The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [98]
The hostility of lesbian feminism toward transsexuals reached its peak in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, published in 1979. Charging that transsexual women were patriarchy’s shock troops, medically constructed pseudo-females created to infiltrate the lesbian community and destroy it, Raymond characterizes sex-reassignment surgery as a new kind of rape. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit as well.” Like Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who closed the 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