Overview

Fifteen years ago, when it was first published, The Transsexual Empire challenged the medical psychiatric definition of transsexualism as a disease and sex conversion hormones and surgery as the cure. It exposed the antifeminist stereotyping that requires candidates for transsexual surgery to prove themselves by conforming to subjective, outdated and questionable feminine roles and passing as women. Then as now, defining and treating transsexualism as a medical problem prevents the person experiencing so-called gender dissatisfaction from seeing it in a gender-challenging or feminist framework. Transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotyping in a role-defined society. In the new introduction to this feminist work, Raymond discusses how these same issues are now debated in the context of transgender. Transgenderism reduces gender resistance to wardrobes, hormones, surgery and posturing - anything but real sexual equality. It assimilates the roles and definitions of masculinity and femininity, often mixing and matching, but never really moving beyond both. In a similar way, transsexualism is thought to be a radical challenge to gender roles, breaking the boundaries of gender and transgressing its rigid lines. But if the transsexual merely exchanges one gender role for another, and if the outcome of such a sex reassignment is to endorse a femininity which, in many transsexuals, becomes a caricature of much that feminists have rejected about many-made femininity, then where is the challenge, the transgression, and the breaking of any real boundaries? This book will be used as a text in women's studies, psychology, sociology, technology and public policy, as well as by medical students, law students, and all who have an interest in feminist issues.

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9780807762721

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Reviews

Transsexualism: is it, as Jan Morris and others maintain, remediation for lifelong gender discomfort or is it, as Raymond argues, a stunted attempt in the quest for integrity, yet another sorry consequence of a patriarchal society? Raymond's convoluted investigation calls up the heavy artillery (the Gnostics to Jacques Maritain and Adrienne Rich) in an effort to explore this puzzling new phenomenon. She maintains that transsexualism, which supports a lucrative medical subspecialty, doesn't free its mostly male-to-female patients and allow them true behavioral choice but instead forces on them the stereotypical behavior that modern women resist (Rebecca West has suggested that Morris sounds like a man's idea of a woman). Raymond has certainly pored over the published accounts - of pioneers (Benjamin, Money), of witnesses (Morris, Martino), and others centrally involved - and she clearly throws critical issues into relief. But there are undercurrents of resentment here - toward medical specialists who set the ground rules for constructed sexuality and toward transsexuals who have invaded the lesbian-feminist movement ( Because transsexuals have lost their physical 'members' does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women - women's minds, women's space, women's sexuality ). Not that Raymond writes as if grinding an axe - more like grinding her teeth ( The real Fall may not have been the division into biological sexes but the separation into oppressive sex roles and stereotypes ). A serious, intense contemplation which raises valid issues among lesser but pervading concerns. (Kirkus Reviews)

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