Episode 7: The “Transsexual Empire” with Susan Stryker

Really is a vast conspiracy, see?

And that's why I call it QAnon for feminism.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

So today, we're going to be talking about a book that a lot of our listeners will have heard about, but that I'm guessing very few of them will have actually read.

And 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.

Our 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.

She's also also the editor of the Transgender Studies Reader and is the author of Transgender History and the director of the documentary Screaming Queens, The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria.

Welcome, Susan.

Hey, thank you.

Great to be here.

Adrian, you have to tell our listeners what the book is.

Yes, so the book is called The Transsexual Empire, and it came out in 1979.

It is by an author named Janice Raymond, who's pretty much famous for this book, but you know, remains active today.

The book has been reissued a bunch of times.

You and I, Maura, read the 1994 edition.

I have to say that

I had read about this book and I had never read it before.

And now I have read it cover to cover.

I'm not sure whether to be thrilled about that or not, but I've done it.

Susan, can you tell us a little bit about your relationship to this book?

Maybe say a little bit about yourself and where, in the life and times of Susan Stryker, did the transsexual empire first enter your radar?

Sure, happy to say a little bit about myself.

As some of the young'uns would would say today, I am a person of transsexual experience.

I'm in my early 60s now.

I've had trans feelings since very early childhood and kind of made a career out of thinking about the history of trans and gender and related questions of feminist theory and queer theory and gender theory.

When did I first encounter this book?

Well, as you mentioned, it was published in 1979, which is the year year that I started the university.

And one of the first things that I did when I left my small town hometown in southwest Oklahoma and went to the great big university town of Norman, Oklahoma, was to go to the university library to look up the word transsexualism in the card catalog.

And there were two books in the university library.

One of them was a book by the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, who wrote on sex, gender, and sexuality.

That book was called Perversion, the erotic form of hatred.

And the other book under transsexualism in the card catalog was Janice Raymond's, The Transsexual Empire, the subtitle of which is The Making of the She-Male.

And, you know, I read both of those books.

you know, while I was standing there in the stacks.

And

I will say that my first experience with Raymond was like, oh, like, this is a feminist argument against transsexualism.

But I also had been exposed at that time in my life to the idea of, you know, the aphorism from Simone de Beauvoir: one is not born, but rather one becomes a woman.

So I had some like vague sense of social constructionism.

I had the sense that there were some feminist arguments in favor of a, you know, what we would call a model of how you become who you are through some kind of social process.

And I thought, wait, there's like two different versions of feminism here, and one of them doesn't like trans.

So it was honestly a really important marker for me to encounter Raymond's anti-trans arguments because it just set up in my little 18 year old pretty ignorant brain the idea that there was a conversation that I was entering into about

a way that I felt about myself and about feminist values that I felt that I already had.

And then so it's, it's been a touchstone for me for 40 years.

I'm glad that you mentioned Raymond's place in your own life history because it's, I love that dichotomy of the two books, one by a psychiatrist and one by this anti-trans feminist because it kind of points out to me that Raymond was writing at a moment when the idea of trans people and trans identity was sort of coming out of the medical, psychiatric sort of world and becoming more broadly discussed.

Can you talk about sort of the state of thinking about trans identity at the time that Raymond wrote The Transsexual Empire?

Yeah, certainly.

A lot of what was being published was coming from this very, you know, heavily medicalized, psychiatrized, pathologized framework.

You know, transsexuals were people who had this

damaged sense of self.

There was some error in how they thought about themselves.

The best that they could hope for was some kind of

partial sort of rehabilitation through surgery and hormones that would make them sort of less abject than they felt themselves to be, but were always going to be damaged goods.

And it was a very minoritizing and pathologizing way to think about trans people.

Sort 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 in it and it was basically a story like, you know, Dear Abby, I've discovered that my husband is wearing my clothes.

Is he a homosexual?

And Abby was like, no, a homosexual is someone who loves a member of their own sex.

Your husband is either a transvestite, which is someone who enjoys wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, or a transsexual who feels that they properly are a member of the other sex.

And I was like, transsexual, there's a word for somebody like me.

And I went to my public library in Lawton, Oklahoma, and looked up.

transsexual and the only books that they had in my hometown library were college-level textbooks of abnormal psychology.

And so, you know, I was, like I said, 10, 11, 12, somewhere around that age, trying to pick my way through some readings that were above my comprehension level.

But my takeaway point was, oh, I thought I might be transsexual, but transsexuals are crazy people, you know, who are really messed up.

And I'm fine, except for this sense I have in my own head of, I'm not a guy.

You know, it's just like, I'm a girl.

You know, like, where does that come from?

But other than that, it's like I'm a perfectly average person in the world.

So I

did not think that that word was about me per se because it carried such stigmatization, such pathologization with it.

But it was the only word out there that was in the right ballpark.

So I kind of kept circling around that word.

I'm glad that you mentioned that the word at the time in the 1970s was transsexual as opposed to now we would generally not use that term.

Although some people

do, it's not the first thing that like right-thinking, you know, like liberals who are trying to be inclusive say.

Yeah, people just say trans by and large as a shorthand.

Transgender, which used to be a more radical-sounding word, it's like has come to mean something that's fairly normative.

It's like you were

a type A or B person who becomes a type B or A person, you know, one way, one time, transition between the binary.

That'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 a medical model of transsexualism.

And, 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.

I've noticed that for some students as well, yeah.

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.

But that transsexual comes to mean like 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 doctors' offices.

But so transsexual meaning body change of some kind, and trans meaning like anything from like drag queens to butchers to just like any kind of conceivable gender variant, so that the term transgender kind of loses all sorts of specificity.

Anyway, 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.

You can't ever definitively nail it down with a clean, clear, and concise definition.

So, I do think it always behooves us to talk about, you know, when I use this word, this is what I mean it to mean.

I ask in part because I think Raymond's book, which as you pointed out, is sort of like she's kind of innovating in transphobia, right?

She's moving her, like, sort of the pathologizing account of, you know, what is wrong with trans people that you're getting from psychiatry.

And she's moving it into this like politicized transphobia.

And I would say that the transsexual empire is

like really the founding and still kind of the text of the trans-exclusive radical feminist sort of posture.

But when I read the transsexual empire, and especially when I read her like new introduction from the 1994 addiction that Adrian and I read, she can't like quite decide what she means.

by the term and it's very slippery and she occasionally expresses frustration.

She's like, now I have to talk about all these different kinds of people at once.

And she's like, a few different points seems to be trying to like circumscribe the definition so that she can attack.

attack a stable, like unmoving enemy.

First thing we should say, obviously, is probably the world's biggest trigger warning.

There is going to be a lot of transphobia expressed in the text that we're discussing today.

This is, as Maura is saying, sort of the urtext of what is today the gender critical movement.

And yeah, Janice Raymond's entire book is essentially one long screed against the very idea of transgender identity.

So before we go on, maybe it makes sense to just kind of give folks a kind of sense of what this book sounds like and what we mean when we say that there's just this really amazing continuity between its arguments and those that you hear in gender critical spaces today.

I'll just highlight too, because we don't want to interrupt the conversation too much, but one point that people will notice right away, and Maura already alluded to that just a second ago, Raymond is almost exclusively concerned with trans women.

Not in the sense that she thinks that trans women matter most to feminists, right?

But in the sense that Raymond thinks that trans men don't really exist and they exist only as emanations of like the devious machinations of trans women, right?

Raymond describes what she calls transgenderism as, quote, largely a male phenomenon, though she does allow that, quote, there are women who claim it as their own.

Women meaning trans men in this case, right?

Here's a quote from her.

The female to construct it male transsexual, right?

We're hearing here finally about trans men, is the token that saves face for the male transsexual empire.

She is the buffer zone who can be used to promote the universalist argument that transsexualism is a supposed human problem, not uniquely restricted to men.

I think this is so fascinating that she's absolutely fixated on one side of this and wants to understand it entirely as an emanation of masculinity and masculinism.

It's not at all something that she has to kind of violently reject the idea that this could be taking place across the human population, right, in various guises and forms.

That's not possible.

What it is, is one single kind of conspiratorial effort by trans women to invade women's spaces.

And we might also talk about the women's spaces themselves, right?

Like critiquing trans persons for Raymond, and I think this is something that we see in gender critical discourses today all the time, it always seems to involve imagining them trying to sort of wheedle their way into a space that they quote-unquote normally would be excluded from, right?

Here again, quote from the Transsexual Empire: One of the definitions of male, as related in Webster's, is designed for fitting into a corresponding hollow part.

This, of course, means much more than the literal signification of heterosexual intercourse.

It can be taken to mean that men have been very adept at penetrating all of women's hollow spaces, at filling up the gaps and of sliding into the interstices.

Obviously, women who are in the process of moving out of patriarchal institutions, consciousness, and modes of living are very vulnerable and have gaps.

So this idea that in the process of some kind of feminist consciousness raising project, there are these gaps opening up and that trans women somehow move into and exploit those is something that was front of mind for Janice Raymond in the 1970s.

And I think is still, you know, you can see that in gender critical writing today.

But so, maybe let's first back up and talk a little bit about this author, Janice Raymond, how she came to this topic, how she came to write this book, where she was at when this book came out.

It seemed like this book appears to be her life's work in some way, right?

She like kind of reissues it from time to time.

She's reissued it once, as far as I know.

And yeah, I mean,

certainly where Raymond intersects with trans studies and queer studies and many versions of feminism.

It is with this book, but she actually wrote other books.

She wrote against liberalism from a radical feminist perspective.

She did a tremendous amount of work on sex trafficking.

A lot of, I would say the major focus of her career was actually working in the transnational arena on international sex trafficking.

She wrote a book on passionate female friendships.

She wrote, I'm trying to think of them all.

There's about

six titles.

The most recent book that she wrote was called Double Think, which was on

the contemporary anti-trans craze.

And I would have to say that Raymond's more recent work, it's like, I...

I just feel like she's devolved into a kind of conspiratorialism, kind of like, you know, QAnon for feminism.

You look at her citations and it's all like stuff off the internet.

But her early work, it's like, even though I disagree with her, there's an intellectual project there.

I think she's wrong, but I don't think she's stupid.

And what's interesting to me is like how

you, I think, need to read Raymond for where she's coming from and identify the places where, you know, what I personally find to be like these like kernels of paranoia and conspiratorialism around trans people.

That's the part that's a problem, and that's the part that I think flowers and blossoms over the course of her career.

But that where she starts out, there's surprising alignment, I think, between Raymond's critique of the biomedical establishment and Foucaultian notions of biopolitics.

So I think she's not actually wrong in some of the things she says about quote-unquote mainstream medicine.

But where she goes wrong then is the way that she makes trans people both both the sort of the victims and the vectors of this thing that she is so opposed to.

But Raymond herself,

she turns 80 this year in 2023.

Happy birthday, Janice Raymond, if you're listening.

I 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 born in 1943.

She's from Rhode Island, from a large catholic family the oldest of several children for her undergrad she went to salve regina women's college in newport which is a catholic institution she actually took orders as a nun in the later 1960s took vows she entered a religious order i i think it was sisters of mercy that's who ran um not the band no

no kind of like the magdalene laundry yeah it's a weirdly common story for radical feminists of this microgeneration, 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.

Well, she did.

She did.

Yeah, 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.

She was in favor of abortion and contraception, which did not endear her to the sisters.

And she left being a nun and then came out as a lesbian.

She went to theological seminary at Andover in the early 1970s and then went to Boston College, which is a Jesuit college in Boston.

And she worked there with Mary Daly.

And Mary Daly is a really important figure in so-called 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.

In the 60s, during the Vatican II period, Daly seemed to have this 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 boivo-ean reading of what she thought of as Catholic misogyny and sexism.

We should say for our listeners who can't see that this book is actually on Susan's desk.

It's sitting between the two of us right now.

So it's front of the mind for you?

It 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.

So 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.

I try to understand what their own thought process and intellectual traditions are, what their arguments are.

You can offer a more powerful critique if you're not just poking at a straw figure somehow.

I admire you for reading Mary Daly in part because I find her so almost unreadable.

Her writing is very convoluted and dense.

I found Raymond a lot more of a straightforward pro-stylist.

Yeah, well, Daly, I think, becomes harder to read the longer she writes.

The Church in 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.

Her next book, at least the next one that I pay a lot of attention to, is Guyan Ecology, the meta-ethics 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.

And as her work gets closer and closer to the Wickedary period, the Guyan ecology period, the more she relies on neologisms and fake etymologies.

And I don't say fake etymology necessarily in a bad way.

She plays with words.

She takes them apart and thinks about what the roots mean and ways that the very way that we speak encodes ideas about sex, gender, sexuality, men and women.

And, 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.

And I think she's coming out of a particular feminist linguistic tradition, people like Sarah Hoagland.

It'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.

And 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.

So, 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.

I 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.

Right.

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.

I mean, when you read the book, it's like there's still plenty of theology and religious language in it, but the dissertation was about twice as long as the book, and it is much more explicitly grounded in theological thought.

She wrote it as a dissertation in theology in the theology department at a Jesuit university.

And the way that I read what she's doing is that she is somebody who was devout, lost her faith over what she perceived as sexism and misogyny within Catholicism.

Probably fairly right, fairly, not going to argue with her, but that even in the name of renouncing a particular Christian faith, that so much of the way she thinks is for me shaped by the intellectual and religious traditions that she's come out of.

And that even in the act of rejecting them, it's almost like she's hollowing out categories and concepts that are part of her received culture and investing them with new meaning.

But there's something about the structure of thought that is still very, looks very familiar to Catholic theological arguments about bodily integrity and moral philosophy and natural law.

I mean, she puts different content into that.

Yeah, I mean, the very framing, right?

This is where I sort of noticed it.

So Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father, right, is about the idea that there's an androcentric logic at the heart of Christianity.

But Daly's point is, let's replace that with a better cosmology, right?

And it's interesting because, like, Raymond, because, as you say, like, I looked at the dissertation because you shared it with us, which was really helpful, in the published Transsexual Empire, she's a lot closer to saying, oh,

actually, transsexualism, quote unquote, is a theodicy of the existing sexes, meaning it's overly faithful, right?

Which like it's and it's basically almost religious

in the way it treats gender or treats sex, I guess is how she puts it, which is interesting, right?

Because it can sound like it's a critique of religion.

But with Mary Daly in the background, you hear like, no, you just think, like, it's the whole same critique.

It's androcentrism, she thinks, right?

It's male-centered cosmology of sex.

Let's reverse that and fill it with, there's a radical critique of Christianity lurking in the background there, but it's basically, as you say, are looking is looking to fill it with new content.

She's not looking to say, therefore, let's chuck Christianity.

She's saying, yeah, let's reinvent Christianity.

It's just that these beignets have the wrong filling,

not that the beignets are spoiled.

Yeah, I think

there is something to that.

That's like she's against God the Father or beyond God the Father.

And so you're for God the mother.

Like, and you're imagining that in a way that isn't just like a strict reversal, but mostly it's just like, it's like saying what you thought was bad is good and what you thought was good is bad.

It's like there's something very simplistic in that.

It's just really important, I think, to recognize Transsexual Empire as something that is essentially coming out of a theological tradition and its repudiation and its reconstruction.

The very first,

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.

And 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 the Working Group on Women women and feminist theology, or some such titles published in 1974.

And it was a collection of papers given at a regional conference in 1972 and 2003.

I think that's got to be the one.

And if so, that first version of Transsexual Empire was about her critique of androgyny within Christian theology and the idea that I think is actually quite central to her her work, which is what she calls an ethics of integrity.

To give a very foreshortened version of the ethics of integrity, it is one of those ideas that I think is like, this is kind of like covert Catholicism, even though she says she's repudiating it.

It's this idea of like there is like a natural organic unity to the body and the self that, you know, she doesn't say is God-given in the androcentric way, but maybe it's like God-given in the matra.

Given by the goddess.

The goddess rather than the god.

She actually says at one point in Transsexual Empire that she wants to write about a pre-existing organic unity before the fall, so to speak, of sex stereotyping and misogyny.

So there is this sense like there is a pre-given unity to the self and there's an integrity to the body that needs to be honored and expressed and unfolded and elaborated that is not too different from Catholic arguments for why you're not supposed to have contraception, why you're not supposed to have abortion, you know, why you're not supposed to get tattoos.

It's kind of like, that's God's body.

You're just renting it.

You need to not mess up.

the body.

And it needs to do what God said it was supposed to do, which is like have babies.

And so, I mean, Raymond doesn't go to that place.

I mean, she is in favor of abortion and contraception.

She was not somebody who was a biological progenitor of other people's lives.

Part of what she gives up in her renunciation of Catholicism is the idea of

women are supposed to be mothers and baby makers and wives.

But she holds on to that idea of there being a kind of ethics of integrity that is rooted in this like deeply ontological sense of what your body is for.

It strikes me that the ethics of integrity might not have been something unique to Catholicism in this time, you know, where like 1979, when she publishes Transsexual Empire, it's sort of the disintegration, radical feminism has disintegrated.

A lot of feminist institutions are sort of at the end of the height of their power, shall we say.

And what is still kind of holding on a little bit is the counterculture, which is also sort of in many of its instigations very invested in this idea of the natural as a moral ideal.

Yeah, yeah.

That seems right.

So there's a kind of a stance of disappointment.

There's a stance of withdrawal a little bit.

You mentioned that you spent a lot of time with Raymond's paper at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard recently.

I wonder, does that come through like this, yeah, this feminism of woundedness and retreat?

100%.

There's letters.

I mean, I read her correspondence with friends and colleagues and students, and there's several letters where she's writing with other radical feminist women who are in her community, and they're sharing their experiences of how they felt particularly wounded by experiences of sexism and misogyny as girls within Catholicism, and that there was a way that it just, you know, devastated their sense of self-esteem and limited their sense of who they would be as people.

And so for Raymond, it's like so much of what feels like feminist empowerment to her

is addressing you know what i would call the narcissistic wound of how catholicism damaged her sense of self about being a woman it's like it's wendy brown's idea of a wounded attachment and that so much of her work is about trying to heal from that

and that it then excludes from feminist community people who are not dealing with the same wound in the same way.

Right.

Yeah, I love the way you put that because it kind of drives at something that we might just flag for listeners right away.

That one of the big, there are parts of this book, as you say, that we're not going to recognize in current sort of gender critical, quote unquote, discourse.

But one thing that she really has really in spades is the sense of like encroachment on spaces and communities.

And the way you're positioning this right now is like, this is the community into which you withdraw because you've been disappointed by the institutions, by the communities that were supposed to give meaning and texture to your lives.

Like, that the fear for those spaces is all over this book, right?

Like, masculinity becomes to her basically this like form of like creeping in.

And, you know, you only have to read, you know, the author of Harry Potter today to see where this ends up, but like, it's here.

It's here in 1978, 79.

Yeah, and if you look at Mary Daly's Guine Ecology, 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.

And what Daly said was actually something that provoked one of my very first academic articles on Frankenstein, where Daly wrote in Gynecology about what, you know, she was calling like the Frankenstein effect and said that male male-to-female to

transsexuals were like necrophilic agents who were invading living women's space you know like so 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 it's like that's there in the 1970s.

And we might briefly just say if people want to read this really famous essay, and if you haven't read it yet by Susan, it's called My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamony, right?

Performing Transgender Rage, which I think is also in GLQ, but if people don't have that, it's also in the Transgender Studies Reader that you edited.

That is correct from 1994.

There's a way that that article, for me, is like I thought of it as a response to Sandy Stone's essay, The Post-Transsexual Manifesto.

The Empire Strikes Back.

The Empire Strikes Back.

I was going to say that The Empire Strikes Back, colon, post-transsexual manifesto.

Sandy Stone, for our listeners, is one of the trans women who, in the Transsexual Empire, Raymond attacks at length and in quite personal terms.

Yeah.

Right.

For being part of a record label.

Did I catch that?

Olivia Records.

Olivia Records.

And an all-woman record label where Sandy Stone was, I think, a sound engineer.

So backstory.

Sandy, amazing person, done many things over the course of a fascinating and long life,

but she

most of her work revolves around sound and hearing at some level.

She was a recording engineer at the record plant.

She, my, my favorite story about her is that she was Jimi Hendrix's sound engineer.

She's just, she's brilliant.

And then she transitioned.

And as a lesbian, feminist trans woman, she was involved with the Olivia Records Collective, which was one of the early women's music labels.

And to hear some people say, it's like she helped make it better because she had this level of professionalism that some of the people who were more self-trained didn't.

To hear other people tell the story, it's like she brought a male energy and male sound, you know, to women's music.

So we won't get into the aesthetics of Olivia's catalog during the Sandy Stone period, which could be a whole other show with y'all.

But the important thing here is that in Janice Raymond's book, The Transsexual Empire, there's a chapter called Sappho by Surgery.

It's basically an argument against the fact that trans women can be women and shouldn't be part of lesbian and feminist communities.

And the Sandy Stone story becomes part of that.

It's like, here's this quote-unquote man who's like invaded the women's music scene.

And Raymond was involved with an effort to boycott Olivia.

It's like, they say they're a lesbian feminist collective, but a man works there.

And so it became a flashpoint.

And, you know, the sort of first wave of feminist transphobia in the 1970s, Sandy was like, you know what?

I'm out of here.

It's like, I'm good.

She was on great terms with the people at Olivia.

It was a very mutually congenial parting.

But then, you know, it's basically a decade later, Sandy has moved on to getting a PhD in history of consciousness studies at UC Santa Cruz, working with Donna Haraway.

And she writes this piece that it's like, I think of as the beginnings of sort of like post-structuralist gender theory, trans studies, critique of second-wave feminism, where it's like, it doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it reframes a lot of those cultural feminist debates around trans

in light of different ways of thinking that are more associated with, you know, Donna Haraway's science and technology studies and whatnot.

So anyway, it was called The Empire Strikes Back.

I thought a

cheeky title.

She even thanks Janice Raymond.

She says, I'd like to thank Janice Raymond for playing Luke Skywalker to my Darth Vader.

Yeah, she's a clever, clever person.

So

I read Sandy Stone's piece and I thought, this is it, man.

Like, this is trans studies.

It's a thing.

It's like, need to jump on this bandwagon.

And I wrote my words to Victor Frankenstein.

It's like as my response to what I understood Sandy's call to be.

And so partly for that reason, I was going back and looking at Raymond's writing and Mary Daly's writing and hit upon this idea of like, ah, Frankenstein.

You know, it's like, that's the thing.

It's like,

that's where I'm going to go with this.

So

again, Raymond was influential in me first thinking about the relationship between feminism and transness in 1979 when I read her book as an 18-year-old.

And she pops up again when I'm a 30-whatever year old and I'm launching an academic career working on trans issues.

again was an important touchstone in my thinking.

But back to the religion question quickly.

To just give a sense of ways that Raymond's thought continues to be informed by religious metaphor and religious framework, there was an article that came out in

1979-80s, like it's around the time that she's publishing the book version of Transsexual Empire.

And this is an article in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, volume 35, numbers one and two, 1979-1980.

The title of the piece is called Women's Studies, colon, a knowledge of one's own,

and that it's an argument about where should women's studies be situated within the university.

It's like, should it be integrated into the different disciplines, or should it be a standalone discipline with its own departments?

And Raymond's kind of a separatist, and it's like, oh, it should be its own thing.

But there's one section of that article that's called The Religious Dimensions of Women's Studies.

And she says, feminist teaching and learning, defined as women's studies in an autonomous framework, measures its integrity.

They're that idea that always pops up with her in part by its ability to communicate living feminist values in a socio-political context.

And she says, yet I would venture to say that what is behind the fear of knowledge being politicized is the perception of a lurking spiritual or even religious dimension, which goes beyond religion's identification with God, gods, or religious organizations.

It is religious in the sense that it raises questions of ultimate concern or meaning for women's lives, aids and abets a conversion experience from female to feminist, or strengthens the latter identity, and provides the words with which to articulate that standpoint.

I want to speak about religion in a most basic sense as it is derived from its accepted Latin root, relegare, meaning to tie or to link.

Women's studies should help tie women's lives together.

It should make connections about female being in the world, dasine, connections made perhaps for the first time.

It should bring together those disparate and fragmented parts of female existence through systematic comparative and historical reflection.

Women's knowledge and understanding may not equal integrity, but they are the beginning of the journey to regain it.

So 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, and that this will be the way that you have the conversion experience of becoming, I won't say new in Christ, but like new in gynocracy.

I want to just tease out a little more specifically for our listeners exactly what Raymond is imagining as this like pre-fall integrity, right?

Because she doesn't say, as I think a lot of like Christian conservatives now would say, it's like, okay, God created us male and female and you know Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, et cetera.

She has a distinct sort of reinvention or inversion of that.

idea of like a sort of, I can't call it androgyny because she rejects that term, but you know, it's a sort of a pre-sexed existence.

Well, you know, that's where I personally find some unresolved paradoxes and contradictions in Raymond's thought.

I mean, that there is a way that she wants to say like, oh, human being, it's like, should be like restored to like this sense of primal integrity.

But then there's part of it that really does seem to be about female and not male and to re-inscribe.

She says, I'm not a gender essentialist, but I think she is like a sex ontologist.

That is a contradiction in the thinking that is not really resolved for me.

I think it's right that we're spending a lot of time on the religious extraction of a lot of Raymond's ideas.

At the same time, I think it's also interesting, what I sort of was unprepared for in reading it was just like these elements of anti-psychiatry that really are all over this book.

I think that hardly any reader of the Transsexual Empire would come away not noticing the Catholicism or the ex-Catholicism of this book.

At the same time, if you were to speed read it, I think you'd come away with the sense, above all, of a big, very engaged critique of some kind of medical or psychiatric establishment.

I'll maybe just read one passage, right?

The present counseling and treatment of transsexuals based on the medical model I have described gives the transsexual no real moral options.

Failing to analyze our society's definitions of masculinity and femininity, such therapy offers little encouragement and advice to help the transsexual live beyond both these containers of personhood.

I think that's so interesting, right?

Like this is the vector and victim thing you were alluding to earlier, that Raymond can sound like she's actually quite concerned about the rights and the health of transgender people.

And then, the other thing that this really, I think, brings home for us is that for her, the interpolation of the medical establishment is sort of a sign that this whole thing is just one big masculinist conspiracy.

Basically, medicine is an extension of male domination, and here it sort of reinforces the gender binary.

Yeah, and you know, and I think it's it's exactly that anti-psychiatric element that allowed the book to be received largely positively and when it came out in 1979, that it very much spoke to sort of an anti-institutional, anti-psychiatric perspective.

It's like, as I mentioned earlier, I think there are ways that even though the vocabularies are very different, some of the arguments that Raymond makes are really not that dissimilar to to what Foucault would say, you know, in History of Madness.

It's like there, or what, you know, Félix Squattarie would say in, you know, like his particular version of psychoanalytic theory.

Raymond was thrilled to have been endorsed by Thomas Saz, the Hungarian-American, Jewish, I don't know, psychoanalyst, certainly psychologist, but he wrote this book, The Myth of Mental Illness, in 1961, which is basically making the same arguments that Foucault was making in his work at that time on madness and critique of the psychoanalytic establishment.

And that the argument that Saaz 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.

And that it's kind of like what was it Rosa von Pranheim who made the film it 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 that the idea is that medicine and psychiatry as they are practiced and instituted create what she was calling a theodicy, but you know, what you might just want to call like hegemony, like 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.

It's the big pharma.

And these are arguments that, you know, I think many people on the left would not actually

disagree with.

When I was reading a lot of the contemporary reviews of Transsexual Empire when it came out, 1979, 1980, I found one by Biddy Martin that was like, you know, absolutely, it was positive, you know, but then it was like great critique of medicine.

Yeah, this thing about transsexuals is, you know, a little off.

But trans people who were reviewing the book, like Roz Kavney, who wrote a great critique of Raymond as soon as the book came out, were very critical, were pointing out the connections between the anti-trans and anti-Semitic.

She's not explicitly anti-Semitic, but it's just like the structure of argument that you would see in anti-Semitic fantasy.

It's the same structure of argument against trans people.

You know, so people were pointing that out from the word go.

But most of the reviewers were actually saying, like, yeah, right on critique of

for-profit Western medicine, totally in alignment with a Foucaultian biopolitical analysis.

And then, like I said, she makes trans people the worm and the bud there.

It's like, it's the C transsexuals, everything that's wrong with Western medicine.

And even though she says she doesn't blame them, it's like she then kind of treats trans people like the zombies, you know, who are out to eat her face.

It's like, oh, they got infected by the virus of, you know, modern heteropatriarchal capitalism.

They're infected by that.

We don't blame them for being infected, but we still have to kill them so they won't eat our face.

That's kind of the structure of the argument.

You're hitting on something that is like a really recurring inconsistency in the transsexual empire, which is she can't figure out if trans, we're saying trans people, but really this is almost a book exclusively about trans women.

She can't figure out if trans women are being acted upon by this evil medical pharmaceutical like

force

that polices, pathologizes, and ultimately medicalizes gender non-conformity.

Or if they are like sort of deviously holding all the puppet strings and actually am I the only non-Catholic in the group?

I'm not Catholic.

I'm not Catholic.

I was raised Catholic.

This is what I wrote in my printout of this passage because I several of these passages was sin question mark, question mark, question mark.

And that's the other structure where you can be the carrier of it, right?

Like, and it's kind of your fault, and it's kind of not, right?

Like, you're not, you know, Satan is acting through you,

and it's not actually like, it's not your fault in the sense that, like, you're not doing it, but you did something to deserve it.

And like, I think it's to me that really, that paradox like becomes is a paradox only through our secular eyes like it i think it's just catholic as hell i definitely think raymond 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, you know, I would say a kind of purity.

Can't be contaminated by this thing.

It's like, so maybe the trans woman is just the carrier of this thing called the transsexual empire, where it's like doctors like John Money have like 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, you know.

So, like I said, you don't blame the zombie for like being bit, but you still want to keep them from eating your face.

Briefly talk about the John Money thing.

Because, like, first of all, I know that I didn't go, but you went to see Matt Walsh speak at Stanford

last fall.

Sometime in the last academic year.

Yeah.

And he still does the whole like John Money was a dirtbag, therefore there are no trans people or something like that.

But, you know, 45 years after this book, and John Money is all over this book, too.

And what's fascinating about this, I mean, first of all, it's kind of the genetic fallacy, right?

Like, you know, just a preview to your new book.

Your book's going to show that this fixation on John Money is actually, he didn't originate this concept as gender.

We can talk about that a little bit more.

Context about John Money, who was an endocrinologist from New Zealand or Australia.

He's like from New Zealand, not an endocrinologist.

He, I'm going to forget the name of his degree program, but it was like, it was the degree program set up at Harvard by Talcott Parsons.

It was like, basically, like a social analysis.

It was like the first interdisciplinary social sciences program.

Interesting.

So he was not trained as a clinician.

Right.

Well,

I suppose you could say he was trained as a psychologist.

Social relations, I think it's a social, yeah, Department of Social Relations.

So interdisciplinary social sciences.

That's what money was actually trained in.

He wrote his dissertation on the medical management of intersex people, but he did not have a medical background.

That's interesting.

That is interesting.

He was working at a gender clinic at Johns Hopkins.

He set up the gender clinic at Hopkins.

Yeah.

So he was working at Johns Hopkins, which Johns Hopkins Medical School is where a lot of the techniques for surgical genital modification, as well as like a lot of pediatric endocrinological research, had been done from the 1930s forward.

It was like the place to go for that.

So money went to Johns Hopkins after he was at Harvard because he was an intersex specialist and he wanted to study the clinical management of intersex youth.

And it's in the context of that work,

which basically was like, huh, some people have really ambiguous genitals and yet they still grow up to think of themselves as like men or women and live as men and women in society.

How does that work?

And so it was at some level an anti- biologist understanding of like how people become who they become.

Money's thought was actually quite complicated because he pioneers what now gets called biopsychosocial models.

It's like, oh, there's a biological component, but there's a social component and there's a.

If I'm remembering correctly, he did resist the uptake of this kind of more constructionist oriented vision of gender by feminists.

He rejected the idea that gender was a feminist idea.

And this kind of gets to what Adrian was saying about I'm working on a book called Changing Gender, which is about the history of the gender concept itself.

And money is popularly regarded as the guy who invents the modern notion of gender based on his intersex work, where he made a distinction between what he was calling sex and GIR, gender identity slash role.

And then it was this guy at UCLA, Robert Stoller, who says, okay, let's break that into three parts, biological sex, psychological gender identity, and social gender role.

And all roads lead to John Money as slightly revised by Robert Stoller.

In the feminist literature, in the social scientific literature, Money is just regarded as the guy who introduced the term gender to talk about not grammar and how you classify nouns and create agreement between different parts of speech as a grammatical practice.

So he's the person who popularly believed to be the guy who takes that idea of grammatical gender and starts using it in a social scientific way to talk about the process by which

we all become the particular people we think that we are and to introduce a distinction between

biology, identity, and social role.

We should probably go to the other side of John Money and why he gets weaponized by people like Matt Walsh.

But it's because, like, right now, up to now, we're talking about John Money, we've described a very insightful, pioneering scientist.

And they think he's a skeezy perf, you know, that's basically the easy, that's the short takeaway.

Egregious mishandling of childhood intersex conditions, some really chilling and horrific accusations by

some of those patients.

He also seems to have had a mistress hospitalized, diagnosed falsely with schizophrenia, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy.

She narrowly escaped lobotomy.

And then he seems to have been taking pictures of naked kids.

You know, it's gnarly.

It gets really, really garlic.

Yeah.

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.

I 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, you know, what I would think of as like non-consensual genital mutilation on children.

I mean, to not put too fine a point on it because this idea about the social acquisition of gender identity and this idea of a critical window.

It's like, you know, up until a certain point, your identity is like pretty plastic and malleable.

And then at a certain point, it kind of like clicks and locks in and you develop a core sense of gender identity and it's really unchangeable after that.

So that model meant, okay, if you're transsexual and you have this like core sense of gender identity that is opposed to your biology, it should be like, okay, you should be able to get surgery and do hormones.

But for intersex kids, it was like quick, before they develop a sense of who they are as a boy boy or a girl, carve up their genitals to make it look more like, you know, non-intersex genitals.

And I think that was just horrific for intersex people.

The same thing that could be enabling for trans people was horrific for intersex people.

You know, just follow up on 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.

What 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.

It's like, see, John Money, skeezy, pervy, pedophile.

Therefore, this whole gender idea is, you know, bogus, BS, false ideology, and trans people are, you know, as we said,

groomers.

It's all about harming children.

See John Money.

It's like it becomes.

There'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, you know, subsequently informed your life seems to have been a pedophile and therefore so are you.

It's the causal linkage is quite creative.

Yeah, right.

Raymond goes after John Money.

It's like she, I think her critique of John Money is actually pretty good, you know, but it's kind of like, see, John Money was wrong, therefore transsexual bad.

Or therefore the thing he was trying to describe doesn't exist.

It's like, this man is a bad astronomer, therefore there is no sum.

It's like, well, I don't think that's how it works.

If you're going to try and eliminate the findings of every field that has a man who's committed sexual assault in it, like, I'm sorry, we just don't have any, we don't have any human knowledge anymore.

All of economics would just be there.

Yeah.

That's right.

And so I do want to get back to the John Money and gender question, but back to Janice Raymond and the structure of her own argumentation.

It's like, sometimes I think she's really smart.

And other times I'm going like, that is just a really poorly formed argument at the level of logic.

Something that's been pointed out by me, but also by many other people.

And that chapter on Sappho by surgery, it's like, it's the place that she comes the closest to, you know, what I think of as a kind of an anti-Semitic fantasy as well as a lot of Orientalist tropes in her writing but she basically says like well like why are transsexuals bad well because Magnus Hirschfeld who was a German wrote about sexology and helped transsexuals at his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and

Nazis were German and the Nazis destroyed that institute and then Harry Benjamin, who knew Magnus Hirschfeld and was the father of transsexualism, was German.

So I'm not saying that like transsexuals were invented by Nazis in the camp, but I am pointing out like Nazis were German, you know, and so it's like there's a kind of circularity and guilt by association that it's like she just insinuates, she draws bad analogies.

The parts of her work that are less grounded in rigorous thinking and are more conspiratorial, you can just look at the way, in my opinion, it's just like her whole thought process and structure of argumentation breaks down around those claims.

John Money didn't invent gender.

It's like I'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.

Like, you know, when Margaret Mead says sex role, that's what we're calling gender.

And it's like, what they're essentially pointing to is the emergence of social constructionist arguments in cultural anthropology.

That like in the late 19th, early 20th century, you had, it's like, is it biology or is it culture?

It's like,

why is there cultural difference, you know, across the world?

Why are Samoans different than people who live in New York City?

Is it because they're biologically different or culturally different?

And so the argument was like, well, it's cultural difference.

It's like it's all about different symbolic worlds and languages and social practices and, you know, becoming who you are and social interaction with other people.

So that whole model.

There were psychologists who were saying when people like Margaret meets a sex role, that's what we mean by gender.

And it references that whole intellectual tradition, which is in fact the intellectual tradition that informs the graduate program that John Money trained in at Harvard.

It's like he is just saying something that terminology is being used, the concept is already there.

There's absolutely nothing that John Money invented.

There is even an earlier history.

I've just finished this chapter from my book.

And like using gender in much the way that John Money would use it in the 19th century history of the debunked science of phrenology, you know, like of reading bumps on people's heads to determine their character and diagnose them.

And there was a whole phrenological theory of gender.

that involves questions of sexual orientation and self-concept and ideas about stereotyping and social roles.

There was a fully elaborated theory of gender in the 1840s.

I love that you went back because, in some way, those two points, I hadn't thought of them together, but they belong together.

The reason why you need to lop off the long history of the use of gender is in order to be able to tell a good conspiracy story, right?

Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to re-narrate society becoming aware of something and talking about it.

And you're trying to recast it as this like nefarious scheme by John Money and Magnus Hirschfeld, right?

Like, which is easier if you're keeping the number of conspirators to a manageable level.

It's like, oh, and now Margaret Mead's involved, an entire Harvard department, like it starts sounding as crazy as it is.

I'd never thought of it this way, but like, yeah, it's meant to sort of focus on these particular people because it's ultimately a conspiracy story.

By abbreviating the history of the inquiry, it makes...

the disproving of the inquiry a lot like like this is the common turf refrain right until like two years ago, everybody knew men were men and women were women.

And now

we've got this crazy gender thing that we didn't have Christine Jorgensen when I was growing up in the 1960s.

We've had this crazy gender thing quite a bit longer, and then it becomes a little hard to dismiss as a like sort of novel frivolity.

You know, just to kind of keep going deeper into the rabbit hole, this whole idea of, well, gender used to be grammar, and then it became, you know, sociology and psychology.

When you look at what grammatical gender does cross-linguistically, it's like not all languages have gender.

I've learned so much about linguistics in the last couple of years and still feel like I know very little.

But gender in grammar is just what they call it, a semantic strategy, like a strategy for making meaning by classifying nouns, you know, like creating groups of nouns.

and then making other parts of speech like verbs, indefinite articles, direct objects, which or just like agree in their form

with the way the noun has been classified.

It's like that's grammatical gender, creating noun categories and making other parts of speech agree with them to create agreement that conveys meaning.

It's like that's what grammatical gender is.

And if you look at what languages that have grammatical gender do,

it's like about two-thirds of them use

human biological sex difference difference as an implicit category for creating linguistic genders.

Not always, but really commonly.

So, this idea of humans experience a world.

We 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.

That's gender.

Those categories are gender.

You can think about the objects that are being categorized as like sex.

There's like things that exist in the world, actually, things that you kind of make into things in a particular way by how you cut up the existing world into call them like thing buckets or nouns.

It's like that you make a part of the world be a noun that has a name.

And then you imagine that that noun has a certain kind of capacity for acting, like a verb, right?

And that it acts on another part of the world, a direct object.

So like that very sense of like, what is the thing that can do what to what?

It's like, that is just a basic syntactical structure of all languages.

The idea that you encounter.

a world, you struggle to put it into symbolic categories.

That actually existing world is going to be messier than whatever category you come up with.

It's like materiality is always going to exceed the symbolic frame that you put on it.

So there's just this routine noise in the system of trying to make sense of these like moments of things exceeding their symbolic buckets.

It seems to be more of a problem in moments of huge you know, socio-political, economic transformation, where your assumptions about what the world are are being called into question.

And that it's like in those moments of deep, vast transformation that people whose lives seem to challenge the basic social construction of reality exceed the symbolic buckets that you put lives in.

It's like that you're encountering a phenomenon that doesn't make sense to you and you're trying to figure it out and you're trying to come up with new words for those things.

And it's like what I see as a historian is that it's in those moments that people trying to figure out how do we make sense of this world that we're living in, they hit upon the language of gender because it is absolutely intrinsic to how we understand the way language itself works.

So 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 and 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 i mean there's nothing conspiratorial about it like it's just a really really deeply grounded in our symbolic engagement with the world.

I 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.

I mean, I feel like we've been very nice to Raymond.

One thing I will say, she is so fond of Webster's dictionary defines something as.

It's so much, which on the one hand, I kind of kept laughing at it.

On 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?

To me, that person doesn't seem to be a woman.

They say they are and everyone seems to believe them.

There's a real crisis there for her.

Yeah, I mean, it's why Mary Daly has her Wicked Dairy.

British Turf love wear those t-shirts that say woman, like a dictionary definition of woman that says adult, human, female.

They're so proud of it.

Yeah, they love it.

So 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.

That having been said, it's astonishing how much our TERF discourse today is identical with what Raymond does here, right?

Like, there are instances that I have found from the later 1960s.

It's like I start to see some explicitly feminist critiques of trans, for lack of a better word, around like 1968.

That's way earlier than I would have thought.

Yeah.

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 called themselves the red butterflies.

And like there's some very transphobic content there.

You see it in Robin Morgan and Witch, you know, the women's international terrorists conspiracy from hell.

You see it in groups like the Epheminists and Flaming Faggots.

It's like there are people who they want to treat trans as like stereotyping, as false consciousness.

It's like a bourgeois morality.

I mean, like there's like all of these usual things that you hear, like critiques from the left and new left about quote unquote identity politics.

You're starting to see some of that pretty early on.

By 1971, I've found instances of explicit transphobia in some radical feminist publications here in the Bay Area.

I think 1973 is actually a really important year.

It's like the moment where, you know, I think you can kind of see the end of the radical social movements of the later 60s and early 70s that just like in the face of political repression and the face of changes in the economy, the emergence of neoliberalism, there are many things that are going on around 1973, but one of the things that you see that year is

trans people being thrown under the bus by lesbians and gay liberationists, that there's a shift in the discourse where suddenly it's like, oh, trans people are the baddies.

So Raymond did not invent all of that stuff, but that shift, that moment where you're starting to see the consolidation of an anti-trans position within the cultural left, that's the very moment that Raymond is starting to work on transsexual empire.

It's like there's, like I said, there'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 like comes mostly out of like ignorance and prejudice.

But what Raymond's, in my opinion, real contribution is to Turfism 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.

And she does all of the narrative work.

I mean, that she is the person who's like, in my opinion, kind of creating that conspiratorial paranoid interpretation of trans life you know and she's telling the the plausible story of connecting these dots to say like it really is a vast conspiracy see and that's why i call it q anon for feminism so many of them are german yeah

yeah i think we got to wrap up but susan i learned so much thank you so much for your time and for inviting us into your home you're very welcome to talk to you absolutely amazing and we could have done another 90 minutes of this and maybe we will one day who knows uh Hope to be at Stanford a little more in the years ahead, so maybe we'll have a chance to hang out.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much, Susan.

My pleasure.

In Bed with the Wright, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthas.