The Riddle of Gender

Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Janice Raymond rejects biological explanations for transsexuality and views it purely as a social phenomenon. Despite the extreme difference in their lifestyles and points of view (McHugh is a conservative Catholic and Raymond a radical lesbian feminist), Raymond and McHugh echo each other in characterizing transsexual-ism as “an ideology” and comparing sex-reassignment surgery to a lobotomy.

In The Transsexual Empire Raymond promotes a somewhat paradoxical view of sex and gender. On the one hand, she says that sex is determined by chromosomes; this assumption is the foundation of her belief that “it is biologically impossible to change chromosomal sex, and thus the transsexual is not really transsexed.” On the other hand, Raymond denies that chromosomes and the cascade of physiological effects they initiate have any relevance in determining gender. Gender, in her view, is purely a matter of “sex role socialization.” Although she attacks John Money and his research throughout the book, she says that the role of sex hormones in the development of gender identity “is clearly outweighed by environmental factors,” a position that differs very little from Money’s belief that the sex of assignment and rearing trumps all other variables in the formation of gender identity. Masculinity and femininity, Raymond asserts, “are social constructs and stereotypes of behavior that are culturally prescribed for male and female bodies respectively.” Transsexuals, she says, are people who have been inadequately socialized into their culture’s sanctioned gender roles. “The transsexual has not been adequately conditioned into the role/identity that accompanies his or her body.”

These statements, with their underlying assumption that gender is a purely social construct, make it difficult to understand Raymond’s vehement objection to sex reassignment. If gender differences are simply a matter of “sex role socialization” then men and women must be (in their pure, unsocialized state) psychologically identical. So why shouldn’t they be free to express their “gender” in any way they please? Raymond’s answer to the riddle of gender reflects the assumptions of the period in which she wrote The Transsexual Empire, and the community of which she was a part. Though it is clear that she recognizes significant differences in behavior between men and women, Raymond does not believe that these differences are biologically based. Instead, they are based on shared history and culture. In her view, “maleness” and “femaleness” are political categories above all, and the defining characteristic of womanhood is a shared subordination and victimization at the hands of men.

“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 as women,” she says. Transsexual women (or, to use the term that Raymond prefers, “male to constructed females”) do not share this common history of victimization and subordination and so are not, and can never be, women. “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.”

Discomfort with one’s body, the sense of having been born in the “wrong” body—one that does not match one’s view of one’s self as a man or woman—is a manifestation of “sex role oppression,” akin to racial oppression, Raymond says. Transsexual people suffer gender dysphoria because society has provided them with a stereotyped view of what it means to be a man or a woman, Raymond maintains. The fatal error of the transsexual is acceptance of the patriarchal gender system, swallowing patriarchy’s claim that certain feelings and behaviors are reserved for certain bodies. Transsexuality is a political problem that demands political solutions, Raymond argues. By surgically and hormonally altering their bodies to achieve a better “fit” between gender identity and physical appearance, transsexual people play into the hands of the patriarchal enemy, men whose primary goal is to keep women powerless and subservient. “Transsexualism is thus the ultimate, and we might even say, the logical, conclusion of male possession of women, in a patriarchal society. Literally, men here possess women.”

Transmen (female-to-male transsexuals) are, in Raymond’s view, mere “tokens” whose role is to “save face for the transsexual empire.” Female-to-male transsexual people adopt “stereotypes of masculinity,” says Raymond, and “have been assimilated into the transsexual world, as women are assimilated into other male-defined worlds, institutions and roles, that is, on men’s terms, and thus as tokens.” Though Raymond seems to view all transsexual people as puppets or pawns of men and of the male power structure, she absolves transmen as victims (after all, they were born women), whereas transwomen (born men) are active collaborators with the real enemy—the doctors and researchers who have developed and maintain the transsexual empire. “The Transsexual Empire is ultimately a medical empire, based on a patriarchal medical model. This medical model has provided a ‘sacred canopy’ of legitimations for transsexual treatment and surgery.” Sex reassignment is nothing more than behavioral modification, Raymond asserts, and its goal is social control through the creation of stereotyp-ically female pseudo-women who will be used to keep biologically born females in their place as a second sex, prisoners of a male-defined “femininity.”

Raymond’s book, which despite its harsh rhetoric does in certain places provide a compelling critique of gender roles, deteriorates into outright paranoia near its close. “One hypothesis that is being tested in the transsexual ‘laboratories’ is whether or not it is possible for men to diminish the number of women and/or create a new ‘breed’ of females,” she states darkly. “Scientists have already stated their ‘scientific’ interest in diminishing the number of women.” She compares the relationship between transsexual people and the physicians and surgeons who treat them as “master/slave” and “sadist/masochist” pairings. Finally, and perhaps predictably, she drags in the Nazis, saying that “it is significant that the first physician on record to perform sex-change surgery was a German by the name of F. Z. Abraham, who reported the first case in 1931.” Abraham, of course, was a colleague of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose institute was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.

Janice Raymond’s book was mentioned by nearly every transsexual person I interviewed. Until the publication of Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed, in 2002, The Transsexual Empire remained the best-known and most widely read and discussed book on transsexualism by an academician who is neither a physician nor a transsexual person. This is unfortunate, as Raymond’s book provides an account of transsexualism that is far from balanced and is scientifically quite naive. Though she accuses doctors and physicians of ideological bias, her book is itself anchored in ideology, the ideology of lesbian separatism. Reading the book today, one is struck not only by the vitriol of Raymond’s argument, but also by its profound paranoia. One senses that under Raymond’s rage lies a deep fear of men and an unwillingness to believe that any person born (and socialized) as a male can ever be “cured” of the desire to impose his will on women. As Tom Kennard notes, describing his years as a lesbian-feminist separatist, “Women, good. Men, bad.”

A generation after the publication of The Transsexual Empire, that view seems comically simplistic, as does another of Raymond’s core arguments—that transsexuals are, as a group, “more royal than the king” in adhering to stereotypical gender roles. Transgendered and transsexual people today (particularly young people) express a sometimes bewildering range of gender identities and roles. For example, around the time I began working on this project a friend sent me an e-mail survey he had received from a Washington, D.C., area support group, which inquired:Do you identify as transgendered, transsexual, transvestite, cross-dresser, trangenderist, genderqueer, FTM/F2M, MTF, M2F, trans-man, transwoman, transperson, third-gendered, gendertrash, gender outlaw, gender warrior, trans, transfag, transdyke, tranny, passing woman/girl, drag king, drag queen, male lesbian, girl boy, boychick, boy girl, boy dyke, gender-bender, gender blender, transqueer, androgynous, transfolk, butch dyke, nelly fag, gender-different, gender subversive, man/boy with a vagina, chick with a dick, shape-shifter, he-she, she-male, transboy, transgirl, androgyne, gender variant, genderfucker, trannyfag, trannyqueer, trannydyke, Two Spirit, new man, new woman, she-bear, Tomboy, intersexual/female guy, tranz, bearded female, herm, hermaphrodite, MTM/M2M, FTF/F2F, un-gendered, agendered, genderfree, bigendered, midgendered, polygen-dered, pangendered, omnigendered, crossgendered, byke, boi, pre-op, post-op, non-op, no- ho, epicene, othergendered, transkid, female impersonator, gender-atypical, ambigendered … or any other related term not on this list?

As this list illustrates, if gender-variant people agree about anything these days, it is about their right to express their identitities and to label themselves (or not label themselves) in any way they choose. But even as Raymond was writing about the tendency of transsexual people to adopt highly conservative views of gender to placate their medical masters, individuals and groups were beginning to challenge that perspective. During the late sixties and early seventies, transsexual people, like almost everyone else, began questioning traditional gender norms—and were consequently liberated from the view that doctors and researchers were the primary authority on transsexuals and transsexualism. The Transsexual Action Organization—founded in Los Angeles in 1970 by Angela