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For our predictive texts series, we have asked our contributors to select a book which sheds eerily prescient light on our lives today. We weren’t after HG Wells or George Orwell, we wanted something less predictable. Here is the foresight so far.
“Transsexualism has taken only twenty-five years to become a household word,” reads the opening line of the 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. The author, Janice Raymond, a renowned academic and feminist campaigner, caused a massive kerfuffle when she published the work, which seriously tackled the theory and consequences of diagnosing the feelings of body dysphoria and the unbearable desire to live and present as the opposite sex.
Raymond wrote TTE as a response to the rising rates of sex-change surgery in the US. She had long been concerned about the medical practices that negatively impacted women, such as unnecessary hysterectomies and caesareans. This led her to question the medical consequences of the bodily mutilation inherent in transsexual surgery, and the detrimental effects of taking lifelong hormones.
She predicted that the handful of gender identity clinics treating adult transsexuals – the first of which opened in 1967 – would become what she calls ‘sex role control centers’ for so-called deviant female and male children. “Such gender identity centers are already being used for the treatment of designated child transsexuals,” she wrote, before arguing that these centres would proliferate.
There are now at least 40 such clinics treating children’s ‘gender dysphoria’ in the United States, and in England there are seven treating adults, and only one at present that specialises in under 18s, but with calls for more. This is in spite of concerns about the effects that such treatment might have on individuals legally considered too young to make most major life decisions.
Small wonder, then, that 40 years after it was first published, TTE is perceived as an important foundation stone in gender critical feminist thinking.
In 1979, the word gender was understood to be separate from the word sex. Sex was what defined a person biologically; gender was understood to mean the sex-appropriate behaviour that was socially constructed. Today, gender has replaced the word sex in common parlance, as if gender itself were biological.
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SubscribeMy primary critique of Raymond’s book is a passage I also agree with. She describes our bodies as possessing native ecosystems which become disrupted when transgender surgery happens to them. Her words transport me back to Catholic School where I was taught that each human body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit. If I believe this (and I do) then my body is not my own and certain destructive behaviors (smoking cigarettes for one) become off-limits to me. However, not every human being thinks this way. People have been getting tattoos and piercings since recorded history began. We color our hair and think nothing of it. We’ve walked in platform shoes and high heels and have put on make-up. We’ve been scarified. So it seems to me that the plastic surgery involved in an attempt to alter one’s sex is an extension of all those thing, not a difference in kind.
However, forcing a person to engage in sex role stereotyping in order to qualify for sex surgery is the height of oppression and (at least in the U.S.A.) has mostly stopped. And the transgendered, although possessing agency, have nowhere near the power that their doctors have. Raymond is wrong to assume that both sides are equal, creating a team out to destroy female integrity. That thought probably doesn’t
even cross the mind of someone exploring sex-change surgery.
All around, it’s an ugly business with almost universally devastating consequences for one who goes under the knife–particularly if one is trying to “become female.” NO ONE wins when trying to subscribe to patriarchal notions of who’s who and what goes where.
Just some random thoughts. I would very much like to hear from other people on this subject–without anyone having to raise his or her or hir or their voice.