The Transmisogyny Bible: A Critical Dissection

Examining the fundamentalist screed from 1979 that shaped modern institutional transphobia.

The Transsexual Empire began its life as a religious studies dissertation under the supervision of Mary Daly. The book itself is dedicated to her and cites her liberally, if her fingerprints all over the text’s structure and argumentation were insufficiently obvious for a casual reader. Given that Janice Raymond herself left the Sisters of Mercy, this makes the book a rather fascinating artifact, a labor undertaken by two former Roman Catholics whose personal disagreements with the faith do not appear to have led to a critical re-examination of their own philosophies, ontologies, or modes of thinking.

Indeed, The Transsexual Empire is a remarkably Catholic book—in spirit if not in letter. Very amusingly, about a paragraph into the book’s original introduction, Janice Raymond concedes that transsexuals do, in fact, change their sex. She cattily refers to trans women as “male-to-constructed-female”, ensconcing pronouns within scare quotes in an effort to ‘expose’ the artificiality of the Transsexual’s entire Be-ing, but in the process admits that through hormones, surgeries or some combination thereof, the transsexual does indeed undergo physiological changes and processes that reconstitute her bodily. It is an amusing admission precisely because of how bizarrely far Raymond goes in constructing an artificial barrier between the supposed mirage of transsexual womanhood when transposed against the “real thing”, as though patriarchy subjects us all to karyotyping prior to determining whether we ought to be subject to misogyny. For not even a page into the work can Janice Raymond pretend that gender is not social; her answer to this is to ignore the social entirely, to dive into chromosomes and pharmaceutical conspiracies and Wholeness of Spirit, amidst other assorted esoterica that is meant to evoke the Frankenstinian nature of trans womanhood, to monster us in a remarkably literal manner.

It is an approach that will be emulated for decades.

There is a sense in which attempting to fact-check the book, to subject it to any sort of rigorous analysis is in and of itself an exercise in futility; contradictions abound, unaddressed and straightforward to highlight with little effort. Raymond asserts that transsexual women avail of surgery at much higher rates than transsexual men, but selectively focuses on SRS to do so; looking at top surgery would easily invert that figure. Raymond asserts that transsexual women are uniformly heterosexual, traditionalist and right-wing, invested in “stereotypes of womanhood”, then herself cites a transsexual woman who explains (one imagines slowly, while enunciating) that the medical industry itself mandates specific behaviors, outlooks and worldviews from transsexuals before permitting them to access transition care, resulting in a highly self-selected group. Rather than reckoning with the horrors of such gatekeeping and surveillance, or highlighting the extent to which transsexual women must perform a patriarchal womanhood for mostly-male doctors on pain of being barred from the medicine they require, Raymond is only too happy to damn the lot, to blame transsexuals for the sins of the very people abusing and controlling them.

Given her clear disdain for heterosexualism, does lesbian feminist Janice Raymond exult at the discovery of transsexuals who are unapologetically queer? Of course not: her greatest, most pointed ire is reserved for those transsexuals she considers perversions of a supposed lesbian purity. Sappho by Surgery is her most vicious, caustic chapter by far, a tirade against a specific transsexual woman whom she deems unworthy of participating in a radical feminist collective—against the very collective’s wishes and defenses of said woman! Janice Raymod boldly and bravely sticks her opinion where it is not wanted, declaring Sandy Stone an “invasive” presence in feminist spaces with no hint of irony and less self-awareness. She had, in fact, sent a draft of this chapter to Olivia Records in 1976, kicking off an escalating series of hostilities, campaigns and boycott threats before Stone voluntarily left the collective. Stone’s transgression was daring to share the expertise she’d accrued in a male-dominated music industry with a woman-only feminist collective, an act that Raymond could not forgive due to Stone’s Original Sin of maleness and “male energy”.

In the book’s 1994 edition, Raymond deemed Leslie Feinberg worthy of similar treatment in the subsection of a new introduction that she provocatively titled The Transgendered Lesbian. In it she excoriates firebrand, socialist and actual feminist Leslie Feinberg for daring to conclude in her most popular work, Stone Butch Blues, that lesbians can and ought to find a sense of kinship and solidarity with transsexual women. Even a decade and a half after the book’s initial publication, that sense of petty vindictiveness that so pervades Raymond’s writing is intact, cementing once and for all how the facade of feminist scholarship is invoked to provide a paper-thin veneer for her own personal grievances, against transsexuality writ large if not against specific activists whose politics she has the gall to judge as lacking.

For that is what The Transsexual Empire ultimately is—one “ex”-Catholic’s ground-down axes masquerading as substantive feminist critique. The book can hardly stand on its own merits, positing a wide-ranging ‘male conspiracy’ to bilk poor, conflicted and confused transsexuals by subjecting them to unnecessary medicalization instead of providing them with the (conversion) therapy they truly need to be at peace. Such a fiery accusation, attacking the very foundations of the hyper-capitalist pharmaceutical industry, meets a rather watery end in the tome’s own pages, where Raymond notes the hostility with which psychiatrists, sexologists and medical gatekeepers regard transsexual women, rejecting the majority as unworthy of the care they request and require. An endeavor to turn transsexuality into a new medical-industrial cash cow is somewhat undercut when those administering that healthcare themselves frequently turn away perfectly willing and paying clients. Perhaps this is a form of capitalist exploitation with which we are—to this day—unfamiliar.

On what does the book’s thesis ultimately rest, then? The answer is “not very much”. Commensurate with Raymond’s hyperfocus on chromosomes as the true determiner of one’s sex over the various phenotypical and endocrinal changes she tacitly admits transsexual women undergo, Raymond insists that the transsexual’s ultimate crime is a violation of our own bodily integrity. The phrase “God’s design” is absent on the page but very much present between the lines, as Raymond strains to describe the severity of transsexual women’s crimes against our Selves. A similar line of reasoning led her to polemicize against mifepristone in Misconceptions, Myths and Morals, demonstrating quite comprehensively how Raymond’s conception of bodily integrity has nothing to do with bodily autonomy. There is a “higher power” that Janice Raymond refuses to name but who must be considered when making decisions about one’s own flesh, to ascertain whether it is truly the right choice or whether one is better served by healing one’s spiritual sickness over fixating on worldly matters.

Sister Raymond, it would appear, never quite left that convent.

Despite this—despite the flimsiness of the text to which most modern institutional transphobia can be traced, a happy ending remains elusive. For the sad truth is that The Transsexual Empire never needed to be rigorous, never needed to be well-formulated, immaculately researched and coherently argued. It simply needed to exist. It simply needed to be a shameless, incisive and polemical text that accuses transsexual existence itself of being “rape” while ignoring the rampant sexual abuse of transsexual women both within the medical industry and without. The book’s existence was enough, providing ready citations to motivated actors whose disgust and disinclination towards transsexuals needed no sound reasoning and the most threadbare of justifications. To wit: the book’s epilogue is not a summary or a conclusion or a retread of its arguments but a prescription, a list of concrete actions that must be taken to curb the burgeoning transsexual threat. It gives me no joy to report that Janice Raymond’s marching orders to limit the number of trans clinics and throttle transsexual existence at the policy level has seen wide adoption.

Even that observation undermines the book’s cultural impact. Raymond constructs a pharmaceutical specter in order to exorcize it with what she believes to be the true curative for transsexuality: conversion therapy. The transsexual is a sick individual whose mind and spirit need healing more than her body. If she perceives herself to have no place in a patriarchal society, she must be treated by encouraging her to view herself as a gender non-conforming individual rather than allowing her to mutilate herself with the healthcare she desperately requires. Raymond views transsexuality as regressive, as caving to patriarchal society’s narrow definitions of “man” and “woman”; the solution is to carve out a unique path so that the individual becomes someone who fights patriarchal edicts instead of conforming to them. The fact that seizing one’s biodestiny, defying the immutability of sex and the enforcement of sexual difference, and embracing transsexual existence is in-and-of-itself a cataclysmic undermining of patriarchy’s very foundations is, of course, not remarked upon.

Such is the legacy of The Transsexual Empire: Decades after its publication, this view of transition and transsexuality is practically the liberal-feminist, ‘progressive’ consensus. Academics as respected as Judith Butler have trotted out the line that transition is “conformist”. Worse still,  the idea that trans people do not change their sex, only their gender is now commonplace in queer-liberal discourses. Macabre models such as the “gender unicorn” and “genderbread person” helpfully perpetuate a model of sex whereby its immutability is never challenged, where despite whatever changes trans people make to our bodies, “no one is claiming that trans people actually change their sex”. The freaks are simply playing pretend, well-informed “allies” chortle amongst each other, and the polite thing to do is to humor them while remembering that their birth sex, their natal assignment is, of course, inescapable.

And so goes the cruelest punchline of the joke that is The Transsexual Empire: the modern liberal-feminist progressive, so enlightened on queer and trans issues, is now less willing to admit that transsexual people do in fact change our sex than Janice Raymond was in her Transmisogyny Bible.