saw their feminine identification in terms of feminine occupations, housework, secretarial, and stewardess work.
00:37:11
Speaker
Some expressed feminine identification in terms of marriage and motherhood, wanting to meet the right man, have him take care of me, adopt kids, and bring them up.
00:37:24
Speaker
One expressed very definite views on child rearing that were quite ironic in this context. I would definitely teach my kids that boys should be boys and girls should be girls.
00:37:36
Speaker
One thing that's immediately worth highlighting is this is not a completely accurate portrayal of what her interviewees said. And we'll see later, you know, she'll like have interviewees say things that are not just, I want this very stereotypical femininity. This is presenting a bit of a skewed look onto what she got out of her interviews.
00:37:57
Speaker
The other thing to point out is like you read these this description and and there's obvious reasons why trans people being interviewed by an academic would portray their gender this way. And in fact, one of the big responses to this book The Transsexual Empire is a, you know, one of the sort of founding texts in sort of trans studies is Sandy Stone's Empire Strikes Back. And we'll talk more about that later.
00:38:24
Speaker
But one of the main points she makes is like, look, trans people are having access to transition gatekept by the medical establishment who are expecting them to say this list of things. And so they've said that list of things.
00:38:40
Speaker
It's obvious why this is the case. But she's just like, oh, look at how regressive their gender politics are. And what's even funnier is that when she describes her process of going into these interviews, she even talks about how she gives like a list of the questions and sort of the open-ended interview process. And she discusses a little bit what her methodology is. And she even says like, oh, and when I felt comfortable saying so, like I even voiced some like opposition to this idea of,
00:39:09
Speaker
transsexuality or, you know, whatever. And so she's even bringing her own sense of like, oh, I couldn't speak my mind into these interviews. And it's it's just, it's very funny. you No reflections, zero reflections.
00:39:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if she would go and interview 13 cis women and hear them say that they feel they have absolute knowledge that they're women and that sometimes they feel nurturing, emotional, intuitive and the like and be like, yeah,
00:39:37
Speaker
not real women. I can sense it. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, is that this whole framework is set up exactly to produce this dilemma, right? As soon as you're saying these are male-to-constructed female, and then these are natural women, and then I'm going to really focus on... right She's not necessarily wrong that... right Her point is, I'm going to call them male-to-constructed female because female as a sort of gender identity is socially constructed. And it's like, well, that's not necessarily wrong. It's just...
00:40:06
Speaker
When you only see that happening in these cases and you don't even look at what you're calling natural women, yeah, you're going to see this this weird dichotomy, but it's like you're looking for it. You've you've constructed your entire like apparatus to see that distinction.
00:40:20
Speaker
Yeah, like these are things for people to say that are an outcome of patriarchal culture. They are stereotypical. That's absolutely true. But she's not actually looking for the role patriarchy plays in producing people saying these. She's looking for people saying these because she feels that it will validate her understanding of...
00:40:45
Speaker
of transsexuality as a whole as artificial. Things can have artificial aspects, can express artificial aspects without just like being artificial things.
00:40:57
Speaker
Yeah, so we're seeing her methodology, we're seeing we're seeing all of this, and she's talked about all these guys that she doesn't like, and then she gets to this guy, Thomas Kando. So, Julia, do you want to talk a little bit about who john who Thomas Kando is? Yeah, so, you know, she's not relying entirely on her own interviews. She's not relying entirely on what these sexologists are saying.
00:41:16
Speaker
ah One of the sources she draws from is this work by this young sociologist, Thomas Kando, And okay, so like Giannis Raymond, this was his dissertation topic. He was at University of Minnesota in the 1960s, when the medical school there started doing these surgeries at a clinic.
00:41:32
Speaker
And he's like, this is a great thing I can do. Like, this is an exciting new topic. I can make a name for myself as an academic. And he wrote some papers. And just to kind of give a view of the sort of guy he is, just do a little bit of ad hominem.
00:41:44
Speaker
While researching this guy, I found on his academic website this document called I Spent My Life Practicing Politically Incorrect Sociology. And let me read some of these. They're basically blog posts from like the 90s and not. So before blogging... Before you read those, Sarah, just notice the page count on this document. I've like screenshotted this in just the way...
00:42:06
Speaker
We are on page one out of 529. Holy shit. He took all his blog posts and he compiled them into a PDF. So here's some of these and nots blog posts.
00:42:20
Speaker
I'll just give you the time. oh my God. Aren't blacks as guilty of racism as whites? On that note, aren't women as guilty of sexism as men? The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was a Stalinist plot.
00:42:36
Speaker
Kando was Hungarian, so that's the interest. Sociologists are too preoccupied with homosexuality. Me too. And last last one, are prime numbers fun?
00:42:51
Speaker
Wait, are prime numbers fun? Well, Betteridge's Law Headlines applies. I see. they're not fun. he's got He's got a whole section in there on mathematical opinions. And then there's also some fun stuff in there. There's like some of this hero. You can see that this was written in 2007 or this was compiled in 2007. This is such a classic crank. I can't believe if he even goes into math crankery. This is so funny.
00:43:16
Speaker
There is some stuff on there about like the lead up to the Iraq war where he's, he has a whole section on, he's like I'm going to take on the right now, right? Like I'm politically incorrect, but i'm I'm a brave maverick. I'm not just hating on the left. I'm going to hate on the right a little bit. And so he has got a whole blog post about how like Fox news is too anti-French.
00:43:34
Speaker
that the anti-French sentiment on Fox News and like the the in the early Iraq War and the whole like Freedom Fries thing is like anti-French bigotry, that they're doing anti-French racism. So he's got a whole thing defending the French, which as francophobe podcast, I gotta flag that.
00:43:53
Speaker
Black people? Oh, thumbs down. The French? Oh, yeah. i mean, that's a very French opinion to have. But it's it's also funny because that's his leftism, right? That's his, like, I'm going go against the right too by saying, I'm a fan of the French. Don't hate on the French. It's just very funny. Thomas Kando, welcome to the resistance.
00:44:14
Speaker
Yeah, i so Julia sent this to me and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Okay, we can't talk too much about this guy. It needs to be an ODM episode. And then I started reading these and I was like, I'm never reading this document. I'm not making an ODM episode on this guy. But yeah, it's pretty incredible. Just skimming through it is really fun. I'll i'll send you the link later and you can like peruse it. Oh, I'm looking forward to it.
00:44:35
Speaker
yeah Yeah, so she uses a lot from Thomas Kando, and this is one of her big sources in this chapter 3. So his study was called Sex Change, the Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals.
00:44:49
Speaker
Drop the screenshot. In contrast to the psychological and biological theorists, Kando spotlights the social problem immediately. quote, unlike the feminists who argue that the social structure is unjust with respect to women and therefore needs reform, transsexuals decide to alter their own physical sex in order to legitimately conform to cultural expectations, end quote.
00:45:13
Speaker
He affirms that transsexuals aim primarily to achieve the desired sex roles and not merely the anatomy of the opposite sex. In answer to the question of what is the ultimate criterion of being a woman, transsexuals emphasize mostly social psychological criteria.
00:45:31
Speaker
Ten out of seventeen mention such things as being attracted to men, being loved and needed by the family, and behaving like a woman. It is significant here that most of the transsexuals questioned did not see biological criteria, that is, the female organs themselves, as ultimate reasons for changing sex.
00:45:52
Speaker
Right, so Kando's kind of big thesis is that male deconstructed female transsexuals are very conforming to stereotypical femininity, more so than biological women.
00:46:04
Speaker
This is a very current TERF argument, absolutely. Yeah, so that's something that you notice when reading this book is everything you see, like kind of the anti-trans from like a quote-unquote progressive or feminist side, nothing is new. it's It's all just like repeating these ideas from decades ago. But this next excerpt is one that we picked just to make Sarah make funny faces.
00:46:27
Speaker
This is also again talking about Kando's work. Most of the transsexuals perceived their sexual relationships, even preoperatively, as heterosexual. One transsexual, Sally, phrased this in rather direct language, I hate homos.
00:46:44
Speaker
I never wanted sex with them. I had homosexual affairs in grade school and in high school, but only with normals. As Kondo summarizes, transsexuals are reactionary, moving back toward the core culture rather than away from it.
00:47:02
Speaker
They are the Uncle Toms of the sexual revolution. With these individuals, the dialectic of social change comes full circle, and the position of greatest deviance becomes that of greatest conformity. Okay, first off, Sally, absolutely ridiculous phrasing.
00:47:22
Speaker
It makes total sense to me that someone who is a woman would want to sleep with people who are attracted to them as a woman. You know, like, yeah it's it's dispiriting to imagine someone being attracted to me personally because they like male typical characteristics.
00:47:41
Speaker
I don't want that. Second, don't say Uncle Tom that way, man. Like, you're going be publishing your blog posts in like 500 page PDF later about like how the blacks are going too far. Dude, you can't say that. Come on, please.
00:47:58
Speaker
Third, The dialectic of social change comes full circle and the position of greatest deviance becomes that of greatest conformity. I don't believe you know what those words mean, dude. Like you're just trying to say it looks like it is, but actually it isn't.
00:48:15
Speaker
It's the opposite of that. I'm using the word dialectic, which so this is probably intellectually coherent. Yeah, don't you know that a dialectic is when there's two things, but you need three points to determine a circle? It doesn't make any sense, Thomas Kendo.
00:48:29
Speaker
We would call this horseshoe theory today. That's right, we're doing horseshoe theory. Yeah, so so so basically, you know, she she quotes from her interviews. She quotes from this Tom Kando guy that transsexuals are very, very conforming.
00:48:45
Speaker
Now, the problem with saying this is that it's not true. But there's lots of counterexamples. And in fact, some of these counterexamples she's discussed. So one of them we already touched on, which was Jan Morris. ah Jan Morris was a British journalist. She's probably most well known for being the journalist who accompanied the first recorded like summiting of Mount Everest so she was the one who didn't go all the way at the top I think it was like 20,000 feet above sea level and reported that and she wrote a transition memoir conundrum where she kind of talked about her experiences and what becomes clear everyone reads this is that you know Jan Morse is not just solely this
00:49:25
Speaker
Every time from the very beginning I've wanted to be the most stereotypical housewife, woman, whatever. So we have to see, you know, Janice Raymond has to contend with this, and so this is what she has to say on the matter.
00:49:37
Speaker
Another way of viewing Morris's acceptance and seemingly contradictory extolling of both stereotypes is to say that Morris squeezed out of his male status all the vigor of young manhood.
00:49:49
Speaker
However, at the age of 47, in the decline of his male vigor, he latched on to the status of a woman. Since women are often more vigorous when they are older and the cultural pressures have subsided, Morris captures the best of both worlds, so to speak.
00:50:08
Speaker
Transsexualism thus allows him to fully exploit both stereotypes. i Sorry, I laugh because there's a famous tweet. of um Referring to trans woman as best of both worlds.
00:50:22
Speaker
Furthermore, what Morris and other transsexuals exhibit in their acceptance of both identity and role artifacts is not unique to transsexual males. This psychology of acceptance has been noted in other male contexts.
00:50:37
Speaker
For example, Susan Brownmiller in her groundbreaking work Against Our Will, Men, Women, and Rape, cites rape in male prisons as a means of transforming tough and masculine men into what are called gal boys.
00:50:49
Speaker
Brownmiller, in her section on male rape in prison, gives us one more example of how the change from one role to another is managed in an astonishingly brief time. Right. So there's basically like, you know, every possible outcome is already determined, right? These are male to constructed female transsexuals. If they're going all the way into these stereotypes, it's just proof that they're fully into this. If they don't fully go into the stereotypes, it's because, ah, actually like...
00:51:18
Speaker
you know masculinity and femininity were all like the same thing all along so you know one has to wonder if there's like any possible way she could have imagined these people behaving that wouldn't have confirmed her thesis yeah it's a totally rigged game and furthermore even though she claims to be supportive of people breaking sex stereotypes The portrayal here is of trans women who are not stereotypically feminine as being exploitative in doing so. They're wringing the vigor out of their young maleness.
00:51:54
Speaker
It's also so funny to be like, oh, obviously she transitioned later in life because you know how a culture really like... Loves older women....generates older women and gives power to older women. And older women are so respected and have such a voice. And it's like, what are you talking about?
00:52:10
Speaker
Dude, the dominant cultural theme and thinking about aging women is this concept of going over the hill or hitting the wall, which is just like when women are deemed to have had their value dropped to essentially zero when they hit a certain age.
00:52:25
Speaker
That's weird, because all I see when people talk about aging women is the word MILF a lot. So I don't know where you two are, but that's not my cultural milieu. Yeah, I think that's a consequence of the sites you're on, Julia.
00:52:37
Speaker
Right. So we have a second screenshot here. Kind of this is another example of the contradictions of the male to constructed female transsexual. Another recent example of the apparent contradictions that Jan Morris represents is described in an article that appeared in the Gay Community News, reporting on three male-to-constructed female transsexuals, Carolyn, Heather, and Sandy.
00:53:01
Speaker
Most of the questions that were asked in this interview seemed devised to judge the degree of stereotypical identification of the three with dominant feminine norms. The contradiction in Carolyn's statements about sexual stereotyping is fairly obvious.
00:53:15
Speaker
Carolyn identified, quote, herself, end quote, as a feminist. When asked what attributes, that all the female pronouns are in quotes here, when asked what attributes she would describe to a woman, she refused to comment on the grounds that it was sexist to limit certain characteristics to a certain sex.
00:53:33
Speaker
However, when pushed further on what is essential to being a woman, she responded with a classic stereotyped answer. Being willing to be sincere and loving and being able to just give a great deal, get it back too, care for somebody, put together a nice home. A second transsexual, Sandy, rejected macho men but then admitted that she desired to be dominated by men in bed.
00:53:55
Speaker
The third, Heather, also considered herself a feminist, disliked macho men, considered herself aggressive and independent, but on the other hand was reduced to selling her body to men. My own interview data confirms the same kind of contradictions.
00:54:10
Speaker
R, for example, said she didn't believe in part of the stereotypically feminine role, such as doing housework, wanting kids, staying around the house, but she delighted in wearing profuse makeup and frilly feminine clothes.
00:54:24
Speaker
R also made the very important point that one of the reasons transsexuals may seem to conform exaggeratedly to the stereotype is that they have to prove to the gender identity clinics that they can pass, i.e. live, work, dress, and be accepted as women.
00:54:38
Speaker
This, of course, raises the significant issue of to what extent the medical and psychiatric professions contribute, perpetuate, and reinforce the stereotyping syndrome. Several things to pull out of this quote, but I want to focus on this last one first.
00:54:55
Speaker
What does this interviewee R. say? They have to prove to the clinics that they can pass as women, and that's why they seem to fill these stereotypes. This is... a huge crack in Raymond's thesis now that, you know, there's this agency of these transsexual women that maybe what she's seeing is not actually accurate and she should be a bit more skeptical as to some of these sources. But this crack will keep reappearing. Yeah, she's she's correctly picking out a lack of authenticity. And she just doesn't understand that it's like so corrosive to her argument.
00:55:32
Speaker
Well, her response to it is like, this is a lack of authenticity, therefore... yeah she's like, this is this is the kind of authenticity that supports what I'm saying, when and it's it's exactly the opposite.
00:55:45
Speaker
Right, she's she's reading it as like, oh, these people are being disingenuous because they need to be disingenuous to the gender identity clinic. Which is true,
00:55:56
Speaker
but And therefore they must be disingenuous more broadly for no reason. Like, and it's, it doesn't even enter into her mind. the The obvious point that there are spheres where you might have to be inauthentic to to get these things, but that doesn't mean that you are fully inauthentic, right? Like it's the thing you said, right? You can have aspects of this inauthentic or this artificiality, but that doesn't make everything artificial. It's just, yeah, it's so obvious and it's this huge crack and she just doesn't see it at all.
00:56:22
Speaker
Related to that, In the same paragraph, she's talking about, you know, the same kinds of contradictions. And what is the contradiction here? That she likes some feminine things and not others. She has her own, you know, she's not interested in playing the stereotypical feminine role in some ways, but she likes makeup. That's not a contradiction. That's just called, like, being a person and having opinions about your life. And it's not a contradiction to not want kids but like wearing makeup. That's not a contradiction, Janice. Like, what are you talking about?
00:56:51
Speaker
Well, what we're kind of seeing here is, you know, what's going sort of wreck the feminist movement like the 80s with these like lesbian sex wars, like with this political lesbianism, what are the appropriate ways to be a lesbian, to be a sexual person? And like, yeah, being overly femme, like that was frowned upon, these like butch femme dynamics.
00:57:12
Speaker
Or this thing about, like, you know, Sandy rejects macho men but wants to be dominated in bed. Again, like, you know, can lesbians do F&M? This was a ah point of contention to where there were arguments on both sides and kind of tore apart the feminist movement.
00:57:27
Speaker
Or my favorite here, Heather, you know, considers herself a feminist independent but also has to do sex work to survive, and that's a contradiction. None of those are contradictions. Those are all just situations that people are in. that's I mean, I'm really noticing that for a feminist, she seems to have no interest in how gendered power dynamics can play out. Like when we're talking about Carolyn, the first person who's talked about here, initially she refuses to respond to being prodded to be sexist, and then they pressure her.
00:57:59
Speaker
And she's like she gives some like vague statement that touches on the kind of themes they want. And instead of viewing this as someone who is being like squeezed by these interviewers to express like a gender role, she's just like, oh, well, that's an essential characteristic of who Carolyn is. like We get to see her true views, just totally ignoring the role of like the social power of the interviewer in this situation. And then the person who's, quote, reduced to selling her body to men, like, first off, okay, so she's a she's a sex worker, exclusionary, radical feminist.
00:58:38
Speaker
Yes. But, like, she takes that role as a prostitute to be something that is essential to this person and revealing of who this person is when it's just the job that she has. Yeah. It doesn't tell you about how authentically feminine she is or not. That's an incredibly patriarchal thing to say. yeah and it's more of this game being rigged. Either you are stereotypically feminine, and then you're upholding stereotypes, or you are not stereotypically feminine, and then that's a contradiction for some reason. It's all just purely misogynist, and I think this is one of the things we want to
00:59:17
Speaker
Just bring up and talk about what this is there's a there's a perception by a lot of people that like turfiness grows out of a certain kind of like man-hating feminist right that like What happened is the radical feminists hated men and they hated men so much and they see trans women as men and that's why they hate trans women and You dive into this and it's so obvious that like no This is misogynist. This isn't like just transphobic. This is just straight-up misogynist This is talking about women in this really misogynist way and So i think we' want to keep that in mind when we get to the next chapter or no We're gonna actually skip over the next chapter
00:59:54
Speaker
for now, and we'll come back to it because she writes them out of order and it's it's really awkward ordering. But she gets to chapter five, therapy as a way of life. And in here is where she provides her solution. So she's described this problem. She's described, in her mind, she's described a coherent picture of the ideology of transsexualism.
01:00:12
Speaker
You know, there's obviously huge gaps and it's sort of incoherent, but this is, she's gone through the problem. So now she's going to tell us what her solution is. And here's where we're going to have to decide like how much of this is theology, how much is she influenced here by the feminist theology of her advisor. So this part is called Therapy as a Way of Life is the name of this chapter. The medical model itself promotes this so-called normalization, and in doing so limits the quest for self-transcendence.
01:00:40
Speaker
The kinds of health values it generates do not encourage the transsexual to recognize that such health may be unhealthy in the long run. Health values are all of a piece again with our philosophy of adjustment, spurious individualism, and unashamed and thoughtless self-seeking. Such notions of health make true individualism and autonomy unachievable, rendering the individual passive, acquiescent, and medically manipulatable.
01:01:07
Speaker
They deprive the individual of the possibility of transcendent activity and center him slash er on false goods, parentheses, gods. Yeah, so something that's becoming a apparent here is this is another one of Raymond's bugbears. is She's very skeptical of contemporary medicine and medical practice and the science of it.
01:01:28
Speaker
And, you know, skeptical as to what is the meaning of health. So she's very anti-psychiatry, for example. Something else she spent a lot of her career on is she's various like reproductive technology, surrogacy, therapy.
01:01:42
Speaker
embryo selection, things like that. She's very much against all of these things. And so this is kind of coming into this is, you know, she thinks that like, this is just like the wrong view of like what health is, there has to be like this other approach to it.
01:01:55
Speaker
I see. Okay, yeah, I grew up in like a hippy-dippy California community, and it was full of sort of, i guess you could say, proto-wellness fascists who all got like really into QAnon later. And this reads exactly like those people.
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, like when I was reading this, I was like, oh, this sounds like all the Maha, make America healthy a again stuff you see recently with RFK Jr. Like, regarding vaccinations, mothers shouldn't have Tylenol while they're pregnant, these sorts of things.
01:02:28
Speaker
So what is her solution then? You know, coming from feminism, I think feminist love is consciousness raising. And so she proposes consciousness raising as a social therapy to be the solution. Consider the possibility of counseling that encouraged the transsexual to break both stereotypes.
01:02:44
Speaker
Here, the transsexual would be encouraged to become the agent of her or his own energies and to strive for more varied modes of being and becoming. In a very real sense, at this point, the transsexual would become a social critic.
01:02:59
Speaker
All of us are in some way constricted by sexual socialization. One way of viewing transsexuals is that they are uniquely constricted by the rigidified definitions of masculinity and femininity.
01:03:11
Speaker
The general cultural constrictions from which we all suffer become body-laden with them. However, deprived of an alternative framework in which to view the problem, the transsexual is unable to express the problem clearly.
01:03:25
Speaker
The gender identity clinics have a vested interest in suppressing criticism and may collude with the transsexual to solve the problem in an ultimately uncritical way.
01:03:36
Speaker
Given a different mode of therapy where consciousness raising is the primary modus operandi, the transsexual might not find it as necessary to resort to sex conversion surgery.
01:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, okay. She just really, really does not want trans people to have medical treatment. Like, that's the first thing. She also really doesn't want them to socially transition, but I get the sense that's like a secondary priority.
01:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, in some sense. And it's it's such a contradiction to be talking about foregrounding autonomy and individualism at the same time to say, we need to have this counseling, this consciousness-raising counseling that that helps you achieve that autonomy and individualism, which also, by the way, is going to make it so that you don't need all these other things.
01:04:25
Speaker
It just, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, she's just talking about, like, conversion therapy with kind of a woke kind of, oh, we're not converting you back to, you know, we're not trying to teach trans women, we're not trying to put them in conversion therapy to make them men, we're trying to put them in conversion therapy to make them woke, and then they'll be men, but they'll be woke men. But it's...
01:04:48
Speaker
It's the same shit, right? Notice the sleight of hand where she's pretending that she wants to encourage the transsexual to break both stereotypes, when in fact what she's done in all the excerpts we've seen is she's taken every behavior that someone transgender has exhibited and categorized it as either male stereotype or female stereotype.
01:05:09
Speaker
Actually, according to her, everything you do fits into that binary. It's one or the other. Mm-hmm. I mean, remember Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew talking about...
01:05:21
Speaker
how bigotry exactly works this way. There's nothing that the Jew can do that the anti-Semite cannot turn into a product of juda of of his Jewishness, right? Like, either the Jew is stingy, and then that's the stingy Jew, or the Jew is generous, and then that's the Jew trying to pretend not to be the stingy Jew by being generous. And it's like, it's it's the same thing. It's like, it's Well, and I think one thing to highlight here is kind of as we were talking about earlier is, you know, she's relying really heavily on contemporary accounts. And if you step forward decades into the future, these things start to no longer be true.
01:05:59
Speaker
So not everywhere, but in the US, at least this therapy gatekeeping model is mostly dead. It still exists for minors, but for adults, they've moved away from this model. You no longer have a therapist like standing in the way if you want hormones.
01:06:16
Speaker
And what we've seen is this has not ended, quote-unquote, sex conversion therapy, right? It's not these therapists that are creating the problem, that are creating these people with these desires.
01:06:27
Speaker
You know, when this has gone, we still these people still have these desires. Even today, places where there is more gatekeeping, places where, right, like states in the U.S. where they have gone fully towards more self-ID and informed consent models, you see more transition, right? Like, it's not... Like...
01:06:47
Speaker
they're The places that do more gatekeeping, that restrict things more for minors, and even that require more, I mean, there are still for procedures and things you still need to get letters from therapists, but therapists are, it's, you know, it's it's a different interaction now than it was back then. But sort of the easier these things become and the less gatekeeping, the less of the medical establishment intervenes, like we see the number of trans people increasing because people are able to access the care that they want. And so it's pretty obviously not the medical establishment implanting this desire in people just on the numbers. You can just look and see that if you'd like opened your eyes at this point. I think if you opened eye your eyes in the 70s, you would see this. And I think our next episode kind of demonstrates this.
01:07:26
Speaker
This next excerpt isn't from Raven herself, this is from Sandy Stone. Sandy Stone does make an appearance later in the transsexual empire, but she wrote a response paper in the 90s, The Empire Strikes Back.
01:07:37
Speaker
And yeah, so she kind of talks about the same phenomenon of like, where is this desire coming from? it coming from these people or is it coming from medical establishment? The scenario worked this way.
01:07:49
Speaker
Initially, the only textbook on the subject of transsexualism was Harry Benjamin's definitive work, The Transsexual Phenomenon. When first clinics were constituted, Benjamin's book was the researcher's standard reference.
01:08:02
Speaker
And when the first transsexuals were evaluated for their suitability for surgery, their behavior matched up gratifyingly with Benjamin's criteria. The researchers produced papers which reported on this, and which were used as bases for funding.
01:08:17
Speaker
It took a surprisingly long time, several years, for the researchers to realize that the reason the candidates' behavioral profiles matched Benjamin's so well was that the candidates too had read Benjamin's book, which was passed from hand to hand within the transsexual community, and they were only too happy to provide the behavior that led to acceptance for surgery.
01:08:36
Speaker
So Sandy Stone here is speaking you know out of research but also out of personal experience. She was one of these male, deconstructed female, transsexuals who did not really fit the diagnostic criteria. Maybe most significantly, you know one of these criteria was being attracted only to men, wanting to like you know basically be a housewife.
01:08:58
Speaker
ah Sandy Stone was a lesbian.
01:09:02
Speaker
so yeah so this you know janice raymond missed the direction of causality here what is causing this transsexual phenomenon is transsexuals people who want these like changes to their body want these hormones want these surgeries and these clinics whether it's in hirschfeld's day or like these gender clinics in the 70s or like today in the 21st century are all just responding to people with this desire And one of the things she also says sort of around this point is, you know, part of, it's not just even her personal experience, but it was sort of more common. And now, I mean, now things are on the internet. And so the sociologically it's a little bit different, but like she said, look, trans people all have like their own personal little archive of like trans stories and things that they've heard from people and things that have been passed down. And, and so she's like, so I, you know, I've talked to my friends and like, we have our own data and our own,
01:09:56
Speaker
experiences and our own like autobiographical stories that are outside of this like sexological research model. And it's obvious that this is happening, right? And so like she is pointing out both this...
01:10:07
Speaker
feedback loop and also this failure of sociology if you're going to take only the data that exists in this model as your basis for doing analysis. So it's pretty easy stuff to just point out and say, yeah, this is a huge crack in Janice Raymond's argument. But here's Janice Raymond's rebuttal to this kind of claim.
01:10:26
Speaker
Transsexual surgery, in much the same way, produces satisfaction and relief for the transsexual. In contrast to more overt, coercive forms of behavior control and modification, such as involuntary commitment in prisons or mental institutions, or informed consent obtained while in these same institutions, transsexualism appears to be blissfully and freely chosen.
01:10:49
Speaker
Yet, just as commentators have asked how a truly informed consent can be obtained in a coercive context, such as a prison or mental institution, I would pose the question, how can transsexuals truly give informed consent and freely choose to convert to the opposite sex anatomy and role when the coercive power of sexual socialization is filtered through all institutions in a patriarchal society?
01:11:13
Speaker
Not that such socialization is deterministic, but rather that it deeply conditions one's choices as well as one's motivation to choose. In a traditional sense, no one forced the transsexual to change sex.
01:11:27
Speaker
No one forced the transsexual to start hormone therapy. No one forced the transsexual into opposite sex roles and behavior. But in a society where masculinity and femininity accompany a male or female body, the options are limited, if one does not have a context of support to transcend these roles.
01:11:45
Speaker
When the transsexual experts maintain that they use transsexual procedures only with people who ask for them and who prove that they can pass, they obscure the social reality. Given Patriarchy's prescription that one must be either masculine or feminine, free choice is conditioned.
01:12:03
Speaker
She says the socialization is not deterministic, but that it rather deeply conditions one's choices as well as one's motivation to choose. What is the distinction there exactly? like She is really saying that like it may look like these people are being proactive, like they are freely choosing to undergo transmedical procedures, but trust me, trust me, they're being fucked with. Their heads are being absolutely puppeted.
01:12:34
Speaker
So she actually has ah an analogy here that I think will elucidate this point, which I didn't clip in because I... Yeah, it's it's really bad, but she explicitly compares this to the use of drugs in the black community in the US and how it like it might look like people are choosing to do drugs, but really it's yeah, it's really bad.
01:12:57
Speaker
So basically her response to your question is like interesting question. Would you like to also know I am a racist? Great stuff. But yeah, like You could critique this argument by pointing out that it proves something too strong because, of course, like trans people aren't the only ones who live in a patriarchal society and aren't the only ones whose like behaviors and stuff are influenced by this.
01:13:18
Speaker
And I mean, maybe she'll bite that bullet. Maybe she'll agree with Andrea Dworkin and she'll say like all sex is rape because we live in a society that doesn't allow one like true informed consent.
01:13:29
Speaker
but I think a lot of people would not take that step or not go that far. this is This argument is proving way too much. It's got to have a problem. I actually think it's like a completely meaningful question. Like, do people really choose to be women or men, that sort of thing? It's the fact that she's only choosing to apply it to trans people that ah is really revealing. Yeah, and and I mean, that is what a lot of different people who talk about the social construction of gender and...
01:14:00
Speaker
Gendered performance and performativity and like this is what it's trying to analyze is the way that don't like this is something that we've talked about in different contexts before But the way that it like these patriarchals like these stereotypes she calls them and like patriarchal society. It's not just something which restricts your choices. It's actually something that enables the possibility of choice and performance and interaction in society like it it it happens at a deeper level than just certain prohibitions on certain actions. And this is what a lot of like 20th century, like Foucault and all these people are talking about all the time. It doesn't answer any of those questions to just say like, oh, well, you just got to do what your natural body is, right? That just completely throws out the whole critique you've been building to. And we've just seen this again and again. yeah so she has more issues with this kind of informed consent for transition.
01:14:49
Speaker
This is about 10 pages later. A third issue to consider is just how informed consent can be attained, especially in the face of so many unknown hazards about the experiment.
01:15:00
Speaker
First of all, a truly informed consent would highlight for the transsexual the whole issue of sex roles and gender definitions themselves. it would reveal to him how moving from one stereotype to its opposite does not even minimally alter the social basis of sexual conformity in this culture and how the transsexual in undertaking surgery is reinforcing this conformity.
01:15:24
Speaker
These are what might be called the social hazards of the transsexual experiment. My survey of the literature and first-hand interviews with transsexuals and transsexual clinicians thus far have revealed that these social hazards, or even their possibility,
01:15:39
Speaker
are not explored. Yeah, they're not explored because it's fucking stupid. What are you talking about by growing tits and reinforcing social conformity? What? It's kind of funny to imagine a psychologist like counseling a patient, you know, you'd like to do this, but have you considered that by doing this, you're reinforcing gender norms?
01:16:03
Speaker
You sure you want to do that?
01:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be really funny to go to the therapist and then be sent home with like Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and you know a list, a reading list to do, right? Yeah, we need we need to give the tranny's homework.
01:16:21
Speaker
instead of the greet Instead of the dialectical behavior therapy workbook, you're giving in the workbook of like how to be a feminist. I mean, it's funny you say that because this is more or less what she thinks should happen. So when she has an appendix, suggestions for change, where she gets a little more practical and she wants to talk about what sort of like counseling or peer group support should be useful. And she does base it on these sort of like feminist reading groups.
01:16:45
Speaker
This is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to pregnancy crisis centers getting set up. Like, actually, you don't really understand what you're doing with your body here. And maybe what instead we should have is these fake institutions where you come in and someone hectares you about you're doing this morally wrong thing. And are you sure you want the medical treatments?
01:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, so, I mean, you say that, and I think it's time for us to sort of, un to you know, the the section heading in the outline that Julie and I are using for this episode, just titled Catholicism. Like, that she's just being Catholic here. This whole thing is just Catholicism.
01:17:27
Speaker
Right? like And we've seen, it right, it's exactly that thing. It's just, there's this... order for the world and your body is designed not by god because she's pretending that it's not catholicism but she you know it's it's your body has a natural purpose and you're doing the wrong thing with it and you should feel guilty about it by the way yeah so here's her description here's her actual description of what this kind of consciousness raising therapy should look like in this next excerpt However, aside from this one-to-one form of counseling, the model of consciousness raising emphasizes the group process itself.
01:18:03
Speaker
As women have analyzed their own problems as women in consciousness raising groups, it is extremely important that transsexuals, as persons wishing to change sex, take their particular manifestation of gender oppression into their own hands.
01:18:17
Speaker
Transsexuals are not women. They are deviant males, and their particular manifestation of gender deviancy needs its own unique context peer support.
01:18:30
Speaker
Peer support has been one of the crucial aspects of consciousness-raising in feminist groups. Given the support of other women, it became possible for many to break the bonds of so-called core gender identity.
01:18:43
Speaker
In the same way, peer support could be extremely insightful for transsexuals. It could help surface the deeper issues that lie behind the problem of why one finds oneself with, for example, a female mind in a male body.
01:18:57
Speaker
in quotes It could then assist in exploring whether indeed this is the proper label for the transsexual's unique form of sexual oppression. Such counseling and group interaction would be far more honest than the present forms of therapy that promote passing.
01:19:12
Speaker
I am not so naive as to think that they will make transsexualism disappear overnight, but they would at least pose the existence of a real alternative to be explored and tried. Given peer encouragement to transcend cultural definitions of both masculinity and femininity without changing one's body, persons considering transsexualism might not find it as necessary to resort to sex conversion surgery.
01:19:38
Speaker
So the comparison, spin this connection to Catholicism is interesting because you read this, and at least to me, this reads like these very like Christian conversion therapy groups for like gay teens. Like, you know, you you catch your son with another boy.
01:19:53
Speaker
And you send him off to like a, you know, a this like specialist, this pastor, and he gets in a group and all these like troubled teens together are like trying to explain, like being led to explain to each other why they shouldn't do this same sex sexual activity. And it's incredibly similar. so Well, there is one key difference, which is that she's alighting the presence of the authority. It's completely invisible in here. She only talks about the peers. But actually, in this whole scenario of all these trans people sitting and around in a room talking about gender, she's there too and she's guiding them and she's saying no no no no no it's not like that it's like this right because the thing is the notion of groups of trans women getting together and talking we know exactly what's going to happen there which is first off they're going to become feminists second they're all going to sleep together yeah
01:20:51
Speaker
yeah And this is like obviously a thing like you can tell that it's important for her to have the authority figure there because if it weren't this would already exist like you don't think trans people are like congregating and talking to each other. We do it constantly. We're in a podcast with three of us right now.
01:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, and so it's important that she she wants to pretend like this is the same thing as like consciousness raising feminist groups, but she explicitly wants it to be like oriented towards a particular outcome for the person right and so it is much more this catholic conversion therapy rather than any kind of progressive consciousness raising group and you can make the connection to kind of like uh anti-gay like this conservative christian anti-gay stuff is you know some of them will be like oh yeah i want to like legally like make this unallowed but you know the more sophisticated ones that want to seem progressive will be like no no no
01:21:46
Speaker
I don't want to legislate against this, I just kind of want to morally mandate it out of existence. And this is the same language that Raymond uses in her book, as, you know, I contend that the problem of transsexualism would be best served by morally mandating it out of existence.
01:22:03
Speaker
You see a lot of these anti-trans, anti-gay parallels there. Man, you were talking about the TERF stereotype as being like, it grows out of man-hating feminism. And like the further we go on, the more the more contrary that the reality is to that. I mean, this is this is incredible.
01:22:25
Speaker
So we've seen a little bit about her solution then, right? It's this consciousness raising, this conversion therapy essentially. But we should talk a little bit about the values that are underlying the solution. So again, this is really where the Mary Daly influence is showing through. So she has this whole chapter, chapter six, where she talks about this, what she calls ethic of integrity.
01:22:46
Speaker
Right, so this is where we're really gonna get into, like you asked the question in the beginning, what does she mean by integrity? This is where she's gonna answer. that That's what this whole chapter is about. The first excerpt is her definition.
01:22:58
Speaker
Briefly, integration means putting together a combination of parts in order to achieve completeness or wholeness. In contrast, the word integrity means an original wholeness from which no part can be taken away.
01:23:11
Speaker
It is my contention that, in a deep philosophical sense, transsexual therapy and treatment have encouraged integration solutions rather than helping individuals to realize an integrity of being.
01:23:22
Speaker
This gets really into the philosophical weeds. You could spend a lot of time really digging into this. I think maybe rather than doing that, it would be more helpful to get like a little bit of a taste of the sort of argumentation going on here.
01:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, something the listener would have heard is that she writes being with like a dash in the middle. And sometimes she even writes like being in parentheses becoming. And she's trying to kind of use this like 20th century, like Heidegger language. And it it's not actually using the concepts in like that real or meaningful way.
01:23:55
Speaker
It's just academic speak.
Exploration of Androgyny and Religious Contexts
01:23:58
Speaker
In this sense, androgyny represents a partial recognition of an integrity that goes beyond male and female bodies. Many writers see Jesus as the unique bearer of androgynous humanity.
01:24:11
Speaker
This conception of Jesus, implicit in some of the Gnostic literature, is developed by Erigena in his portrayal of the resurrected Jesus, and reaches its apex in Jacob Bohm.
01:24:23
Speaker
Other writers see the very nature of God as an androgynous unity, sometimes referred to as the divine androgyne, and sometimes portrayed as both male and female in its manifestations.
01:24:35
Speaker
This conception of God is most evident in the Kabbalah and in Jacob Bohm. However, there is very often an undercurrent of male mothering in connection with androgyny. Although the primal atom is written about as androgynous or hermaphroditic, one is still left with the impression that the original human was more male than female.
01:24:55
Speaker
This undercurrent is conveyed in the language of the Kabbalah. Eve existed in atom, in potentiality from the first. The language here is most important, for if anything, biologically speaking, it was Adam who was contained in Eve from the beginning.
01:25:11
Speaker
Other statements imply that it was Eve, woman, who was separated from man, giving the impression that the female part of the original androgyne was more fragmented and less perfect than the male, so that even though the primal person was supposedly androgynous, this creature was composed of one distinctly more perfect part and one distinctly less perfect part.
01:25:30
Speaker
Thus, the male portion of androgyny remains steady and constant, while the female is the wayward, unsteady half. In the Gnostics, moreover, the female must make herself male before a salvific androgyny can be reached.
01:25:45
Speaker
So, very much pulling from this like feminist theology that's coming from Mary Daly, right? it's It speaks for itself. We can maybe read a little mil Mary Daly to get more of a taste of what's going on here.
01:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, so this is this is her advisor. The madness which is the Dionysian final solution for women, whoa, okay, is confusion, inability to distinguish the female self and her process from the male-made masquerade.
Paranoia and Conspiracy Theories in Raymond's Arguments
01:26:14
Speaker
Dionysus sometimes assumed a girl-like form. The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Oh no, oh, okay, this is getting and bad.
01:26:27
Speaker
Like whites playing blackface, he incorporates the oppressed role without being incorporated in it. In the phenomenon of transsexualism, the incorporation slash confusion is deeper.
01:26:40
Speaker
As ethicist Janice Raymond has pointed out, the majority of transsexuals are male to female, while transsex females basically function as tokens and are used by the rulers of the transsexual empire to hide the real nature of the game.
01:26:55
Speaker
In transsexualism, males put on female bodies, which are in fact pseudo-female, in a real sense, they are separated from their original mothers by the rituals of the counseling process, which usually result in discovering that the mother of the transsexual-to-be is at fault for his gender identity crisis.
01:27:15
Speaker
These patients are reborn from males. As Linda Berufaldi suggested, this fact was symbolized in the renaming of the renowned transsexual of tennis, Renee Richards, whose original first name was Richard.
01:27:31
Speaker
The rebirthing male supermothers include psychiatrists, surgeons, hormone therapists, and other cooperating professionals. The surgeons and hormone therapists of the transsexual kingdom, in their effort to give birth, can be said to produce feminine persons.
01:27:46
Speaker
They cannot produce women. This is... Awful! Holy shit! God damn! Trying to reach for an analogy and being like, by the way, I'm also, my racial politics are also terrible, is just, it's ever it's it's very consistent.
01:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think kind of what I want highlight here is, okay, like, I'm not trying, don't think we're poo-pooing this for using academic language, like, I think all of us are the sort of perverts who love this sort of thing, but it's a very controversial foundation to form the basis of your attack on transsexualism. Like, you know, someone can very well agree that John Money sucks, that he's, like, there's problems with this medical model, but...
01:28:30
Speaker
I mean, I'm sorry, like this Dionysian final solution, this like whole stuff about like divine androgyny, like very in the weeds. I would describe this as just paranoid animus.
01:28:44
Speaker
Interesting you mentioned paranoia, because this will come back. Yeah, and even this thing, right, the point she's making about, you know, being renamed to Renee Richards because Renee means reborn.
01:28:55
Speaker
That's really cute. She wants to read this kind of, like, paranoid conspiracy in just, yeah, she just chose the name Renee. I don't know. Like, that's cute. Like, what are you trying to, I don't know. It's... Yeah, the... the The ritual of the Dionysian final solution is symbolized in this trans woman choosing her name to be Renee.
01:29:18
Speaker
What are you talking about? it's an It's another thing we've seen a lot in this podcast where bigots will try to explain a problem and they'll just say something that's totally normal, but then like with ominous music in the background. right like We saw this a lot with Enoch Powell talking about...
01:29:39
Speaker
doing like demographic analysis of like this many people move from this place to this place and in this year this many and it's just like yeah cool dude who cares right so she talks about trans sex females by which she means trans men basically function as tokens and are used by the rulers of the transsexual empire to hide the real nature of the game okay so first off the paranoia sent on that is like a thick musk like it's it's disgusting second it's actually still unclear to me what the what the real nature of the game is despite all the explanation we've seen like it's a little unclear to me like what the goal is what is the aim that is being hidden exactly oh the ultimate aim is to medically and biologically replace women
01:30:36
Speaker
I'm not joking, like this shows up in like in Raymond's book. She continually comes back to this like, you know, these physicians who have written about, you know, someday being able to like make artificial wounds and not eating women.
01:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact, we kind of didn't talk about it in the earlier chapters, but I mean, we thought a little bit when she was talking about...
01:31:03
Speaker
Mother's femine is phallus, her father's castrated femme, right? She wants to say, mean, she makes another correct critique, which is psychoanalysis blames everything on the mother. And like we saw that in our Shainwolf episode, like there's constantly just like, it's, and instead of saying, oh, maybe actually we need to look beyond just, it's all the mother's fault and look at you know other factors of the person's life and Society write all these things she's like oh, it's really the father and the surgeon that the the transsexual, you know the surgeon who is Giving sex surgery or you know who's performing these surgeries is a kind of father, right? It's a dominating father and they're living out the male fantasy of Getting ready women the father is symbolically becoming a woman by giving birth to this
01:31:50
Speaker
to this transsexual. Oh my god. So that's the goal of the game. It's extremely paranoid. This is so feverish. I'm losing my fucking mind here. And I mean, we've talked about going forward in time and seeing the way that things have changed and seeing how that she's totally not been borne out. But this is something you can go back to. Like one of the very first surgeries like that Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic did Weimar Germany, like a trans woman walked into the clinic with a gun in her pocket and said, give me an orchiectomy right now or I'm going to blow my brains out. Cool. Yeah, that that this whole paranoid thing, like, we have actual history just directly contradicting this. Women are so powerful. Yeah, to summarize all of this, basically, right, we've seen that she has, like, latched onto a problem. And again, like, we've seen this a lot, like,
01:32:46
Speaker
She notices something in society that's bad and at some points, like, comes really close to making a good critique and then just swerves. So I have two sort of short examples of this.
01:32:58
Speaker
The process of the de-ethicization of behavior by psychology and psychiatry has particular relevance for discussions of transsexualism and the consequences which follow. By attributing transsexualism to biological or psychological causes, scientists, as stated previously, are conveying that there are only two choices.
01:33:18
Speaker
One, adjustment to one's body role, or two, surgery and counseling to transform one's body and role. In effect, both of these choices are biomedical. Choice number one adds up to biology as destiny, and choice number two states that this failing hormonal and possibly surgical treatment contingent upon one's passing, of course, are indicated. Right, and she goes on to say, and so because both of these choices are so constrained, like neither is a real choice, and so there isn't actually autonomy for transsexuals. And this is kind of true. like What she's saying is this medicalized version, this medical model for transition that existed at the time where you need to...
01:34:01
Speaker
prove that you can pass to get surgery or adjust to your body are both versions of biological essentialism. And it's like, yeah, that's a good critique, but you just, so you think that you should just make the first one better. You should you should just adjust to your body role, but in a woke way, right? It's like, you've actually opened up this contradiction and then you're saying, okay, let's do the first one. It doesn't really answer it at all.
01:34:27
Speaker
And in fact, she she really gets so close to the point. This one drove me actually insane. We might say that the body is part of the creative ground of existence, but we are not bound by that structure in the full creative sense.
01:34:41
Speaker
Our spirit is bound to our bodies as its creative ground, but surpasses it through freedom and choice. The body is present in all our choices, but as total persons, we have the freedom to be other than what culturally accompanies a male or female body. Yeah.
01:34:57
Speaker
Literally the next sentence is, therefore transsexuals shouldn't get surgery. It's what? like so it' It's interesting, right? She is coming close. She has all the pieces to make the correct conclusion here, right?
01:35:11
Speaker
you know We've seen these cracks appearing with like what's going on. The question then is, why was Janice Raymond blinded? Why did she not see the obvious solution that... transsexuals should just be feminists like all other women like that's the solution what did she miss so she added at the end she went back and inserted a chapter and this chapter is the one that most often gets quoted when people talk about this book sappho by surgery the trans sexually constructed lesbian feminist great i'm so excited Yeah, the inclusion of this chapter, this really does betray what her motive is and explains why, where her argument goes wrong.
01:35:51
Speaker
It's also where her paranoia is made most apparent. Yeah, it's really awkwardly shoved into the book. She opens chapter five by saying, okay, now continue what I was saying in chapter three. Like, it it really is this paranoid fever dream that just arrives in the book and is like, oh, this really illuminates all these tensions we've been already noticing. While regarded by many as an obscure issue that affects a relatively minute proportion of the population, transsexualism poses very important feminist questions.
01:36:21
Speaker
Transsexually constructed lesbian feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-deconstructed 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-deconstructed 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 stereotyped femininity. Yeah, so she's very clear, like, this consciousness-raising thing, this idea of, like, trans women getting together and talking to each other and and becoming feminists. Like, if the outcome of that is that they become feminists who want to advocate for feminism, that's actually even worse somehow. Like...
01:37:08
Speaker
somehow that's even worse. And I think something to highlight here is that this is not abstract at all. So I didn't include the excerpt because I thought it was kind of grotesque, but the first footnote in this chapter is a whole page long and it's about Sandy Stone. There's this whole page where she's just, here's the specific trans woman who was working at this feminist like recording company and i hate her i hate her so goddamn much is basically what this footnote says and you know you see this again parallel to the modern tactic of singling out an individual trans woman for coordinated harassment like there's this big case recently in the uk where this dr beth upton was just hounded out of her job with combination of like you know some transphobic nurse making complaints and then like the court system and the media kind of picking up on it was this coordinated harassment campaign and so this book
01:38:03
Speaker
is part of a coordinated harassment campaign against Sandy Stone. So, yeah, this is one of the most famous sort of parts of this book that often gets quoted. All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.
01:38:20
Speaker
However, the transsexually constructed lesbian feminist violates women's sexuality and spirit as well. Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception.
01:38:33
Speaker
It is significant that in the case of the transsexual-constructed lesbian feminist, often he is able to gain entrance and a dominant position in women's spaces because the women involved do not know he is a transsexual, and he just does not happen to mention it.
01:38:49
Speaker
The question of deception must also be raised in the context of how transsexuals who claim to be lesbian feminists obtain surgery in the first place. Since all transsexuals have to pass as feminine in order to qualify for surgery, so-called lesbian feminist transsexuals either had to lie to the therapists and doctors, or they had a conversion experience after surgery.
01:39:11
Speaker
I am highly dubious of such conversions, and the other alternative, deception, raises serious problems, of course. What do you mean, of course? I think it's actually yeah fucking base that trans women are lying to their doctors. That's, like, incredibly important. Sarah, the problems the problems are so obvious that it's not even worth listing one.
01:39:34
Speaker
Yeah, so there's this, you know, this thing about this deception we talked about earlier, like you, there's a certain role you have to fulfill and so you have to lie if you don't fill this role. And rather than taking this as like, oh, this is a way in this which these people are like harmed or exploited by this medical system, it's a sign of their untrustworthiness.
Raymond's Views on Trans Individuals in Feminist Spaces
01:39:53
Speaker
You can't trust these trans sexually constructed lesbian feminists because they had to lie to their surgeon. It's just fucking absurd. Yeah, and she's supposedly against the medical establishment. She's supposedly like, oh, these people are demonstrating like incredible coercive power over these people and manipulating them into being transgender. But then the second she has evidence that a trans person lied, she's like, you fucking snakes. How dare you do this to your noble fine doctors? You bastards.
01:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, so the animosity, like the vitriol here against trans women, especially trans lesbians, I think is just apparent, right? Like it's, you know, her careful like scholarly pose in the other chapters is slipping.
01:40:35
Speaker
Her conspiracy theorism, which we've also seen, is also really shining through in this chapter. Yeah, she has this obsession throughout the book that really rises to a fever pitch here with like historical like eunuchs. And so that's what she's going talk about here.
01:40:50
Speaker
Furthermore, the deceptiveness of men without members, that is, castrated men or eunuchs, has historical precedent. Oh my god, this is so fucking funny. We're really going here? We're really doing this?
01:41:03
Speaker
There is a long tradition of eunuchs who were used by rulers, heads of state, and magistrates as keepers of women. Eunuchs were supervisors of the harem in Islam and wardens of women's apartments in many royal households.
01:41:17
Speaker
In fact, the word eunuch, from the Greek eunuchos, literally means keeper of the bed. Eunuchs were men that other, more powerful men used to keep their women in place.
01:41:27
Speaker
By fulfilling this role, eunuchs also succeeded in winning the confidence of the ruler and securing important and influential positions. well Moreover, the word eunuch is also related to the word scheme.
01:41:43
Speaker
Eunuch's scheme to obtain political power.
01:41:53
Speaker
that's That's where I thought we were heading with the fucking scheming vizier. This is so funny. in Mesopotamia, many eunuchs became royal officers and managers of palaces, and others emerged on the pages of history as important and often virile figures.
01:42:09
Speaker
Some were famous warriors and statesmen, as well as scholars. one find eunuchs associated with temples dedicated to the goddesses from at least 2000 BC until well into the Roman period. In fact, the earliest mention of eunuchs is in connection with the Minoan civilization of Crete, which was a transitional period from an earlier, gino-centric society.
01:42:31
Speaker
It thus appears that eunuchs, to some extent, always attached themselves to women's spaces, and most frequently were used to supervise women's freedom of movement and to harness women's self-centeredness and self-government.
01:42:45
Speaker
Quote, it is stated that entree into every political circle was possible for eunuchs, even if barred to other men. End quote. Will the acceptance of trans sexually constructed lesbian feminists who have lost only their outward appendages of physical masculinity lead to the containment and control of lesbian feminists?
01:43:05
Speaker
Will every lesbian feminist space become a harem? Like eunuchs, transsexuals have gained prominent and dominant access to feminist political circles, quote, barred to other men, end quote. Just because transsexual-constructed lesbian feminists are not only castrated men, but have also acquired artifacts of a woman's body and spirit, does not mean that they are un-men, and that they cannot be used as keepers of woman-identified women, when the real men, the rulers of patriarchy, decide that the women's movement, used here as both noun and verb, should be controlled and contained.
01:43:43
Speaker
In this way, they too can rise in the kingdoms of the fathers. The political implications of historical eunuchism and its potential for female control should not be lost upon woman-identified women.
01:43:57
Speaker
Someone should write about this castration anxiety phenomenon. I feel there's something there. Oh, I've never heard anyone examine that before. i just came up with it. It's my OC. Do not steal.
01:44:12
Speaker
mean, this is hilarious. Like, there's not really much to say, but I just want to point out that what is her modern day, like, eunuch managing this harem of the sultan or whatever orientalous Orientalist thing she's going on?
01:44:23
Speaker
It's a sound engineer at a feminist recording studio. Like, Yeah, just some random person. Yeah, I mean, when you see libs of TikTok post a video of some random trans person being like, these are the people who are scheming to groom your children. Like that person is generally just some like, ah some low level functionary, like a teacher or some shit.
01:44:48
Speaker
Not a person of power. um Also, I'm sorry, I'm never going to be able to get the phrase eunuch is... the word eunuch is also related to the word scheme out of my head. That is so fucking funny.
01:45:03
Speaker
I'm surprised there isn't a little illustration in the book of like a nasty transsexual with like a bunch of stubble and stuff just like wringing their hands and plotting. Yeah. And again, I think it's, you know, we we mentioned it quickly, but this, like the Orientalism here, this extremely racialized analysis where it's like, oh, you should you should be thinking about the scary harems of the Muslims. Right. It's just, it's so gross.
01:45:31
Speaker
Yeah. So... It is gross. And it's kind of her... There are other chapters are coherent, but it's falling apart here, right? like So there's actually my favorite part in this chapter, is she cites a short story in Penthouse magazine. We all know Penthouse, like pornographic magazine. She cites this story in Penthouse to illustrate how transsexual constructed lesbian feminists infiltrate women's spaces.
01:45:55
Speaker
not going to read it. like If you want to, you can find the book and read it. It's kind of gross. And then at another point, like you know she's just reduced to raw assertion. We know that we are women who are born with female chromosomes and anatomy, and that whether or not we were socialized to be so-called normal women, patriarchy has treated and will treat us like women.
01:46:17
Speaker
Transsexuals have not had this same history. no man can have the history of being born and located in this culture as a woman he can have the history of wishing to be a woman and of acting like a woman but this gender experience is that of a transsexual not of a woman surgery may confer the artifacts of outward and inward female organs but it cannot confer the history of being born a woman in this society She's just reduced to just saying, like, yeah, like, we just know that we're different and I don't have to explain it. It's just not a very scholarly pose. Like, in the rest of this, she's trying to explain this. And here she's just, like, raw assertion.
01:46:58
Speaker
And as you pointed out at the beginning, Sarah, like, she's talking about these interviews and she's talking about, you know, one of the things she talks about in her interviews with the with trans women is... this, oh, how do they know they're women? They're always going to these, either they're either saying these stereotyped things or they're just asserting it as like something they know.
01:47:15
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, you are doing the exact same thing, right? Like imagine this answer to how do you know you're a woman? and being given like in the interview of just saying like, oh, I just know that I am like that's exactly the thing that she completely discredits. So it's it's a raw assertion that just demonstrates exactly that she has decided to see this from the beginning and there's nothing you can say that will change her mind. There's no actual analysis happening. Yeah, and I think so one more excerpt to kind of illustrate the level of analysis in this chapter.
01:47:49
Speaker
In the final analysis, transsexual-constructed lesbian feminists are in the same tradition as the man-made, made-up lesbians of the Playboy centerfolds. Every so often, Playboy and similar magazines feature a sappho pictorial.
01:48:05
Speaker
Recently, male photographers have entered the book market by portraying pseudo-lesbians in all sorts of positions, clothing, and contexts that could only be fantasized by a male mind.
01:48:16
Speaker
In short, the manner in which women are depicted in these photographs mimics the poses of men pawing women. Men produce lesbian love the way they want it to be, and according to their own canons of what they think it should be.
01:48:31
Speaker
Transsexually constructed lesbian feminists are in this tradition of pseudo-lesbian propaganda. Both the playboy pseudo-lesbian and the transsexual pseudo-lesbian spread the correct, read male-defined, image of the lesbian, which in turn filters into public consciousness through the mass media as truth.
01:48:52
Speaker
By thus mutilating the true self-definition of the lesbian, men mold her image slash reality according to their own. As Lisa Buck has commented, transsexualism is truly their word made flesh.
01:49:07
Speaker
Elsewhere, you know in these other chapters, this empire and transsexual empire is the medical psychiatric establishment. These are the the fathers producing these male-to-constructed female transsexuals.
01:49:21
Speaker
Here in this chapter, she's continually so like bringing up pornographic magazines, Penthouse, Playboy, and so on. And you know you look at her subtitle, The Making of the She-Male, you get the impression she really does view she-males as pornographic.
01:49:36
Speaker
And this is something that has direct political ramifications too. The implication that transsexuals are by their nature at every moment existing as sexual objects and projecting like a sexual image out onto the world that we're sort of like radioactive rocks radiating sexuality is something that is really important to conservatives efforts to denigrate us as like groomers etc and control our public appearance because existing norms around what is controllable about public displays of sexuality then become applied to just our everyday life become applied to me buying lemons at the grocery store whatever suddenly that's a sexual act
01:50:22
Speaker
You see this, for example, like Texas has this drag ban, right? You can't do drag performances where there's children around. You look at how the legislation is written, drag performance just includes anything a trans woman does, or for that matter, a trans man.
01:50:37
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact, she even talks about this a little bit elsewhere in the book, where she talks about like all sorts of laws against cross-dressing. And she says, look, there's all these laws that like you know sex workers who are doing deception...
01:50:52
Speaker
There's laws against that, but then it's just used to pick up people who are just wearing whatever clothing that's not, you know, gender conforming on the street. And that's bad. We should only be arresting people when there's fraud involved. So she really like, again, she's getting close to this point of seeing like, oh, if you try to like legally say this is, you know, fraud or this deception, like she understands that this is a method of of of control. but But yeah, she just thinks that this is ah a porn category, right? She thinks that trans people are just a porn category.
01:51:19
Speaker
We kind of said a lot about what Janice Raymond thinks, and I think it's only fair to give her the last word. Yeah, so here's what here's what she has to say on kind of how she wants her book to be taken, what the point of all of this was. This is sort of very much a conclusion in a way.
01:51:36
Speaker
It is my deepest hope that this book will not be viewed as an unsympathetic treatment of the anguish and existential plight of the transsexual. What I have tried to resent is a different vision of where to focus sympathy and sensitivity.
01:51:51
Speaker
You lying motherfucker. Oh my God. Yeah, like she's just gotten through talking about these deceptive transsexuals who are lying to society and lying to things. And actually, a lot of this chapter, that the lot of the Safo Bisergery chapter and like the ways in which it's conspiratorial, she even comes out right and says, and she's like, oh, it's like it's it's a mystery. like Why are so many you know basically cis lesbians accepting trans women in their ranks? And she has to just completely reject the possibility that
01:52:22
Speaker
you know, being a lesbian is a sexual orientation and cis lesbians can find trans women hot because trans women are women. That has to be totally out out out of bounds of possibility. And so she she's just painted this whole conspiratorial paranoid thing talking about scheming eunuchs. And now she's like, but you know that I'm sympathetic. I just, you know.
01:52:43
Speaker
I just want us to think, be more thoughtful about the ways in which we're sympathetic. these are our future overseers and the oh and the and the and the and the in the and the Muslim harems. And they're fucking, they're raping us just by existing. and And I'm so scared of them. And also, I'm really trying to be empathic here. I'm just saying like, oh man, things suck for them. And we got to understand how to focus our sympathy correctly.
01:53:11
Speaker
Returning to the theme of like how what you see in modern day, like organized transphobia is also present in this book, is you do see the same sort of rhetorical moves. I'm little just like, you know, we need to mandate this out of existence, out of existence like, you know, they're grooming our children, all these like things in this like, present themselves, but like, I'm like, you know, I don't have anything against them.
01:53:34
Speaker
Like, I'm really, simple I just don't think it should happen to children or in public or... I mean, it is just sort of tying into this reactionary bent and this reactionary current. And we've seen ways in which these people are sort of just accessing, you know, all of our episode subjects in some way are just accessing some kind of ambient bigotry and sort of amplifying it. But this text itself was really influential. And lots of texts during sort of big arguments in the 80s will reference it and people, you know, both on both sides of of this argument and...
01:54:04
Speaker
Well, you'll see like these ideas just repeated without like citation. so i don't know, maybe this ends up getting clipped, but a good example of this would be like Bell Hook's take on the film Paris is Burning is just straight out of Janice Raymond.
01:54:20
Speaker
Just the same sort of critique of drag and transsexuality as this like women, or not, sorry, with men taking on this performance of women. Where does Janice Raymond go with her career after this?
01:54:33
Speaker
Okay, so that's a great transition because that's... Okay, so for all that the transsexual empire had lot of influence within academic feminism, I don't think it's her materially most
Raymond's Influence on Policy and Later Marginalization
01:54:45
Speaker
influential work. So her, I would argue, her most influential work was this report, quote, technology on the social and ethical aspects of transsexual surgery.
01:54:56
Speaker
This was a report commissioned by the National Center for Healthcare Technology, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. So this was 1981. Based upon this report, they recommended public insurance not cover trans healthcare, care so Medicaid to Medicare.
01:55:11
Speaker
A formal ban was put in place in 1989. Of course, many private insurers followed suit. private insurers, you know, if the government says you don't have to cover this, they'd love to have an excuse not to cover the surgery. And it wasn't until Obama in 2014 that this ban was overturned. So she's not trying to legally mandate things out of existence, she says, but the government shouldn't pay for it. and I'm not trying to make abortion illegal. i just don't want my tax dollars going for it.
01:55:37
Speaker
Okay, but this isn't the only thing she's done. She's done more than get angry at transsexuals. So her other really two big passions, both of which are themes present in this, is she's really against sex work. She's done a lot of theoretical work about kind of trying to, you know, the legal aspects of sex work and what I, and I think a lot of people would call this like an anti-sex worker perspective. And her other big thing is on reproductive technology. So the medical ethics of things like surrogacy, embryo selection, things like that, she's very heavily against this. Again, she's very heavily against sort of like this medical establishment, psychiatric establishment. Yeah, but she's kind of found her way back to anti-transfeminism more recently. Sure. So as a coda, though, she's, you know, like a lot of people, her dissertation work wasn't the main thing she did in her career. Right.
01:56:29
Speaker
She mostly worked on this stuff about sex work and about reproductive technologies. But in her retirement, she has returned to an early interest. And her most recent book from a few years back is called Double Think.
01:56:42
Speaker
a feminist challenge to transgenderism. And i read through a bunch of it, and frankly, this book is more pathetic than anything else. So the transsexual empire is hugely influential, but modern-day anti-trans activism pretends that transsexualism was invented in 2014, right? If you think that transsexualism was invented in 2014, you can't admit your own intellectual history.
01:57:05
Speaker
So Janice Raymond has become a marginal figure in this movement that she wrote the bible for And a that's a thing. think that's a interesting thing. think that's interesting thing. think that's very interesting thing.
01:57:23
Speaker
costs a lot of money because it's out of print there's a section where she complains that oh People say Andrea Dworkin stopped being transphobic, but actually her whole life she kept a agreeing with me. It's just all these petty level little things. My favorite though, Sarah, maybe you want to read this, is this is my favorite grievance she has in her book.
01:57:42
Speaker
After 40 plus years of dissenting from transgender orthodoxies, I learned that the Women's Studies program, now renamed as Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, in which I taught for 28 years, had posted this message on its website.
01:57:58
Speaker
given the persistence of legacies of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, including its presence in the history of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and in response to requests for clarification on this issue from trans communities at UMass and in the Pioneer Valley, we categorically reject transphobia in our department, on our campus, and in our discipline.
01:58:20
Speaker
Oh, she got salty about that, I bet. Yeah, so for those who don't know, Pioneer Valley is a bit of a lesbian mecca. This is where, for example, Smith College is, you know, per capita, one of the queerest places in the country. And, you know, kind of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals are generally pretty pro trans people, especially compared to the cishet population.
01:58:44
Speaker
And she's so upset at this. She's so upset that everyone around her just doesn't agree with her. Do you remember that survey that's like, do you support trans women or something like that? And the survey responses are like 96% yes for trans women, like responding about themselves and like 98% for cis lesbians. It's the Hallamie effect, yes.
01:59:09
Speaker
Yeah, I actually, I did a little bit of also like, where is she now kind of research. I didn't go into this book at all, but I did find this like very funny podcast interview she did on a like right-wing feminist podcast where it is too like right-wing, like it's a right-wing grifter basically, or it's two right-wing grifters or, you know, but they're not synced up in the right way. So it's just like a really awkward interview to listen to because the woman first is like, oh, your book came out and 1979, like that's the year I was born.
01:59:42
Speaker
And then it's just this really awkward moment where Janice Raymond is like, oh.
01:59:48
Speaker
And then the woman is like, yeah, and it's interesting, like your book is so relevant, but it's so hard to find. And Janice Raymond is like, oh. And Janice Raymond goes, oh it's available for free on my website.
02:00:00
Speaker
and And so she's, like, inviting her to do the grievance politics of, like, your book is hard to find. And then Janice Raymond is, like, missing the point. It's like, Janice, don't you understand that you're being canceled? That the man is, like, pushing you down? Yeah, and they're just... And Janice is like... they're not They're not on the same page. You're saying my work is forgotten? And that...
02:00:20
Speaker
Well, and to a large extent, her work is forgotten. She's a very marginal figure. You look at, like, who the big names are. None of them are Janice Raymond. None of them, like, really cite her. Again, they have to pretend that their movement isn't this old.
02:00:34
Speaker
But I think that we can synthesize the Janice Raymond work with modern feminist issues, and so I would like to propose a question for the two of you. Can bisexuals be trans sexually constructed lesbian feminists? Yes or no?
02:00:48
Speaker
Helen, you go first. Hold on, i need I need to count something in my head. You can't spell transsexual-constructed lesbian feminist without bisexual, I think. I think that it is all in there if you shuffle it around, so I'm gonna go with yes.
02:01:03
Speaker
Well, as a daughter of a woman, and someone who's very fond of women, I have to say that it's very important that we keep women in our hearts, that we keep bisexual women in our heart, that we keep surgically constructed transsexual androgynous Jesus pieces or whatever the phrase is in our hearts. And so I care about that and I'm gonna keep supporting that and that's my answer. Yeah.
02:01:29
Speaker
At times I was reading this and I'm wondering, and especially as we're talking about it and saying this phrase over and over of the the male deconstructed female, I'm like wondering if like she needed a phrase that long because she constantly wanted to just be saying tranny
Critique of Raymond's Terminology and Legacy
02:01:41
Speaker
over and over. And so she needed She needed, like, a tongue twister, like a kind of, like, a fidget, like, just to kind of, like, get back into the headspace, right? These male-to-constructed female... These trans-sexually-constructed lesbian feminists. It's just so lame. It's so terrible. I really regret committing to the bit of exclusively saying that, because it got really awful by the end.
02:02:05
Speaker
It's a... Terrible phrase. Yeah, it feels really bad, especially once we're talking about like actual women. It's like, ugh. All right, shall we do FAG ratings? Before we get into FAG ratings, we wanted to give people some things to look at to go forward because a lot of people have also responded to both Janice Raymond and also to the anti-trans movement in general. Here's some trans studies 101. Yeah, so we had looked at some other sources to talk about, and then we didn't clip a lot from these other places. and We clipped a little bit from Empire Strikes Back,
02:02:35
Speaker
The work of Susan Stryker also is something we were thinking about a lot as we prepped this episode. She talks a lot as well about trying to move away from a medically, like ah a purely medical model of transition, but not to say, like, don't go with surgery, but to say, like, instead of viewing this as some kind of, like, medical pathology, view it as as an actual thing of of autonomy and and freedom. bit more contemporary there is the works of Anvir Longchiu, who has really leaned in this issue of, like,
02:03:03
Speaker
autonomy as being the basis for kind of like the politics or ethics of transsexuality. Yeah. And then there's also Judith Butler's most recent book, Who's Afraid of Gender, which is a really good overview of contemporary anti-trans politics. So on this podcast, we have a way of rating all of our subjects on a three point scale.
02:03:24
Speaker
an FAG scale for their ferocity, their arrogance, and their gullibility. And it's one to five for each of those three categories. And we will allow ourselves to go to six if it seems like particularly exceptionally bad in some case, but usually we try to keep it one to five in general.
02:03:40
Speaker
So for ferocity, where do we think... this stands i'm kind of leaning towards a three to me this is like the prototypical bigot coming out here someone who has an obsessive crank tendency but who isn't totally willing to just demolish their own social standing and just go all out and be like it's time for a tranny holocaust or something like that. To really get into like the higher ratings, I think I would need to see a little bit more from Janice.
02:04:21
Speaker
But I think a three is fair. Yeah, I agree with that analysis. is There's clearly like a lot of vitriol behind this. But for most of her books, she does keep the image of the feminist scholar. Yeah.
02:04:34
Speaker
So... Okay, so it seems like we're all going three. i think that I would also agree with that. I'm a little tempted to go for four just because it is so explicitly misogynist. And right, I guess I'm thinking in my head, like, she's talking about like her view of what a woman is and women's role in society, she claims is a feminist one.
02:04:56
Speaker
But it's actually in a lot of ways very close to like Leacock's position on what what a woman's role in society is. She sees this like very biologically determined, even though she claims that's not what it is, this very like natural law position for women.
02:05:09
Speaker
At times, I mean, this is also ah a theme we didn't really draw out, but we saw in a lot of the excerpts. She does buy into a lot of this like women are secretly in charge. Right. Like, why do, you know, the, the, why do trans women become lesbians? Right. Why, why are there trans sexually constructed lesbian feminists? It's because they recognize that like now women are secretly gaining power. You women are gaining power. Especially women. In the very first excerpt, which is talking about.
02:05:36
Speaker
When she's talking about Renee Richards, she's like, oh, she hit the ball back into the male court because women were winning, right? Part of her whole analysis here is like women are winning the sex war. And so now this is the latest salvo from the men is these transsexuals.
02:05:50
Speaker
And so a lot of her analysis and is You know, we gave Leacock a four, and she also has the weird sort of racial politics, but I do agree it's maybe not quite there, so I think I'll stick with three as well.
02:06:02
Speaker
I think what you're talking about Helen, though, is her arrogance rating, lot of the stuff. Yeah, I think where I'm going to go with is she's much closer to Leacock in Arrogance, who we both gave a five. I'm definitely giving her a five for Arrogance. This is extremely arrogant, what she's written here. no I agree. Like, it's... ah a big project. She's like purporting to give this like feminist analysis of transsexualism and it's not very attuned to nuance, I would say.
02:06:34
Speaker
We didn't even actually clip. There's some parts that are even more, I think, lazily written, which would up the arrogance for me. In the introduction when she's talking about why, or right maybe it's chapter one, but when she's talking about like why she chooses transsexualism and this notion of ideology, she literally has a section where she says,
02:06:50
Speaker
Webster's dictionary defines ideology as... And then she does the other... she She does a dictionary citation one more time. And she's like, oh, the dictionary defines like male as you know like a protruding thing to fit into a like a hollowed out... right In the sense of like you know wood carved... Whatever. like A male to female like electrical cord. And she's like, oh, and and so this is why I call...
02:07:13
Speaker
the transexual constructed lesbian feminist male is because they are protruding into the hollowed out you know lesbian feminist activism right like she's doing this really lazy arrogant just here's what the dictionary says and ah secretly that's what's really going on it's so helen can i correct your terminology there i believe you meant to say a male to constructed female transsexual electrical cord
02:07:41
Speaker
male to constructed female electrical cord oh my god I think I'm gonna settle on a three for her to me she has you you were describing her laziness and I would describe her as exactly at the level of arrogance I associate with just a lazy academic and that is like a meaningful amount remember like a one on her scale is not like a normal person necessarily but I think that lands at about a three for me I'm in the middle and I would put her at four.
02:08:12
Speaker
Okay. Gullibility is interesting. And so this is one where really what we want to rank with gullibility is each of our subjects, you know, or if we're talking about the production of bigotry, each of our subjects has some role in the production of bigotry.
02:08:28
Speaker
And how aware is the subject of what their role is, where a higher gullibility means that they're less aware. They're sort of more just being used by...
02:08:40
Speaker
forces that they're not aware of versus like how aware are they of what they're trying to do? I'd rank her quite low. And I think part of this is this report I mentioned she wrote for the HHS.
02:08:52
Speaker
She knowingly collaborated with this right wing Reagan administration to get the government to stop funding trans health care. This is not someone who's unaware what her role in the production of bigotry is. This is someone who's happy to do it.
02:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think the only thing that raises it slightly for me is her seemingly genuine confusion about why cis lesbians might be attracted to trans women.
02:09:23
Speaker
And I think this is tied into more broadly her conviction. and this isn't just her, this is something that is like, and still persists to this day, this vision of like lesbian is not only a sexual orientation, but as like a broader political movement as being like, oh, we're a lesbian in the sense of not only being with women, but you know rejecting men in male society.
02:09:43
Speaker
And actually something we didn't talk about in the consciousness raising therapy section, she's talking about peer support. She has this idea that, oh, what what feminists recognize is that actually, you know, peers should support each other and what the feminist movement realizes that men and women are not peers and so women should support each other because they're really peers.
02:10:02
Speaker
She has this whole thing that she seems to genuinely believe that, like, of political lesbianism and that is, like, unable to understand that, like, no, actually the primary motivation for lesbians is erotic because it's a sexual orientation.
02:10:17
Speaker
That might make it a two for me, but I don't think higher than two. I agree with the two. I think I'm going to go with a one on this. So my thinking here is that she's engaged in this larger political project, and she seems to understand herself as engaged in project building, which to some extent is an academic affectation.
02:10:42
Speaker
But don't I can kind of see the re-education programs or whatever that she's envisioning being set out like in this text. like There are practical programs that she really wants this writing to create in the world.
02:11:02
Speaker
And I don't know. i'm really i'm unclear because this episode I think was a lot less biographical than many of our other episodes. So just going purely on vibes, I'm gonna give it one.
02:11:14
Speaker
Okay, so that means that I gave her a 10, Julia you gave her a nine, and Sarah you gave her a seven. So fairly low overall, I think.
02:11:26
Speaker
And I think that's kind of fair. Like, this stuff is terrible, and I did want to throw the book, and I i maybe did once or twice. But it's not—a lot of it is so boring. A lot of it is so lazy. It's so—I got mad at this news story of this trans woman who worked at a record company and then wrote a 200-page manifesto about, like, Dionysian confusion. Like, it— The way it struck me when I first read this is I was like, this is obviously shoddy, this is obviously motivated by like personal bigotry and hate,
02:11:59
Speaker
How did anyone, like, take this seriously? How did anyone feel like, oh, yeah, this was a great work for feminist scholars. would have cited in my own book that I write five, ten years later. Just, it's transparently shit. Yeah, and I think that's another part where her gullibility is low, is not only did she collaborate with the government in these ways, but also, i mean, she set out to change feminist discourse, and she largely did, right? Like,
02:12:22
Speaker
even though, as we're saying, it's not good. And if you read it, it's like, this doesn't make sense. Nonetheless, she had the effect she kind of explicitly set out to have, which is to make this a main current of feminist thought. Maybe not the main current, but certainly a major one at the time. We should try doing good bigoted works at some point.
02:12:42
Speaker
I actually thought going into prepping this, not... more recently, but a couple of months ago when I first conceived this episode, I sort of had higher hopes for this on the level of craft, because it opens maybe with some of her strongest stuff.
02:13:00
Speaker
And I thought, okay, this will be interesting because she is taking the time to do this analysis. And a lot of this in today in contemporary discourse gets just... put into, you know, an Atlantic piece or some even shorter opinion column or a blog post or a post on Mumsnet, which like, I think she's posting on Mumsnet now. Like, I think that's part what, because she's certainly like in that crowd.
02:13:20
Speaker
And so I thought, okay, there's some argument here. There is something to look at. She's trained as an academic. She'll be able to like lay out an argument and it'll be bad and terrible ideologically. But I was a little bit surprised by how shoddily written it is especially once you leave the introduction and it just totally falls apart i know it doesn't benefit the world really in any way but i'm glad that she's suffering narcissistic injury and obscurity Warms my heart.
02:13:50
Speaker
Okay, well, that's our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Julia for guesting. Thank you to Helen for being lovely. And you can go to our Patreon, patreon.com slash odiumsymposium, and subscribe for early episodes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
02:14:07
Speaker
But also what would be really nice would be if you rated us on your podcast app of choice, if you told your friends about us. We don't know how to market. it We're lazy and a little bit thick. And so we're kind of hoping you do it for us.
02:14:22
Speaker
All right. Bye, guys. Bye. Ciao. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. I don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
02:14:41
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you write a loving name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:14:58
Speaker
some level of masochism.