00:00:00.000really is a vast conspiracy, see? And that's why I call it QAnon for Feminism.1.00
00:00:16.720Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Moira Donaghan. And whether we like it or not,
00:00:20.940we are in bed with the right. So today, we're going to be talking about a book that a lot of
00:00:25.560our listeners will have heard about, but that I'm guessing very few of them will have actually read.
00:00:30.000And we're very excited to have someone walk us through this book and to situate it for us and to kind of think about both its spoiler alert, pretty noxious legacy, but also about the very specific circumstances that gave rise to it.
00:00:42.500Our guide today is none other than Susan Stryker. Susan is the former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and the founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative of the University of Arizona, and currently holds an appointment as the Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College.
00:00:59.700She's also the editor of the Transgender Studies Reader and is the author of Transgender History
00:01:05.180and the director of the documentary Screaming Queens, The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria.
00:01:16.260So the book is called The Transsexual Empire, and it came out in 1979.
00:01:22.900It is by an author named Janice Raymond, who's pretty much famous for this book, but, you
00:01:28.680know, remains active today. The book has been reissued a bunch of times. You and I more read
00:01:33.220the 1994 edition. I have to say that I had read about this book and I had never read it before.
00:01:39.640Now I have read it cover to cover. Not sure whether to be thrilled about that or not,
00:01:44.020but I've done it. Susan, can you tell us a little bit about your relationship to this book? Maybe
00:01:48.080say a little bit about yourself and where in the life and times of Susan Stryker did the transsexual1.00
00:01:53.600empire first enter your radar? Sure. Happy to say a little bit about myself. As some of the1.00
00:01:59.420youngins would say today, I am a person of transsexual experience. I'm in my early 60s now.
00:02:07.680I had trans feelings since very early childhood and kind of made a career out of thinking about
00:02:14.880the history of trans and gender and related questions of feminist theory and queer theory
00:02:20.800and gender theory. When did I first encounter this book? Well, as you mentioned, it was published in
00:02:27.2001979, which is the year that I started the university. And one of the first things that
00:02:34.140I did when I left my small town hometown in Southwest Oklahoma and went to the great big
00:02:40.640university town of Norman, Oklahoma, was to go to the university library to look up the word
00:02:46.640transsexualism in the card catalog. And there were two books in the university library. One of them
00:02:55.160was a book by the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, who wrote on sex, gender, and sexuality. That book was
00:03:03.420called Perversion, the Erotic Form of Hatred. And the other book under transsexualism in the card1.00
00:03:10.880catalog was Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire, the subtitle of which is The Making
00:03:17.980of the She-Male. And, you know, I read both of those books, you know, while I was standing there
00:03:25.460in the stacks. And I will say that my first experience with Raymond was like, oh, like,
00:03:32.700this is a feminist argument against transsexualism. But I also had been exposed at that time
00:03:40.760in my life to the idea of the aphorism from Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born, but rather
00:03:48.120one becomes a woman. So I had some vague sense of social constructionism. I had this sense that
00:03:56.200there were some feminist arguments in favor of what we would call a model of how you become1.00
00:04:03.340who you are through some kind of social process. And I thought, hey, there's two different versions0.98
00:04:09.200of feminism here and one of them doesn't like trans. So it was honestly a really important
00:04:15.600marker for me to encounter Raymond's anti-trans arguments because it just set up in my0.94
00:04:22.540little 18-year-old pretty ignorant brain the idea that there was a conversation that I was0.82
00:04:28.760entering into about a way that I felt about myself and about feminist values that I felt0.93
00:04:38.140that i already had and and so it's it's been a touchstone for me for 40 years i'm glad that you
00:04:44.720mentioned raymond's place in your own life history because it's i i love that dichotomy of the two
00:04:50.560books one by a psychiatrist and one by this anti-trans feminist because it and it points
00:04:56.020out to me that raymond was writing at a moment when the idea of trans people and trans identity
00:05:03.200was sort of coming out of the medical psychiatric sort of world and becoming more broadly discussed
00:05:11.000was, can you talk about sort of the state of thinking about trans identity at the time
00:05:16.720that Raymond wrote The Transsexual Empire? Yeah, certainly a lot of what was being published was
00:05:21.300coming from this very, you know, heavily medicalized, psychiatrized, pathologized
00:05:27.620framework. You know, transsexuals were people who had this damaged sense of self. There was some1.00
00:05:35.240error in how they thought about themselves. The best that they could hope for was some kind of,
00:05:41.420you know, partial sort of rehabilitation through surgery and hormones that would make them sort of
00:05:49.180less abject than they felt themselves to be. But, you know, we're always going to be damaged goods.
00:05:54.920And it was a very minoritizing and pathologizing way to think about trans people.
00:06:02.380Sort of another story that I've told along these lines, I first learned the word transsexual when I was something like 10 or 11 years old, reading the Dear Abby advice column in my hometown newspaper, where, I mean, somebody had written it and it was basically a story like, you know, Dear Abby, I've discovered that my husband is wearing my clothes.
00:06:22.660is he a homosexual? And Abby was like, no, a homosexual is someone who loves a member of
00:06:27.620their own sex. Your husband is either a transvestite, which is someone who enjoys0.99
00:06:31.840wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, or a transsexual who feels that they properly are a1.00
00:06:36.880member of the other sex. And I was like, transsexual, there's a word for somebody like me.0.97
00:06:40.980And I went to my public library in Lawton, Oklahoma, and looked up transsexual and the
00:06:50.520only books that they had in my hometown library were college level textbooks of abnormal psychology
00:06:58.300and so you know i was like i said 10 11 12 somewhere around that age trying to pick my
00:07:06.340way through some readings that were above my comprehension level but my takeaway point was0.90
00:07:13.600oh i thought i might be transsexual but transsexuals are crazy people you know um who are really1.00
00:07:19.580messed up and I'm fine, except for this sense I have in my own head of, I'm not a guy. It's just1.00
00:07:27.500like, I'm a girl. Where does that come from? But other than that, it's like I'm a perfectly
00:07:33.020average person in the world. So I did not think that that word was about me per se, because it
00:07:43.100carried such stigmatization such pathologization with it but it was the only word out there
00:07:51.380that was in the right ballpark so I kind of kept circling around that word I'm glad that you0.84
00:07:58.120mentioned that the word at the time in the 1970s was transsexual as opposed to now we would
00:08:04.280generally not use that term although some some people do yeah it's not the first thing that like
00:08:09.860right thinking you know like liberals who are trying to be inclusive say yeah people just say
00:08:14.040trans by and large as a as a shorthand transgender which used to be a more radical sounding word
00:08:21.500like has come to mean something that's fairly normative it's like you were a type a or b
00:08:29.200person who becomes a type b or a person you know one way one time transition between the binary
00:08:35.220That's what transgender has come to mean. Whereas now it's, you know, it's like, it's non-binary. It's like all the cool kids are non-binary. But back in the day, transgender, like in the early 90s, it's like it carried with it more of that sense of like, yeah, this is a radical alternative to like the medical model of transsexualism.
00:08:55.000And, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that now. I also see a lot of people who are younger than me re-embracing the word transsexual.
00:09:05.780I've noticed that for some students as well. Yeah. You know, that the idea of transsexual is too caught up with kind of a more normative sense of being gendered in an odd way. It's kind of like, oh, you're just a girl who everybody thought was a boy. You know, it's like, it's not like you're like trying to color outside the lines in any, you know, really radical and creative way.
00:09:26.600But that transsexual comes to, I think, particularly people who want to engage with some kind of medicalized body transformation practice, whether that is through some kind of approved clinic or medical practice, or whether it's more DIY and more street-oriented practices or more mutual aid kinds of trans people taking care of trans people outside of the clinics and the doctor's offices.
00:09:56.080But so transsexual meaning body change of some kind and trans meaning like anything from like drag queens to butches to just like any kind of conceivable gender variance so that the term transgender, it kind of loses all sorts of specificity.
00:10:14.340Anyway, maybe the easy thing to say is that these words, transgender, trans, transsexual, non-binary, what have you, it's like the meanings shift over time.
00:10:25.000you can't ever definitively nail it down with a clean clear and concise definition so i do think
00:10:33.940it always behooves us to talk about you know when i use this word this is what i mean it to mean
00:10:38.000i ask in part because i think raymond's book which as you pointed out is like she's kind of
00:10:43.620innovating in transphobia right she's moving her like sort of the pathologizing account of
00:10:51.140you know what is wrong with trans people that you're getting from psychiatry and she's moving0.69
00:10:57.000it into this like politicized transphobia and i would say that the transsexual empire is like
00:11:03.460really the founding and still kind of the ur text of the trans-exclusive radical feminist sort of
00:11:08.820posture but when i read the transsexual empire and especially when i read her like new introduction
00:11:14.320from the 1994 addiction that adrian and i read she can't like quite decide what she means by the
00:11:20.280term and it's very slippery and she occasionally expresses frustration she's like now i have to
00:11:25.560talk about all these different kinds of people at once and she's like a few different points
00:11:30.860seems to be trying to like circumscribe the definition so that she can attack a stable0.69
00:11:36.340like unmoving enemy first thing we should say obviously is uh probably the world's biggest
00:11:40.740trigger warning there is going to be a lot of transphobia expressed in the text that we're
00:11:44.540discussing today this is as maura saying sort of the urtext of what is today the gender critical
00:11:50.040movement. And yeah, Janice Raymond's entire book is essentially one long screed against
00:11:56.680the very idea of transgender identity. So before we go on, maybe it makes sense to just kind of
00:12:01.680give folks kind of sense of what this book sounds like and what we mean when we say that there's
00:12:06.080just this really amazing continuity between its arguments and those that you hear in gender
00:12:12.020critical spaces today. I'll just highlight too, because I don't want to interrupt the conversation
00:12:17.420too much. But one point that people will notice right away, and Maura already alluded to that
00:12:22.480just a second ago, Raymond is almost exclusively concerned with trans women, not in the sense that
00:12:28.700she thinks that trans women matter most to feminists, right? But in the sense that Raymond
00:12:34.560thinks that trans men don't really exist, and they exist only as emanations of like,0.97
00:12:39.900the devious machinations of trans women, right? Raymond describes what she calls transgenderism0.99
00:12:45.820as, quote, largely a male phenomenon, though she does allow that, quote, there are women who claim
00:12:51.560it as their own. Women meaning trans men in this case, right? Here's a quote from her.
00:12:56.240The female to constructed male transsexual, right? We're hearing here finally about trans men,0.81
00:13:01.260is the token that saves face for the male transsexual empire. She is the buffer zone1.00
00:13:06.420who can be used to promote the universalist argument that transsexualism is a supposed0.60
00:13:11.280human problem, not uniquely restricted to men, right? I think this is so fascinating that she's
00:13:17.060absolutely fixated on one side of this and wants to understand it entirely as an emanation of
00:13:23.740masculinity and masculinism. It's not at all something that she has to kind of violently
00:13:29.340reject the idea that this could be taking place across the human population, right, in various
00:13:34.840guises and forms. That's not possible. What it is, is one single kind of conspiratorial effort
00:13:40.880by trans women to invade women's spaces.0.99
00:13:45.860And we might also talk about the women's spaces themselves, right?0.79
00:13:49.780Like critiquing trans persons for Raymond,
00:13:52.700and I think this is something that we see in gender critical discourses today all the time,
00:13:57.740it always seems to involve imagining them trying to sort of wheedle their way
00:14:02.860into a space that they quote unquote normally would be excluded from, right?0.84
00:14:06.720Here again, quote from the transsexual empire,
00:14:08.980one of the definitions of male, as related in Webster's, is designed for fitting into a0.98
00:14:14.820corresponding hollow part. This, of course, means much more than the literal signification
00:14:20.220of heterosexual intercourse. It can be taken to mean that men have been very adept at penetrating
00:14:25.780all of women's hollow spaces, at filling up the gaps and of sliding into the interstices.
00:14:31.720Obviously, women who are in the process of moving out of patriarchal institutions,0.96
00:14:36.140consciousness, and modes of living are very vulnerable and have gaps. So this idea that
00:14:41.700in the process of some kind of feminist consciousness-raising project, there are0.84
00:14:46.220these gaps opening up that trans women somehow move into and exploit those is something that1.00
00:14:52.180was front of mind for Janice Raymond in the 1970s. And I think it's still, you know, you can0.81
00:14:57.680see that in gender critical writing today. But so maybe let's first back up and talk a little bit
00:15:03.000about this author janice raymond how she came to this topic how she came to write this book
00:15:09.860where she was at when this book came out it seemed like this book appears to be her life's
00:15:14.480work in some way right she like kind of reissues it from time to time she's reissued it once as
00:15:19.340far as i know and yeah i mean certainly where raymond intersects with trans studies and queer
00:15:28.320studies and many versions of feminism, it is with this book. But she actually wrote other books.0.80
00:15:35.300She wrote against liberalism from a radical feminist perspective. She did a tremendous
00:15:42.600amount of work on sex trafficking. I would say the major focus of her career was actually working1.00
00:15:50.120in the transnational arena on international sex trafficking. She wrote a book on passionate
00:15:57.480female friendships uh she wrote i'm trying to think of them all there's about six six titles
00:16:05.220the most recent book that she wrote was called double think which was on um you know the the
00:16:13.340contemporary anti-trans craze and i would have to say that raymond's more recent work it's like i
00:16:21.340I I just feel like she's devolved into a kind of conspiratorialism like you know QAnon for
00:16:28.040for feminism you look at her her citations and it's all like stuff off the internet
00:16:32.340but her early work it's like even though I disagree with her there's an intellectual
00:16:37.040project there I think she's wrong but I don't think she's stupid and what's interesting to me
00:16:42.180is like how how you I think need to read Raymond for where she's coming from and identify the
00:16:50.660places where, you know, what I personally find to be like these like kernels of paranoia and
00:16:57.080conspiratorialism around trans people. That's the part that's a problem. And that's the part that
00:17:03.280I think flowers and blossoms over the course of her career. But that where she starts out,0.84
00:17:09.300there's surprising alignment, I think, between Raymond's critique of the biomedical establishment
00:17:15.600and Foucauldian notions of biopolitics.
00:17:18.380So I think she's not actually wrong in some of the things she says about,
00:17:25.340But where she goes wrong then is the way that she makes trans people,0.73
00:17:29.640both the victims and the vectors of this thing that she is so opposed to.
00:17:36.060But Raymond herself, she turns 80 this year in 2023.
00:17:41.220Happy birthday Janice Raymond, if you're listening.
00:17:43.240I might make some errors. In fact, here I've worked with Janice Raymond's papers at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, but a lot of this deep dive into her work is kind of new to me. But it's like she was born in 1943. She's from Rhode Island, from a large Catholic family, the oldest of several children.
00:18:04.480For her undergrad, she went to Salve Regina Women's College in Newport, which is a Catholic
00:18:11.360institution. She actually took orders as a nun in the later 1960s, took vows. She entered a
00:18:19.900religious order. I think it was Sisters of Mercy. That's who ran-
00:18:25.400No, kind of like the Magdalene Laundry.
00:18:29.000Yeah. It's a weirdly common story for radical feminists of this micro generation, like working class, white, Northeastern upbringing, they become nuns and then leave the church and sort of race a lesbian identity, usually in the aftermath. But she didn't totally leave Catholicism behind.1.00
00:18:47.060Well, she did. Yeah, she she was coming out in the later 1960s in the context of the first or the second wave feminist movement. First, first iteration of second wave feminism in the late 60s. She was in favor of women's rights.0.93
00:19:03.300She was in favor of abortion and contraception, which, you know, did not endure her to the sisters.0.62
00:19:11.020And she left being a nun and then came out as a lesbian.
00:19:16.800She went to a theological seminary at Andover in the early 1970s and then went to Boston College, which is a Jesuit college in Boston.
00:19:31.300And Mary Daly is a really important figure in so-called, you know, cultural feminism or radical feminism. She had a story in some ways quite similar to Janice Raymond's that she started out as a devout and believing Catholic. She was also a feminist.
00:19:54.100In the 60s, during the Vatican II period, Bailey seemed to have the sense of like, the church can be reformed. It could become more liberal. Perhaps they might even ordain women priests. We can get rid of sexism within Catholicism. Her first book was actually called The Church and the Second Sex, which was a straight up, you know, de Beauvoir-ian reading of what she thought of as Catholic misogyny and sexism.
00:20:23.220We should say for our listeners who can't see is that this book is actually on Susan's desk. It's sitting between the two of us right now.
00:20:31.440It is. I really disagree with where a lot of this school of thought lands, but I want to take it seriously and understanding where it came from.
00:20:42.900So I've actually read Mary Daly and I've read Janice Raymond. It's not just like, oh, they said bad things about trans. I hate them.
00:20:50.500I try to understand what their own thought process and intellectual traditions are, what their arguments are.
00:20:58.720You can offer a more powerful critique if you're not just poking at a straw figure somehow.
00:21:04.300I admire you for reading Mary Daly, in part because I find her so almost unreadable.
00:21:09.100Her writing is very convoluted and bent.
00:21:11.540I found Raymond a lot more of a straightforward prose stylist.
00:21:14.560Yeah, well, Daly, I think, becomes harder to read the longer she writes.
00:21:19.180The Church and the Second Sex is a pretty straightforward book. Her next book was called Beyond God the Father. That's where she's thinking of herself at this point as a post-Christian feminist.
00:21:33.100Her next book, at least the next one that I pay a lot of attention to, is Gynecology, the Metaethics of Radical Feminism. She has a book called The Wickedary, which is like a keywords book for the feminist cosmology she's trying to propound.
00:21:51.440And as her work gets closer and closer to the wickedary period, the gynecology period, the more she relies on neologisms and fake etymologies, and I don't say fake etymology necessarily in a bad way.
00:22:09.940She plays with words. She takes them apart and thinks about what the roots mean in ways that the very way that we speak encodes ideas about sex, gender, sexuality, men and women.
00:22:24.920And, you know, I think that there is actually something to that, you know, I don't want to just say like, oh, yeah, she's just making up words, that she's doing something interesting with language.
00:22:36.620And I think she's coming out of a particular feminist linguistic tradition, people like Sarah Hoagland.
00:22:44.960It's like, you know, it's not really that different in some ways from people like George Lakoff, you know, the linguist at Berkeley, who wants to talk about metaphors we live by and to think about how there are conceptual vocabularies that actually shape what our experience of the world is.
00:23:04.720And so Daly is doing things like that. It's just, I think she winds up with a pretty wacky, wacky cosmology that to me, I'm going to like, how can you see that? How can you think about the universe the way that you think about the universe and imagine it as some place that is like, you know, benevolent towards all being like, it seems like she weaves a thread of hate in there to me.
00:23:32.580So like I said, there is a complicated and substantive intellectual project in Daly's work and in Raymond's work. I just think it runs off the rails.
00:23:43.020I think it might be surprising to some of our listeners to know that Raymond is coming from this milieu of a feminist theology. It's kind of a strain of feminist thought that's gone like way out of fashion.
00:23:53.100Right. And what's interesting to me in the book version, the published version of Transsexual Empire, is that she largely excises all of the theological underpinnings.
00:24:06.480I mean, when you read the book, it's like there's still plenty of theology and religious language in it.
00:24:11.580But the dissertation was about twice as long as the book, and it is much more explicitly grounded in theological thought.
00:24:20.100thought. She wrote it as a dissertation in theology, in the theology department at a
00:24:25.400Jesuit university. And the way that I read what she's doing is that she is somebody who
00:24:31.600was devout, lost her faith over what she perceived as sexism and misogyny within Catholicism.
00:26:59.180that isn't just like a strict reversal.
00:27:02.060but mostly it's just like it's like saying what you thought was bad is good and what you thought
00:27:06.940was good is bad it's like there's something very simplistic in that it's just really important i
00:27:13.940think to recognize transsexual empire is something that is essentially coming out of
00:27:20.180a theological tradition and its repudiation and its reconstruction the very first
00:27:26.960And Raymond says this in the introduction to the published version of Transsexual Empire, she's like, the first place I presented this work was at a regional meeting of the American Religious Studies Association in 1972.
00:27:42.040And if I look at, you know, try to follow the citational trail there, it seems like that paper, I haven't located it yet, but I think it was the one that was published in a collection of essays from a working group on women and feminist theology, or some such titles, published in 1974.
00:28:06.260and it was a collection of papers given at a regional conference in 1972 and three. I think
00:28:13.120that's got to be the one. And if so, that first version of Transsexual Empire was about her0.99
00:28:21.880critique of androgyny within Christian theology and the idea that I think is actually quite
00:28:29.140central to her work, which is what she calls an ethics of integrity, to give a very foreshortened
00:28:36.040version of the ethics of integrity it is one of those ideas that i think is like this is kind of
00:28:43.620like covert catholicism even though she says she's repudiating it and it's this idea like there is a
00:28:49.800natural organic unity to the body and the self that you know she doesn't say is god given in
00:28:57.520the androcentric way but maybe it's like god given in the natural given by the goddess the
00:29:03.980goddess rather than the god. She actually says at one point in Transsexual Empire that she wants0.62
00:29:10.460to write about a pre-existing organic unity before the fall, so to speak, of sex stereotyping and
00:29:19.100misogyny. So there is this sense like there is a pre-given unity to the self and there's an
00:29:27.220integrity to the body that needs to be honored and expressed and unfolded and elaborated that
00:29:34.960is not too different from catholic arguments for why you're not supposed to have conscious you
00:29:40.100know why you're not supposed to use contraception why you're not supposed to have abortion
00:29:42.820you know why you're not supposed to get tattoos it's kind of like that's god's body you're just
00:29:47.860renting it you need to not mess up the body uh and it needs to do what god said it was supposed
00:29:55.460to do, which is like have babies. And so, I mean, Raymond doesn't go to that place. I mean,
00:30:00.420she is in favor of abortion and contraception. She was not somebody who was a biological
00:30:06.900progenitor of other people's lives. Part of what she gives up in her renunciation of Catholicism
00:30:13.860is the idea of women are supposed to be mothers and baby makers and wives, but she holds onto
00:30:22.400that idea of there being a kind of ethics of integrity that is rooted in this like deeply
00:30:30.960ontological sense of what your body is for it strikes me that the ethics of integrity might
00:30:37.100not have been something unique to catholicism in this time you know we're like 1979 when she0.60
00:30:42.940publishes transsexual empire it's sort of the disintegration radical feminism has disintegrated0.98
00:30:47.640a lot of feminist institutions are sort of at the end of the height of their power, shall we say.0.74
00:30:54.680And what is still kind of holding on a little bit is the counterculture, which is also sort of in
00:31:00.900many of its instigations, very invested in this idea of the natural as a moral ideal.
00:31:05.920Yeah, that seems right. So there's a kind of a stance of disappointment. There's a stance of
00:31:10.260withdrawal a little bit. You mentioned that you spent a lot of time with Raymond's paper at the
00:31:14.220Schlesinger Library at Harvard recently. I wonder, does that come through, this feminism
00:31:19.600of woundedness and retreat? 100%. There's letters. I mean, I read her correspondence0.90
00:31:25.660with friends and colleagues and students. And there's several letters where she's writing with
00:31:31.240other radical feminist women who are in her community, and they're sharing their experiences
00:31:37.600of how they felt particularly wounded by experiences of sexism and misogyny as girls within Catholicism
00:31:47.680and that there was a way that it just devastated their sense of self-esteem and limited their sense
00:31:53.420of who they would be as people. And so for Raymond, it's like so much of what feels like
00:31:59.660feminist empowerment to her is addressing, you know, what I would call the narcissistic wound
00:32:07.640of how Catholicism damaged her sense of self about being a woman. It's like, it's Wendy Brown's idea0.77
00:32:14.740of a wounded attachment. And that so much of her work is about trying to heal from that.
00:32:21.200And that it then excludes from feminist community people who are not dealing with the same wound in0.69
00:32:28.820the same way right yeah i love the way you put that because it kind of drives that something that
00:32:34.440we might just flag for listeners right away that one of the big there are parts of this book as you
00:32:40.160say that we're not going to recognize in current sort of gender critical quote unquote discourse
00:32:46.260but one thing that she really has really in spades is the sense of like encroachment on spaces and
00:32:53.500communities and the way you're positioning this right now is like this is the community into which
00:32:58.440you withdraw because you've been disappointed by the institutions, by the communities that were
00:33:05.220supposed to give meaning and texture to your lives. The fear for those spaces is all over
00:33:12.060this book. Masculinity becomes to her basically this form of creeping in. You only have to read
00:33:20.120the author of Harry Potter today to see where this ends up, but it's here. It's here in 1978-79.
00:33:26.540Yeah. And if you look at Mary Daly's gynecology, which I think comes out in like 77, 78, I'm going to forget exactly the date. But there's a passage in there where she's writing on trans women, male to female transsexuals.
00:33:42.620And what Daly said was actually something that provoked one of my very first academic articles on Frankenstein, where Daly wrote in gynecology about what she was calling the Frankenstein effect and said that male to female transsexuals were necrophilic agents who were invading living women's space.
00:34:08.760So this idea of the transsexual as something that is death-dealing, that is opposed to life, that is trying to destroy a living women's community and sacred space, that's there in the 1970s.
00:34:27.940We might briefly just say, if people want to read this really famous essay, and if you haven't read it yet, it's called My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix, Performing Transgender Rage, which I think is also, it's in GLQ, but if people don't have that, it's also in the Transgender Studies Reader that you edited.
00:34:46.080That is correct. From 1994. There's a way that that article, for me, I thought of it as a response to Sandy Stone's essay, The Post-Transsexual Manifesto.
00:34:59.340The Empire Strikes Back. I was going to say that. The Empire Strikes Back, colon, Post-Transsexual Manifesto.
00:35:04.560Sandy Stone, for our listeners, is one of the trans women who, in the transsexual empire, Raymond attacks at length and in quite personal terms.0.72
00:41:14.760and provides the words with which to articulate that standpoint.
00:41:19.500I want to speak about religion in a most basic sense,
00:41:23.500as it is derived from its accepted Latin root, religare, meaning to tie or to link.
00:41:30.220Women's studies should help tie women's lives together.0.99
00:41:33.460It should make connections about female being in the world,1.00
00:41:36.740connections made perhaps for the first time.0.66
00:41:40.000It should bring together those disparate and fragmented parts of female existence through systematic comparative and historical reflection.0.99
00:41:48.720Women's knowledge and understanding may not equal integrity, but they are the beginning of the journey to regain it.0.50
00:41:56.120So here you can see the connections in her thinking between a religious framework, that notion of integrity, which precedes a fall that disintegrates and fragments personhood and self, and that a proper feminist framework will bring together all of the disparate parts that have been harmed by, you know, let's just say the fallen nature of the world under heteropatriarchal capitalism.
00:42:24.900and that this will be the way that you have the conversion experience
00:42:28.940of becoming, I won't say new in Christ,0.94
00:42:34.500I want to just tease out a little more specifically for our listeners exactly what
00:42:57.720Raymond is imagining as this like pre-fall integrity right because she doesn't say
00:43:04.140as i think a lot of like christian conservatives now would say it's like okay god created us male
00:43:09.260and female and you know adam and eve not adam steve etc she has a distinct sort of reinvention
00:43:15.880or inversion of that idea of like a sort of i can't call it androgyny because she rejects that
00:43:21.100term but you know it's a sort of a pre-sexed existence well you know that's where i personally
00:43:28.420find some unresolved paradoxes and contradictions in Raymond's thought. I mean, that there is a way
00:43:35.760that she wants to say like, oh, human being, it's like, should be like restored to like this sense
00:43:42.960of primal integrity. Then there's part of it that really does seem to be about female and not male
00:43:49.800and to re-inscribe. She says, I'm not a gender essentialist, but I think she is like a sex0.56
00:43:54.680the ontologist. That is a contradiction in the thinking that is not really resolved for me.
00:44:01.000I think it's right that we're spending a lot of time on the religious extraction of a lot of
00:44:05.460Raymond's ideas. At the same time, I think it's also interesting what I sort of was unprepared
00:44:10.060for in reading it was just like these elements of anti-psychiatry that really are all over this
00:44:15.260book. I think that hardly any reader of the transsexual empire would come away not noticing0.68
00:44:20.820the Catholicism or the ex-Catholicism of this book, at the same time, if you were to speed
00:44:26.640read it, I think you'd come away with a sense, above all, of a big, very engaged critique
00:44:31.500of some kind of medical or psychiatric establishment.
00:44:35.240I'll maybe just read one passage, right?0.94
00:44:37.020The present counseling and treatment of transsexuals based on the medical model I have described1.00
00:44:41.760give the transsexual no real moral options.1.00
00:44:45.020Failing to analyze our society's definitions of masculinity and femininity, such therapy1.00
00:44:49.900offers little encouragement and advice to help the transsexual live beyond both these containers1.00
00:44:55.520of personhood i think that's so interesting right like this is the vector and victim thing you were0.64
00:45:01.060alluding to earlier that raymond can sound like she's actually quite concerned about the rights
00:45:06.840and the health of transgender people and then the other thing that this really i think brings home
00:45:11.820for us is that for her the interpolation of the medical establishment is sort of a sign that this
00:45:17.720whole thing is just one big masculinist conspiracy. Basically, medicine is an extension of male
00:45:25.020domination. And here it sort of reinforces the gender binary. Yeah. And, you know, and I think0.76
00:45:30.660it's exactly that anti-psychiatric element that allowed the book to be received largely
00:45:38.220positively. And when it came out in 1979, that it very much spoke to sort of an anti-institutional,
00:45:45.560anti-psychiatric perspective. It's like, as I mentioned earlier, I think there are ways that
00:45:52.460even though the vocabularies are very different, some of the arguments that Raymond makes are
00:45:57.580really not that dissimilar to what Foucault would say, you know, in History of Madness.
00:46:03.500Or what, you know, Félix Guattari would say and, you know, like his particular version of
00:46:09.800psychoanalytic theory. Raymond was thrilled to have been endorsed by Thomas Saz, the Hungarian
00:46:18.040American Jewish psychoanalyst, certainly psychologist. But he wrote this book,
00:46:24.560The Myth of Mental Illness in 1961, basically making the same arguments that Foucault was making
00:46:31.240in his work at that time on madness and critique of the psychoanalytic establishment.
00:46:37.380And that the argument that Zaz was making was basically you can't think of what we call mental illness as being a somatic illness of the body, that that was a false analogy, that mental illness was just a problem of adjustment, a problem in the course of living that was not an organic illness.
00:46:59.080And that it's kind of like, what was it, Rosa von Prondheim, who made the film and is not the homosexual who is sick, but the society that condemns him. And that's very much the idea in Zaz and that Raymond kind of riffs on, you know, that the idea is that medicine and psychiatry, as they are practiced and instituted, create what she was calling a theodicy, but, you know, which you might just want to call like hegemony.
00:47:26.720Like this sense of a totalizing system of thought that puts forth its notions of what is good and what is health and what's a proper form of life, but that it's actually deeply informed by capitalist heteropatriarchy.
00:47:44.820And these are arguments that I think many people on the left would not actually disagree with.
00:47:51.540You know, when I was reading a lot of the contemporary reviews of Transsexual Empire, when it came out in 1979, 1980, I found one by Biddy Martin that was like, you know, absolutely, it was positive, you know.
00:48:06.280But then it's like, great critique of medicine. This thing about transsexuals is a little off. But trans people who were reviewing the book, like Roz Cavney, who wrote a great critique of Raymond as soon as the book came out, were very critical.1.00
00:48:23.540were pointing out the connections between the anti-trans and anti-Semitic. She's not explicitly
00:48:29.720anti-Semitic, but it's just like the structure of argument that you would see in anti-Semitic
00:48:34.860fantasy. It's the same structure of argument against trans people. So people were pointing
00:48:40.040that out from the word go. But most of the reviewers were actually saying like, yeah,
00:48:45.040right on critique of for-profit Western medicine, totally in alignment with a Foucauldian
00:48:51.860biopolitical analysis and then like i said she makes trans people the the worm in the bud there0.99
00:48:58.360it's like it's the c transsexuals everything that's wrong with western medicine and even0.89
00:49:03.400though she says she doesn't blame them it's like she then kind of treats trans people like1.00
00:49:08.940the zombies you know who are out to eat her face it's like oh they got infected by the virus of0.97
00:49:14.240you know modern heteropatriarchal capitalism they're infected by that uh we don't blame them0.92
00:49:20.840for being infected but we still have to kill them so they won't eat our face and that's kind of the
00:49:25.700structure of the argument you're hitting on something that is like a really recurring0.98
00:49:29.520inconsistency in the transsexual empire which is she can't figure out if trans we're saying trans
00:49:34.840people but really this is almost a book exclusively about trans women right she can't figure out if0.69
00:49:39.540trans women are being acted upon by this evil medical pharmaceutical like force that polices
00:49:49.140pathologizes and ultimately medicalizes gender non-conformity yeah or if they are like sort of0.95
00:49:56.680deviously holding all the puppet strings and actually am i the only non-catholic in the group
00:50:01.520i'm not catholic i'm not catholic i was raised this is what i wrote in my in my printout of this
00:50:06.780of this passage because i several of these passages was sin question mark question mark
00:50:10.820question that's the other structure where you can be the carrier of it right like and it's kind of
00:50:16.080your fault and it's kind of not right like you're not you know satan's acting through you and it's
00:50:21.140not actually like it's not your fault in the sense that like you're not doing it but you did something
00:50:25.920to deserve it and like i think it's to me that really that paradox like because it's a paradox
00:50:31.880only through our secular eyes like it's i think it's just catholic as hell i definitely think
00:50:38.280Raymond feels that she needs to protect herself and her women's community from the infection of trans womanhood. I mean, she doesn't use the word infection, but there is this idea of a kind of purity can't be contaminated by this thing.0.92
00:50:58.140So maybe the trans woman is just the carrier of this thing called the transsexual empire where it's like doctors like John Money have created this false ideology of gender and trans women have violated the integrity of their body by embracing this false consciousness and they feel entitled like any man to be in women's space and to possess women heart and soul and that must be rejected.0.95
00:51:25.500you know so like so you don't blame the zombie for like being dead but you still want to keep0.96
00:51:30.500them from eating your face please talk about the john money thing because like first of like i know
00:51:34.680that i didn't go but you went to see matt walsh speak at stanford last fall sometime in the last
00:51:41.340academic year yeah and he still does the whole like john money was a dirtbag therefore there are
00:51:47.300no trans people or something like that but you know 45 years after this book and john money is
00:51:52.460all over this this book too and what's fascinating about this i mean first of it's like it's kind of
00:51:57.440the genetic fallacy right like you know there's a preview to your new book your book's going to show
00:52:02.080that the fixation on john money is actually he didn't originate this concept of gender
00:52:06.740we can talk about that a little bit more context about john money who was a endocrinologist
00:52:12.000from new zealand or australia he's like from new zealand not an endocrinologist he i'm gonna forget
00:52:18.840the name of his degree program, but it was like, it was the degree program set up at Harvard by
00:52:23.240Talcott Parsons. It was like, basically like a social analysis. It was like the first
00:52:27.780interdisciplinary social sciences program. Interesting. So he was not trained as a
00:52:33.440clinician. Right. Well, I suppose you could say he was trained as a psychologist.
00:52:38.260Social relations. Yeah. Department of social relations. So interdisciplinary social sciences,
00:52:44.340That's what money was actually trained in. He wrote his dissertation on the medical management
00:52:51.320of intersex people, but he did not have a medical background. That's interesting.
00:52:58.960That is interesting. He was working at a gender clinic at Johns Hopkins.
00:53:03.040He set up the gender clinic at Hopkins. Yeah. So he was working at Johns Hopkins, which
00:53:09.260Johns Hopkins Medical School is where a lot of the techniques for surgical genital modification,
00:53:14.660as well as like a lot of pediatric endocrinological research, had been done from the 1930s forward.
00:53:24.900So money went to Johns Hopkins after he was at Harvard because he was an intersex specialist,
00:53:31.480and he wanted to study the clinical management of intersex youth.
00:53:35.820and it's in the context of that work it was you know which basically goes like huh some people
00:53:41.320have really ambiguous genitals and yet they still grow up to think of themselves as like men or
00:53:46.300women and live as men and women in society like how does that work and so it was at some level
00:53:52.980an anti-biologist understanding of like how people become who they become money's thought
00:54:00.980was actually quite complicated because he pioneers what now gets called biopsychosocial
00:54:06.820models. It's like, oh, there's a biological component, but there's a social component.
00:54:13.060And if I'm remembering correctly, he did resist the uptake of this kind of
00:54:17.400more constructionist oriented vision of gender by feminists.
00:54:21.600He rejected the idea that gender was a feminist idea. And this kind of gets to what Adrian was
00:54:27.240saying about, I'm working on a book called Changing Gender, which is about the history
00:54:31.200of the gender concept itself. And money is popularly regarded as the guy who invents
00:54:40.040the modern notion of gender based on his intersex work, where he made a distinction between what he
00:54:46.680was calling sex and G-I-R, gender identity slash role. And then it was this guy at UCLA,
00:54:55.060Robert Stoller, who says, okay, let's break that into three parts, biological sex, psychological
00:55:00.060gender identity, and social gender role. And all roads lead to John Money as slightly revised by
00:55:10.060Robert Stoller. In the feminist literature, in the social scientific literature, Money is just
00:55:16.620regarded as the guy who introduced the term gender to talk about not grammar and how you classify
00:55:24.800nouns and create agreement between different parts of speech as a grammatical practice.
00:55:31.080So he's the person who popularly believed to be the guy who takes that idea of grammatical gender
00:55:37.040and starts using it in a social scientific way to talk about the process by which
00:55:43.540we all become the particular people we think that we are and to introduce a distinction between
00:55:51.840biology identity and social role but we should probably go to the other side of john money and
00:55:59.160why he gets weaponized by people like matt walsh but it's because like right now now we're talking
00:56:04.360about john money we've described a very insightful pioneering scientist and they think he's a skeezy
00:56:09.180perf you know that's basically that's the easy that's the the short takeaway egregious mishandling
00:56:15.920of childhood intersex conditions some really chilling and horrific accusations by some of
00:56:22.440those patients he also seems to have had a mistress hospitalized diagnosed falsely with
00:56:28.960schizophrenia subjected to electroconvulsive therapy she narrowly escaped lobotomy and then
00:56:34.220he seems to have been taking pictures of naked kids uh you know it's gnarly it gets really really
00:56:40.540Yeah, I will say it's like, I will just say it's like, I would have a lot of ethical problems with John Money. And I certainly think he did some things that were not ethical. And I also think it's a very tangled hairball of accusations because it's like, I do think he did things that were wrong.
00:57:03.400I think the way his theory of gender identity acquisition played out for intersex people in particular was horrific and that it has authorized a lot of what I would think of as like non-consensual genital mutilation on children.
00:57:19.160I mean, I did not put too fine a point on it because this idea about the social acquisition
00:57:24.540of gender identity and this idea of a critical window, it's like, you know, up until a certain
00:57:29.360point, your identity is like pretty plastic and malleable.
00:57:32.920And then at a certain point, it kind of like clicks and locks in and you develop a core
00:57:39.640And it's really unchangeable after that.0.79
00:57:42.580So that model meant, okay, if you're transsexual and you have this like core sense of gender0.93
00:57:48.480identity that is opposed to your biology. It should be like, okay, you should be able to get0.94
00:57:53.220surgery and do hormones. But for intersex kids, it was like quick before they develop a sense of1.00
00:57:59.020who they are as a boy or a girl, carve up their genitals to make it look more like, you know,1.00
00:58:04.700non-intersex genitals. And I think that was just horrific for intersex people. The same thing that0.99
00:58:11.180could be enabling for trans people was horrific for intersex people. You know, just follow up
00:58:17.080Well, what Moira was saying, the fact that money is such an influential and, in my opinion, ethically challenged, really messy person who, while sometimes being accused of things he didn't do, certainly did do a lot of things that were bad.
00:58:33.340What happens is that in the anti-trans rhetoric of today, because all roads lead to John Money, there's a lot of ad hominem arguments made about money.0.92
00:58:46.620It's like, see John Money, skeezy pervy pedophile. Therefore, this whole gender idea is bogus BS, false ideology, and trans people are, as we said, pedo groomers. It's all about harming children. See John Money.0.99
00:59:03.380There's a guilt by association and there's a logic of conspiracy running through that kind of associative condemnation as well. It's like this guy who contributed to an academic understanding that subsequently informed your life seems to have been a pedophile and therefore so are you. It's the causal linkage is quite creative.
00:59:25.860yeah right right raymond goes after john money it's like she i think her critique of john money
00:59:31.140is actually pretty good you know but it's kind of like see john money was wrong therefore transsexual
00:59:35.360bad or therefore the thing he was trying to describe doesn't exist it's like this man is
00:59:39.500a bad astronomer therefore there is no sun it's like well i i don't think that's how it works
00:59:44.200if you're going to try and uh eliminate the findings of every field that has a man who's
00:59:49.460committed sexual assault in it like i'm sorry we just don't have any we don't have any human
00:59:53.380knowledge anymore all of economics would just be yeah that's right and so i i do want to get back
00:59:58.780to the john money and gender question but back to janice raymond and the structure of her own
01:00:04.660argumentation it's like sometimes i think she's really smart and other times i've been like that
01:00:09.980is just a really poorly formed argument at the level of of logic something that's been pointed
01:00:15.980out by me but also by many other people and that chapter on sappho by surgery it's like it's the
01:00:23.320place that she comes the closest to what I think of as a kind of an anti-Semitic fantasy, as well
01:00:31.540as a lot of Orientalist tropes in her writing. But she basically says, well, why are transsexuals0.90
01:00:40.020bad? Well, because Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a German, wrote about sexology and helped
01:00:46.300transsexuals at his institute for sexual science in berlin and nazis were german and the nazis
01:00:55.480destroyed that institute and then harry benjamin who knew magnus hirschfeld and was the father of
01:01:03.720transsexualism was german so i'm not saying that like transsexuals were invented by nazis in the
01:01:10.380camp but i am pointing out like nazis were german you know and so it's like there's a kind of
01:01:16.100circularity and guilt by association that that it's like she just insinuates she draws bad
01:01:24.140analogies the parts of her work that are less grounded in rigorous thinking and are more
01:01:30.980conspiratorial you can just look at the way in my opinion it's just like her whole thought process
01:01:38.040and structure of argumentation breaks down around those claims john money didn't invent gender it's
01:01:43.980I've found people who are basically making the same argument that John Money makes in psychology in the 1940s, well-published, prominent psychologists who are basically saying things like, when we say gender to mean everything that John Money then says gender means in the 1950s, what we're really talking about here is the model that Margaret Mead came up with.
01:02:09.540like, you know, when Margaret Mead says sex role, that's what we're calling gender. And it's like,
01:02:14.540what they're essentially pointing to is the emergence of social constructionist arguments
01:02:19.740in cultural anthropology. Like in the late 19th, early 20th century, you had, it's like,
01:02:27.180is it biology or is it culture? It's like, why is there a cultural difference, you know,
01:02:32.340across the world? Why are Samoans different than people who live in New York City? Is it because0.97
01:02:37.600they're biologically different or culturally different. And so the argument was like,
01:02:41.340well, it's cultural difference. It's like, it's all about different symbolic worlds and languages
01:02:46.200and social practices and, you know, becoming who you are and social interaction with other people.
01:02:51.860So that whole model, there were psychologists who were saying when people like Margaret meets a sex
01:02:58.960role, that's what we mean by gender. And it references that whole intellectual tradition,
01:03:04.600which is in fact the intellectual tradition that informs the graduate program that john money
01:03:11.820trained in at harvard it's like he is just saying something that terminology is being used
01:03:18.200the concept is already there there's absolutely nothing that john money invented there's even an
01:03:25.280earlier history i've just finished this chapter for my book and like using gender and much the
01:03:31.360way that John Money would use it in the 19th century history of the debunked science of
01:03:38.220phrenology, you know, like of reading bumps on people's heads to determine their character and
01:03:44.600diagnose them. And there was a whole phrenological theory of gender that involved questions of
01:03:52.660sexual orientation and self-concept and ideas about stereotyping and social roles. There was
01:04:00.620a fully elaborated theory of gender in the 1840s. I love that you went back because in some way,
01:04:07.280those two points, I hadn't thought of them together, but they belong together. The reason
01:04:11.140why you need to lop off the long history of the use of gender is in order to be able to tell a
01:04:16.660conspiracy story, right? Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to re-narrate
01:04:21.360society becoming aware of something and talking about it. And you're trying to recast it as this
01:04:27.120nefarious scheme by John Money and Magnus Hirschfeld, which is easier if you're keeping
01:04:34.080the number of conspirators to a manageable level. It's like, oh, and now Margaret Mead's involved,
01:04:38.620an entire Harvard department. It starts sounding as crazy as it is. I'd never thought of it this
01:04:43.000way, but yeah, it's meant to focus on these particular people because it's ultimately a
01:04:48.420conspiracy story. By abbreviating the history of the inquiry, it makes the disproving of the
01:04:55.060gray a lot like like this is the common turf refrain right until like two years ago everybody
01:05:01.060knew men were men and women were women and now we didn't have this one now we've got this crazy
01:05:05.480gender thing that we didn't have christine jorgensen when i was growing up in the 1960s
01:05:09.720we've had this crazy gender thing quite a bit longer and then it becomes a little hard to
01:05:14.180dismiss as a like sort of novel frivolity you know just to kind of keep going deeper
01:05:19.520into the rabbit hole this whole idea of well gender used to be grammar and then it became
01:05:24.380you know sociology and psychology when you look at what grammatical gender does cross linguistically
01:05:31.900it's like not all languages have gender i've learned so much about linguistics in the last
01:05:37.620couple of years and still feel like i know very little but gender in grammar is just what they
01:05:44.060call it a semantic strategy like a strategy for making meaning by classifying nouns you know like
01:05:52.280creating groups of nouns, and then making other parts of speech, like verbs, indefinite articles,
01:05:58.720direct objects, agree in their form with the way the noun has been classified.
01:06:06.460It's like, that's grammatical gender. Creating noun categories and making other parts of speech
01:06:11.580agree with them to create agreement that conveys meaning. It's like, that's what grammatical gender
01:06:16.800is. And if you look at what languages that have grammatical gender do, it's like about two thirds
01:06:25.480of them use human biological sex difference as an implicit category for creating linguistic
01:06:34.320genders. Not always, but really commonly. So this idea of humans experience a world,
01:06:42.300We create symbolic categories and concepts to make sense of that and to engage with other parts of the world, other humans and non-human parts of it, that we interact with the world through linguistically structured concepts and categories.
01:07:02.320You can think about the objects that are being categorized as like sex.
01:07:06.860there's like things that exist in the world actually things that you kind of make into
01:07:12.220things in a particular way by how you cut up the existing world into going like being buckets or
01:07:19.500nouns it's like that you make a part of the world be a noun that has a name and then you imagine
01:07:24.820that that noun has a certain kind of capacity for acting like a verb right and that it acts on
01:07:30.960another part of the world a direct object so like that very sense of like what is the thing that can
01:07:37.100do what to what it's like that is just a basic syntactical structure of all languages the idea
01:07:44.080that you encounter a world you struggle to put it into symbolic categories that actually existing
01:07:52.040world is going to be messier than whatever category you come up with like materiality
01:07:58.240is always going to exceed the symbolic frame that you put on it. So there's just this routine
01:08:04.700noise in the system of trying to make sense of these moments of things exceeding their symbolic
01:08:13.340buckets. It seems to be more of a problem in moments of huge socio-political economic
01:08:23.160transformation where your assumptions about what the world are being called into question
01:08:29.600and that it's like in those moments of deep vast transformation that people whose lives
01:08:37.960seem to challenge the basic social construction of reality exceed the symbolic buckets that you
01:08:46.500put lives in it's like that you're encountering a phenomenon that doesn't make sense to you and
01:08:52.580you're trying to figure it out and you're trying to come up with new words for those things and
01:08:58.600it's like what i see as a historian is that it's in those moments that people trying to figure out
01:09:05.520how do we make sense of this world that we're living in they hit upon the language of gender
01:09:11.740because it is absolutely intrinsic to how we understand the way language itself works
01:09:17.600So it is no surprise to me that over and over again, in the English-speaking world that I'm mostly looking at from, say, 1492 to the present, that this language about gender keeps coming up repeatedly.
01:09:33.280And so that's part of what the book is about. It's like at these moments, gender as a term becomes something that is useful for explaining encountered social material phenomenon and that the gender terminology gets elaborated as an explanatory framework.
01:09:53.900I mean, there's nothing conspiratorial about it. Like it's just a really, really deeply grounded and our symbolic engagement with the world.
01:10:03.680I like the way you're putting that and I like the way you're pointing to the very real need that seems to both underlie kind of the mobilization of these things, that they suddenly are in motion and the fact that like some people just like really want to nail meanings down.
01:10:18.260I mean, I feel like we've been very nice to Raymond.
01:10:20.800One thing I will say, she is so fond of Webster's Dictionary to find something as it's so much, which on the one hand, I kind of kept laughing at it.
01:10:29.040On the other hand, like now that you're saying that, it's like, yeah, this is someone whose sense of meaning in the world has become unstuck and who she stares at the Webster and is like, why will you no longer make sense of the world for me?0.92
01:10:41.860To me, that person doesn't seem to be a woman.0.92
01:10:43.760They say they are and everyone seems to believe them.0.98
01:10:46.020There's a real crisis there for her.0.87
01:10:47.260Yeah, I mean, it's why Mary Daly has her Wicked Dairy.1.00
01:10:50.800British turfs love to wear those t-shirts that say woman, like a dictionary definition of woman that says adult, human, female.1.00
01:10:59.340So one thing we might briefly say is that, like, it is astonishing just how much, I mean, I feel like you're really alive and very sensitive in noticing these ever-shifting discourses.
01:11:09.680That having been said, it's astonishing how much our TERF discourse today is identical with what Raymond does here, right?
01:11:18.340There are instances that I have found from the later 1960s.
01:11:24.140It's like I start to see some explicitly feminist critiques of trans, for lack of a better word, around like 1968.
01:11:34.320That's way earlier than I would have thought.
01:11:35.760Yeah. Where I see it mostly is in feminist versions of the new left, people who claim to be more Marxist in some ways. Like there was actually a, this wasn't feminist, but gay. There was a Marxist cell within the GLF that they call themselves the Red Butterflies.
01:11:57.300and like there's some very transphobic content there you see it in robin morgan and witch you
01:12:05.780know the women's international terrorist conspiracy from hell you see it in groups like the feminists0.99
01:12:12.880and flaming faggots it's like there are people who they want to treat trans as like stereotyping0.99
01:12:19.660as false consciousness it's like a bourgeois morality i mean like there's like all of these0.99
01:12:24.480usual things that you hear, like critiques from the left and new left about quote-unquote
01:12:29.960identity politics. You're starting to see some of that pretty early on. By 1971, I found instances
01:12:39.120of explicit transphobia in some radical feminist publications here in the Bay Area. I think 1973
01:12:47.680is actually a really important year. It's like the moment where, you know, I think you can kind
01:12:53.640of see the end of the radical social movements of the later 60s and early 70s that just like
01:13:00.420in the face of political repression, in the face of, you know, changes in the economy,
01:13:06.320the emergence of neoliberalism. There are many things that are going on around 1973. But one
01:13:11.360of the things that you see that year is trans people being thrown under the bus by lesbians0.69
01:13:18.680and gay liberationists, that there's a shift in the discourse where suddenly it's like trans0.97
01:13:24.000people are the baddies. So Raymond did not invent all of that stuff, but that shift, that moment
01:13:30.480where you're starting to see the consolidation of an anti-trans position within the cultural left,0.69
01:13:39.920that's the very moment that Raymond is starting to work on transsexual empire. It's like there's0.67
01:13:46.220There's that critique of the biomedical establishment that is totally in keeping with the left. There's a way that she's picking up on the anti-trans critique that I think comes mostly out of ignorance and prejudice.
01:13:59.300But what Raymond's, in my opinion, real contribution is to TERFism is that she's the person who secures all of that thought in a deeper intellectual tradition and provides kind of a respectable genealogy for it.
01:14:18.060and she does all of the narrative work i mean that she is the person who's like in my opinion
01:14:24.680kind of creating that conspiratorial paranoid interpretation of trans life you know and she's
01:14:33.200telling the plausible story of connecting these dots to say like it really is a vast conspiracy
01:14:39.600see and that's why i thought q anon for feminism so many of them are german yeah yeah i think we
01:14:46.360gotta wrap up but susan i learned so much thank you so much for your time and for inviting us
01:14:50.600into your home you're very welcome let's talk to you absolutely amazing and we could have done
01:14:55.240another 90 minutes of this and maybe we will one day who knows uh hope to be at stanford a little
01:15:01.560more in the years ahead so maybe we'll have a chance to hang out fantastic thank you so much
01:15:07.240my pleasure in bed with the right would like to thank the michelle r claimant institute for
01:15:12.000gender research for generous support jennifer portillo for setting up our studio
01:15:15.900our theme music is by katie lao our producer is megan kalthus