The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [99]
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