At first, I wanted to do the talks as X spaces, but I have decided on just recording commentaries separately and posting them. Part of the reason has been that I spend most days helping my father at the laundromat and the minimart he and my mother opened before she died in December 2024 from sepsis after surgery over hernia mesh complications. The other part has been my health. The scheduling of the spaces has grown to be difficult, apart from editing the audio together, cutting or adding some commentary, and formatting the transcription. My strained relationship with technology for my writerly ends is Sisyphus and his stone. Depending on interest, I may decide to do more X spaces that are more general discussions as opposed to sessions focusing on specific texts. However, at this point, it does not make sense to do a live session every week or even every other week.

Following this session, there will be a shorter recording for another talk discussing German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science). This discussion will include Hirschfeld’s collaboration with Erwin Gohrbandt in the first cases of surgical “sex conversion” on Dora Richter and Lili Elbe. Following his work with Hirschfeld’s Institute from the early 1920s into the early 1930s, Gohrbandt became a high-ranking Nazi doctor by the late 1930s.

Despite Hirschfeld’s influence, Raymond’s 1979 Transsexual Empire only discusses him on exactly one page in which she references Harry Benjamin writing that the Nazis targeted Hirschfeld’s Institute because its “confidential files were said to have contained too many data on prominent Nazis, former patients of Hirschfeld” (see TE, p. 152). Apart from critiquing John Money, Raymond primarily focuses on noted “father of transsexualism” Benjamin, who authored The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966. Closer analysis of Hirschfeld’s work would give us a clearer understanding of how his work influenced Benjamin and Money as successors who far advanced transsexualism.

Some of this information appears in the present talk as I construct a historical background to accompany Raymond’s analysis.

I apologize for the difficulties in getting everything done, as I have wanted to do more, but life is not always as I wish it were.

Donovan Cleckley, April 9, 2026

Sessions

Session I—January 28

TE, “Introduction to the 1994 Edition” (pp. xi-xxxv)

TE, “Introduction. Some Comments on Method (for the Methodical)” (pp. 1-18)

D, “Introduction. From Transsexualism to Transgenderism” (pp. 1-20)

Session II—February 11

TE, “Chapter I. ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism’” (pp. 19-42)

D, “Chapter II. The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?” (pp. 55-86)

Session III

TE, “Chapter II. Are Transsexuals Born or Made—or Both?” (pp. 43-68)

D, “Chapter I. The New Trans Biologism: Female Brains and Female Penises” (pp. 21-54)

Session IV

TE, “Chapter III. ‘Mother’s Feminized Phallus’ or Father’s Castrated Femme?” (pp. 69-98)

D, “Chapter III. Self-Declared Men, Transitioning and De-Transitioning” (pp. 87-121)

Session V

TE, “Chapter IV. Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian Feminist” (pp. 99-119)

D, “Chapter IV. The Trans Culture of Violence Against Women” (pp. 123-154)

Session VI

D, “Chapter V. Gender Identity Trumps Sex in Women’s Sports and Children’s Education” (pp. 155-181)

Session VII

TE, “Chapter V. Therapy as a Way of Life: Medical Values versus Social Change” (pp. 120-153)

TE, “Chapter VI. Toward the Development of an Ethic of Integrity” (pp. 154-177)

Session VIII

D, “Chapter VI. The Trans Gag Rules: Erasing Women, Pronoun Tyranny, and Censoring Critics” (pp. 183-221)

Session IX

TE, “Appendix. Suggestions for Change” (pp. 178-185)

D, “Conclusion” (pp. 223-233)

KEYWORDS

Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, Doublethink, transsexualism, transgenderism, sex-role stereotyping, “sex-conversion surgery,” Harry Benjamin (The Transsexual Phenomenon), Magnus Hirschfeld, George/Christine Jorgensen, Christian Hamburger, Rita/Reed Erickson (Erickson Educational Foundation), Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA)/World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), John Money, “transgender child” industry, “gender-affirming care,” “transition or die”/suicide threat, pornography (“sissy porn”/“forced feminization”), men’s fetishization of women, “men possessing women” (Raymond and Dworkin), cultural appropriation of lesbianism, institutional capture/stifling of debate, “illusion of inclusion” (Raymond)

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): Hello. My name is Donovan Cleckley. This YouTube video includes text from my X space, dated Wednesday, February 11, discussing the work of Janice G. Raymond on transsexualism and transgenderism. It is Session II of a small planned series of readings and discussions of Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male and her 2021 follow-up titled Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. This session discusses chapter one from The Transsexual Empire, titled “‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism,’” in quotation marks, and chapter two from Doublethink titled “The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?”—both interestingly discussing men’s fetishization of women. I have chosen to pair chapters of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire in order with differing chapters from Doublethink that correspond with similar themes.

After the X space on February 11, I was a bit sick, so my voice was in some recovery to avoid recording commentary in poor quality. Plus, on February 28, I presented a paper discussing the French novelist Colette and radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, an opportunity that I enjoyed. I will see about getting text from that presentation up with some audio in the coming days as a break from the present book series discussing Raymond’s Transsexual Empire and Doublethink. Meanwhile, I have been unhappy with the social media suppression, especially on platforms like X, where I may as well be writing letters to a fireplace. It is not a “memory hole” in the truest sense of nothingness, as in Orwell’s novel, but shadowbanning functions to isolate writers and diminish voices, social conditions that smash intelligence to pieces. My experience on X has been that it does not prove useful unless one generates the intellectual equivalent of “junk food” as content, which excludes serious political analysis. I have noticed that the monetized accounts who get the most shares often have the least informative posts that rely on varieties of clickbait, sensationalized misinformation, and recycling others’ content.

For this session about The Transsexual Empire and Doublethink, I have reduced the length with a sharper focus on a few key points from the chapters and some commentary rather than attempting more of a comprehensive review. This session and later ones will follow a similar format to emphasize certain passages and lessen the overall time spent covering everything. Because I did a lot of editing on the text for this one, including some additions, I am planning to do most of the talks recorded without being X spaces. I may plan spaces to do some broader discussions of material, but I think the effort put into spaces can be more strategically applied to recording audio versions of some written content. Thank you all so much for listening.

Chapter I—“‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism’”

CLECKLEY: This chapter in Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, humorously titled “‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism,’” in quotation marks, covers some information regarding transsexualism, some now more widely recognizable. Modern sex-conversion surgery, she explains, dates back to the early 1930s. Hormonal and surgical techniques remained in development, not widely publicized until the early 1950s. When the New York Daily News ran a front-page story with the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” on December 1, 1952, George/Christine Jorgensen’s widely publicized case inspired men’s initial demands for “sex change” in the United States. Sensationalized media coverage followed Jorgensen’s return from Denmark, where he underwent surgical interventions to modify his male body into a simulacrum of “femaleness” made by male surgeons for their male patient. Men saw this ordinary-looking ex-GI become his own so-called “blonde beauty,” and they figured they could become the women of their own fantasies. Achieving widespread publicity into 1953, Jorgensen’s case demonstrates how the marketing of trans ideology in the media began much earlier than often acknowledged.

Transsexualism’s early support came from German-American sexologist Harry Benjamin (1885-1986), known as “the father of transsexualism,” who did the pioneering study of transsexualism in his 1966 Transsexual Phenomenon. The Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) and Johns Hopkins University were significant in transsexualism’s early institutional support. Rita Erickson (1917-1992), known as “Reed Erickson,” was a wealthy female philanthropist, a trans-identified female, who funded the EEF, which had an office in Manhattan from 1967 to 1976. In her interviews for The Transsexual Empire, Raymond spoke with EEF associate director Zelda R. Suplee (1908-1989). We will be talking some about Suplee and her responses to Raymond’s questions. An interesting fact about the EEF is that its decline had to do with Erickson’s own continuing problems with drug addiction during the 1970s. She eventually fled to Mexico in 1983 following her arrest for possession of cocaine. Erickson’s drug addiction persisted despite her wealth that funded not only her social and medical transition but also resources for others desiring similar medicalization.

From 1964 until 1977, Erickson’s foundation was active, briefly reviving between 1981 and 1984, until permanently closing. It was not a consistent source of financial support for what was, at the time, so-called “transsexual rights activism.” When the EEF ended most of its operations in 1976, Suplee closed her New York office and relocated to Galveston, Texas, where she then directed the Janus Information Facility (JIF), which was a referral service for transsexual patients. It was affiliated with the University of Texas Medical Branch, directed by Dr. Paul A. Walker (1946-1991), a gay male sexologist who later died of complications from HIV/AIDS. Walker was the founding president of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) in 1979, rebranded to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2011.

As Raymond discusses, transsexualism originated as a popular medical term into the early 1950s when the U.S. sexologist D.O. Cauldwell (1897-1959), in a 1949 issue of Sexology, used it to describe the case of a young woman who desired to be male. Raymond does not give us more information about the case other than saying that Cauldwell used “psychopathia transsexualis” “to classify a girl whom he described as obsessively wanting to be a boy” (TE, p. 20). When I read his report, I noticed that Cauldwell described a young woman, who had turned eighteen, coming from a difficult family background, who liked other women and disliked wearing “feminine attire.” He refers to her as “Earl,” not her name but, he explains, is like hers in that it “is frequently borne by members of both sexes.”

Interestingly, Cauldwell strongly opposed Earl’s desire that he find her a surgeon to remove her breasts and her ovaries, surgically close her vagina, and “create for her an artificial penis.” Even though she was of legal age, he considered it criminal to do so. How others saw her was her obsession, loving to be seen as “male” and “immensely happy” once when mistakenly called “Sir.” Earl did not like working but remained economically dependent on her family, despite her family not being wealthy enough to support her. Cauldwell notes there was an “expression of death-wishes” that annoyed him and his wife, presumably that Earl talked regularly of suicidal ideation to draw sympathy. Later, we will return to Earl’s case for more in-depth analysis, but it presents a significant difference from cases like George/Christine Jorgensen’s and those of married heterosexual males like James/Jan Morris. I note the case here because it reaffirms Raymond’s analysis in Transsexual Empire and foreshadows later developments that she discusses in Doublethink.

Following Cauldwell’s 1949 report, Harry Benjamin, who met the German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) in about 1906 or 1907, used transsexualism during a 1953 lecture to the New York Academy of Medicine. In fact, Benjamin’s first published use of transsexualism was in a 1953 article “Transvestism and Transsexualism,” first printed in The International Journal of Sexology. Sources like The Transgender Studies Reader, in 2006, claim an earlier origin in Hirschfeld’s use of the term seelischer Transsexualismus, or “psychic transsexualism,” in 1923 (see TSR, p. 23). Terminology like “transsexualism,” however, would not become mainstream until the early 1950s following Cauldwell and Benjamin. At the same time, coverage of the Jorgensen case, which began in December 1952, continued into 1953.

According to Raymond, the first physician to perform transsexual surgery was F.Z. Abraham (1901-1937), in 1931, who reported the first case of “sex-conversion surgery.” Raymond’s note includes the following reference: F.Z. Abraham, “Genitalumwandlung an zwei maennlichen Transvestiten,” Sexualwiss, 18 (1931): 223-26. In 1998, The International Journal of Transgenderism published an English translation of the article titled “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites.” Upon further research, I discovered that Abraham was among the first physicians involved with so-called “sex change.” Given more recent archival research, we know there were others: Ludwig Levy-Lenz (1892-1966), Erwin Gohrbandt (1890-1965), and Kurt Warnekros (1882-1949). Abraham names Levy-Lenz and Gohrbandt in his 1931 article discussing “vaginoplasty” for two distressed male transvestites. They performed the earliest modern “sex change” in the form of “vaginoplasty” on patients that included Einar Wegener (1882-1931), known as “Lili Elbe,” Arno Ebel (1881-1961), known as “Toni Ebel,” and Rudolf Richter (1892-1966), known as “Dora Richter.”

Referenced by Raymond, Abraham’s article mentions Richter and Ebel in the two initial cases but not Wegener, yet we know Wegener’s surgeries occurred in 1931, the same year he died from complications. Weeks after Grohbandt performed “vaginoplasty” on Richter, Warnekros performed a fifth surgery on Wegener on June 17, 1931, involving a “vaginoplasty” and uterus transplant, which led to organ rejection, infection, and death from cardiac arrest on September 13, 1931. Gohrbandt’s role in Wegener’s “transition” was the removal of his testicles when Wegener was at Hirschfeld’s Institute in Berlin in 1930. In Richter’s case, Gohrbandt performed the orchiectomy in 1922 in his collaboration with Hirschfeld’s Institute. With the assistance of Levy-Lenz, in 1931, he also performed the penectomy and vaginoplasty on Richter. After performing these pioneering “transsexual” operations on patients in the 1920s and early 1930s, Gohrbandt became a high-ranking medical authority under the Nazi regime by the late 1930s. He was involved with subjecting prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp to freezing experiments, with findings published in 1945.

Interestingly, Hirschfeld and Levy-Lenz, Gohrbandt’s former colleagues at Hirschfeld’s Institute, were both Jewish, despite their early involvement with a man who became a prominent Nazi figure after pioneering “sex change.” Later in The Transsexual Empire, Raymond notes the connection to Nazi medical experimentation, including a case of a thirteen-year-old boy whom “the scientists of Auschwitz” subjected to “sex change” (see TE, p. 152). However, she does not name Gohrbandt, as the documentation was not as readily accessible in the 1970s, typically not translated from the original German. There is now a more complex and complete picture featuring this pioneer of “sex change” collaborating with Hirschfeld, a Jewish gay man, in the early 1930s, and then becoming a prominent Nazi by the late 1930s. In his Transsexual Phenomenon, Harry Benjamin, who visited Hirschfeld from the early 1900s into the early 1930s, suggested that “prominent Nazis” were among Hirschfeld’s patients treated for sexual abnormalities. On the Nazi destruction of Hirschfeld’s clinic, he said, “The Institute’s confidential files were said to have contained too many data on prominent Nazis, former patients of Hirschfeld, to allow the constant threat of discovery to persist” (TP, p. 12; see also TE, p. 152). Antisemites scapegoated Hirschfeld, both Jewish and homosexual, for their hidden sexual perversions, projecting their pornography and their repressed desires. If Benjamin was right that prominent Nazis were Hirschfeld’s patients, then the narrative becomes complicated. To no surprise, the Nazis were not pure, as they insisted, but as impure as their antisemitic caricatures of the Jews. Contemporary fixation on Hirschfeld’s Jewishness and homosexuality demonstrates more of the same psychosis.

From 1931 to 1952, as Raymond notes, medical experimentation occurred primarily in Germany and Switzerland developing the modern surgical and hormonal treatments euphemized as “sex change.” She notes that Jorgensen’s surgeon Christian Hamburger (1904-1992), a Danish endocrinologist, “seems to have been the first to make use of hormonal castration and to follow up on his patients” (TE, p. 21). Far less known than fellow German-American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, Hamburger is responsible for the development of the modern clinical approach for surgical and hormonal treatments for transsexualism and transgenderism. In his 2013 biography of Christine Jorgensen, Richard F. Docter discusses how Hamburger “gained considerable professional stature and recognition for his exceptional leadership in the Jorgensen case, and that he was proud of his pioneering work”: “He is seldom credited with being the inventor of the modern protocol for transsexualism but he was” (Becoming a Woman, 2013, p. 90). In fact, Jorgensen, whose birth name was George, chose “Christine” in honor of the man who performed his “sex change”: Christian. Following the early experiments at Hirschfeld’s Institute on Wegener and Richter, it seems worth emphasizing that we lack a record of medical professionals doing extensive follow-up studies on their patients. There were about two decades of surgical attempts with relative lack of care over whether or not the patients were physically and mentally stable in the long term following these experimental surgeries.

By the late 1950s, in New York, Harry Benjamin used funding from Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) grants for treating so-called “transsexual” patients, culminating in his book-length study published as The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966. Raymond notes that Benjamin, as “the father of transsexualism,” is the key figure in the U.S. who gave transsexualism psychiatric and medical legitimacy. Over a decade before HBIGDA came into existence in 1979, with its rebrand to WPATH in 2011, Erickson’s foundation provided funding for the Harry Benjamin Foundation in 1964. It brought together more professionals to do more research, which included pre- and post-operative evaluations. Initial funding came from Erickson and the EEF, which had a vested interest in research showcasing the positive effects of surgical and hormonal interventions for patients desiring “sex conversion.” From the beginning, there was a financial incentive from Erickson to generate positive research about this medical experimentation and disincentivize concerns about transsexualism and patient outcomes.

Following these developments, into the 1960s, the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic opened on November 21, 1966, co-founded by New Zealand American sexologist John Money (1921-2006) and French pediatric endocrinologist Claude Migeon (1923-2018). It was the first U.S. academic center that provided surgical and hormonal interventions in “sex reassignment,” now euphemized as “gender affirmation.” It closed in 1979 and later reopened as the Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health in 2017. After Johns Hopkins began its gender identity program, as Raymond notes, other university hospitals began providing these services for those desiring “sex conversion.” Raymond tells us, “Of all persons who have been engaged in this work at Johns Hopkins John Money, now Professor of Medical Psychology and Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been the foremost publicist of the transsexual phenomenon” (TE, p. 22). While Hirschfeld’s Institute was significant, from its founding in 1919 until the early 1930s, transsexualism owes more to later sexologists who publicized it and profited on it for their professional careers: Harry Benjamin and John Money. Benjamin and Money contributed to the development of transsexualism’s medical rationale that supported its legal dominion, as the medical and legal infrastructure did not begin in the 1980s and 1990s. While psychiatrist Robert Stoller (1924-1991) coined “gender identity” in 1966, Money coined the term “gender role” in 1955, which later expanded to “gender-identity/role” (GI/R).

Since the publication of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire in 1979, we know the patient cohort has transitioned from primarily male and older or middle-aged, to female and younger, typically girls or young women. This statistical flip from adult male transvestites, a significant number of perceivably homosexual males, to teenage girls can lead to the false assumption that it has always been this way. Here is a passage from Raymond’s Transsexual Empire where she discusses the early sex ratios for women versus men desiring “sex change”:

While it is clear that more men than women request and obtain sex-conversion surgery, various ratios have been cited by researchers. The lowest ratio of women to men (one to eight) was reported by Benjamin in 1966. This was based on his own clinical experience with 152 cases of male transsexualism and twenty cases of female transsexualism. The highest ratio (one to two) was reported by John Randell in 1959. Most reports fall in between these two. According to international medical literature the generally accepted ratio is one to three or one to four. Recently, it has been claimed that the incidence of female-to-constructed-male transsexualism is rising. Canon Clinton Jones of the Hartford Gender Identity Clinic and Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins both mentioned this increase to me in personal interviews with them. Both said that they had seen, during the early seventies, almost as many women as men seeking surgery. However, the number of operations performed on men is still substantially higher. It is significant that this supposed increase has not been verified in print, with the exception of a somewhat vague reference made by Dr. Anke Ehrhardt in a commentary on the article, “Transsexualism and Surgical Procedures,” in which she states: “More and more females appear in doctors’ offices and seek hormone and surgical treatment.” What actual number “more and more” specifically refers to is, of course, anyone’s guess. Zelda Suplee stated that from her personal contact with would-be transsexuals the preponderance is still male-to-constructed-female. (TE, pp. 24-25)

Seen in his Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin’s sample featured twenty females and 152 males, a ratio of one female for every eight males. Other ratios were one female for every two males and, in the literature more generally, one to three or one to four, based on the peer-reviewed research into the 1970s that reported these ratios. Even measured at two males for every one female, the ratio would indicate that male-identified sexual ideology overwhelmingly influenced transsexualism’s development from the professionals to the patients. Eight times as many men as women, as in Benjamin’s patient cohort, suggests extreme bias toward men, but the average of three to four men for every one woman still underscores a significant bias in men’s favor. Raymond’s detractors have claimed that she overlooked females in 1979, but the truth is the phenomenon was male-dominated from the 1950s into the 1970s. Even as transsexualism became more mainstream by the 1980s, the phenomenon of men desiring to be “lesbians” remained far more common than women desiring to be “gay men.” There were exceptions like Sheila Sullivan (1951-1991), known as “Lou Sullivan,” a heterosexual female who fetishized male homosexuality and died of AIDS-related complications. But men desiring to be “lesbians” have outnumbered women desiring to be “gay men,” and earlier “trans rights,” in the 1970s, focused on inserting men into women’s spaces—men’s rights. The “gender-neutral” treatment of this history as being relatively equal in contribution from women and men misses that it prioritized male sexual desire as it misappropriated women’s rights and gay rights. By the early 1990s, “transgender” gained broader usage that included both transsexualism and transvestism, contrasting the prior narrow focus on those considered “transsexual.” This “umbrella” term included transvestites—any purported “gender nonconformity,” including the male transvestic fetishists who married women and, later, declared themselves “lesbians.”

Raymond notes that sexologists have provided various “scientific” explanations for why there seemed to be fewer women than men desiring “transition.” Jorgensen’s surgeon and namesake Christian Hamburger suggested the one to three ratio “may be biological in nature,” but he did not explain the biological factors that cause it (Hamburger, qtd. in TE, p. 25). Then, he suggested that it could be because Jorgensen’s case, the most prominent case reported, was of a man supposedly “becoming” a woman. Since men saw how male professionals made a man into a so-called “woman,” they wanted these same male professionals to manufacture a so-called “womanhood” of man’s own. Naturally, John Money suggested that men are more vulnerable to “psychosexual disorders” than women, which is why transvestic fetishism manifests far more frequently alongside other perversions or paraphilias in men. Money simultaneously theorized men’s greater predisposition for “psychosexual disorders,” but he did not consider pornography consumption a factor in the development of maladaptive sexual behavior. Raymond notes variations of this argument repeating sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey’s hypothesis that “the male is more prone to conditioning by psychological stimuli in the sexual and gender sphere than is the female” (Pauly, qtd. in TE, p. 25). Male sexologists like Money have attacked radical feminists for “antisexualism” and man hating, or “misandry,” while the sexologists themselves have theorized how men are predisposed to sexual perversion.

With more women and girls, especially young ones, “self-identifying” as “men” and “boys,” what Raymond calls “the illusion of inclusion” further crystallizes. She argues that the strategic inclusion of women propagates the illusion that women and girls benefit in a mutual way from transsexualism. Over the decades, with more women and girls being assimilated into this empire, whether as professionals or patients, the illusory benefit has solidified at the majority of women’s expense. We have seen a significant rollback of women’s rights to privacy and dignity in service to affirming men’s claims to womanhood. Women certainly have been collaborators, as oppressed groups collaborate in their oppression, but narratives exclusively blaming women and feminism neglect important considerations. Women’s collaboration did not call into existence a medical and legal infrastructure that developed over decades. When media coverage now describes men who commit mass shootings as “women,” it underscores a trend of scapegoating women and rendering male responsibility invisible. The same is true of male sex offenders described as “women” in media headlines. Rewriting these men as “women” dissociates male violence from its male perpetrators and relocates men’s crimes to womankind, which ultimately works against women. The “illusion of inclusion” has been a terrible lie for women to the advantage of men who manipulate the ignorance of the masses in this case of “the banality of evil,” referencing Hannah Arendt.

Raymond discusses men’s fetishization of women in terms of men possessing women to impose male sexual and metaphysical dominion over womanhood itself. “In a very real sense, the male-to-constructed-female transsexual not only wants female biological capacities but wants to become the biological female” (TE, p. 29). Men have been socialized to fetishize and objectify women, Raymond argues, which relates to how they fetishize and objectify their own bodies as so-called “female” bodies after surgeries and hormones. That women exist as fetishized body parts in pornography is not unrelated to men purchasing breasts and vaginas of their own to actualize their sexual and metaphysical claim to womanhood. As Raymond writes:

Male-to-constructed-female transsexualism is only one more relatively recent variation on this theme where the female genitalia are completely separated from the biological woman and, through surgery, come to be dominated by incorporation into the biological man. 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. (TE, p. 30)

Unserious readers make the error of assuming Raymond’s title Transsexual Empire intended to convey a plot for men to replace women, but she referred to a system that reified sex-role stereotyping and extended men’s social control over women. This “new” method of dominion over women has led at least some men to believe they can become superior women over nature’s supposedly defective original woman. Where it seems men far more readily access womanhood on the basis of “self-identification,” surgery or not, the same has not been true of women accessing manhood with ease. Raymond’s use of the concept “men possessing women” in 1979 predates Andrea Dworkin’s use in the subtitle to her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women. In fact, Raymond critiqued Dworkin in 1977 over her uncritical view of transsexualism in Dworkin’s 1974 book Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality. Although we will be discussing it more, following Raymond’s critique, Dworkin endorsed Raymond’s 1979 book. In The Transsexual Empire and Pornography, Raymond and Dworkin critique men’s fetishism of women, especially lesbians, as manifested in both transsexualism and pornography.

A less discussed part in Raymond’s Transsexual Empire is her note on the removal of the ovaries being “used to tame deviant women during the nineteenth and early twentieth century rash of sexual surgery” (TE, p. 36). She explains that this procedure, known as the “ovariotomy” or the “oophorectomy,” was a form of “female castration” soon replaced with hysterectomy. “If one regards the female-to-constructed-male as a potential deviant, as a potential lesbian and woman-identified woman,” Raymond argues, “the comparison between these castrated women and female-to-constructed-male transsexuals is significant” (TE, p. 36). Prior to transsexualism into the 1900s, men did not have their testicles removed in the same way that women had their ovaries removed for diagnoses like “hysteria” during the late 1800s into the early 1900s. I wrote about some of this history in a piece titled “Beatty’s Operation and Medical Violence as ‘Life-Saving Medicine’” in January 2024.

Even though Raymond’s hecklers dismiss her for not more extensively discussing women transitioning, despite men being most cases by 1979, this chapter actually discusses long-term effects of androgen therapy on women who stop hormone treatment. For instance, she notes the mostly irreversible effects on women’s voices, the development of facial hair, and the surgical and hormonal interventions that both women and men undergo. Transsexualism, Raymond argues, deprives women and men of their bodily integrity. “As the penis is a constant reminder to the male transsexual of his rejected male body,” she writes, “so are breasts and menstruation to the female” (TE, p. 36). “Self-actualization” by surgery only makes one more imprisoned within the body, for such medical intervention never enables transcendence from the reconfigured body.

Raymond concludes by noting that the medical and psychiatric literature of the 1960s and 1970s focused on two areas: prenatal critical hormonal factors and family influences on individual psychosocial development. Both the biological and the psychosocial explanations, she argues, neglect sex-role stereotyping in a patriarchal society and the social problems that it causes—including transsexualism itself. Sexologist John Money and psychiatrist Robert Stoller produced scientific explanations for transsexualism that happened to blame the mother for the conditioning of transsexual development at either the biological or the psychosocial level. Raymond critiques these scientific theories in later chapters, as we will see. That was chapter one of The Transsexual Empire titled “‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism.’”

Chapter II—“The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?”

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): I chose chapter two of Doublethink, which is titled “The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?,” to pair with chapter one of The Transsexual Empire because of corresponding themes in content, particularly Raymond’s discussion of men fetishizing women. When I looked back at the transcript from the X space, I saw that the section for Doublethink could have been shortened to emphasize a few key ideas. I decided to do a separate recording here to reduce the length and focus on important concepts in that chapter.

CLECKLEY: Chapter two in Raymond’s Doublethink, titled “The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?,” begins with discussing the institutional capture and stifling of debate that have become common followed by the framing of “gender-affirming care” for children as “emergency health care.” This section covers issues like the “making” of “the transgender child,” the suicide threat, and pornography’s role in men’s fetishization of women. I will be highlighting work from Josephine Bartosch, Max Robinson, Genevieve Gluck, Alix Dobkin, and Germaine Greer as they appear in Raymond’s chapter.

On the “making” of “the transgender child,” Raymond cites Bartosch’s 2021 piece titled “America’s Creation of the Transgender Child,” that discusses how “the transgender child industry has outstripped policy.” Raymond references the piece to discuss the difference between the strikingly more profit-oriented approach in the U.S. versus the U.K. “The obvious difference is that in the United States,” Bartosch explains, “healthcare is dominated by the private sector who have an obvious motive to promote drugs and surgeries.” Bartosch’s piece also importantly notes the shift from “transsexual” to “transgender,” which “de-sexed what had previously been considered an adult psychosexual disorder” (emphasis added). Whereas talk of “transsexual” children would cause discomfort, “transgender” makes it suddenly palatable and, like in I Am Jazz, a mass consumable.

Bartosch has a recent book titled Pornocracy, co-authored with Robert Jessel, which I will be planning to review, perhaps as a break from discussing The Transsexual Empire.

See Josephine Bartosch, “America’s Creation of the Transgender Child,” The Post Millennial, April 3, 2021, https://thepostmillennial.com/americas-creation-of-the-transgender-child.

In the section discussing the suicide threat, Raymond cites Max Robinson’s 2021 book Detransition: Beyond Before and After to discuss the narrative of “transition or die miserable, sooner or later” (Robinson, qtd. in D, p. 59). Deriving power from the “born this way” narrative used for gay rights, the paradoxical “born in the wrong body” narrative deploys suicidal ideation to force compliance with individual demands. According to Robinson:

But it simply isn’t true . . . there is a very simplistic roadmap provided to patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The patient is in severe distress and the medical professional will alleviate that distress through prescribing hormones, performing surgery, or directing the patient to another medical professional who will facilitate these medical interventions. (Robinson, qtd. in D, pp. 59-60)

Raymond writes how “[t]he suicide threat is emotional blackmail that particularly exploits the guilt of parents” who feel skeptical about quick medicalization for their children. If parents even question puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, then the prevailing narrative tells them they put their children at risk of suicide: “transition or die.” “The clinical message,” Raymond explains, “is that waiting or withholding treatment from youth transitioners may increase suicidal thoughts or actual suicides” (D, p. 60). Functioning as propaganda, suicide threat terrorizes parents and skeptical voices who otherwise would express criticism. Dressed in suicide, propaganda suppresses dissent.

See Max Robinson, Detransition: Beyond Before and After (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2021).

Importantly, Raymond notes how the gender industry significantly intersects with the sex industry, an observation that connects to her earlier analysis in 1979. Here Raymond cites Genevieve Gluck’s work analyzing how pornography has influenced men’s desire to possess womanhood. Raymond quotes Gluck on the genre of pornography known as “sissy porn”:

The pornography typically involves men wearing lingerie and engaged in ‘forced feminization’—eroticizing the illusion of being made to ‘become women’ through dress, makeup, and sexual submissiveness, and the fetishizing of the humiliation this brings. (Gluck, qtd. in D, p. 75)

This analysis emphasizes the way in which pornography—in particular, “sissy porn”—socializes male sexuality toward a fantasy of being “female” built on dissociation from the self. With intoxicating effects, pornography facilitates escapes from selfhood. Gluck and I discussed transgenderism and objectification in a previous talk we did in 2022. Among her insights, she had said, “Pornography plays a big role in that it was women, first, whose bodies were being modified for sexual purposes, for the sexual pleasure of men.” Further research since 2021 has confirmed what Raymond and Gluck have known: Pornography has been an essential technology in transgenderism’s propagation.

Gluck is a co-founder of Reduxx, where more of her work can be seen there and via her Substack.

Genevieve Gluck, “Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About the Influence of Porn on the Trans Trend?” Feminist Current, November 29, 2020, https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/11/29/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-the-influence-of-porn-on-the-trans-trend.

Discussing men’s appropriation of lesbianism, Raymond cites lesbian feminist Alix Dobkin, who wrote pieces like “Love Women or Die: Are We an Endangered Species?” about how “diversity” extended from women “from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds” to men. Here is a passage from Dobkin’s piece, part of which Raymond quotes:

In Lesbian community, ‘diversity’ used to be code for the coming together of Lesbians from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds. But now those labels indicate the ‘inclusion’ of—you guessed it: ‘nice’ men, ‘supportive’ men, ‘curious’ men, ‘questioning’ men, ex-men, and anyone with a ‘sexual minority’ credential. In fact, it’s getting to the point where anyone who is oppressed for any reason can stake a claim to womanhood according to those who define ‘woman’ as ‘victim.’ (Dobkin, 2000, p. 9)

Raymond discusses an interesting possible analysis of cultural appropriation in regard to lesbians as a distinct group with a culture of their own. While many care about cultural appropriation in cases involving Native Americans, men can appropriate womanhood as if women have no identity. Raymond writes that “when men who identify as women claim they are women or lesbians, too many women disregard this appropriation of a female identity” (D, p. 86). An interesting part of Raymond’s analysis is that she acknowledges women’s collaboration in transgenderism and their complicity. She fairly acknowledges women’s role while neither scapegoating women and/or feminists nor erasing men’s responsibility.

See Alix Dobkin, “Love Women or Die: Are We an Endangered Species?” off our backs, vol. 30, no. 5 (May 2000), 9, 18.

Closing the chapter, Raymond cites Germaine Greer’s 1999 book The Whole Woman, the sequel to her 1970 book The Female Eunuch. According to Greer: “Women’s lack of choosiness about who may be called a woman strengthens the impression that women do not see their sex as quite real, and suggests that perhaps they too identify themselves as the not-male, the other, any other” (Greer, qtd. in D, 86). Greer sharply questions women’s unfortunate and paradoxical identification with otherness in opposition to their own interests. There is this other line from Greer, where she writes: “Gender identification is never more than approximate” (p. 73). From transsexualism to transgenderism, many decades now tell us the approximation has been about sex-role stereotyping becoming sex itself. Pornography reiterates it. As Raymond has been right on this issue, so has Greer. Watching clips of Greer speaking, I think of how brilliant she has been for so many decades—not always agreeable, certainly, but always sharp. My hope is that more young women become as disagreeable and sharp in their own brilliance like Greer before them.

See Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, 1999 (New York: Random House, 2000).

That was a discussion of chapter two of Doublethink titled “The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?,” which I shortened for the sake of this recording.

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): With his permission, like in Session I previously, I have included the commentary from Michael Costa, editor-in-chief with Gays Against Groomers. Costa asked some insightful questions, which I have included with my replies, as recorded during the space.

COSTA: Thanks so much for having me on, Don. I appreciate it. This is one of my favorite books, probably my favorite book—The Transsexual Empire. And it’s really nice being able to come to these sessions and hear your opinion on it, since you’re an expert on this stuff. I just want your opinion. When you examine the progression of the “trans agenda,” from back in the 1970s until current day, from back when Janice Raymond was researching and writing The Transsexual Empire, up until the current “kiddie cutter” cult that we’re trying to fight in the Supreme Court because they’re mutilating kids… When you look at the progression from when Jan Raymond wrote the first book, up until currently when she recently published Doublethink, given those two texts, do you think that Janice Raymond has been vindicated, or something else?

CLECKLEY: I would say that Raymond’s original analysis definitely has been vindicated. As we progress into The Transsexual Empire, we will be talking about the earlier theories around transsexualism and its development in children. They have been these dubious, really, social theories about child development that were given a kind of “scientific credibility.” Now, we look back on ideas from men like John Money and Robert Stoller, and we think they are quacks, and they were, clearly, abusive in their theories and practices regarding children and child development. So, I would say Raymond has been vindicated, but I think the problem is that so much of the public has been slow to recognize that, for one, what she wrote in The Transsexual Empire was not a “conspiracy theory.” She went out and interviewed and talked with the people at these clinics and the directors of the clinics—she actually talked with John Money and interviewed John Money.

The idea that she was just writing this “conspiracy theory” text, which trans activists want people to consider Raymond’s work a “conspiracy theory” text, is totally false. Raymond’s work was investigative journalism in the appropriate sense of the word, not in the sense of having a blog and lots of opinions, but in the sense of going out and really talking with people involved with these issues and seriously addressing the issues that they raise. My answer is “Yes.” She has been vindicated through the developments in the pushback against transgenderism and in the discoveries about how it has been abusive. But I think she has had the status of many women who have been Cassandras, which is to say they have warned us of the collapse or the destruction that would come, and they have found themselves disregarded by much of the society at large.

Had the majority of people even considered the ideas that she discussed, even without necessarily integrating the feminist understanding of patriarchy, even without that aspect of the analysis, they could have seen transsexualism as a farce early on. In the absence of the feminist aspects of the analysis, we can still see the problems with transsexualism in Raymond’s discussions of the sexologists and in her interviews with the men who were involved with it and the women like Zelda Suplee, who provided responses to Raymond’s interview questions.

COSTA: That was a really thorough and great answer. Fascinating. Thanks so much, Don.

CLECKLEY: Thank you so much, Michael! Thank you all for joining me again.

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): Thank you all so much for listening. There will be a text version of this talk available on my Substack, linked in the description below. Given that I have received some new archival texts, I would like to do shorter videos exploring them. Such talks will be structured differently from recording longer-form discussions. If you found value in this session about Janice G. Raymond’s work on transsexualism and transgenderism, then please like, subscribe, and share. For any followers who can do a paid subscription or a one-time donation, I appreciate it. It all helps. Again, thank you all so much.

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Here at the close of Women’s History Month, I want to recognize Germaine Greer for her brilliance in her 1970 book The Female Eunuch.

Excitingly, I have a few new recent additions to my archival collection, which I will be discussing in the coming days, including work from sexologists Magnus Hirschfeld and D.O. Cauldwell.

For now, this piece introduces readers to another figure who was a contemporary of both Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud: Otto Weininger.

Weininger thought the dimorphism of the sexes right through, and discovered that, given such a polarity, men could have no real communion with women, only a highly compromised shared hypocrisy. Valerie Solanas performed the same exercise for women, and found that men covet all that women are, seeking degradation and effeminization at their hands. She retaliated by shooting Andy Warhol in the chest. Weininger more honestly made his attempt upon himself and succeeded. Just as Solanas despises men as they present themselves to be and in their failure to live up to their own stereotype, Weininger despises women both because their image is passive and animalistic, and because they are not even genuinely so.

- Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

Otto Weininger (1880-1903) wrote Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), published in 1903, and died by suicide. Weininger’s Sex and Character argues that individuals possess both masculine and feminine, with masculine as positive and feminine as negative. He theorizes human beings as a mixture of male (“M”) and female (“W”) principles, somewhat like an early theorizing of “gender identity.” Women, Weininger argues, are entirely sexual and mindless, animalistic, lacking a continuous ego or transcendental subjective soul; in this view, women are simply vessels for male desire, matter for man to use at will. Despite being Jewish, Weininger was antisemitic and considered Jewishness a negative “psychic constitution,” similar to femaleness in negation.

Without going into great detail as to Weininger’s theories, here is a characteristic passage from his Sex and Character, all italics his:

The purpose of Woman, then, is to be non-purpose. She represents nothingness, the opposite pole to the divinity, the other possibility in humankind. That is why, quite rightly, nothing is regarded as more contemptible than a man who has become a woman, and why such a man is respected even less than the most dimwitted and coarsest criminal. And this also accounts for the deepest fear in Man: the fear of Woman, that is, the fear of meaninglessness, the fear of the tempting abyss of nothingness.

It is the old woman who wholly reveals what Woman is in reality. As experience also shows, the beauty of Woman is only created by Man’s love: a woman becomes more beautiful when a man loves her, because she passively complies with the will involved in his love. However mystical this may sound, it is a simple everyday observation. The old woman demonstrates that Woman never was beautiful: if Woman existed there would be no witches. But Woman is nothing, she is a hollow vessel covered for a while in makeup and whitewash.

All the qualities of Woman depend on her non-existence, her lack of essence: it is because she has no true, immutable life, but only an earthly one, that she assists procreation in this life by her matchmaking, and that she can not only be transformed by a man who has a sensual effect on her, but is receptive to all possible influences.

Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), 1903, trans. Ladislaus Löb, eds. Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 268

Weininger reminds me of Andy Chu, known as “Andrea Long Chu,” a transgender writer who has written, quite infamously: “Sissy porn did make me trans” (p. 79). An intellectual son, Chu takes Weininger’s definition of femaleness in terms of negation and extends it to include himself sucked into “the tempting abyss of nothingness.” Less philosophically dressed, Chu puts his thesis more simply than Weininger: “The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation . . . Put more simply: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it” (p. 11) (emphasis added).

Wesley Yang wrote a 2008 piece in Tablet discussing Weininger that identifies his misogyny in a way eerily akin to Chu’s. “Weininger’s misogyny is eccentric,” Yang writes. “His extremism leads him, at times, to sound rather like a radical feminist” (emphasis added). “To be for women, imagined as full human beings, is always to be against females,” Chu writes. “In this sense, feminism opposes misogyny precisely inasmuch as it also expresses it” (p. 14) (emphasis added). (“Or maybe I’m just projecting,” so Chu says.). Weininger and Chu share a misogyny that exposes man’s deep grappling with his own identity and his faulty attempt to use woman as his spittoon.

Interestingly, Chu’s theory draws inspiration from Valerie Solanas, fetishizing the very concept of castration into “femaleness.” To quote Chu: “Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism” (p. 35). “Sex change” provides a superficial “cure” for men who would be like Weininger and outright hate what they envy but cannot be: They can hate women as they claim womanhood itself. There is a connection here that I think Greer perfectly understands when she writes in her 1999 book The Whole Woman: “Whatever else it is gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother.”

Here are some helpful resources discussing Weininger and Chu:

Wesley Yang, “Was This Man a Genius?” Tablet, August 13, 2008, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/was-this-man-a-genius.

Genevieve Gluck, “Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About the Influence of Porn on the Trans Trend?” Feminist Current, November 29, 2020, https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/11/29/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-the-influence-of-porn-on-the-trans-trend.

Blake Smith, “The Long Goodbye,” Tablet, April 13, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-long-goodbye-andrea-long-chu.

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The following is a selection from Greer’s Female Eunuch in which she writes perhaps the earliest feminist critique of Weininger, drawing the connection between his work and Freud’s sexual theories about women. I have left the block quotes Greer inserted throughout the section because I love how she composed The Female Eunuch. More nonfiction works should utilize this style, where there are “floating” block quotes accompanying the extended critique.

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 119-121, 129-131.

One of the fullest statements of the theory of the female soul was set out in Sex and Character, a remarkably rigorous and committed book by a mere boy, Otto Weininger, who committed suicide some years after its publication. His brilliant, neurotic life can be taken as an illustration of what dimorphism must eventually accomplish. By disintegrating human nature and building boundaries between warring halves, Weininger condemned himself to perversion, guilt, and early death. He began by identifying women with the body, with unconscious sexuality, and thereafter with passive animalism. As a rational male he condemned such a bestial element. “No men who think really deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.”1

Like Freud, with whom he had much more in common, he thought of women as castrated by nature; because he thought so highly of the penis he thought women did too:

An absolute nude female figure in life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness which is incompatible with beauty . . .2

The qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of a developed sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the higher mind. Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper . . .3

Weininger thought the dimorphism of the sexes right through, and discovered that, given such a polarity, men could have no real communion with women, only a highly compromised shared hypocrisy. Valerie Solanas performed the same exercise for women, and found that men covet all that women are, seeking degradation and effeminization at their hands.4 She retaliated by shooting Andy Warhol in the chest. Weininger more honestly made his attempt upon himself and succeeded. Just as Solanas despises men as they present themselves to be and in their failure to live up to their own stereotype, Weininger despises women both because their image is passive and animalistic, and because they are not even genuinely so. Their pretence is brought about by the exigency of the sexual situation which they exploit, hence the duplicity and mendacity which characterize all their actions. Because woman lives vicariously she need take no moral responsibility for her behaviour: because she has no responsibility she has no morality and no ego. Because of the lack of ego and the variety of roles that women manipulate, they have no identity, as one may guess from their willingness to give up their names. Woman is never genuine at any period of her life.5

The most chastening reflection is that Weininger was simply describing what he saw in female behaviour around him. He could not see that these deformities were what women would one day clamour to be freed from. As far as he could see, women were like that and he did not know what came first, their condition or their character. He assumed that it must have been the latter, because he could not explain their condition any other way.

Political and civic equality of the sexes implies moral equality. It implies the perfectly appalling logical consequence that the morals of women shall in future be the same as those of respectable Christian Victorian man—at best. That, of course, means the total collapse of Christian morality.

Robert Briffault, Sin and Sex, 1931, p. 132

All the moral deficiences Weininger detected masqueraded in Victorian society as virtues. Weininger is to be credited with describing them properly. Nevertheless his concepts of ego, identity, logic and morality were formed from observation of this same undesirable status quo, and women today might well find that what Weininger describes as defects might be in fact freedoms which they might do well to promote. For example:

With women thinking and feeling are identical, for man they are in opposition. The woman has many of her mental experiences as henids (undifferentiated perceptions) whilst in man these have passed through a process of clarification.6

‘Definitio est negatio.’ We might argue that clarification is tantamount to falsification: if you want to know what happened in a particular situation you would be better off asking someone who had perceived the whole and remembered all of it, not just some extrapolated clarification. How sad it is for men to have feeling and thought in opposition!

[119-121]

Nowadays education itself is changing so that creative thought does not decline with the inculcation of mental disciplines, which are now not taught as ends but simply as means to other ends. Unfortunately, the chief result of the change so far seems to be the reluctance of children to study science, but eventually science itself will become a complete study.

Weininger has more serious charges though:

A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes…she may be regarded as ‘logically insane’.7

It is true that women often refuse to argue logically. In many cases they simply do not know how to, and men may dazzle them with a little pompous sophistry. In some cases they are intimidated and upset before rationalization begins. But it is also true that in most situations logic is simply rationalization of an infra-logical aim. Women know this; even the best educated of them know that arguments with their menfolk are disguised real-politik. It is not a contest of mental agility with the right as the victor’s spoils, but a contest of wills. The rules of logical discourse are no more relevant than the Marquess of Queensberry’s are to a pub brawl. Female hardheadedness rejects the misguided masculine notion that men are rational animals. Male logic can only deal with simple issues: women, because they are passive and condemned to observe and react rather than initiate, are more aware of complexity. Men have been forced to suppress their receptivity, in the interests of domination. One of the possible advantages of the infantilization of women is that they might after all become, in the words of Lao-Tse, “a channel drawing all the world towards it” so that they “will not be severed from the eternal virtue” and “can return again to the state of infancy.”8 If only the state of women were infancy, and not what we have reduced infancy itself to, new possibilities might be closer to realization than they seem. When Schopenhauer described the state of women as moral infancy, he was reflecting not only his prejudice against women, but also against babies. The failure of women to take logic seriously has serious consequences for their morality. Freud adds the gloss to Weininger’s text:

I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their superego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women—that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgements by their feelings of affection or hostility—all these would be amply accounted for in the modification of the formation of their superego . . . We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denial of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.9

The circularity of this utterance is quite scary. After all, are the sexes equal in position and worth or not? What is position? What is worth? He promises to explain unsubstantiated deficiencies in the female character by an unsubstantiated modification in an unsubstantiated entity, the superego: if physiology is destiny Freud is anxious to invent a physiology of the mind. If judgement had not been separated from feeling so unnaturally in the Nazi officers presumably they would not have carried out orders so crisply. What kind of a criticism is it to say that women are less stoical than men? After two world wars stoicism seems to have outlived its value. If women have been denied moral responsibility by male ‘justice’ and dubbed angels while they were treated with contempt, it is likely that they will have formed their own conclusions about the monstrous superego and illusory morality of men. Protestant Europe has set for itself an unattainable morality of integrity in defiance of heavenly mercy, the unaided conscience bowed by full and unending responsibility for all actions, despite the partiality of knowledge and infirmity of will which characterize human action. Freud saw the results in his own community but he could not postulate an alternative to guilt and neurosis. The chief mainstay of such religion is the capacity of the ego to continue repression. Women may be bad at keeping up the cycle of the organism punishing itself, but that too may be an advantage which involves less delusion than its opposite.

The feeling of identity in all circumstances is quite wanting in the true woman, because her memory, even if exceptionally good, is devoid of continuity . . . women if they look back on their earlier lives, never understand themselves.10

My colleague Nathan Leites, Ph.D., has concluded after a review of the literature that the term ‘identity’ has little use other than as a fancy dress in which to disguise vagueness, ambiguity, tautologies, lack of clinical data, and poverty of explanation.

Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender, 1968, p. x

On Weininger’s evidence the ego is ersatz, consisting of the memory of the self which exists at any particular time. He remarks with horror that if you ask a woman about herself, she understands it to be her body. She does not seek to define herself by asserting her image of her merit, her behaviour. Man has a temporal notion of identity, which is falsifiable, woman a simple spatial one. “Here you are” said the white buttons Yoko Ono gave away at her exhibition. It seems important after all. Perhaps woman, like the child, retains some power of connecting freely with external reality. Weininger seemed to think so. “The absolute female has no ego.”11

The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child’s body from the mother’s body…this negative posture blossoms into negation of self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression).12

What a blossoming! If women had no ego, if they had no sense of separation from the rest of the world, no repression and no regression, how nice that would be! What need would there be of justice if everyone felt no aggression but infinite compassion! Of course I am taking advantage of the masters of psychology, bending and selecting their words like this, but what else can they be for? We cannot allow them to define what must be or change would be impossible. Whitehead and Needham looked forward to a new kind of knowledge which would correct the insanity of pure intelligence, “a science based on an erotic sense of reality, rather than an aggressive dominating attitude to reality.”13 If wisdom might not be incompatible with a low sense of ego, then charity seems in the mystical definitions of it to be dependent upon such a corrosion of separateness: the greatest myth of Christianity is that of the mystical body.

To heal is to make whole, as in wholesome; to make one again; to unify or reunify; this is Eros in action. Eros is the instinct that makes for union, or unification, and Thanatos, the death instinct, is the instinct that makes for separation or division.14

Weininger’s disgust for Eros and his devotion to Thanatos drive him to state women’s comprehensiveness more fully. Believing him we might think we had been saved already:

This sense of continuity with the rest of mankind is a sexual character of the female, and displays itself in the desire to touch, to be in contact with the object of her pity; the mode in which her tenderness expresses itself is a kind of animal sense of contact. It shows an absence of that sharp line that separates one real personality from another.15

Poor Weininger finally cut himself off altogether in a last act of fealty to death. The immorality of individualism is obvious in an age when loneliness is the most pernicious disease of our overcrowded metropolises. The results of parcelling families in tiny slivers living in self-contained dwellings has defaced our cities and created innumerable problems of circulation and cohabitation. The sense of separateness is vainly counteracted by the pressure for conformity without community. In most of the big cities of the world the streets are dangerous to walk upon. Woman’s oceanic feeling for the race has little opportunity for expression; it is grotesquely transmogrified in organized works of charity, where her genius for touching and soothing has dwindled into symbolic attitudinizing. Weininger’s repugnance for animal contact is still universal among the northern races. Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone. Psychoanalysis, the most obscenely intimate contact of all, is not hallowed by any physical contact. Latterly, special classes form in church halls in arty suburbs, so that men and women can recover their sense of reassurance by touch. Too late for Weininger.

Might the cleavage between the subjective and objective have been badly made; might the opposition between a universe of science—entirely outside of self—and a universe of consciousness—defined by the total presence of self to self—be untenable? And if realistic analysis fails will biology find its method in an ideal analysis of the psychomathematical type, in Spinozistic intellection? Or might not value and signification be intrinsic determinations of the organism which could only be accessible to a new mode of ‘comprehension’?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, p. 10

[123-128]

The prevailing criticism of the female soul can best be explained by the male battle to repress certain faculties in their own mental functioning. Women possessed in abundance those qualities which civilized men strove to repress in themselves, just as children and savages did. The value of such criticism is in the degree to which it reveals the severity of the contouring of the ideal personality, that is to say, male criticism of the female mind is revealing only of the male himself. Men in our culture crippled themselves by setting up an impossible standard of integrity: women were not given the chance to fool themselves in this way. Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

For a Tear is an Intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe

Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow.

Blake, Jerusalem, p. 52

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence, and sensuality? What will hold us back from Weininger’s fate? Most women who have arrived at positions of power in a man’s world have done so by adopting masculine methods which are not incompatible with the masquerade of femininity. They still exploit the sadomasochistic hook-up of the sexes, in which “we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil.”16 Wanda wore feminine clothes to add poignancy to her torture of Gregor, just as Mrs. Castle made sure that she looked attractive when she went to berate the workers as a criminal and irresponsible element in society. It is up to women to develop a form of genuine womanpower against which the Omnipotent Administrator in frilly knickers cannot prevail.

There is much to suggest that when human beings acquired the powers of conscious attention and rational thought they became so fascinated with these new tools that they forgot all else, like chickens hypnotized with their beaks to a chalk line. Our total sensitivity became identified with these partial functions so that we lost the ability to feel nature from the inside, and more, to feel the seamless unity of ourselves and the world. Our philosophy of action falls into the alternatives of voluntarism and determinism, because we have no sense of the wholeness of the endless knot and of the identity of its actions and ours.

A.E. Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, 1958, p. 12

Womanpower means the self-determination of women, and that means that all the baggage of paternalist society will have to be thrown overboard. Woman must have room and scope to devise a morality which does not disqualify her from excellence, and a psychology which does not condemn her to the status of a spiritual cripple. The penalties for such delinquency may be terrible for she must explore the dark without any guide. It may seem at first that she merely exchanges one mode of suffering for another, one neurosis for another. But she may at last claim to have made a definite choice which is the first prerequisite of moral action. She may never herself see the ultimate goal, for the fabric of society is not unravelled in a single lifetime, but she may state it as her belief and find hope in it.

The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist of this, that man and maid, freed from all false feeling and aversion, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbours, and will come together as human beings.17

[129-131]

Our next session covering Chapter I of The Transsexual Empire and Chapter II of Doublethink will be this coming Wednesday, February 11, at 9:00 PM Central Standard Time (CST).

Sessions

Session I—January 28

TE, “Introduction to the 1994 Edition” (pp. xi-xxxv)

TE, “Introduction. Some Comments on Method (for the Methodical)” (pp. 1-18)

D, “Introduction. From Transsexualism to Transgenderism” (pp. 1-20)

Session II—February 11

TE, “Chapter I. ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism’” (pp. 19-42)

D, “Chapter II. The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?” (pp. 55-86)

Session III—TBA

TE, “Chapter II. Are Transsexuals Born or Made—or Both?” (pp. 43-68)

D, “Chapter I. The New Trans Biologism: Female Brains and Female Penises” (pp. 21-54)

Session IV—TBA

TE, “Chapter III. ‘Mother’s Feminized Phallus’ or Father’s Castrated Femme?” (pp. 69-98)

D, “Chapter III. Self-Declared Men, Transitioning and De-Transitioning” (pp. 87-121)

Session V—TBA

TE, “Chapter IV. Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian Feminist” (pp. 99-119)

D, “Chapter IV. The Trans Culture of Violence Against Women” (pp. 123-154)

Session VI—TBA

D, “Chapter V. Gender Identity Trumps Sex in Women’s Sports and Children’s Education” (pp. 155-181)

Session VII—TBA

TE, “Chapter V. Therapy as a Way of Life: Medical Values versus Social Change” (pp. 120-153)

TE, “Chapter VI. Toward the Development of an Ethic of Integrity” (pp. 154-177)

Session VIII—TBA

D, “Chapter VI. The Trans Gag Rules: Erasing Women, Pronoun Tyranny, and Censoring Critics” (pp. 183-221)

Session IX—TBA

TE, “Appendix. Suggestions for Change” (pp. 178-185)

D, “Conclusion” (pp. 223-233)

KEYWORDS

Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, Doublethink, transsexualism, transgenderism, feminist critique, sex roles, gender, “gender identity,” “sex-conversion surgery,” John Money, Harry Benjamin, Robert Stoller, “gender dysphoria,” medicalization, bodily integrity

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): Hello. My name is Donovan Cleckley. This YouTube video includes audio from my recent X space, dated Wednesday, January 28, discussing the work of Janice G. Raymond on transsexualism and transgenderism. It is Session I of a small planned series of readings and discussions of Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male and her 2021 follow-up titled Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. This session provides some background information about Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, such as its earlier developments, and discusses the 1979 original introduction, the 1994 introduction to the Teachers College Press edition, and the 2021 introduction to Doublethink. Thank you all so much for listening.

1979 Introduction to The Transsexual Empire

CLECKLEY: So, to start us off, I want to introduce The Transsexual Empire. It started as a conference paper that Raymond had delivered at the New England Regional American Academy of Religion meeting in 1972. There was a work titled “Beyond Male Morality,” which appeared in 1974 in a collection titled Women and Religion, published by Scholars Press, also for the American Academy of Religion. In that paper, Raymond dealt with the development of certain values in society, particularly talking about the notions of “masculinity” and “femininity,” how they are understood socially, and she talked about the ways in which they are restrictive. By “male morality,” she did not mean that all men were bad; she referred to the values constructed in society, things largely from male-created institutions.

Subsequent to this earlier work was “Transsexualism: The Ultimate Homage to Sex-Role Power” in 1977, which appeared in Chrysalis, an early feminist journal published into the late 1970s, perhaps into the 1980s as well [Note: Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture ended in 1980 due to financial difficulties, spanning three years from its first issue in 1977 but producing ten issues, nonetheless]. Although it was discontinued, there were later journals that took up the name Chrysalis—in fact, one being a transgender journal that actually took on the name of a prior feminist publication. Interestingly, when Raymond’s piece appeared in 1977 it was alongside the Black radical feminist Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” which appeared under the title “Poems Are Not Luxuries.” Raymond talks about how that original work that became The Transsexual Empire was her doctoral dissertation that concerned the medical ethics of what, at the time, was known as “sex-conversion surgery.”

We’ll get started with that 1979 introduction. Like I mentioned, we’ll go to some brief discussion just to talk about if you have moments that you found interesting or insightful from the introduction. We can certainly talk about those and just highlight some key moments.

Starting off, one of the one of the interesting things, as it begins, is Raymond talks about how, while transsexualism is defined in psychological and medical terms, as if it is disconnected from social conditions, that as a feminist ethicist, she approached it in terms of how it how it showed what she calls “male-defined values and philosophical/theological beliefs,” which is to say, “beliefs about the so-called natures of women and men” (TE, p. 1). From the very beginning, she brings up John Money, who, as many know, began the first work on “gender identity” with regard to infants. He argued that, for instance, “that the core of one’s gender identity is fixed by the age of eighteen months” (TE, p. 2). Much of the research that Money produced, as Raymond notes, had these beliefs that went unquestioned because he would produce everything in terms of “scientific data.” As we know, over time, Money’s dominion has been questioned, although it has interestingly become integrated into the structure of transgenderism as we know it, with modern trans activists often denying Money’s original role in the creation and the legitimation of transsexualism decades ago.

One of the key terms that Raymond uses in that early introduction in 1979 is “theodicy,” which she says, and this is a great quote:

In this theodicy, as in all religious theodicies, the surrender of selfhood is necessary to a certain extent. In the medical theodicy, transsexuals surrender themselves to the transsexual therapists and technicians. The medical order then tells transsexuals what is healthy and unhealthy (the theological equivalence of good and evil). Thus the classification function of the term transsexualism analyzes a whole system of meaning that is endowed with an extraordinary power of structuring reality. (TE, p. 2)

What she means there, when she talks about theodicy, is in the secular sense. She talks about medicine and psychology as “secular religions,” with regard to transsexualism and the notions of “good” and “evil” become expressed as “healthy” and “unhealthy” that, as we know, later developed into “affirmation”—a way of justifying one’s existence through a therapeutic treatment. Raymond takes issue with what, as she says, is “more and more moral problems have been reclassified as technical problems; and indeed how the very notion of health itself, as generated by this medical model, has made genuine transcendence of the transsexual problem almost impossible” (TE, p. 2).

She starts immediately with acknowledging the difficulties in language surrounding the issue, which was certainly an issue in 1979—now even more so than perhaps then. With the medical literature on transsexualism at the time, there was “masculinity,” “masculine,” “femininity,” “feminine.” And there would often be a failure to draw a distinction that the male who feminized himself was not female, that the medical literature at the time would equate feminization with acquiring “femaleness” and equate masculinization with acquiring “maleness.” It was a kind of buying or taking on sex through this use of the masculine and the feminine, surgically constructed or hormonally constructed, despite it being superficial—which it is—that there was this falseness, a false sense of it being deeper. Raymond says, “To feminize or masculinize into a cultural identity and role is to socialize one into a constructed identity and role” (TE, p. 3). She emphasizes the process of socialization throughout this work. It is not that femininity and masculinity just sit there separate from the society in which people live. Her point in utilizing the language of “masculinization” and “feminization,” as she says, is to point to the superficial stereotyping involved behind this use of surgical and hormonal interventions to give men what they believe to be the semblance of “womanhood” and women what they believe to be the semblance of “manhood.”

She says, “Maleness and femaleness are governed by certain chromosomes, and the subsequent history of being a chromosomal male or female. Masculinity and femininity are social and surgical constructs” (TE, p. 4). She was later criticized over her use of chromosomes in The Transsexual Empire, although the part that her critics leave out is that she talks about the history of being a male or female. So, it’s not just chromosomes, as she was later accused by Judith Shapiro in a criticism which we’ll come back to in the 1994 intro. Shapiro accused her of having a “chromosomes are destiny” view. But Raymond, in fact, discusses how it is not only chromosomes or biology itself, but also the experience of living in a female or male body in society, a fundamental difference between women and men, an embodied difference, not simply chromosomal.

She talks about the origin of the word “transsexualism” and how it was first used by Harry Benjamin in a lecture in 1953 when he was talking at the New York Academy of Medicine. However, it would not appear in the Index Medicus until over a decade later in 1965. Prior to its appearance in the Index Medicus, works dealing with sex-conversion surgery would be classified under “transvestism,” “homosexuality,” or what would be some other category. Transsexualism was not in the Index Medicus. However, she notes that “as transsexualism acquired its own terminological existence and independent classification,” the assumptions of it being a state of being, of it being just there, came into being. She points out the value of using transsexualism, the suffix -ism referring to an ideology. She refers to how it has to do with a system of beliefs, which is to say that it is not just an industry. Industries do not operate independently of ideologies. We recognize the notion of an overarching ideology behind transgenderism, or transsexualism then, seen more recently expressed in Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality from 2021.

CLECKLEY (voiceover): At this point in the audio, when I mentioned Helen Joyce’s 2021 Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, the space disconnected. I do apologize for the technical difficulties. The session will now continue.

CLECKLEY: The way that “psychiatric syndrome” was used, which Raymond discusses, was interesting. In the late 1960s, work on transsexualism used the phrase “psychiatric syndrome,” and then went on to say, “Is any patient who seeks castration by surgery, by definition psychotic? We do not find this to be the case” (qtd. in TE, p. 6). It is very weird to pretend that the request for castration by surgery, that there’s not any kind of psychosis or anything psychotic about it. It shows that even the use of “psychiatric syndrome” was less an acknowledgement of it as something like a disease, but an attempt to get around the fact that the authors themselves did not think it was even in that.

NOTE: For the quote about seeking castration not being a function of psychosis, refer to Milton T. Edgerton, Norman J. Knorr, and James R. Callison, “The Surgical Treatment of Transsexual Patients,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 45 (January 1970): 42. This paper represented the peer-reviewed medical literature at the time during the 1970s. I remember talking with a trans-identified man once who insisted that Raymond did not use the up-to-date research for the time, but her references on transsexualism in 1979 consisted of works written in the 1960s and the 1970s.

The earliest work from Money and Green in 1969 indicates they did not believe transsexualism to be of biological origin. There is still no research to indicate that it is of biological origin. Raymond brings up one of the interesting early insights from that period, from the 1960s into the early 1970s: John Money’s concept of “the six sexes.” It sounds ridiculous, but Money defined “chromosomal sex,” “anatomical or morphological sex,” “genital or gonadal sex,” “legal sex,” “endocrine or hormonal sex,” and “psychological sex.” Of course, he split this in this way so that there was an acknowledgement of some kind of varying difference among all of these—and there is a certain amount of subjectivity to the way that Money approached it. Raymond actually notes that with “psychological sex,” it would likely be better to say “psychosocial sex,” indicating that it was not purely psychological, but rather that what he called “psychological sex” did have to do with the socialization of girls and boys in society.

NOTE: From Raymond’s notes, on Money’s concept of “the six sexes,” the reader can refer to John Money, “Sex Reassignment as Related to Hermaphroditism and Transsexualism,” in Richard Green and John Money, eds., Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 91-93.

Apart from referencing Green and Money, who edited Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment in 1969, Raymond brings up the contributions of Robert Stoller, who actually coined “gender identity” in 1964. In his book Sex and Gender, in 1968, Stoller defined the split between sex and gender. He talks about sex in biological terms, and says “the word sexual will have connotations of anatomy and physiology” (Stoller, qtd. in TE, p, 8). However, he says there is “behavior, feelings, thoughts, and fantasies that are related to the sexes but do not have primarily biological connotations” (Stoller, qtd. in TE, p. 8). For the “psychological phenomena,” Stoller basically said, “Okay, well, let’s use gender for all of that.” With Stoller, there was already this split in 1968. For those who have talked about “the true transsexual,” that also already was a thing. In 1969, Ira Pauly, in Green and Money’s 1969 anthology, said, “In the true transsexual there is no question of, or ambivalence about the gender preference, for the identification has been completed for some time at the point when they appear before the physician requesting sex reassignment” (Pauly, qtd. in TE, p. 8). That quote goes back to what Raymond says about theodicy, where medical treatment becomes a way of dealing with the suffering, of dealing with the suffering of women and men who feel this kind of “gender dysphoria,” this “dissatisfaction” that comes into the clinical setting.

NOTE: From Raymond’s notes, the reader can refer to Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender (New York: Science House, 1968), pp. viii, ix; and Ira Pauly, “Adult Manifestations of Female Transsexualism,” in Green and Money, Transsexualism, p. 44. A point worth underscoring here is the extensive psychiatric and medical literature that predated the existence of the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement. Feminists did not build a medical and legal infrastructure that already existed—and it was not in women’s interests.

Raymond notes that there’s a lot of trouble with the use of the word “gender.” She says that when used with words like “dissatisfaction,” “discomfort,” “dysphoria,” it gives us a sense of everything being able to be reduced to therapy and technical means. It removes the social dimension from the issue. She says:

Feminists have described gender dissatisfaction in very different terms—i.e., as sex-role oppression, sexism, etc. It is significant that there is no specialized or therapeutic vocabulary of black dissatisfaction, black discomfort, or black dysphoria that has been institutionalized in black identity clinics. (TE, p. 9)

I think it is fascinating that Raymond brought up the parallel to transracialism in 1979, noting that there were no clinics that dealt with race the way that there were clinics that dealt with gender. There have been no clinics that deal with race the way they deal with gender, barring the individual exceptions of people like Rachel Dolezal or Martina Big, who have been figures recognized as “transracial.”

NOTE: Rachel Dolezal, also known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, may be the most well-known “transracial” person. See Rachel Dolezal, with Storms Reback, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc., 2017). Dolezal’s case is of interest because she describes extreme distress, to the point of suicidality, over being white only alleviated by “living as Black.” Contrasting Dolezal’s identification, Martina Big is a more extreme case. Once very white and blonde, Big is lesser-known, as she went from recognizably oversized breast implants to blackening her white skin using Melanotan injections, a form of “perma-tanning,”—i.e., medicalized blackface minstrelsy. Big first became known through extreme plastic surgery to reach a bra size of 32S. She underwent twenty-three procedures adding saline to her breast implants. Each breast holds approximately 3,700 cubic centimeters (cc) of saline. She previously started with 32D implants. For a better parallel to “gender identity clinics,” Raymond could have used “racial identity clinics.” As more body modification becomes mainstream, and transgenderism becomes yesterday’s -ism, we may see increasing cases of transracialism.

She notes that “the experts” began to move away from using transsexualism, away from using the -ism, toward the more general use of the word gender dysphoria as of 1975. The Second International Conference on Transsexualism was renamed to the Second International Conference of Gender Dysphoria. The use of “gender dysphoria” became a way to name a condition rather than acknowledge the circumstances of transsexualism that produce “gender dysphoria.” She writes, “To make it the private property, so to speak, of the transsexual empire and its professionals is to superficialize the depths of the questions that lie behind ‘gender dysphoria’ (TE, p. 12). She notes that there have been issues with the way in which the surgery was popularized post-Christine Jorgensen—this is to say into the 1960s. The specific need for surgery was not evident, although some people may have felt that they wanted to “change sex.” She argues that we cannot be certain to what extent the availability of surgery has generated a wider need for it, because the terminology has made it seem as if it was always that way, as if people always needed this surgery and people were just dying without it.

Raymond has been criticized for mostly writing about men because “the transsexual empire” did primarily involve male patients when it began. I will get more into the statistics as we go. Raymond’s argument for it being primarily or almost exclusively a male phenomenon was not just her saying “because patriarchy.” No, it was actually because the statistics indicated that virtually all of the patients were males. On the high end, seen in the study from Harry Benjamin, it was one woman for every eight men. On the low end, it was one woman for every three to four men. On average, there were three to four times as many men seeking transsexual surgeries and/or hormonal interventions. Again, on the high end, it was eight times as many men as women. With a ratio like that, there is a significant imbalance of whose interests would be met.

NOTE: Harry Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, in 1966, reported eight men for every one woman. Later studies, also referenced in Raymond’s book, reported four and three men to every one woman. The statistics will be discussed in our talk about Chapter I—“‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism.’”

Going to the end of that first introduction, Raymond talks about how transsexualism is a social problem that cannot be explained without reference to the society in which we live and the sex roles in which women and men come to live. The way that it’s treated in terms of a purely medical phenomenon, as if totally psychological, ends up leaving out the entire dimension of the social context for it. What I would like to emphasize, too—and this is at the very end of her introduction—she talks about how she’s “not arguing that what is natural is good,” “not polarizing technology against nature.” Rather, she’s “making an appeal to the integrity or harmony of the whole” (TE, p. 17). She deals with this in a chapter called “an ethic of integrity.”

She’s not saying that it’s just about a violation of “a static biological nature of maleness or femaleness,” but there is a kind of be-ing and becoming that have to do with bodily integrity and the integrity of our bodies that becomes violated through this this attempt to artificially simulate the opposite sex. Again, she emphasizes that chromosomes contribute to fundamental bodily experience, but chromosomal maleness and femaleness are not the only thing. She says, “I am emphasizing that medicalized intervention produces harmful effects in the transsexual’s body that negate bodily integrity, wholeness and be-ing” (TE, p. 18). She does make a great emphasis on the integrity of the body and bodily integrity that become violated through regimes of surgery and hormones. And she ends the intro:

Transsexualism is a half-truth that highlights the desperate situation of those individuals in our society who have been uniquely body-bound by gender constrictions, but it is not a whole truth. While transsexualism poses the question of so-called gender agony, it fails to give an answer. I hope to show that it amounts to a solution that only reinforces the society and social norms that produced transsexualism to begin with. (TE, p. 18)

And that was that first introduction for The Transsexual Empire in 1979.

1994 Introduction to The Transsexual Empire

So, the 1994 intro, Raymond comes back with—again, she’s back—and there is humor in it, because there was a strong attempt, which she discusses in the intro to Doublethink, to prevent the second republication of the book. There was already a pushback by 1994 and, of course, this is post-1990 which was the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. Already, queer theory had laid its roots, and the environment was far more hostile to publish, even republish, this book. We’ll get into that with Doublethink.

Here she talks about how, in 1979, Johns Hopkins phased out its procedure and dismantled its gender Identity committee. Now this actually did not have to do with The Transsexual Empire, at least Raymond notes that she does not think that was the case. She points to a study from the psychiatrist Jon Meyer, who was director at Johns Hopkins, and he had kept follow-up records of those who had come to the Johns Hopkins clinic. It was noted that it was “a palliative measure [but] it does not cure what is essentially a psychiatric disturbance” (qtd. in TE, p. xi). Meyer then agreed on closing the program.

Trans activists have attributed the closure of the program to Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, but the idea that they read Raymond’s book and took her advice is unlikely. The clinic gave no indication that it did actually sit and read her book and go by her advice; it did have to do with that follow-up study that indicated there was actually not a vast improvement in the mental health of the people who had come to the clinic. Raymond brings up the fact that John Money, who in the 1950s and 1960s, even in the early 1970s, had done his sex/gender or gender identity/sex roles research. He talked about sex roles and gender in more of an abstract way at that time, but his later research, as it got into the 1970s and the 1980s especially, and then into the 1990s, concerned the permissibility of child pornography and incest. Raymond notes that Money, in one of the works that he did into the 1980s, he actually argued, “When the genuine pair-bonding of erotic love has existed between the two partners in incest, then the discovery and disbanding of their partnership, not the partnership itself, may be the source of trauma” (Money qtd. in TE, xii). Money was saying that the worst thing about incest would be the stigma, not the incest itself. He compared a man who commits incest, largely against a girl or young child, to “being a religious deviant in a one-religion society” (Money qtd. in TE, xii). Money effectively viewed incest as being like somebody who does not conform to a dominant religion. Money was originally a large part of the Johns Hopkins program. His gradual writing on the permissibility of “adult-child sex,” which is to say child sexual abuse, became a point of contention. It caused, I think, and Raymond also argues this, that it was likely a strong contributor to the decline of that clinic, certainly more than the likelihood of them actually sitting down and reading The Transsexual Empire.

NOTE: Trans activists do not acknowledge Money’s simultaneous advocacy for transsexualism, “adult-child sex” in purportedly “consensual” pedophilic relations, and child pornography, despite him being an undeniably significant figure in transsexualism’s early institutional support.

Raymond brings up that, by 1994, the number of clinics and centers did not seem to increase or decrease. From 1979 to 1994 it seemed to be about the same [NOTE: Even with the closure of Johns Hopkins or any others, new programs began offering the same services]. The pattern that she observed, which was that most of the patients were men who were desiring to be women, actually held up. She points to the University of Minnesota’s program, which was the second U.S. institution to perform the surgery—85% were men who were transitioning. That was in 1992—85%. It shows that she was utilizing statistics when she said it was largely a male phenomenon. She points to the relative lack of women pursuing social and medical transition having to do with the fact that women’s “gender dissatisfaction” was primarily directed in conformity to femininity, including “breast implants, hormone replacement therapy, infertility hormones and reproductive procedures, and plastic surgery” (TE, p. xiv). Raymond makes a convincing case that it seemed to be less of an “experiment” for women than for men who would play at getting to be “feminine.” She brings up something that came from John Money, which was “it’s easier to construct a hole than a pole,” his method of treating patients who had genital damage, in the tragic case of the Reimer twins, where he had David Reimer subjected to “vaginoplasty,” in the destruction of his male genitalia as an infant.

I think she makes an interesting point on women’s relative accessibility to men versus men’s accessibility to women. She points out that it seems that the idea of maleness is harder for women to access than men to access this sense of being female. She says, “For if maleness were as easily available as femaleness, i.e., if men were as accessible, men, too would be treated like women” (TE, p. xv). There is a distinction between the treatment of women and men.

Raymond brings up the medical model. Thomas Szasz, a prominent critic of psychiatry, provided a book endorsement for The Transsexual Empire. He coined various things, like “transchronological”—a person who wants to be young. Does a poor person who wants to be rich suffer from the disease of being “transeconomical”? Which I think is funny. He even brought up—Does a Black person who wants to be white suffer from the disease of being “transracial”? Raymond highlights these, which is interesting, that Szasz perhaps coined “transracial” in the sense of racial transition. He brought up these—“transchronological,” “transeconomical,” “transracial.” Of course, we do not have corresponding clinics that have to do with age, economic, or race change. We do not think about those in purely medical or psychological terms the way that we think about issues related to “gender.” Raymond brings up the analogy between gender and race highlighting the lack of the presence of clinics that deal with race, age, or economic dissatisfaction, which is fascinating.

Going to the critical responses and critics that dealt with her book, Raymond points to a feminist critic named Annie Woodhouse, who wrote an otherwise good book called Fantastic Women. The problem was she accused Raymond of “essentialism,” which we know is something that is kind of commonly thrown at women who are critical of transsexualism. She argues that Raymond holds this view of the “essence of femininity” defining women. But Raymond actually corrects this and says, “It is the female reality that the surgically-constructed ‘woman’ does not possess, not because women innately carry some essence of femininity, but because these men have not had to live in a female body with all the history that entails” (TE, p. xx). For Raymond, it goes back to the body and bodily integrity. That was one critic of Raymond.

We know that one of her other critics was Sandy Stone, who wrote “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” which is the founding document of “transgender studies.” It was written and written in the late 1980s, in 1987 and he continued making changes and editing it, and it appeared in a 1991 collection called Body Guards, which had to do with arguing for “gender ambiguity.” He wrote a kind of critique, which was really just an attack on Raymond. He writes “the transsexual is really text,” and she quotes Stone writing, “In the transsexual as text we may find the potential to map the refigured body onto conventional gender discourse and thereby disrupt it, to take advantage of the dissonances created by such a juxtaposition to fragment and reconstitute the elements of gender in new and unexpected geometries” (Stone, qtd. in TE, xxii). Wow, right? Stone talks about the body-as-text, that it can be taken apart and put back together and made into different things and “unexpected geometries”—like flesh origamies. Stone gives Raymond’s Transsexual Empire a kind of backhanded compliment. He says, of course, it was “the definitive statement on transsexualism by a genetic female academic.” And, then, he follows by saying, “There is some hope to be taken that Judith Shapiro’s work will supersede Raymond’s as such a definitive statement. Shapiro’s accounts seem excellently balanced. . .” (Stone, qtd. in TE, p. xxiii). Raymond notes that Shapiro actually appropriated much of Raymond’s own critique from The Transsexual Empire, but she distances herself from Raymond and presents Raymond as kind of prudish. She says, “Raymond contemplated transsexualism with all the frustration and disgust of a missionary watching prime converts backslide into paganism and witchcraft” (Shapiro, qtd. in TE, p. xxiv). Then, Shapiro brings up all of the anthropological instances of any kind of “gender crossing.” She goes through Native Americans, the xanith in Oman, and woman-to-woman marriages in Africa. She brings all these up as being instances of “transgender,” that rationalize transgenderism. None of those cultural practices, by the way, had a highly well-funded industry, an empire, behind them, so it is a false analogy.

NOTE: Readers may refer to both Shapiro and Stone in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991). See Shapiro, “Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex,” pp. 248-279, and Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” pp. 280-304. Stone’s autoethnographic work has been wrongly considered a “review” when it does not do the essential work of a book review.

Raymond talks about tolerance being misleading, what she calls later in the text “repressive tolerance.” She brings up prominent figures of the 1990s, like RuPaul, where he had said, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.” And, of course, we know that drag, the mentality of drag, the celebration of it, grew into the 1990s. There were no Drag Queen Story Hours, but, certainly, it was ascending as a kind of celebrated cultural practice. She points out the genuine lack of subversiveness in “cross dressing,” that it reduces the political to a personal style. She brings up the appearance of k.d. lang in a spread for the August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair, where lang is pictured in a very role-defined and sexually objectifying cover photo. In fact, one of the captions says, “I have a little bit of penis envy. They’re ridiculous but they’re cool” (lang, qtd. in TE, p. xxxiii). And then the other caption being: “As much as I hate it, I admire the male sexual drive, because it’s so primal and so animalistic” (lang, qtd. in TE, p. xxxiii). Even “gender nonconformity” was being paired and marketed with a kind of explicit sexual objectification. This notion of “transcending gender” was bound up with sexual objectification. Raymond defines transgenderism this way:

Transgenderism is the product of a historical period that circumscribes any challenge to sex roles and gender definitions to some form of assimilating these roles and definitions. In much of the western world, the general effect of the 1980s has been to move back the feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s. It has encouraged a style rather than a politics of resistance. (TE, pp. xxxiv)

Individualism takes over as opposed to “collective political challenges to power.” She ends by saying that the ideals of transgenderism look provocative. It seems provocative and subversive, but it does not actually move us beyond gender. It assimilates and reinscribes gender in ways that are harmful, that monetize and institutionalize surgical profiteering off suffering. I like the question that she asks, which refers to Kate Bornstein, a trans activist in the 1980s and the 1990s. He had put out a book called Gender Outlaw. Raymond has a question here that says, “What good is a gender outlaw who is still abiding by the law of gender?” (TE, p. xxxv). I always like that. I think it was such a great turn of phrase there. She says that transgenderism does not present real sexual politics, that a real sexual politics would work toward a transformation moving beyond the reinscribing of gender as such. And that’s the intro to the 1994 edition of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire.

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): With his permission, I have included the commentary from Michael Costa, editor-in-chief with Gays Against Groomers. He joined the space to note the influence of Raymond’s work on subsequent efforts to end the social and medical transitioning of children abused in the process of surgical and hormonal interventions. In 2024, Gays Against Groomers published a book titled The Gender Trap: The Trans Agenda’s War Against Children, work that rightfully acknowledges feminist contributions like Raymond’s. There are some exceptions to the prevailing discourse that scapegoats feminism on the basis of self-declared “feminists” like Donna Haraway [“Cyborg Manifesto,” 1985] and Judith Butler [Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990]. Costa asked some insightful questions, which I have included with my replies, as recorded during the space.

COSTA: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I have a question. This is probably my favorite book, so it’s great that you are taking the time to platform it. If people had just listened to lesbians, none of this stuff would be happening right now. I feel like it’s really important for people to know, because the lesbian analysis of this issue is the most comprehensive, in my opinion. I think it’s because lesbians have experienced the negative aspects of gender ideology, from multiple points—from the woman hating to the gay aspect to education and medical malpractice, they know it all.

I write for conservative lesbians, and I’m looking to elaborate on the details of Harry Benjamin and WPATH and the history and the connections there. I’ve reported on the very concerning history of sexological predators like John Money and Harry Benjamin. I want to educate the public and lobby politicians using details about the problematic history and connecting it to the current efforts to dismantle WPATH permanently. I want to use these historical details in my legislative lobbying as a way to provide evidence to the government that this wannabe “medical organization” has always been corrupt and is rooted in backwards views on sex and gender. I also want to incorporate that history into my news reporting, because I’m convinced that gender medicalization is nothing more than a scam, a scam, a scam. It has been since the very beginning, all the way back in the Harry Benjamin days up to the current ROGD [rapid-onset gender dysphoria] scandal we’re currently witnessing unfold in real time. It seems like WPATH has always been riddled with controversy. What about the problematic history of WPATH do you recommend I include in my work?

CLECKLEY: With reference to what Raymond writes in Transsexual Empire, I think it would be worth mentioning the change in name. We know that it changed from HBIGDA, the Harry Benjamin international Gender Dysphoria Association—HBIGDA—to WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health], and the shift was pretty recent. It was named in 1979 in honor of Harry Benjamin, and then rebranded into the 2000s [NOTE: The rebrand from HBIGDA to WPATH was in 2007]. I think that name change is significant in the connection to Harry Benjamin’s original work. Part of the terminology that Raymond uses in The Transsexual Empire, which we no longer really think about, because so much of the language has been taken over by “gender affirmation” and “gender-affirming care,” is that the original terminology was “sex-conversion surgery.” The subtitle for Harry Benjamin’s original Transsexual Phenomenon had “sex conversion” in it. It was his study of “sex conversion” in males and females. It is significant to acknowledge that the language was originally centered around the concept of “conversion,” “conversion surgery,” and that the rebranding of it to “gender affirmation,” the notion of the “gender-affirming care” was specifically to make people think of it not as a “conversion,” not like a negation of the body or a negation of the self, but, instead, this positive “affirmation,” “self-realization.”

I think certainly you could bring up Raymond, of course, and note how she talks about Harry Benjamin when he produced these early definitions. He was, in a way, throwing things at the board to see what stuck. And that’s one of the things that is so egregious about Benjamin’s work. There are inconsistencies when you read The Transsexual Phenomenon. It is strange, the way he talks about “sex conversion,” running the whole gauntlet of it; it is extraordinarily regressive, but it was so effectively rebranded in progressive terms. Like Raymond said, when she defined transgenderism at the end of that 1994 intro, it really did function as a backlash against the developments within the women’s movement from the 1970s into the 1980s. The 1990s marked a significant backlash against the women’s movement.

But, yeah, I would definitely reference Raymond. She brings up the terminology of “sex conversion,” even in the intro, toward the beginning of the book, that I think is significant. I think it is a point that people do not readily bring to mind because the language has changed in ways that has permitted a kind of “reality control,” an Orwellian “reality control,” over how people use language, how they think. I think that would be something to bring up with regard to Raymond’s specific criticisms and her discussion of Harry Benjamin.

COSTA: That was a really great answer. I took notes. Thank you for having these spaces, and I will definitely be a regular listener.

CLECKLEY: Thank you. And was there anything that you wanted to mention that was interesting from the 1994 intro?

COSTA: Raymond discussed basically how it’s different for a man to wear a dress and heels versus a woman wearing pants and comfortable shoes, that nonconformity there is not reciprocal. Being a tom is not the same thing as being a transvestite. Right now we’re seeing these things collide and everything being collapsed under the label of “trans.” So, we have grown men with fetishes, reading books to little girls about why they should become boys, and acting as if this is all the same thing. The reason why the adults, why those men are “trans,” is not the same reason why those kids are “trans.” And I put “trans” in giant quotes. What do you think about what you said about how it’s different for one to be a cross-dressing [male] transvestite versus a woman who likes to wear slacks, and how that is relevant to the current conversation?

CLECKLEY: Raymond does discuss that. I had skipped over it, just because I skipped over some things in the intro, in the interest of time, so we could get to Doublethink. She does make that distinction that women wearing pants is different than men wanting to put on fishnets and wanting to put on skirts, wanting to put on more restrictive clothing that constricts their bodies—clothing that, for the most part, is imposed on women and girls, clothing that does not permit a full range of movement for women and girls. Fishnets and stockings and skirts—these are not regular or average clothes that promote a reasonable range of movement for women and girls; pants are human. You just wear them, and you’re comfortable, and you move around more easily. Raymond notes that women wearing pants gives them the ease of movement that has been historically associated with men.

There is an interesting connection to the first wave of feminism, where women in the nineteenth century talked about dress reform. As we know, the use of bloomers had to do with women wanting to create alternatives to the dresses that they had to wear for so long. The dresses were so restrictive that they caused women literal health issues. These dresses that were corseted obstructed women’s movement and caused actual bodily issues for women. It is fascinating and ironic to have men in the late twentieth century demand access to the restrictive clothing that women seeked for so long to escape, that women had worked so long to escape that restrictive clothing, that clothing that deprived them of full human movement, and, essentially, that infringed on women’s dignity. I think that is a really significant point, and I think that Raymond beautifully illustrates it. In the 1994 intro, this juxtaposes the men who essentially put on skirts, dresses—they do a wonderful “skirt go spinny”-type thing, and they get to be “pretty.” It is restrictive to women. These are clothes or types of clothing that women have worked to escape from, but that in men’s definition of “women,” men’s definition of “womanhood,” that it takes the meaning of woman, that the outfits obscure what women are, and come to define what women actually are, which is part of the horror of the redefinition there.

Thank you so much, Michael, for bringing up that passage; I love that passage from the 1994 intro.

Introduction to Doublethink

If nobody else has anything you want to mention, then we’ll go over the Doublethink intro. As I’ve noted, it will be a little bit quicker because it’s also slightly shorter than the others. But it talks about some important things that I think listeners will find interesting about the publication of Transsexual Empire and subsequent issues that Raymond experienced following the publication of Transsexual Empire.

She talks about, as I noted before, that the original work began as her PhD dissertation, that in the early 1970s she had done work with the women’s health movement, studying ways in which medical practices impacted the lives of women and girls. In fact, one of the areas that Raymond studied was known as “psychosurgery,” formerly called lobotomies, and she looked at the way in which women were actually subjected to psychosurgery at disproportionately higher numbers than men. In Raymond’s view, and in the view of feminists who critiqued psychosurgery, it was a method of social control, of dealing with these women who were seen as “unruly” or who were designated “mentally ill” by men and their families. These women would be taken away and subjected to psychosurgery, lobotomized.

Raymond mentions the continuing attack on her for using the title Transsexual Empire. They say, “Oh, well, that makes you a ‘conspiracy theorist’ because of the word ‘empire.’” But the point of that title, as she explains, was not that it’s all shady and that it is a shadowy cabal. In fact, it is not a shadowy cabal. There was actually—and now certainly is—a gender industry that involves transsexual counseling, surgery, and hormone treatments, and the industry, she says, “deploys a horde of general surgeons, plastic surgeons, endocrinologists, gynecologists, urologists, and psychiatrists” in service of transgenderism (D, p. 2). In that sense, it is an empire—it is an expansive empire. And she points out that, of course, what she wrote about then has since expanded into a kind of “gender identity industrial complex” (D, p. 2).

By the late 1980s—referring to Sandy Stone, although she doesn’t mention him here—trans activists had challenged the original feminist critique. This was actually separate to “the sex wars” of the 1980s. They began to challenge the feminist position, and they inverted it to say the conformity to the sex roles through medicalization actually challenges gender. Instead of what feminists like Raymond said, that medicalization was not a challenge to gender, that it was a challenge to feminism, trans activists inverted it. They totally flipped around the position, and they took roles in the Women’s Studies departments, and those then turned into “Gender Studies.” As we know today, those original Women’s Studies departments are virtually all Gender Studies or some variation of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. She says:

As I saw it then and I see it now, transsexualism and transgenderism raise questions of what gender is and how to challenge it, questions that have become more critical to ask and answer in this expanding ethos of transgenderism—an ideology and practice that promotes a ‘gender identity’ different from the sex a person is born with. (D, p. 3)

“In the new wave of transgenderism,” Raymond notes, “gender becomes biology” (D, p. 3). Gender takes on a kind of force of nature for trans activists.

Previously, when we think about the 1960s and the development of transsexualism, the legitimation of it was top-down from John Money, Harry Benjamin, Richard Green, Robert Stoller—these men who defined and talked about the distinction between sex and gender and treatments of it as a “psychiatric disorder.” They didn’t really regard it necessarily as a disorder, except that they medicalized it. But then they didn’t explain that it had any kind of real basis—except it was a desire. We note that there’s actually been a significant shift from 1979 to 2021, where it seems like the professionals are now no longer required to legitimize it, because it has spread across society in such a way that now it is legitimized at every level of society. It became unmoored from where once it was within the clinical domain. Now, it is everywhere. In a way, it escaped the lab, and it is out.

Raymond talks about how Doublethink is much more about girls and women who are transitioning and detransitioning, whereas there were very few females in the 1970s and 1980s who turned to transsexualism and resorted to hormones and surgeries, which is significant. There was a shift where virtually all of the patients treated at the gender clinics were male, overwhelmingly male, and statistics indicated as much. The patient cohort has flipped, and, now, so many of those being “treated” are, in fact, women and girls. There’s still a large segment of men going into the clinics, but there has been a shift, a significant shift that Raymond recognizes.

In Doublethink, she also points out how she wrote a chapter in Transsexual Empire called “Sappho by Surgery,” and mentioned that men who claim to be women would also claim to be “lesbians,” which Sandy Stone did in the women’s community, in the lesbian community, in the 1970s. I wrote in a note on the page, “‘Sappho by Surgery’ has become ‘Sappho by Speech.’” Men no longer have to undergo any kind of surgery or have to do anything; rather, they now can just say they are “lesbians” by speech. Raymond talks about “the biologizing of illusions,” that the trans obsessions, such as men desiring to menstruate, become pregnant, lactate, these female functions they desire in a fetishistic way to be granted to them through medicalization (D, p. 4-5).

Raymond notes the dubious honor of being the first named TERF, i.e., trans-exclusionary radical feminist. We know that “TERF” has expanded to include anyone—particularly women, of course—but anyone who even slightly objects to transgenderism. Raymond was certainly a foremother in this dubious honor, and I say “dubious honor” because of the harassment that it entails. Raymond talks about some of that early censorship that she experienced that she doesn’t discuss in the 1994 intro. She says:

For me, the censorship happened right from the get-go. In the early 1970s as a graduate student, I had applied for a grant to research and write the dissertation that would become The Transsexual Empire. A prestigious U.S. foundation contacted me to say that the grant had been awarded and needed only some proforma administrative signatures. Since one bonus of the grant was paid health insurance, they asked me to make an appointment for a health physical, a standard part of the insurance application process—an exam they paid for and which I promptly underwent. Several weeks later, a colleague who worked at the foundation and who had endorsed my application informed me that the faculty associated with a prominent university gender identity clinic where I had conducted some interviews had complained that my investigation would threaten their work. This was a backhanded compliment and, needless to say, they nixed my grant. (D, pp. 5-6)

They prevented her from receiving a grant on the basis of her early criticism of transsexualism. Then, after the 1994 publication of that reprint of The Transsexual Empire, in 1995 a man had contacted Teachers College Press—that is to say, the publisher—and claimed that the original preface was deliberately omitted from the book, which, by the way, is not really that big of a deal. But the man claimed that it was a case of “scholarly misconduct” and tried to have, basically tried to have the 1994 edition of the book pulled because he argued the book did not print that preface, a couple of pages, that it violated scholarly principles, and, therefore, the book must be pulled from the shelves. The man who accused her of that continued with his attack and tried very hard to have her book pulled. However, the academic dean eventually dropped the charge of “academic fraud” that made no sense. It was a frivolous claim, but the attempt was to have her book pulled.

Around that same period, in the 1990s after she published Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom, which was a critique of sexual and reproductive technologies in 1993, about their impacts on women, she was at a bookstore. She was doing the launch of Women as Wombs about reproductive technologies. By the way, the book had nothing to do with transsexualism; it did not mention transsexualism or transgenderism. There was not anything extensive about it in that book, but trans activists showed up anyway to the feminist bookstore in New York City, where she did the book launch, and they protested her. She had to walk through a gauntlet of protesters who were threatening, who would follow her to any speaking event. Even if the event had nothing to do with transsexualism or transgenderism, they still came after her.

After she retired from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she had worked as a Professor of Ethics and a Professor of Women’s Studies, they issued a statement on their website saying:

Given the persistence of legacies of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, including its presence in the history of Women’s Studies in the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and in response to requests for clarification on this issue from trans communities at UMass and in the Pioneer Valley, we categorically reject transphobia in our department, on our campus, and in our discipline. (qtd. in D, p. 7)

Raymond notes that the “TERF” in question was not named, but it was obvious who the department was referring to, because nobody else was as identified with radical feminism as her, and nobody else had written and done research and writing on transsexualism and transgenderism the way that she did. After her retirement, they issued this, what she calls “this apology for my unspecified presence in the department [that] felt like a heretic’s sentence at her delayed execution” (D, p. 7). They specifically went out of their way to publish a statement saying they regret the way in which “trans-exclusionary radical feminism” had been in their department, which tells you that they do not stand by their professors.

Recapping some of the points that were already made in the 1994 intro, she references Sheila Jeffreys’s Gender Hurts, from 2014, that the word gender was not really used in as much in the 70s, that most often feminists used the term “sex roles,” and that term was used throughout The Transsexual Empire. As I mentioned at the very beginning, that early version of The Transsexual Empire that Raymond wrote in 1977 was titled “Transsexualism: The Ultimate Homage to Sex-Role Power.” Originally, “sex role” was the common terminology used, as opposed to “gender,” and feminists used “sex role” and “sex roles.” Then, of course, it fell into just “gender,” which became a more medical and psychological term, a term that was more abstract and easier to use in the context of something like, say, “gender dysphoria.” Raymond mentions that Jeffreys talks about how “gender” became euphemistic for things like male violence against women, which became “gender-based violence.” Sex became switched with gender, increasingly, and gender became a “stand-in for the term ‘sex,’ as if ‘gender’ itself is biological” (Jeffreys, qtd. in D, p. 9).

She notes some of the dizzying ways that language has multiplied and become so ridiculous as a result of trans tyranny, the force that it has exerted on language. She talks about the branding of women as “transphobic,” that it functions to make people into fearful bystanders incapable of expressing an honest opinion. She says, “Many people want to remain ignorant, not the ignorance of innocence, but a chosen ignorance that wills not to know” (D, p. 10). That’s a line that I really like from Doublethink, from that intro, because it really underscores that the ignorance here is not innocent; it’s that people do not want to know what the reality is. She notes the importance of refusing to capitulate to language on the terms of trans activists—refusing to use, “she/her/hers” for men or “he/him/his” for women, refusing to engage in these reversals, that it matters. It matters to make a conscious objection to it. When it comes to feminist critics of transgenderism, she says, “We champion a Feminism Unmodified, as Catharine MacKinnon has written, although these days, she doesn’t seem to accept that ‘feminism unmodified’ must stand on the shoulders of ‘females unmodified,’ i.e., women who refuse to be defined by men” (D, p. 13). She makes a crack at MacKinnon, who has become, over the years, a prominent trans activist, strangely more in old age—and, of course, she was that decades ago, albeit less known as such. But that is another story.

Raymond says, “Men who identify as women are now capturing a primary place in the history of women” (D, p. 13). She points to the redefinition of women on men’s terms and discusses the perpetrators of violence against men—in this case, “trans women”—that it is most frequently their male domestic partners, most often men who know the other man is male. It is not strangers going out and killing random men in dresses; rather, it is most often the men who are intimate with them, whom they know. She also points out the fact that statistics for violence against women who declare themselves men are virtually nonexistent compared to the amount of statistics for men who declare themselves women. It’s interesting that there are more statistics about men than there are about women, and there’s more concern about the violence the men experience versus the women. She also notes that violence against women within the “trans” and “queer” community—part of what makes it difficult is that, as she points out, it ends up being violence that is perpetrated by other “trans” and “queer” people. It actually ends up being the men within these communities—and there is a tendency not to want to name it, not to want to name that violence.

She references a collection titled You Told Me You Were Different: An Anthology of Harm, edited by Kitty Robinson, which I recommend. This is Robinson, who says, “When someone who has been victimized by a male trans person believes that male trans people are the most stigmatized, oppressed, at risk people on the earth, the act of staying silent about your abuse is positioned as the only morally good option” (Robinson, qtd. in D, p. 16). Women end up being silent because they feel that they should keep these men safe, and that is horrific emotional blackmail that so many of these young women in particular experience. Raymond talks about the value of the voices of women who were formerly “trans,” but who have realized that transition did not solve the underlying problems that they experienced and that they had since then experienced. They came to a kind of “detransition,” which is really embracing their bodies as themselves, returning to a sense of bodily integrity. She talks about the honesty and the value of those narratives, and the goal of Doublethink is to amplify the experiences of those survivors.

NOTE: Even the language of “detransition” can be confusing, but it is a simplified term for working to embrace one’s body in a meaningful way.

Something to end with is how the language is so difficult. She uses an epigraph from George Orwell, from his book 1984, where he writes, “All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’” (Orwell, qtd. in D, p. 1). We see it occur in the difficulty that women have with language. I think the best way to deal with it is to emphasize men and women, but, in some cases, we have to say “trans-identified” to acknowledge someone who claims that status.

NOTE: When trans-identified men perpetrate crimes utilizing their status, such as those Reduxx has documented, insisting the man should be called a man in every headline, not mentioning “trans,” hides the malicious ideology from criticism by refusing to name it.

One of the confusing things about Doublethink is Raymond tries—I’ll make this, at the end, a criticism of the language she tries to use: “self-declared man” and “self-declared woman.” “Self-declared woman” refers to men, and “self-declared man” refers to women. I think she tried to negotiate being able to acknowledge the self-declared-ness of the status of “trans-identified people.” But it does not work out very well in the language. There are moments where the language gets kind of muddled in passages, because it can be confusing. The alternative would have been to say “men who declare themselves women,” “women who declare themselves men”—which is a mouthful each time. It is one of the difficulties with the use of language, with the problems that transsexualism and transgenderism have presented for us in terms of language.

NOTE: It seems worth emphasizing that the struggle for language is because of the ideology and the industry that have disfigured not only human bodies but also thought and language.

She quotes Orwell again on language: “Doublethink means holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them . . . to deny the existence of objective reality” (Orwell, qtd. in D, p. 18). She says that there’s a difficulty in the challenge that we “confront a language that has corrupted reality and a gender industry that sustains it” (D, p. 18). She does recap talking about the issues around men declaring themselves “lesbians” and male violence against women. Doublethink focuses more, as she says, on the survivors, emphasizing women surviving transgenderism, surviving the violence to which men subject them, especially within the “trans” and “queer” community. So, that was the intro to Doublethink.

Here at the very end, I’m very thankful that we’ve had listeners who have stayed along for the talk through those intros.

CLECKLEY (Voiceover): Thank you all so much for listening. I will be planning future spaces and recordings to be announced via Substack and social media. I would like to do a few shorter recordings as well, for more brief commentaries that may or may not be spaces themselves. There will be a transcription of this one available on my Substack, linked in the description below. If you found value in this introduction to Janice G. Raymond’s work on transsexualism and transgenderism, then please like, subscribe, and share. It all helps. Again, thank you all so much.

If you are unable to become a paid subscriber through Substack, then please feel free to donate via PayPal, if able. I am grateful for reader support!

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I have divided Raymond’s two books across nine sessions, which gives about an hour’s discussion for ideas and key quotes from relevant chapters, even permitting some overlapping discussion from session to session.

My general notes will be available for all sessions, not locked behind a paywall, but the incentive for the paid subscribers will be more interactive discussion than possible via X spaces.

Since Wednesday is my only day off work from the laundromat and the minimart, the first X space will be this upcoming Wednesday, January 28, planned for late in the evening in Central Standard Time (CST), likely around 9:00 PM CST.

Texts

Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979/1994).

See Raymond’s website to download and read this book for free.

Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2021).

See the Spinifex Press website to purchase a copy of Raymond’s most recent book.

Sessions

Session I

TE, “Introduction to the 1994 Edition” (pp. xi-xxxv)

TE, “Introduction. Some Comments on Method (for the Methodical)” (pp. 1-18)

D, “Introduction. From Transsexualism to Transgenderism” (pp. 1-20)

Session II

TE, “Chapter I. ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Transsexualism’” (pp. 19-42)

D, “Chapter II. The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?” (pp. 55-86)

Session III

TE, “Chapter II. Are Transsexuals Born or Made—or Both?” (pp. 43-68)

D, “Chapter I. The New Trans Biologism: Female Brains and Female Penises” (pp. 21-54)

Session IV

TE, “Chapter III. ‘Mother’s Feminized Phallus’ or Father’s Castrated Femme?” (pp. 69-98)

D, “Chapter III. Self-Declared Men, Transitioning and De-Transitioning” (pp. 87-121)

Session V

TE, “Chapter IV. Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian Feminist” (pp. 99-119)

D, “Chapter IV. The Trans Culture of Violence Against Women” (pp. 123-154)

Session VI

D, “Chapter V. Gender Identity Trumps Sex in Women’s Sports and Children’s Education” (pp. 155-181)

Session VII

TE, “Chapter V. Therapy as a Way of Life: Medical Values versus Social Change” (pp. 120-153)

TE, “Chapter VI. Toward the Development of an Ethic of Integrity” (pp. 154-177)

Session VIII

D, “Chapter VI. The Trans Gag Rules: Erasing Women, Pronoun Tyranny, and Censoring Critics” (pp. 183-221)

Session IX

TE, “Appendix. Suggestions for Change” (pp. 178-185)

D, “Conclusion” (pp. 223-233)

If you are unable to become a paid subscriber through Substack, then please feel free to donate via PayPal, if able. I am grateful for reader support!

PayPal

Within the next few weeks, I will be having some new posts featuring some curated pieces from women’s history, including some further selections from Mary Wollstonecraft and Victoria Woodhull on women’s experiences with motherhood and marriage.

In Substack news, for all subscribers, I plan on beginning a sort of book club for discussion of historical texts in light of contemporary issues. Work at the laundromat and the minimart with my father has gone relatively well, so I want to plan Zoom sessions, if not before the start of the year, then into January 2026. My thinking is to limit the book club to paid subscribers, as some incentive, perhaps having a few select “open” sessions, depending on interest (and my sanity). I would like to look at both older texts and more recent ones—for instance, Janice G. Raymond’s 1979 Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male read with Helen Joyce’s 2021 Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. Sessions would include works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their relevance to how we approach today’s problems.

Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet.

If it could weep, it could arise and go.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Grief,” 18421

Months like November and December can be especially difficult after the passing of a loved one, such times when families gather and those missing become sharply noticeable more painfully so than other times.

I remember the point where, talking with doctors, it seemed impossible that Momma would make a recovery, as her infection from vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE) led her into sepsis again since major abdominal surgery late that August.

Over those weeks, from late November into early December, I sat watching the screens of medical technology, seeing numbers improve, at first, and then drastically swing into an increasingly hopeless direction.

When the doctors came around, I tried my best to hold myself together, but, closer to the end, I kept choking with sobs when I would speak with them, sometimes unable to use words—as the ventilator deprived Momma of her last utterances.

I held her hand and kissed it, with my tears falling onto her skin.

There were recordings and pictures in the last months of Momma’s life that I still cannot revisit without unbearable pain.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1842 poem “Grief” describes “everlasting watch and moveless woe” that characterize the paralysis of grief—making us the living into monuments to the dead.

I never tell anybody that grief lessens or becomes easier; it becomes manageable, yes, even somewhat livable.

I remember writing a note to the doctors and nurses at Grandview thanking them and saying that we tried, thanking the young Nurse S., who prayed and cried with me, and the motherly Nurse K., who hugged me and was there for Momma’s last day.

There was a nurse who cared about Momma like one would care for a mother or a grandmother—and came to see Momma and left a rose on her chest.

Other sharp moments have faded over the last year, perhaps for the best now, but visions return, sad and happy, grief with hope.

Here is my post from December 3, 2024, one year ago:

Vickie Cleckley, forever beloved Momma to me, passed away this afternoon, surrounded by her family and loved ones. Days and nights, I stayed by her side, sleeping in the hospital room and watching over her—refusing to leave. Momma is free.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Grief,” 1842

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access

Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness

In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare

Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare

Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express

Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death:—

Most like a monumental statue set

In everlasting watch and moveless woe,

Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.

Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet.

If it could weep, it could arise and go.

If you are unable to become a paid subscriber through Substack, then please feel free to donate via PayPal, if able. I am grateful for reader support!

PayPal

The Revolution thus was not merely an event that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life—against tyranny, against law, against convention. The reformer’s love of humanity, which has so much of hatred in it as well as love, fermented within her.

- Virginia Woolf, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” The Nation and Athenæum 46, no. 1, October 5, 19291

Looking at Goodreads, the most liked quote in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication happens to be the following: “I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves” (p. 133). Divorced from its original context, this quote becomes a variation of “pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps”—but for women. Ironically, the original line is Wollstonecraft responding to Rousseau quoted in the same paragraph: “Educate women like men and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us” (emphasis added). According to Rousseau, women’s “power” over men can be measured in men’s desire for them in their lack of resemblance to men, their otherness in their femininity—essentially, women bartering their sexuality for influence over men. Read in context, Wollstonecraft critiques the idea that women must barter their sexuality for “power” over men and, instead, argues for women’s self-possession and real power over themselves in a selfhood not measured by women’s sexual desirability relative to men. So, the most widely quoted line also happens to be the most widely misinterpreted one quoted without reference to Wollstonecraft responding to Rousseau. Within the top five Goodreads quotes listed, among the snippets from Vindication, there is the one about women being taught of beauty as “woman’s sceptre” (p. 112). Scrolling the page of quotes, however, we do not clearly see Wollstonecraft’s analysis of power as much as the readers’ emphasis on liberal individualism in the most palatable bits. Vindication’s radicalism disappears.

Subordinating Wollstonecraft’s philosophy, the selling point of this peculiar ideology has been that whatever an individual woman chooses becomes potentially empowering, if she chooses, and there is no critique of man’s dominion over woman—or how women themselves collaborate in maintaining the political and civil situation of what she calls “the tyranny of man.” To quote Wollstonecraft: “From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed; and the cunning, which I allow makes at present a part of their character, I likewise have repeatedly endeavoured to prove, is produced by oppression” (p. 282). Writers may substitute Goodreads and summaries online for actually reading Wollstonecraft’s book, but the result is a willful distortion.

What material readers “like” the most from Vindication gives an idea of how they read the work—if they do—and what they, for either good or bad, take from it (see image below). The quote “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves” has 1,439 likes; the fifth most liked quote, with 283 likes, says, “It is vain to expect virtue from women until they are, in some degree, independent of men” (p. 221). The most popular line taken from Vindication talks about women having power over themselves rather than power over men, but readers seem noticeably less attracted to Wollstonecraft’s sharp critique of women’s dependency on men.

I have seen arguments pitting Wollstonecraft against feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Matilda Joslyn Gage to Andrea Dworkin, positing later feminists as deviating from Wollstonecraft’s moral philosophy. The argument goes that, while later feminists have argued that women live as victims of men oppressing them under patriarchy, Wollstonecraft argued for their empowerment as individuals. A post-1970s “victim feminism,” so we hear, took the place of this strange distortion of Wollstonecraft never discussing the oppression of women and never discussing women as victims—because women’s empowerment. In this view, the feminist analysis of men oppressing women becomes man hating, which, apparently, deviates from Wollstonecraft’s 1792 master-slave analogy for man’s relation to woman. This kind of argument very seriously misleads readers about Wollstonecraft’s actual writing to negate modern feminism’s rootedness in her analysis. A question arises: How can women have power over themselves as individuals without seeking any degree of female independence against totalizing dependency on men?

The answer to the lingering “Woman Question” cannot be found in arguing that anything a woman chooses—transgenderism, surrogacy, and prostitution—can be empowering to all women because a woman chooses it. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication tangles with precisely the issue of how individual choice does not happen, as if magically, in a context totally independent of social conditions. But the widespread misrepresentation of Wollstonecraft has stripped the revolutionary consciousness from her moral philosophy, replacing her with a doll. As Dworkin has become a “trans ally” philosopher for the left, Wollstonecraft has become a “tradwife” philosopher for the right—neither doing justice to either woman’s ideas. I argue that a close reading of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication reveals condemnations of “victim feminism” today condemn feminism itself more than feminism gone astray.

Slavery is the analogy Wollstonecraft uses for the oppression of women, described in terms of “a system of oppression,” woman forced into unreasonable dependency on man, that indoctrinates not only women but also men (p. 193). Wollstonecraft’s 1792 master-slave analogy for the sexes predates the “lord-bondsman dialectic” in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and, of course, predates Marx and Engels in their development of dialectical materialism by nearly one hundred years.2 This analysis seems the least understood, certainly not “liked,” with her quote about women being “convenient slaves” having only 18 likes contrasting to the one above with 1,439 likes. Here are examples of Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric that demonstrate her feminist analysis of power running counter to liberal distortions of Vindication:

[Women] may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent. (p. 67)

Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature. (p. 103)

Women, it is true, obtaining power by unjust means, by practising or fostering vice, evidently lose the rank which reason would assign them, and they become either abject slaves or capricious tyrants. (p. 113)

[A]cting the part which they foolishly exacted from their lovers, they become abject woers, and fond slaves. (p. 196)

Women are, in common with men, rendered weak and luxurious by the relaxing pleasures which wealth procures; but added to this they are made slaves to their persons, and must render them alluring that man may lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright. (pp. 226)

When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for, indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions to obtain illicit sway. (p. 252)

Besides, how can women be just or generous, when they are the slaves of injustice? (p. 277)

Passages throughout Vindication demonstrate Wollstonecraft’s analysis of power and, furthermore, present early formulations of theoretical positions evident in the work of feminist theorists from Gage to Dworkin. Removed from context, however, the line “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves” does no justice to the depth of Wollstonecraft’s analysis. Distortion transforms her into a marionette who supplies a desired line of dialogue fitting today’s no less dreadful convention than what she opposed in her own day.

From 1792 to present, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication continues to be relevant in many ways, from her critique of women’s status as “slaves” and “play-things” to her analysis of war and revolution. She even raises the issue of unconventional women, those like herself, being led to believe themselves to be men due to the political and civil limitations imposed on them on the basis of their sex. “I have been led to imagine,” she writes, “that the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames” (p. 101). It is not that unconventional women actually have had “male spirits” born in the wrong body, “confined by mistake in female frames,” but that society has subjugated their human development in marking them as “the second sex.” Not recognizing this political reality, a situation evident by now, does nothing for women and girls convinced of the “mistakenness” of their female bodies to be “corrected” into “maleness” by surgical and hormonal interventions.

Wollstonecraft’s Vindication does not put women’s individual choice above understanding women’s social conditions under patriarchy as “the tyranny of man,” an eighteenth-century foremother of the 1970s radical feminist analysis. Today’s antifeminists tell us that feminism must refuse to define woman or else uphold a “gender regime” that oppresses women. Feminism, so we hear, has become an oppressive regime—becoming a “Big Sister,” like the Orwellian Big Brother—because feminists criticize women’s choices for transgenderism, surrogacy, and prostitution. They infantilize women by treating them as if they cannot be criticized while simultaneously complaining about women’s infantilization. To quote Emerson, they “fall into the vulgar mistake” of believing themselves persecuted whenever contradicted—and they hold the monopoly on contradictions. Self-identified “Marxist” critics along these lines should research the following: What have communist regimes done to working-class people who have objected to communism? By contrast, feminism has not rounded up its female dissidents and imprisoned them, executed them and their families, or starved them to death.

Antifeminists have mistaken their perverse fantasies for rigorous critique, and they have alienated themselves from reality itself. They remain mired in superficial ideological wordplay serving grand persecutory delusions. Feminism has perpetrated no Holodomor, also called the Ukrainian famine, or Great Terror, both under Stalin’s Soviet Union; no Great Chinese Famine or Cultural Revolution, like under Mao; no Cambodian genocide, like under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.3 The moral indolence of antifeminists makes them fascism’s tools, and they fawn over tyrannical regimes when convenient for their shallow political moralizing. To quote Wollstonecraft: “The indolent puppet of a court first becomes a luxurious monster, or fastidious sensualist, and then makes the contagion which his unnatural state spread, the instrument of tyranny” (p. 83). Perversely, feminism’s modern hecklers confuse the feminist critique of women’s individual choice with prison labor and mass murder beneath truly oppressive totalitarian regimes into modernity. Even more ironically, feminism has become a scapegoat for the left’s many -isms: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism.

Asked why so many women submit to their oppression, as if simply the order of things, Wollstonecraft replies: “Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment—women have only done the same” (p. 104). That individual women collaborate in women’s oppression has remained unchanging, as one from any oppressed class, racially or economically, may comply with tyranny against its class. Varieties of retardation not only visible in modern feminism but also evident among its antifeminist counterparts have their roots in the unchecked moral indolence among women that Wollstonecraft criticized in 1792.

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Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, excerpts from the Oxford University Press 2008 reissued edition.

To M. Talleyrand-Périgord, Late Bishop of Autun

If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of woman, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test: though a different opinion prevails in this country, built on the very arguments which you use to justify the oppression of woman—prescription.

Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote their happiness? Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?

In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful. Do you not act a similar part, when you force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark? for surely, Sir, you will not assert, that a duty can be binding which is not founded on reason? If indeed this be their destination, arguments may be drawn from reason: and thus augustly supported, the more understanding women acquire, the more they will be attached to their duty—comprehending it—for unless they comprehend it, unless their morals be fixed on the same immutable principle as those of man, no authority can make them discharge it in a virtuous manner. They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.

But, if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason—else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality.

I have repeatedly asserted, and produced what appeared to me irrefragable arguments drawn from matters of fact, to prove my assertion, that women cannot, by force, be confined to domestic concerns; for they will, however ignorant, intermeddle with more weighty affairs, neglecting private duties only to disturb, by cunning tricks, the orderly plans of reason which rise above their comprehension.

Besides, whilst they are only made to acquire personal accomplishments, men will seek for pleasure in variety, and faithless husbands will make faithless wives; such ignorant beings, indeed, will be very excusable when, not taught to respect public good, nor allowed any civil rights, they attempt to do themselves justice by retaliation.

. . .

But, till men become attentive to the duty of a father, it is vain to expect women to spend that time in their nursery which they, “wise in their generation,” choose to spend at their glass; for this exertion of cunning is only an instinct of nature to enable them to obtain indirectly a little of that power of which they are unjustly denied a share: for, if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges.

[67-68]

Introduction

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

. . .

The education of women has, of late, been more attended to than formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,—the only way women can rise in the world,—by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act:—they dress; they paint, and nickname God’s creatures.—Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio! Can they be expected to govern a family with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world?

. . .

Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert, that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire. Let men become more chaste and modest, and if women do not grow wiser in the same ratio, it will be clear that they have weaker understandings. It seems scarcely necessary to say, that I now speak of the sex in general. Many individuals have more sense than their male relatives; and, as nothing preponderates where there is a constant struggle for an equilibrium, without it has naturally more gravity, some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.

[73-75]

Chapter I—The Rights and Involved Duties of Mankind Considered

It is of great importance to observe that the character of every man is, in some degree, formed by his profession. A man of sense may only have a cast of countenance that wears off as you trace his individuality, whilst the weak , common man has scarcely ever any character, but what belongs to the body; at least, all his opinions have been so steeped in the vat consecrated by authority, that the faint spirit which the grape of his own vine yields cannot be distinguished.

Society, therefore, as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.

In the infancy of society, when men were just emerging out of barbarism, chiefs and priests, touching the most powerful springs of savage conduct, hope and fear, must have had unbounded sway. An aristocracy, of course, is naturally the first form of government. But, clashing interests soon losing their equipoise, a monarchy and hierarchy break out of the confusion of ambitious struggles, and the foundation of both is secured by feudal tenures. This appears to be the origi n o f monarchica l an d priestl y power , an d th e daw n o f civilization. But such combustible materials cannot long be pent up; and, getting vent in foreign wars and intestine insurrection, the people acquire some power in the tumult, which obliges their rulers to gloss over their oppression with a shew of right. Thus, as wars, agriculture, commerce, and literature, expand the mind, despots are compelled, to make covert corruption hold fast the power which was formerly snatched by open force. And this baneful lurking gangrene is most quickly spread by luxury and superstition, the sure dregs of ambition. The indolent puppet of a court first becomes a luxurious monster, or fastidious sensualist, and then makes the contagion which his unnatural state spread, the instrument of tyranny.

[82-83]

Chapter II—The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed

To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.

. . .

Riches and hereditary honours have made cyphers of women to give consequence to the numerical figure; and idleness has produced a mixture of gallantry and despotism into society, which leads the very men who are the slaves of their mistresses, to tyrannize over their sisters, wives, and daughters. This is only keeping them in rank and file, it is true. Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing. The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them.

. . .

Women ought to endeavour to purify their heart; but can they do so when their uncultivated understandings make them entirely dependent on their senses for employment and amusement, when no noble pursuit sets them above the little vanities of the day, or enables them to curb the wild emotions that agitate a reed over which every passing breeze has power? To gain the affections of a virtuous man, is affectation necessary? Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man; but, to ensure her husband’s affections, must a wife, who, by the exercise of her mind and body, whilst she was discharging the duties of a daughter, wife, and mother, has allowed her constitution to retain its natural strength, and her nerves a healthy tone, is she, I say, to condescend to use art, and feign a sickly delicacy, in order to secure her husband’s affection? Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!

. . .

How women are to exist in that state where there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told. For though moralists have agreed that the tenor of life seems to prove that man is prepared by various circumstances for a future state, they constantly concur in advising woman only to provide for the present. Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.

. . .

They were made to be loved, and must not aim at respect, lest they should be hunted out of society as masculine.

. . .

What does history disclose but marks of inferiority, and how few women have emancipated themselves from the galling yoke of sovereign man?—So few, that the exceptions remind me of an ingenious conjecture respecting Newton: that he was probably a being of a superior order, accidentally caged in a human body. In the same style I have been led to imagine that the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames.

. . .

. . . I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex. . . .

It appears to me necessary to dwell on these obvious truths, because females have been insulated, as it were; and, while they have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny. Love, in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.

As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shewn any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. Why have men of superior endowments submitted to such degradation? For, is it not universally acknowledged that kings, viewed collectively, have ever been inferior, in abilities and virtue, to the same number of men taken from the common mass of mankind—yet, have they not, and are they not still treated with a degree of reverence that is an insult to reason? China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God. Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment—women have only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.

[84, 90, 94-95, 100-101, 103-104]

Chapter III—The Same Subject Continued

Women are every where in this deplorable state; for, in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour. But was their understanding once emancipated from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man and their short-sighted desire, like that of dominion in tyrants, of present sway, has subjected them, we should probably read of their weaknesses with surprise.

. . .

Women, it is true, obtaining power by unjust means, by practising or fostering vice, evidently lose the rank which reason would assign them, and they become either abject slaves or capricious tyrants. They lose all simplicity, all dignity of mind, in acquiring power, and act as men are observed to act when they have been exalted by the same means.

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.

[112-113]

Chapter IV—Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes

That woman is naturally weak, or degraded by a concurrence of circumstances, is, I think, clear. But this position I shall simply contrast with a conclusion, which I have frequenly heard fall from sensible men in favour of an aristocracy: that the mass of mankind cannot be any thing, or the obsequious slaves, who patiently allow themselves to be penned up, would feel their own consequence, and spurn their chains. Men, they further observe, submit every where to oppression, when they have only to lift up their heads to throw off the yoke; yet, instead of asserting their birthright, they quietly lick the dust, and say, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Women, I argue from analogy, are degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment; and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain. But I must be more explicit.

. . .

Pleasure is the business of woman’s life, according to the present modification of society, and while it continues to be so, little can be expected from such weak beings. Inheriting, in a lineal descent from the first fair defect in nature, the sovereignty of beauty, they have, to maintain their power, resigned the natural rights, which the exercise of reason might have procured them, and chosen rather to be short-lived queens than labour to obtain the sober pleasures that arise from equality. Exalted by their inferiority (this sounds like a contradiction) they constantly demand homage as women, though experience should teach them that the men who pride themselves upon paying this arbitrary insolent respect to the sex, with the most scrupulous exactness, are most inclined to tyrannize over, and despise, the very weakness they cherish.

. . .

In the middle rank of life, to continue the comparison, men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are now employed in rearing such noble structures. To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted. A man when he enters any profession has his eye steadily fixed on some future advantage (and the mind gains great strength by having all its efforts directed to one point) and, full of his business, pleasure is considered as mere relaxation; whilst women seek for pleasure as the main purpose of existence. In fact, from the education, which they receive from society, the love of pleasure may be said to govern them all; but does this prove that there is a sex in souls? It would be just as rational to declare that the courtiers in France, when a destructive system of despotism had formed their character, were not men, because liberty, virtue, and humanity, were sacrificed to pleasure and vanity.—Fatal passions, which have ever domineered over the whole race!

. . .

Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man for every comfort. In the most trifling dangers they cling to their support, with parasitical tenacity, piteously demanding succour; and their natural protector extends his arm, or lifts up his voice, to guard the lovely trembler—from what? Perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse; a rat, would be a serious danger. In the name of reason, and even common sense, what can save such beings from contempt; even though they be soft and fair?

These fears, when not affected, may be very pretty; but they shew a degree of imbecility that degrades a rational creature in a way women are not aware of—for love and esteem are very distinct things.

I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantile airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise, and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed, and their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the remark still further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true, they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason. “Educate women like men,” says Rousseau, “and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us.” This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

In the same strain have I heard men argue against instructing the poor; for many are the forms that aristocracy assumes. “Teach them to read and write,” say they, “and you take them out of the station assigned them by nature.” An eloquent Frenchman has answered them, I will borrow his sentiments. But they know not, when they make man a brute, that they may expect every instant to see him transformed into a ferocious beast. Without knowledge there can be no morality!

Ignorance is a frail base for virtue! Yet, that it is the condition for which woman was organized, has been insisted upon by the writers who have most vehemently argued in favour of the superiority of man; a superiority not in degree, but essence; though, to soften the argument, they have laboured to prove, with chivalrous generosity, that the sexes ought not to be compared; man was made to reason, woman to feel; and that together, flesh and spirit, they make the most perfect whole, by blending happily reason and sensibility into one character.

. . .

Women of quality seldom do any of the manual part of their dress, consequently only their taste is exercised, and they acquire, by thinking less of the finery, when the business of their toilet is over, that ease, which seldom appears in the deportment of women, who dress merely for the sake of dressing. In fact, the observation with respect to the middle rank, the one in which talents thrive best, extends not to women; for those of the superior class, by catching, at least, a smattering of literature, and conversing more with men, on general topics, acquire more knowledge than the women who ape their fashions and faults without sharing their advantages. With respect to virtue; to use the word in a comprehensive sense, I have seen most in low life. Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the fathers would have scattered abroad; but gentlewomen are too indolent to be actively virtuous, and are softened rather than refined by civilization. Indeed, the good sense which I have met with, among the poor women who have had few advantages of education, and yet have acted heroically, strongly confirmed me in the opinion that trifling employments have rendered woman a trifler. Man, taking her body, the mind is left to rust; so that while physical love enervates man, as being his favourite recreation, he will endeavour to enslave woman:—and, who can tell, how many generations may be necessary to give vigour to the virtue and talents of the freed posterity of abject slaves.

[121, 124, 129-130, 132-133, 148]

Chapter V—Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt

Hapless woman! what can be expected from thee when the beings on whom thou art said naturally to depend for reason and support, have all an interest in deceiving thee! This is the root of the evil that has shed a corroding mildew on all thy virtues; and blighting in the bud thy opening faculties, has rendered thee the weak thing thou art! It is this separate interest—this insidious state of warfare, that undermines morality, and divides mankind!

If love have made some women wretched—how many more has the cold unmeaning intercourse of gallantry rendered vain and useless! yet this heartless attention to the sex is reckoned so manly, so polite, that till society is very differently organized, I fear, this vestige of gothic manners will not be done away by a more reasonable and affectionate mode of conduct.

. . .

Woman in particular, whose virtue is built on mutual prejudices, seldom attains to this greatness of mind; so that, becoming the slave of her own feelings, she is easily subjugated by those of others. Thus degraded, her reason, her misty reason! is employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains.

Indignantly have I heard women argue in the same track as men, and adopt the sentiments that brutalize them, with all the pertinacity of ignorance.

. . .

[On Rousseau] For never was there a sensualist who paid more fervent adoration at the shrine of beauty. So devout, indeed, was his respect for the person, that excepting the virtue of chastity, for obvious reasons, he only wished to see it embellished by charms, weaknesses, and errors. He was afraid lest the austerity of reason should disturb the soft playfulness of love. The master wished to have a meretricious slave to fondle, entirely dependent on his reason and bounty; he did not want a companion, whom he should be compelled to esteem, or a friend to whom he could confide the care of his children’s education, should death deprive them of their father, before he had fulfilled the sacred task. He denies woman reason, shuts her out from knowledge, and turns her aside from truth; yet his pardon is granted, because “he admits the passion of love.” It would require some ingenuity to shew why women were to be under such an obligation to him for thus admitting love; when it is clear that he admits it only for the relaxation of men, and to perpetuate the species; but he talked with passion, and that powerful spell worked on the sensibility of a young encomiast. “What signifies it,” pursues this rhapsodist, “to women, that his reason disputes with them the empire, when his heart is devotedly theirs.” It is not empire,—but equality, that they should contend for. Yet, if they only wished to lengthen out their sway, they should not entirely trust to their persons, for though beauty may gain a heart, it cannot keep it, even while the beauty is in full bloom, unless the mind lend, at least, some graces.

. . .

I know that a kind of fashion now prevails of respecting prejudices; and when any one dares to face them, though actuated by humanity and armed by reason, he is superciliously asked whether his ancestors were fools. No, I should reply; opinions, at first, of every description, were all, probably, considered, and therefore were founded on some reason; yet not unfrequently, of course, it was rather a local expedient than a fundamental principle, that would be reasonable at all times. But, moss-covered opinions assume the disproportioned form of prejudices, when they are indolently adopted only because age has given them a venerable aspect, though the reason on which they were built ceases to be a reason, or cannot be traced. Why are we to love prejudices, merely because they are prejudices? A prejudice is a fond obstinate persuasion for which we can give no reason; for the moment a reason can be given for an opinion, it ceases to be a prejudice, though it may be an error in judgment: and are we then advised to cherish opinions only to set reason at defiance? This mode of arguing, if arguing it may be called, reminds me of what is vulgarly termed a woman’s reason. For women sometimes declare that they love, or believe, certain things, because they love, or believe them.

. . .

The senses and the imagination give a form to the character, during childhood and youth; and the understanding, as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility—till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulse of the heart, morality is made to rest on a rock against which the storms of passion vainly beat.

I hope I shall not be misunderstood when I say, that religion will not have this condensing energy, unless it be founded on reason. If it be merely the refuge of weakness or wild fanaticism, and not a governing principle of conduct, drawn from self-knowledge, and a rational opinion respecting the attributes of God, what can it be expected to produce? The religion which consists in warming the affections, and exalting the imagination, is only the poetical part, and may afford the individual pleasure without rendering it a more moral being. It may be a substitute for worldly pursuits; yet narrow, instead of enlarging the heart: but virtue must be loved as in itself sublime and excellent, and not for the advantages it procures or the evils it averts, if any great degree of excellence be expected. Men will not become moral when they only build airy castles in a future world to compensate for the disappointments which they meet with in this; if they turn their thoughts from relative duties to religious reveries.

Most prospects in life are marred by the shuffling worldly wisdom of men, who, forgetting that they cannot serve God and mammon, endeavour to blend contradictory things.—If you wish to make your son rich, pursue one course—if you are only anxious to make him virtuous, you must take another; but do not imagine that you can bound from one road to the other without losing your way.

[171, 176, 178, 188-189, 190]

Chapter VI—The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas Has Upon the Character

Educated in the enervating style recommended by the writers on whom I have been animadverting; and not having a chance, from their subordinate state in society, to recover their lost ground, is it surprising that women every where appear a defect in nature? Is it surprising, when we consider what a determinate effect an early association of ideas has on the character, that they neglect their understandings, and turn all their attention to their persons?

. . .

Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy of organs; and thus weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?—where find strength to recur to reason and rise superiour to a system of oppression, that blasts the fair promises of spring? This cruel association of ideas, which every thing conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or, to speak with more precision, of feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for themselves; for they then perceive that it is only through their address to excite emotions in men, that pleasure and power are to be obtained. Besides, all the books professedly written for their instruction, which make the first impression on their minds, all inculcate the same opinions. Educated then in worse than Egyptian bondage, it is unreasonable, as well as cruel, to upbraid them with faults that can scarcely be avoided, unless a degree of native vigour be supposed, that falls to the lot of very few amongst mankind.

. . .

Men, for whom we are told women were made, have too much occupied the thoughts of women; and this association has so entangled love with all their motives of action; and, to harp a little on an old string, having been solely employed either to prepare themselves to excite love, or actually putting their lessons in practice, they cannot live without love. But, when a sense of duty, or fear of shame, obliges them to restrain this pampered desire of pleasing beyond certain lengths, too far for delicacy, it is true, though far from criminality, they obstinately determine to love, I speak of the passion, their husbands to the end of the chapter—and then acting the part which they foolishly exacted from their lovers, they become abject woers, and fond slaves.

[191, 192-193, 196]

Chapter VII—Modesty—Comprehensively Considered, and Not as a Sexual Virtue

Men will probably still insist that woman ought to have more modesty than man; but it is not dispassionate reasoners who will most earnestly oppose my opinion. No, they are the men of fancy, the favourites of the sex, who outwardly respect and inwardly despise the weak creatures whom they thus sport with. They cannot submit to resign the highest sensual gratification, nor even to relish the epicurism of virtue—self-denial.

. . .

As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and every thing tends to make them so. I do not forget the spurts of activity which sensibility produces; but as these flights of feelings only increase the evil, they are not to be confounded with the slow, orderly walk of reason. So great in reality is their mental and bodily indolence, that till their body be strengthened and their understanding enlarged by active exertions, there is little reason to expect that modesty will take place of bashfulness. They may find it prudent to assume its semblance; but the fair veil will only be worn on gala days.

. . .

Would ye, O my sisters, really possess modesty, ye must remember that the possession of virtue, of any denomination, is incompatible with ignorance and vanity! ye must acquire that soberness of mind, which the exercise of duties, and the pursuit of knowledge, alone inspire, or ye will still remain in a doubtful dependent situation, and only be loved whilst ye are fair! The downcast eye, the rosy blush, the retiring grace, are all proper in their season; but modesty, being the child of reason, cannot long exist with the sensibility that is not tempered by reflection. Besides, when love, even innocent love, is the whole employ of your lives, your hearts will be too soft to afford modesty that tranquil retreat, where she delights to dwell, in close union with humanity.

[204, 207, 208-209]

Chapter VIII—Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation

. . . For I will venture to assert, that all the causes of female weakness, as well as depravity, which I have already enlarged on, branch out of one grand cause—want of chastity in men.

This intemperance, so prevalent, depraves the appetite to such a degree, that a wanton stimulus is necessary to rouse it; but the parental design of nature is forgotten, and the mere person, and that for a moment, alone engrosses the thoughts. So voluptuous, indeed, often grows the lustful prowler, that he refines on female softness. Something more soft than woman is then sought for; till, in Italy and Portugal, men attend the levees of equivocal beings, to sigh for more than female langour.

To satisfy this genus of men, women are made systematically voluptuous, and though they may not all carry their libertinism to the same height, yet this heartless intercourse with the sex, which they allow themselves, depraves both sexes, because the taste of men is vitiated; and women, of all classes, naturally square their behaviour to gratify the taste by which they obtain pleasure and power.

. . .

Contrasting the humanity of the present age with the barbarism of antiquity, great stress has been laid on the savage custom of exposing the children whom their parents could not maintain; whilst the man of sensibility, who thus, perhaps, complains, by his promiscuous amours produces a most destructive barrenness and contagious flagitiousness of manners. Surely nature never intended that women, by satisfying an appetite, should frustrate the very purpose for which it was implanted?

. . .

The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other. This I believe to be an indisputable truth, extending it to every virtue. Chastity, modesty, public spirit, and all the noble train of virtues, on which social virtue and happiness is built, should be understood and cultivated by all mankind, or they will be cultivated to little effect. And, instead of furnishing the vicious or idle with a pretext for violating some sacred duty, by terming it a sexual one, it would be wiser to shew that nature has not made any difference, for that the unchaste man doubly defeats the purpose of nature, by rendering women barren, and destroying his own constitution, though he avoids the shame that pursues the crime in the other sex. These are the physical consequences, the moral are still more alarming; for virtue is only a nominal distinction when the duties of citizens, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and directors of families, become merely the selfish ties of convenience.

[218-219]

Chapter IX—Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society

. . . [L]et me return to the more specious slavery which chains the very soul of woman, keeping her for ever under the bondage of ignorance.

The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants, and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station, and when the duties are not fulfilled the affections cannot gain sufficient strength to fortify the virtue of which they are not natural reward. Still there are some loop-holes out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself; but for a woman it is an herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost superhuman powers.

A truly benevolent legislator always endeavours to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous; and thus private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common centre. But, the private or public virtue of woman is very problematical; for Rousseau, and a numerous list of male writers, insist that she should all her life be subjected to a severe restraint, that of propriety. Why subject her to propriety—blind propriety, if she be capable of acting from a nobler spring, if she be an heir of immortality? Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man? Is not this indirectly to deny woman reason? for a gift is a mockery, if it be unfit for use.

Women are, in common with men, rendered weak and luxurious by the relaxing pleasures which wealth procures; but added to this they are made slaves to their persons, and must render them alluring that man may lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright. Or should they be ambitious, they must govern their tyrants by sinister tricks, for without rights there cannot be any incumbent duties. The laws respecting woman, which I mean to discuss in a future part, make an absurd unit of a man and his wife; and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cypher.

The being who discharges the duties of its station is independent; and, speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother. The rank in life which dispenses with their fulfilling this duty, necessarily degrades them by making them mere dolls.

. . .

In how many ways do I wish, from the purest benevolence, to impress this truth on my sex; yet I fear that they will not listen to a truth that dear bought experience has brought home to many an agitated bosom, nor willingly resign the privileges of rank and sex for the privileges of humanity, to which those have no claim who do not discharge its duties.

Those writers are particularly useful, in my opinion, who make man feel for man, independent of the station he fills, or the drapery of factitious sentiments. I then would fain convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks, and prevail on them to weigh dispassionately the whole tenor of my observations.—I appeal to their understandings; and, as a fellow-creature claim, in the name of my sex, some interest in their hearts. I entreat them to assist to emancipate their companion, to make her a help meet for them!

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves; and the peace of mind of a worthy man would not be interrupted by the idle vanity of his wife, nor his babes sent to nestle in a strange bosom, having never found a home in their mother’s.

[225-226, 231]

Chapter X—Parental Affection

Woman, however, a slave in every situation to prejudice seldom exerts enlightened maternal affection; for she either neglects her children, or spoils them by improper indulgence. Besides, the affection of some women for their children is, as I have before termed it, frequently very brutish; for it eradicates every spark of humanity. Justice, truth, every thing is sacrificed by these Rebekahs, and for the sake of their own children they violate the most sacred duties, forgetting the common relationship that binds the whole family on earth together. Yet, reason seems to say, that they who suffer one duty, or affection, to swallow up the rest, have not sufficient heart or mind to fulfil that one conscientiously. It then loses the venerable aspect of a duty, and assumes the fantastic form of a whim.

. . .

The formation of the mind must be begun very early, and the temper, in particular, requires the most judicious attention—an attention which women cannot pay who only love their children because they are their children, and seek no further for the foundation of their duty, than in the feelings of the moment. It is this want of reason in their affections which makes women so often run into extremes, and either be the most fond or most careless and unnatural mothers.

To be a good mother—a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands.

[233]

Chapter XI—Duty to Parents

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr. Locke very judiciously observes, that “if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vigour and industry.” This strict hand may, in some degree, account for the weakness of women; for girls, from various causes, are more kept down by their parents, in every sense of the word, than boys. The duty expected from them is, like all the duties arbitrarily imposed on women, more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for decorum, than reason; and thus taught slavishly to submit to their parents, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage. I may be told that a number of women are not slaves in the marriage state. True, but they then become tyrants; for it is not rational freedom, but a lawless kind of power, resembling the authority exercised by the favourites of absolute monarchs, which they obtain by debasing means. I do not, likewise, dream of insinuating that either boys or girls are always slaves, I only insist, that when they are obliged to submit to authority blindly, their faculties are weakened, and their tempers rendered imperious or abject. I also lament that parents, indolently availing themselves of a supposed privilege, damp the first faint glimmering of reason rendering at the same time the duty, which they are so anxious to enforce, an empty name; because they will not let it rest on the only basis on which a duty can rest securely: for, unless it be founded on knowledge, it cannot gain sufficient strength to resist the squalls of passion, or the silent sapping of self-love. But it is not the parents who have given the surest proof of their affection for their children, or, to speak more properly, who by fulfilling their duty, have allowed a natural parental affection to take root in their hearts, the child of exercised sympathy and reason, and not the over-weening offspring of selfish pride, who most vehemently insist on their children submitting to their will, merely because it is their will. On the contrary, the parent, who sets a good example, patiently lets that example work; and it seldom fails to produce its natural effect—filial reverence.

[237-238]

Chapter XII—On National Education

Women have been allowed to remain in ignorance, and slavish dependence, many, very many years, and still we hear of nothing but their fondness of pleasure and sway, their preference of rakes and soldiers, their childish attachment to toys, and the vanity that makes them value accomplishments more than virtues.

History brings forward a fearful catalogue of the crimes which their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves have had sufficient address to over-reach their masters. In France, and in how many other countries, have men been the luxurious despots, and women the crafty ministers? Does this prove that ignorance and dependence domesticate them? Is not their folly the by-word of the libertines, who relax in their society; and do not men of sense continually lament that an immoderate fondness for dress and dissipation carries the mother of a family for ever from home? Their hearts have not been debauched by knowledge, or their minds led astray by scientific pursuits; yet, they do not fulfil the peculiar duties which as women they are called upon by nature to fulfil. On the contrary, the state of warfare which subsists between the sexes, makes them employ those wiles, that often frustrate the more open designs of force.

When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for, indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions to obtain illicit sway.

[252]

Chapter XIII—Some Instances of the Folly Which the Ignorance of Women Generates; with Concluding Reflections on the Moral Improvement That a Revolution in Female Manners Might Naturally Be Expected to Produce

Women are supposed to possess more sensibility, and even humanity, than men, and their strong attachments and instantaneous emotions of compassion are given as proofs; but the clinging affection of ignorance has seldom any thing noble in it, and may mostly be resolved into selfishness, as well as the affection of children and brutes. I have known many weak women whose sensibility was entirely engrossed by their husbands; and as for their humanity, it was very faint indeed, or rather it was only a transient emotion of compassion, “Humanity does not consist in a squeamish ear,” says an eminent orator. “It belongs to the mind as well as the nerves.”

But this kind of exclusive affection, though it degrade the individual, should not be brought forward as a proof of the inferiority of the sex, because it is the natural consequence of confined views: for even women of superior sense, having their attention turned to little employments, and private plans, rarely rise to heroism, unless when spurred on by love; and love as an heroic passion, like genius, appears but once in an age. I therefore agree with the moralist who asserts, “that women have seldom so much generosity as men;” and that their narrow affections, to which justice and humanity are often sacrificed, render the sex apparently inferior, especially as they are commonly inspired by men; but I contend, that the heart would expand as the understanding gained strength, if women were not depressed from their cradles.

I know that a little sensibility and great weakness will produce a strong sexual attachment, and that reason must cement friendship; consequently I allow, that more friendship is to be found in the male than the female world, and that men have a higher sense of justice. The exclusive affections of women seem indeed to resemble Cato’s most unjust love for his country. He wished to crush Carthage, not to save Rome, but to promote its vain glory; and in general, it is to similar principles that humanity is sacrificed, for genuine duties support each other.

Besides, how can women be just or generous, when they are the slaves of injustice?

. . .

From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed; and the cunning, which I allow makes at present a part of their character, I likewise have repeatedly endeavoured to prove, is produced by oppression.

Were not dissenters, for instance, a class of people, with strict truth characterized as cunning? And may I not lay some stress on this fact to prove, that when any power but reason curbs the free spirit of man, dissimulation is practised, and the various shifts of art are naturally called forth? Great attention to decorum, which was carried to a degree of scrupulosity, and all that puerile bustle about trifles and consequential solemnity, which Butler’s caricature of a dissenter brings before the imagination, shaped their persons as well as their minds in the mould of prim littleness. I speak collectively, for I know how many ornaments to human nature have been enrolled amongst sectaries; yet, I assert, that the same narrow prejudice for their sect, which women have for their families, prevailed in the dissenting part of the community, however worthy in other respects; and also that the same timid prudence, or headstrong efforts, often disgraced the exertions of both. Oppression thus formed many of the features of their character perfectly to coincide with that of the oppressed half of mankind; for is it not notorious, that dissenters were like women, fond of deliberating together, and asking advice of each other, till by a complication of little contrivances, some little end was brought about? A similar attention to preserve their reputation was conspicuous in the dissenting and female world, and was produced by a similar cause.

Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense.

[277, 282-283]

Under “Further Reading,” I have made selections of various works discussing Wollstonecraft for a survey of modern readings that I have found useful.

Further Reading

Perspectives on Wollstonecraft

Virginia Woolf, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” 1929, in Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett, 1979 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1980), 96-103.

Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography, 1972 (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1973). See, especially, chapter ten “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),” 147-166.

Erika Bachiochi, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).

Selected Articles

Moira Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” Feminist Review 42 (Autumn 1992): 82-102, https://doi.org/10.2307/1395131.

Susan Ferguson, “The Radical Ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 32, no. 3 (September 1999): 427-450, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423900013913.

Laura Brace, “‘Not Empire, but Equality’: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marriage State, and the Sexual Contract,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 4, 433-455, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9760.00111.

Eileen M. Hunt, “The Family as Cave, Platoon, and Prison: The Three Stages of Wollstonecraft’s Philosophy of the Family,” The Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 81-119, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670500031624.

Eileen Hunt Botting, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightened Legacy: The ‘Modern Social Imaginary’ of the Egalitarian Family,” The American Behavioral Scientist 49, no. 5 (January 2006): 687-701, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764205282213.

Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.

- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman1

O Liberty, we have seen thee hunted from country to country, crushed by conquest, groaning under slavery, insulted in courts, banished from the schools, laughed at in saloons, caricatured in workshops, denounced in churches! It seems thou shouldest find in thought an inviolable refuge. But if thou art to surrender in this thy last asylum, what becomes of the hopes of ages and the boasted courage of the human race?

- Josephine Butler, Introduction to Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays2

Some of them tell us that other things are more important than the liberty of women—than the liberty of working women.

- Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story3

Women’s Movement, Then and Now

“A passionate love of freedom, a strong desire to do social service, and an intense sympathy for the unfortunate”—Sylvia Pankhurst’s words from 1911 on the makings of the women’s militant suffrage movement remain applicable today.4 Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island recalls, for me, accounts of the UK women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century—this urgency of women doing what they felt necessary for women. For the present, McAnena gives remarkably detailed portraits of Stephanie Davies-Arai, Dr. Nicola Williams, Kellie-Jay Keen, and Maya Forstater—women on a great mission not unlike the suffragists before them.5

During the Spinifex Press book launch, this past month on August 14, Helen Joyce made a great point about the women McAnena has chosen, saying:

People are always asking—you’ll have been asked this a million times—what do you think makes all of the people who stepped up different from the people who didn’t. I think the word they want you to get to is ‘courage,’ and I always resist it because it feels too trite. So, you do what every good writer does, which is you showed; you didn’t tell. At book length, you show us what was specific, and what was generic, as in common to all of them, between those people. Alongside the word ‘courage,’ I don’t think any of the people in the book would disagree if I said ‘disagreeable’ is one of those words. We talk about this a lot ourselves inside Sex Matters: Women need to be a bit disagreeable in order to stand up and say when things are going wrong.

TERF Island does not tell a story of universal female agreement on all social and political issues, as such a consensus does not exist—seemingly obvious enough but nevertheless worth acknowledging. Varying ideologues trashing women’s rights activism today point to political differences among women as if they have not always existed not only for this movement but also for other social movements. Like the woman suffragists before women today, there has been no lack of disagreement in terms of approach and what issues matter to address.

To demonstrate women’s political difference, let us consider historical facts.

• Championing the war and contrasting the Pankhurst family’s prior socialist pacifism, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst split from Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst, both of whom opposed World War I, both leading communists. Emmeline and Christabel leaned into nationalism and jingoism against Germany, as The Suffragette became Britannia in 1914, prioritizing the war effort over women’s rights. Many women followed, as seems the case in times of war no less today than one hundred years ago. These same years marked a split among the British suffragettes over the role of working-class women, with Sylvia diverging from both her mother and her sister. According to Sylvia, Emmeline and Christabel judged that “a working woman’s movement was of no value: working women were the weakest portion of the sex: how could it be otherwise? Their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the contest.”6

• Some former suffragettes, like Mary Richardson, first a socialist, went on to sympathize with Germany and what it framed in terms of a fight for national independence; some became Nazi sympathizers, believing the Germans to be victims of global injustice. Starvation and disease in Germany during the Allied blockade, from 1914 to 1919, led to 763,000 German civilian deaths, according to the German Board of Public Health in December 1918, scrutinized and revised to approximately 424,000 by 1928. Given the circumstances, it would have been easy to argue that Germany had been subjected to imperialism at the hands of two powerful empires: the United States and the UK.7

• Politically and geographically, Emmeline’s daughters went their very separate ways: Christabel became an evangelist in the U.S., who believed the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ was upon us; Sylvia remained a communist, opposing imperialism and colonialism, particularly involved with Ethiopian activism; Adela co-founded both the far-left Communist Party of Australia in 1920, later expelled, and the far-right Australia First Movement in 1941.8

I provide the above sketch to illustrate how the women’s movement resists the caricaturing by its most ignorant detractors at present, those who dismiss women’s resistance to trans ideology not unlike past dismissals of women’s rights activism. Moral panics about women’s political differences, as if unprecedented, miss the principle of disagreement intrinsic to women’s rights activism since its earliest years. The past of this social movement gives us a useful map for understanding the present, if only we read it.

(To the question of linking the present women’s rights movement to past iterations, Joyce has recommended Susanna Rustin’s 2024 Sexed: A History of British Feminism, which I plan on trying to get soon, pending some birthday book money.)

TERF Island as Social History

Returning to TERF Island in the present, women of great courage remain disagreeable by necessity, and being disagreeable seems necessary to being courageous. That McAnena’s book is “a social history—it puts people at the center of it,” as Joyce says, underscores the distinctness of her approach: portraits of people. I found it helpful that she used the example of her own book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, from 2021, to note the difference in McAnena’s approach. While Joyce’s Trans analyzes “trans” as an idea, the ideology behind the industry—every industry has an ideology—McAnena’s TERF Island takes us to “the people involved, the actors in this story,” as Joyce explained. Not forgetting the many victims, the survivors, Joyce emphasizes, there is value in telling social history that foregrounds responding to a crisis—in this case, trans ideology and its consequences for women, children, and families throughout society.

Because social movements can be troublesome put to paper, it is a tremendous achievement, courageous in itself, for McAnena to write TERF Island with such integrity in creating a record of women’s lives. I am reminded of Eleanor Flexner’s 1959 Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, although McAnena discusses the work of Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater rather than attempting to cover an entire movement and its various figures. McAnena’s TERF Island takes a micro-level approach viewing specific women, their contributions and their accounts, contrasting a macro-level approach to viewing the entire movement and discussing as many figures as possible.

Readers may ask why McAnena has chosen Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater—why these women, why not more, why not all, why at all, why. The same kinds of questions follow any recording of the women’s movement. Why focus more on, say, Emmeline Pankhurst than Millicent Garret Fawcett, this woman than another woman equal or greater in contribution? “It is risky business deciding whose story to tell, who to mention and who to leave out,” McAnena explains. “In Terf Island I have told the stories which I believe have been central to the UK becoming a beacon of resistance to gender identity ideology” (p. 262).

But, as McAnena understands, Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater are not “the movement,” as if all there is, any more than any social movement can be reduced to select key figures. During the launch, it was valuable that McAnena and Joyce alike insisted that we do need more books—and TERF Island represents one among what should be many women’s accounts to follow. There are so many women’s contributions that matter, many yet to be recorded, as women’s collective work has brought this movement’s victories into being—a point that does not escape McAnena.

Reappearing much the way storybook antagonists do, especially in the sections for Williams and Keen in McAnena’s TERF Island, Willoughby easily represents the quality of today’s opposition: uninformed, self-absorbed, petulant. As Rebecca West has reflected, “The real force that made the Suffrage Movement was the quality of the Opposition.”9 Today, women criticizing transgenderism have found such force true in our time with the various men—and women, unfortunately—not aiming for understanding as much as seeking to misunderstand.

Forceful in his own way, Willoughby has performed the role of an unwitting billboard. His “exchanges” with both Williams and Keen did as much for me in seeing today’s spin on the anti-suffragist: a man in a dress claiming that women’s rights belong to him, sabotage from the man inside. Fortunately, neither Stephanie nor Maya seems to have been close to the Least India Company in an interview setting, not like Williams and Keen.

But this story, as I think McAnena would agree, is one for the women, for every woman to see herself in today’s women’s movement.

Female Friendship

Women’s togetherness in TERF Island reminds me of a quote from Janice G. Raymond’s 1986 A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection: “Female friendship helps create the woman of woman’s own inventiveness.”10 Women’s rights activism resisting transgenderism is women’s resistance to men inventing women according to men’s image. Women resist what Simone de Beauvoir analyzes in Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex): “[I]f she did not exist, men would have had to invent her. They did invent her. But she also exists without their invention” (emphasis added).11 During the launch, Joyce discussed the significance of female friendship in McAnena’s book:

A pattern I had already noticed that I think comes up in the book over and over again is it’s a book about female friendship. Female activism, I think, is somewhat different from male activism. It’s not something I’d thought about before, but, at the center of this book, are not just individuals but friendships and, often quite noticeably, couples: two women. You, of course, work with Nic; the two of you did Fair Play for Women together. There were many other people involved, I know, but that friendship was central to it—and, of course, continues even though you’re now at Sex Matters. For Transgender Trend, I think it was absolutely crucial for Stephanie to find Shelley, and that friendship continues. As we’ve become a more developed movement, the sizes differ—Sex Matters is bigger now. Nic is still friends with all of us, but she’s doing her own thing. I think Transgender Trend probably would see itself as more of a larger group now, too. LGBA is no longer that central thing of Bev and Kate; it’s now a bigger thing as well. But it’s striking that there are these pairs of women and that they’re non-hierarchical: Each of them acts as Boswell to the other’s Johnson; it’s not one Boswell and one Johnson. It’s not one Watson and one Holmes. I think that in a world where there are so few books that women are centered, and the dynamics are so different than when you’re talking about men’s activism, this is a book that is almost entirely about women and how women do things. And that’s beautiful. I would love to think that we would live in a world one day where a book like that would be a reading in a feminist course. Now, we’re not there because feminism has gone right off course, but, maybe one day, it will be a book, and that’ll be one of the things that will come out of it: What is women’s activism like that’s so specific?

Davies-Arai and Shelley Charlesworth with Transgender Trend, McAnena and Williams with Fair Play for Women, Forstater and Joyce with Sex Matters, Bev Jackson and Kate Harris with LGB Alliance—these pairs of women organizing. With Keen, interestingly, we must note the work of Julia Long and Venice Allan—a triad rather than just a dyad! Whether two or more women, female friendship remained a way for these women to maintain a sense of rootedness in their shared work and lives as organizers. Referencing United States historical context, readers may think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, life-long friends and collaborators in writing and oratory. Back to Raymond’s point in A Passion for Friends, women organizing together “create the woman of woman’s own inventiveness,” creating a politics beyond the partisanship conveniently alienating groups of women from each other. What she has written applies very well to McAnena’s TERF Island and the point Joyce makes about the specificity of women’s activism:

Friendship gives women a point of crystallization for living in the world. It gives form, shape, and a concrete location to women who have no state or geographical homeland and, in fact, no territorial ghetto or diaspora from which to act. Friendship provides women with a common world that becomes a reference point for location in a larger world. The sharing of common views, attractions, and energies gives women a connection to the world so that they do not lose their bearing. Thus a sharing of personal life is at the same time a grounding for social and political existence.12

Nevertheless, from a radical feminist point of view, Raymond gives us a warning not to idealize female friendship:

A hopeful vision of female friendship is not based on some ontological essence of female energy or vitality that women naturally possess by virtue of a more refined capability for love, caring, and respect for others. Rather it is anchored in the historical, cultural, and material bonds that women have created for our Selves in spite of the ‘State of Atrocity.’ The obstacles to female friendship and the divisiveness that often attends diversity serve as correctives to a shallow sentimentalism about women’s affinities with women.13

Women can betray other women—a very typical obstacle to female friendship, no less so than for men in relation to male friendship (of course, men do murder other men—including supposed friends—far more frequently than women murder other women). Women can lie about other women and denigrate other women’s contributions, dismissing others while demanding acknowledgment for themselves in rather hierarchical fashion. Women can trash and caricature other women to an excessive degree and dress it up as philosophy or critique, even appealing to other women for solidarity, none of which truly applies to misrepresentation and lies. As much as men can be narcissistic and deluded, women fairly compete with them as manipulators and exploiters of solidarity plundered and good will subordinated to egotism. Downsides all factored, we cannot deny the possibilities of women organizing and working on women’s behalf—what I see there in TERF Island.

I agree with Joyce that, as seen in McAnena’s book, women’s activism noticeably differs from men’s activism, and these qualities deserve careful study for us to think about how women organize for women’s rights and what they do. Painted relative to other women, the portraits of Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater together make a portrait of women’s organizing through collective action. Joyce is right, too, that, ideally, a feminist course at university would assign a book like TERF Island for students to learn about women’s rights activism and how women organize.

Stephanie Davies-Arai—Reasoning and Compassion

TERF Island gives such brilliant detail, nearing three-hundred pages, that it would be difficult, if not virtually impossible, to note everything in a review, so I want to focus on the woman most influential in my understanding: Stephanie Davies-Arai. She launched the website for Transgender Trend in November 2015, and its significance can be demonstrated in the many who have valued Davies-Arai’s work. It has been one of the most important resources for not only parents but also researchers and journalists who have written critiques of transgenderism and its harms to children.

The section about Davies-Arai is the first in TERF Island because, as McAnena explains, the individual women follow the chronological order of the campaigns in their work. Here is her discussion from the launch underscoring the impact of Davies-Arai and Transgender Trend:

Stephanie’s first because she founded Transgender Trend ten years ago, which is incredible, isn’t it? Ten years. This autumn, they’ll be celebrating that. She’s always been about protecting children. And, when you read her story, which is perhaps one of the most personal ones, I covered that because it helps you understand why her focus is children and how she how she’s qualified, actually, to do what she’s doing. I think that—and she didn’t want me to say this, but I think I kept it in the book—that I feel that she is, if you have to pick one person in the UK who’s done the most to protect children from the harms of those medical interventions that take them down a blind alley, I would say that’s Stephanie, and her work continues.

An early work McAnena references from Davies-Arai is her piece titled “Is My Child Transgender?,” dated March 6, 2015, raising the issue of parents increasingly believing their children must be “transgender” from toy or clothing preferences. Trans ideology’s diagnostic framework dictates the following: If a boy prefers things associated with girls, then he must be a girl; if a girl prefers things associated with boys, then she must be a boy. Like radical feminists Janice G. Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, critics of transsexualism and transgenderism over the past few decades, Davies-Arai sharply critiqued how “sex change” medically enforces sex-role stereotyping.14 Davies-Arai noted the role of “the increasingly influential trans activist lobby who insist that gender identity is an innate brain state irrespective of male or female biology or the effects of socialisation.” The fact that girls and boys experience sex-role conditioning demonstrates the force of ideology socializing them into transgenderism and its profitable industry.

A moment showing connection between the US and the UK movements was Denise Caignon, who founded 4thWaveNow a few months before Transgender Trend, first meeting Stephanie in person at the 2023 Genspect conference (see pp. 16-17). Into the late 2010s, both 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend were important early resources for me because of the stigma around criticism of transgenderism being, essentially, “conspiracy theory.” Legitimate concerns would be dismissed, and writers now frequently take for granted the early work necessary to make present discussions possible.

When first researching more into transgenderism in my late teens and early twenties, about 2015-2019, I found Caignon and Davies-Arai to be contemporary voices of reason against madness. I saw them as not only relatable politically but also really committed to women’s rights, children’s rights, and human rights. For Caignon and Davies-Arai, resources and information for parents and those concerned formed the basis for concrete political goals rather than abstract social theories.

(For reference, Caignon’s 2023 Genspect talk “The Hidden Dangers of Gender Medicine for Minors,” as linked here, demonstrates her thoughtfulness and fact-based critique of medical harm, this quality in the work at 4thWaveNow.)

Years of work done with Transgender Trend in the UK, Davies-Arai’s labor communicating with parents and working in favor of children’s dignity, have been essential to the work in resistance to transgenderism. More have joined the fight, fortunately, which not only lessens the burden on Davies-Arai but also gives parents more resources to help them understand the issues and know the facts. McAnena provides a helpful summary of how grassroots groups have formed specifically in response to the needs of parents and their children:

Stephanie Davies-Arai started Transgender Trend to give parents and others an alternative to the simple ‘trans is good, affirm them, give them puberty blockers’ narrative of pre-2015. Since then, there’s been an explosion of grassroots groups aiming to help children with gender confusion and their parents: supportive networks of parents like Bayswater and Our Duty, schools-focused groups like Safe Schools Alliance, clinical groups like Thoughtful Therapists, Genspect, CAN-SG, and SEGM. She’s being contacted by women in other countries asking for advice on how to set up their own groups. Stephanie did what was needed when only a few were speaking up, when parents had nowhere else to go. (pp. 72-73)

I find what Davies-Arai says valuable: “I can see a time when Transgender Trend won’t be needed, and that will be success for us. When I feel the transgender trend is fully over, that’s when I will stop” (qtd., p. 73). The point should not be writing infinite blog posts about this issue, monopolizing it and monetizing it for personal and financial gain. Davies-Arai has modeled a principle of fairness in crediting others and seeing the value of collective action for social change. Far more work remains here, but present conditions are no more inevitable than the formerly more widely accepted dogma around “transitioning” children pre-2015. There is a kind of nihilism in the belief that no small thing done helps short of abolishing the industry, but, as was the case in the abolition of slavery, a centuries-long effort, many reforms came along the way in anti-slavery work. A bit presumptuously, I think, some have assumed the fight has been won, but abolition takes its time. Practical advocacy for parents and children gives hope for new directions, possibilities of a different world, rather than surrendering to narcissistic cynicism at the eleventh hour.

Why Feminism Matters

“Feminism,” Andrea Dworkin explains, “is opposition to woman hating in order to achieve a truly egalitarian society”—so much easier said than done perhaps more than any other political goal.15 Neither right nor left makes it easy for women: one side is right-wing flavored woman hating, the other is that left-wing flavored variety; the choice there is no true choice. Woman hating rots everything across right-wing and left-wing political ideologies, manifesting within totalitarianisms of fascism and communism—and in every man-made religion in between. Women coming last corresponds to social conditions that, in political terms, reify them into a subordinate class from pedestal to gutter. Men’s revolutionary promises virtually always translate to revolutionary compromises for women. Woman-hating ideologies provide the rationale for institutions and industries, with trans ideology representing one case of religious/ideological fundamentalism demonstrating why feminism matters.

Very evident in TERF Island, women’s disagreeableness is an important element, a reluctance to submit oneself to easier political and ideological avenues, but McAnena noted during the launch that independent thinking is also significant. She explains:

One thing I would say: You said that they were ‘disagreeable.’ They certainly are not afraid of disagreeing. But what I definitely think, and I found this working with Nic—and it’s very clear working with Maya as well: They really are independent thinkers. They don’t just take a superficial statement and roll with it. And we can all be independent thinkers. It’s just that, most of the time, we mostly don’t; we don’t think for ourselves. There isn’t time or things aren’t that important or interesting to you. And, of course, it’s risky on this one, but I think that’s what really has enabled them to be as clear and have as much cut-through as they have is that just not accepting things at face value and going and digging. That gives you great confidence when you really know your stuff, and you know that other people don’t.

Thinking for oneself can be difficult when both right and left, as male-defined political ideologies, offer superficially easy answers to women’s problems that, in the end, come at very great cost to women. Scapegoating women is one very typical “solution.” Adela Pankhurst’s life demonstrates that, from the far left of the Communist Party of Australia to the far right of the Australia First Movement, neither wing of this contrived political dualism ultimately works for women.

While I know well that women have collaborated in transgenderism, as women have collaborated in all man-made religions mostly at their own expense, I must agree with Julia Long: Feminism should not be relinquished any more than womanhood. Here is how she has explained it:

The word ‘Feminism’ was hijacked & used to mean its opposite, just as ‘woman,’ ‘mother,’ ‘lesbian’ & all the other ‘female’ words were hijacked. Don’t blame feminism for what’s been done in its name by those who stole it. I won’t relinquish ‘feminism’ any more than ‘woman.’16

By historical analogy, Christianity being “the bulwark of American slavery” during the nineteenth century, as Matilda Joslyn Gage has noted, made it no less true that abolitionists opposed to slavery were overwhelmingly Christian themselves. Transgenderism’s appropriation of feminism is like American slavery’s appropriation of Christianity. Accepting costumed antifeminism crossdressing in feminism’s place may as well be like seeing a male rapist in a wig as a woman and insisting that more women have started committing rape.

Feminism is remembering that women exist and make the world and life itself. To quote McAnena on why she wrote TERF Island: “I wrote this book because I wanted to make sure that the work of these courageous women was recorded, acknowledged and remembered” (p. 271). McAnena’s sense of remembrance is feminist in the way that feminism is not about—or should not be about—collaborating in prostitution, surrogacy, and transgenderism but resisting them and refusing to comply. Today’s feminists have a great spiritual inheritance coming from the suffragists—and, of course, from suffragettes like the Pankhursts.

“We women Suffragists have a great mission—the greatest mission the world has ever known,” said Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912, telling her audience: “It is to free half the human race, and through that freedom to save the rest.”17 Pankhurst’s words live in the work of Davies-Arai, Williams, Keen, and Forstater—and so many women today living that legacy of social improvement toward community for woman and man alike. Liberty has been essential to women’s work from Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, and the Pankhursts to present day TERF Island and today’s women organizing for women.

Below, I have made a “TERF Island Moments of Being” section with a snapshot contribution from each woman in McAnena’s TERF Island. Although I spotlighted Davies-Arai’s influence for me, I want to give readers a sense of the other women and their work. I have chosen Davies-Arai’s 2015 essay, Williams’s 2017 “exchange” with Jonathan/India Willoughby, Keen’s 2018 “exchange” with Willoughby, and Forstater’s 2019 Woman’s Place UK speech. For Williams and Keen, I know it was difficult, but those appearances were revealing moments that showcased trans ideology’s flaws. Back in 2017 and 2018, the belief in “puberty blockers” being, as Willoughby says, “like a pause button on the old video record machines,” the suicide threats, the false analogies to racism—all held tremendously more power than now.

TERF Island Moments of Being

Stephanie Davies-Arai

For children, ‘I’m really a girl’ or ‘I’m really a boy’ is the only language they have to understand and explain their personalities in a world that reinforces the correct gender behaviour everywhere they look. Society does a pretty thorough job of conditioning children into boy and girl roles as it is, can’t at least we parents feel and express confidence in our tough girls and sensitive boys? In jumping straight to the assumption of the statistically most unlikely outcome that a child is transgender, aren’t we just reinforcing those gender stereotypes, and in fact doing exactly the same as the parent who forces a child to conform?

- Stephanie Davies-Arai, “Is My Child Transgender?” March 6, 2015 (see p. 16)18

Dr. Nicola Williams

WILLOUGHBY: All that happens in that situation with the children—they give you puberty blockers, so basically it’s like a pause button on the old video record machines. Nothing permanent happens. You just pause the development.

WILLIAMS: It’s not true to say that we know that this is safe. Puberty blockers have never been used in children to stop natural puberty, and so we don’t know what effect that will be. Social transition, which is where a child changes the way they dress and they’ll be referred to as a different name as, say, as a boy. Psychologically, that will have an impact, so if you’ve got a four-year-old that likes to play with trucks—

WILLOUGHBY: Sorry, this is somebody with no gender issues whatsoever talking about something—

WILLIAMS: Because this is about stereotypes as well and a lot of children—

WILLOUGHBY: This is very similar to the question time program: Four people around the table talking about transgender and not a single transgender person there. Now, if they, if you, had a table of white people talking about Black issues and what it meant to be Black, would that be permissible?

WILLIAMS: We don’t have to be transgender to have views on children transitioning and the risks to women or children—

WILLOUGHBY: Yeah, but what is your experience of it? Probably all you’ve read in the Daily Mail.

WILLIAMS: Over 80% of children that begin to have questions about their gender, they change their mind before puberty so we need to let the children go through puberty—

WILLOUGHBY: No, no, I’m sorry, again, I think that’s absolutely incorrect. You’re referring to data from the 1950s.

WILLIAMS: We need to let the children go through puberty to be able to understand what they actually are.

Good Morning Britain, “Transgender Prisoners Could Soon Be Able to Swap Prisons if New Law Is Passed,” YouTube, November 21, 2017 (see p. 81)19

Kellie-Jay Keen

WILLOUGHBY: So, you wouldn’t want me legally recognized as a woman, so let’s say, for an instance, I could go out on a night, and I got raped—so would I go to a women’s refuge, in your world?

KEEN: Well, no, because then it wouldn’t be a women’s refuge, would it?

WILLOUGHBY: So, where would I go?

KEEN: Well, you could raise money and make your own refuge.

. . .

HOLMES: Are we agreed there is just terrible confusion, and there is a long way to go with all of this?

KEEN: No, I think I am agreed that this is an absolute assault on women and womanhood, and we are losing—

WILLOUGHBY: None of my women friends feel that.

KEEN: Well, that’s your women friends.

WILLOUGHBY: I don’t think the nation feels—

HOLMES: So, you don’t respect her journey in any way, I mean, I think—

KEEN: I don’t see why that matters.

This Morning on ITV, “Feminist Blogger Believes Trans-Women Aren’t Real Women,” YouTube, September 28, 2018 (see p. 138)20

Maya Forstater

The more people who stand up and talk about it, the easier it is for the next people. I only began to tweet and talk about it after reading and listening to so many people here. And I thought because I worked at a think tank that does not take institutional positions and that supports academic freedom of speech I could talk about it. But it turned out I was wrong. I don’t want this to be a cautionary tale, and I hope that what I am doing in taking the organisation I worked for to tribunal it will help to enable a whole lot of people to be a bit braver. If I win my case will give some legal protection. But if more people speak up it becomes easier for others to speak up. If each of us speaks up within our organisations, our professions, and our communities, we can turn this around.

- Maya Forstater, “Sex, Gender, and Development,” Woman’s Place UK, May 20, 2019 (p. 214)21

Here is the launch for McAnena’s TERF Island:

Readers seeking to purchase McAnena’s book can do so at the following link to the Spinifex Press website:

https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781922964267

Nikki Craft and I need support for the Andrea Dworkin Archival Project (ADAP). She has boxes to send from her storage, which she needs to send as soon as possible. If any readers can donate any money, then please reach out to Craft or me—or message our ADAP Facebook page, linked above, or our Twitter/X account.

If you are unable to become a paid subscriber through Substack, then please feel free to donate via PayPal, if able. I am grateful for reader support!

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In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

- Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” October 12, 1962, nearly four months before her death by suicide on February 11, 1963, published posthumously in Ariel in 19651

I have been thinking about what American lesbian feminist Barbara Deming (1917-1984) wrote about nonviolent action: We can escape the dizziness of violence, if only we will try and recognize the other. For Deming, “respecting one’s own person” depends on “respecting the person of the other,” a balance of “self-assertion and respect for others.” Having been involved with the civil rights movement during the 1960s, Deming insisted on conversation despite any disagreement, the avoidance of the gun or the blade. Nonviolent practice always necessitates the other’s humanness, which challenges us to see the rights to life and happiness for others as for ourselves. “The trouble,” she explains, “is that people tend to feel that they are taking bolder action when they disdain all conversations with the adversary.” Acts of violence and their consequences transpire from this forgetting of being part of one another.2

Violence indicts the failures of our civilized way of life. Here are just three recent cases within the past few weeks:

Iryna Zarutska, 23, stabbed to death, murdered by Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, on August 223;

Ericka Lucas, 56, shot on August 29, died on September 9, murdered by Dexter Lamont Mills, 18, and an unnamed juvenile, 164;

Charlie Kirk, 31, shot to death, assassinated on September 10 by Tyler Robinson, 22.5

The most recent case involving Kirk has been the most well-known, and the stabbing murder of Zarutska has been visible—both widely consumed. Ericka Lucas’s murder at the hands of an 18-year-old male and a 16-year-old, an unnamed juvenile, is lesser-known but representative of everyday violence taking human lives. Apparently, Lucas was not even the intended target, believed to be hit by gunfire meant for somebody else. While videos of Zarutska and Kirk in their final moments circulated online as spectacle, there was none of Lucas. I will not watch the stabbing of Zarutska and the shooting of Kirk; I refuse to join their mass consumption. Even outside any otherwise evidently sexual context, violence on video easily becomes a kind of pornography. There is a voyeuristic quality in taking in others’ suffering, their fear, their agony, their death. Unsettlingly, we may even notice a masturbatory quality to consuming violence against others, figuratively if not perhaps literally “getting off” to it.

I think it is true that seeing violence can be morally instructive, as in studies of the Holocaust, lynchings in the United States, and of various wartime atrocities, among such examples. Abolitionists even used pictures and visual renderings alongside slave narratives in the nineteenth century to illustrate everyday brutality where the words could not do. Such imagery was a necessary corrective to the pro-slavery narrative that enslaved people experienced no such brutalization, that, as individuals, they found slavery to be personally if not also spiritually fulfilling.

Seeing atrocity rather than simply reading about it has been necessary in recognition and consideration of violence’s reality. Yet social media has changed how violence becomes viewed and consumed, which twists into the pornographic, unrestrainedly feasting on the spectacle of atrocity. Nowadays, there is this kind of “feeding frenzy” with how videos and images widely circulate online—and nearly endless speculative fiction appears written about them. It very easily crosses the line into violence as spectacle to be mass consumed—in a word, pornography. To some extent, at least I would argue, the consumeristic quality of violence can undermine the possibility of moral instructiveness. I do agree that witnessing violence matters, although social media terribly complicates what it means to witness it.

Violence is common. For 2023, the number of homicides in the US was 22,830, with 17,927 involving firearms—that is, approximately 79% involved shooting a person to death [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)]. With a relatively lower figure, due to differences in assessment, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) gives a figure of 19,800 murder victims in 2023. From the BJS data from 2018 to 2022, an average of 80% of homicides involved a firearm, indicating approximately 15,840 victims in 2023, if following the statistical pattern. Numerical specifics aside, we find a ridiculous number of murdered citizens each year in our streets, in our communities, in our homes—not just tens of them, not just a few hundred, not just a few thousand. Exceeding ten thousand each year, each number represents a family who has lost a loved one to a preventable act of violence, most often being gun violence. The commonness of violence shoots throughout our nation like an infection spreading over the body. Every murder is a tragedy, and even one or a few would be horrible, but 10,000-20,000 murders per year—and sometimes even higher figures, most involving guns—should make us seriously question this society.6

It seems worth a note on sex: Were the numbers in the recorded murder cases more closely analyzed in terms of sex, most perpetrators would be male, often murdering not only other males but also women and children. This kind of sex-based reality cannot be explained solely in economic terms because it cuts across all classes from the rich to the poor throughout human societies—not only in the US. What it tells us is there is civilized barbarism in how we socialize men and boys that produces exactly these conditions not being sufficiently addressed in “culture war” discourse.

Like Deming, I am uncertain what is possible as far as stopping acts of violence tearing apart societies, families, and communities—not just here. But I do think we can think in terms of the possibilities. “What is possible,” she tells us, “is to act toward another human being on the assumption that all men’s lives are of value, that there is something about any man to be loved, whether one can feel love for him or not.”7 Yes, although herself a lesbian feminist, Deming was “old-school” in her use of “men’s lives,” “any man,” and “love for him”—we know, as she did, this assumption should apply to women as well. All women’s lives are of value, we may note, and there is something about any woman to be loved, whether one can feel love for her or not. How can we begin to oppose violence anywhere else if murder annually takes between 10,000 and 20,000 of us in the war zone of the nation itself? Until we think differently here, it seems unlikely it will move elsewhere against violence. The possibility of action through valuation of life against its violation seems worth holding tightly.

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To think for one’s self, is not even now the tendency of mankind; the few who dare, do so at great peril.

—Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State1

Introduction—Who Manufactures Knowledge and Why?

Social movement rhetoric is not only texts read in isolation, as if texts can ever be read this way, but also the research surrounding texts and how researchers present the works to readers and what knowledge has been produced and distributed. The women’s movement has been one of the most evident cases where research surrounding women’s texts, the practice of historiography, significantly influences how readers think about women’s rhetoric and, by extension, the women’s movement. Yet a key problem confronting these studies has been the question of “on” versus “for” when undertaking this research and how women’s texts appear.

How does research “on” women differ from research “for” women? Writing in 1983, Renate Klein (1983) has raised this question in how research methodology has operated—whether it has accounted for women’s lives or has superimposed values and norms on them. To what extent does research studying a woman take peculiar liberties opposing the will of the woman studied? How does the researcher permit the woman to speak, to what degree, and, further, what contextual information does the researcher include or exclude—and why? What factors explain particular exclusions of material that otherwise would give a truer account of the woman as she lived, in all of her specificity—and why include something but exclude otherwise relevant material? Research for women, Klein (1983) explains, “tries to take women’s needs, interests, and experiences into account and aims at being instrumental in improving women’s lives in one way or another” (p. 90). Feminist methodology maintains an examination of research methods utilized and, even more crucially, emphasizes asking the question why.

Women’s studies, plural, not only in Women’s Studies but also throughout all fields, have uncovered contradictions in manufacturing knowledge. Like Klein, Dale Spender (1981) has noted that Women’s Studies grew from the urgency of women needing to assess/access knowledge about themselves and their lives. The dominant patriarchal paradigm’s notion of “objective” knowledge about women has been very peculiarly manufactured knowledge expressing particular values. Feminists, Spender explains, “have exposed the discrepancies between their meanings and those that have been enshrined as legitimated (objective) knowledge” (p. 172). Exposing these discrepancies, feminist methodology has revealed the politics of knowledge shaping women’s lives and the political nature of education itself. “One of the substantive issues that women’s studies addresses,” Spender (1981) writes, “is that of the construction, organisation and distribution of knowledge” (p. 172). This issue has become even more relevant today in how men have increasingly defined women in the right-wing and left-wing male ideological backlash against the modern women’s movement.

Following the feminist critique of manufactured knowledge, this paper approaches reading Andrea Dworkin by considering two rhetorical strategies deployed: symbolic matricide and strategic ignorance. These methods underlie the misrepresentation of Dworkin throughout scholarly writing on her work. Quoted by Julie Bindel (2004), John Berger, known for his 1972 Ways of Seeing, referred to Dworkin as “the most misrepresented writer in the western world.” What Berger says of Dworkin being misrepresented has been as true in her death as in her life, a key difference being that she cannot speak for herself—at least, or so it may seem.

This analysis considers John Stoltenberg’s rewriting of Andrea Dworkin as research “on” rather than “for” women, demonstrating symbolic matricide and strategic ignorance as rhetorical strategies. While Stoltenberg is the executor of Dworkin’s literary estate, his work on Dworkin constitutes a form of research worth critiquing for its methodology as historiography. Among influential scholars, Martin Duberman (2020) has uncritically accepted Stoltenberg’s claims as “legitimated (objective) knowledge” on Dworkin, part of what has influenced other biographical depictions of her. Key problems have included not only discrepancies in Stoltenberg’s accounts, if not falsifications or distortions, but also material being excluded to serve his self-interest to make his arguments “look right.” Why must women’s truth be sacrificed for men’s self-interest? Reading Andrea Dworkin demands truth. To quote Maria Mies (1983): “The postulate of truth itself makes it necessary that those areas of the female existence which so far were repressed and socially ‘invisible’ be brought into the full daylight of scientific analysis” (p. 121). That which has been repressed, material rendered invisible, must become part of how we study women and their works as they have been represented—or, rather, misrepresented. Uncomfortable questions must be asked about the woman being studied, under male eyes, disappearing into the man who studies her and the implications of this queer disappearance of women into men.

Theoretical Framework

Symbolic Matricide

Symbolic matricide has been more typically understood in terms of psychoanalytic theory regarding the separation or alienation of the self from the mother. Under the present conditions of so-called “civilization,” the individual symbolically murders the mother to achieve her or his individuality distinct from the maternal bond. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, Julia Kristeva (1987/2024) writes, “Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation” (p. 21). Far more critical of Freud and Lacan, Luce Irigaray (1986/1994) notes, “The entire male economy demonstrates a forgetting of life, a lack of recognition of debt to the mother, of maternal ancestry, of the women who do the work of producing and maintaining life” (p. 7). The mother represents the material, the mat(t)er, from which all life comes, so it seems paradoxical that she must be denied her sovereign existence (Brodribb, 1992).

Nevertheless, individuation has relied on maternal denialism, that women birth people and ideas, all made from their flesh, not recognized as female labor—the ideological basis for women’s exploitation and oppression in man-made civilization. Despite the mother’s labor as the material basis of all labor, intellectual labor included, matricide occurs in a social and political context of male identity dependent on female negation, that of man dispossessing woman. Women birth all people and their ideas, but women become subordinated to men’s ideas about women—regardless of any malignant or “benevolent” intentions (Dworkin, 1983; Mies 1986/2014). The persuasiveness of symbolic matricide lies in how the man denies the woman’s creative (re)productive capacity and “births”—which is to say plasticizes—the woman in his image. This rhetorical strategy provides a partial explanation for how women’s lives become transmogrified in service to men’s desires.

Strategic Ignorance

Strategic ignorance comes into play when an individual faces a potential conflict between what she or he feels or desires to be true versus truth, a discrepancy that may otherwise trigger distress and the need to reconsider one’s position. Kaitlin Woolley and Jane L. Risen (2018) have noted that information avoidance functions to protect some intuitive preference. Considered another way, individuals may avoid being informed on the concrete/the material to defend the abstract/the immaterial. Where sensing preference focuses on concrete details and provable facts, intuitive preference privileges “what could be” over “what is.” Feelings and desires trump facts.

This psychological defense mechanism defends against whatever may undermine or destabilize one’s altered “reality” exposed as fantasy born of self-interest. Examples include anything from not wanting to know the calories of one’s food to not wanting to know the policies of one’s president. The deployment of strategic ignorance, therefore, preserves one’s feeling of “rightness,” the desire to “look right,” against the reality of truly being wrong. This rhetorical strategy has permitted men to assert—or reassert—dominion over women through “misreadings” that “overlook” discrepancies, effectively persuading the audience through legitimating ignorance as “knowledge.”

Saving the Sentence—Seeing Editorial Surgery

I know you are simply trying to keep her work relevant. I am curious, though, to know your thoughts: Would you agree that, with this piece, you have taken liberties with her writing that she did not want?

—Nikki Craft to John Stoltenberg, February 2, 20162

A Simple Question of Integrity

As seen above, the exchange between Craft and Stoltenberg had to do with a piece titled “Are You Listening, Hillary? President Rape Is Who He Is,” posted to the Andrea Dworkin website, posthumously in 2007, which Stoltenberg wanted replaced with a new version in 2016. Beyond including an extended introduction and postscript, Stoltenberg made significant alterations to the piece, even moving sentences around in the text. By 2016, Dworkin had been dead for just over ten years, so, obviously, it was not her moving around sentences and changing her original text from what she had written. After Craft challenged his editorializing of Dworkin, Stoltenberg admitted she was “completely correct,” but the incident exposed him “forgetting” his commitment “to maintain the integrity of her written work” (Craft, 2016). Even more interestingly, Stoltenberg did not provide the unedited version of the text upon Craft’s request, which prevented her, or anybody else, from seeing to what extent he altered Dworkin’s writing. This incident demonstrates strategic ignorance and symbolic matricide as rhetorical strategies persuading readers to accept Dworkin in Stoltenberg’s image. Strategic ignorance seems evident in Stoltenberg’s “forgetting”; Dworkin was very emphatic about her writing not being subjected to editorializing akin to what has been done. Corresponding with this strategic ignorance, symbolic matricide emerges in the posthumous negation of the text she birthed in favor of Stoltenberg imposing a second “birth” upon it.3

Case Study—Stoltenberg, “Andrea Dworkin Was a Trans Ally,” 2020

This conflict over Stoltenberg’s edits made to “Are You Listening, Hillary? President Rape Is Who He Is” in 2016 was not the end of what Craft (2016) refers to as his “editorial surgery on Dworkin’s sexual politics.” Since 2014, Stoltenberg has portrayed Dworkin as uncritically supporting transsexualism, through the 1970s and 1980s, and modern transgenderism, 1990s onward, under the banner of her being a so-called “trans ally.” Stoltenberg’s earliest version of this argument appeared in a 2014 piece at Feminist Times, followed by a 2020 piece titled “Andrea Dworkin Was a Trans Ally.” For his evidence, Stoltenberg cites (1) the last chapter of Woman Hating (1974), (2) “The Root Cause” (1975), and (3) “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea” (1977). All of the works that Stoltenberg cites as his evidence of Dworkin being a so-called “trans ally” came into publication from 1974 to 1977.4 Of the three, however, only the last chapter of Woman Hating discusses transsexualism. More than Stoltenberg, Martin Duberman has uncritically accepted Stoltenberg’s version of Dworkin, as seen in the 2020 biography Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary. Since these claims have impacted the perception of Dworkin, it seems worth examining (1) what the textual evidence says, including discrepancies, and (2) whose interests this portrayal benefits.

Interviewed by Cindy Jenefsky in 1989, Dworkin “noted that even though feminists and pornographers were moving in different directions at the time Woman Hating was written, they still shared common roots in the counterculture and the sexual liberation movement” (Jenefsky, 1998/2018, p. 139). After 1974, the Dworkin of the seventies, early Dworkin, continued to diverge from the sexual values she internalized from the counterculture and “sexual liberation” influential on left-wing activists of the 1960s-1970s. These cultural influences explain how pornography continued to be embraced into the 1980s-1990s—despite critics like Dworkin who identified the industry’s harms to women and girls. While the last chapter of Woman Hating did not support pornography, it did uncritically advance rhetoric heavily influenced by “sexual liberation” ideology. Hence, during the same interview with Jenefsky, Dworkin reflected on it: “I think there are a lot of things really wrong with the last chapter in Woman Hating” (Jenefsky, 1998/2018, p. 139). For reference, the last chapter of Woman Hating, referred to by Dworkin in her statement, begins on page 174 and ends on page 193. The section titled “Transsexuality” starts at the bottom of page 185 and ends at the top of page 187. When Nikki Craft designed the Andrea Dworkin Online Library (ADOL) in 1995, collaborating with Dworkin very closely, there were passages Dworkin approved from her books reprinted there—including material from Woman Hating. Craft has discussed it as a day-by-day process, done with very great care, where Dworkin was emphatic about which texts should appear. Working on the ADOL website, years following Dworkin’s 1989 reflection, the only material she approved from Woman Hating was from the beginning, page 53 through page 63: her early critique of pornography. Considering Dworkin’s regret over the last chapter in Woman Hating, it seems questionable, at best, to reference it the way Stoltenberg and Duberman do as Dworkin’s authoritative view.

Both Stoltenberg and Duberman exclude Dworkin’s statement on there being “a lot of things really wrong with the last chapter in Woman Hating.” Though Duberman includes Jenefsky’s book listed among sympathetic readings of Mercy, Dworkin’s 1990 novel, he does not engage with Dworkin’s changed perspective years later over the last chapter of Woman Hating. Like Stoltenberg, he neglects considering the problems with citing this 1974 text as representative of Dworkin’s views in a writing career that spanned from the early 1970s until her death on April 9, 2005. Had Duberman provided this strategically ignored evidence to the reader, as detailed here, it would have undermined his and Stoltenberg’s work on Andrea Dworkin. Unsurprisingly, this example of Dworkin explicitly noting her self-reproach over the last chapter of Woman Hating is not the only conveniently missing context.

With Stoltenberg and Catharine A. MacKinnon as his references, Duberman makes false claims about Dworkin’s friendship with lesbian radical feminist Janice G. Raymond, who authored The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male in 1979. “For a time in the seventies,” Duberman (2020) writes, Dworkin was “somewhat friendly with Janice Raymond, whose transphobic 1979 book The Transsexual Empire deplored the ‘medicalization’ of gender that encouraged surgical intervention to create ‘a woman according to man’s image’” (p. 161.). The evidence that all of them, including MacKinnon, exclude is that Dworkin and Raymond discussed Woman Hating, particularly the section on transsexualism. In 1977, Raymond wrote a piece titled “Transsexualism: The Ultimate Homage to Sex-Role Power” that appeared in the third issue of Chrysalis. Raymond’s piece was an earlier version of The Transsexual Empire in progress before its publication in 1979. Raymond (1977) writes:

Andrea Dworkin, in her otherwise insightful book Woman Hating, stated that until sex roles disappear (and thus also transsexualism), sex-change operations should be provided ‘by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.’ . . . With Dworkin, I would affirm that transsexualism is the result of the stereotyped sex roles of a rigidly gender-defined society. But is transsexualism really the ‘emergency answer to an emergency situation,’ or does it prolong the emergency? And is it the basic duty of ‘the community’ (presumably the feminist community) to provide such treatment? (pp. 11-12)

Despite its total omission from accounts on Dworkin’s views, this passage has tremendous significance: Raymond critiqued Dworkin by name, and, from Raymond’s account, Dworkin responded privately to her accepting rather than rejecting her critique. In her Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, Raymond (2021) notes that “Dworkin only objected to my words ‘otherwise insightful’” (p. 46). Dworkin had exactly the humility others lack, and, three years after Woman Hating’s publication, we have this evidence of her rethinking her own less critical thinking about transsexualism.

Even in Woman Hating, Dworkin (1974) explains that “community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it […] [A]s roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear” (p. 186-187). For Dworkin, transsexualism was transitory, not to be prolonged indefinitely, another part of her 1974 perspective that Stoltenberg, MacKinnon, and Duberman have strategically ignored. “These words,” Raymond (2021) argues, “present a challenge to how Stoltenberg has channeled her views” (p. 46). Against the evidence, Stoltenberg has continued insisting that Dworkin’s view expressed in Woman Hating makes her a so-called “trans ally,” a dubious claim even with reading only the 1974 text. The more details taken into account, however, the more difficult it becomes to fit Dworkin’s perspective into the dominant “gender-affirming care” paradigm known today. Dworkin envisioned life beyond gender polarity by abolitionism through social change as opposed to assimilationism through individual medicalization. Describing transsexualism in terms of “an emergency measure for an emergency condition” does not even remotely imply Dworkin viewing it as something to be perpetuated (Dworkin, 1974, p.186). Nevertheless, Dworkin understood individual distress over sex-role stereotyping and the way in which meaning given to one’s sex disfigures one’s humanity.

In his Andrea Dworkin, Duberman (2020) argues that Raymond’s critique of transsexualism “was a view that Andrea deplored, and she let Raymond know it at some length” (p. 161). As his evidence, Duberman cites a letter Dworkin wrote to Raymond, dated January 15, 1978, about so-called “transsexuals,” in which she clarified her perception of “their suffering as authentic” (Dworkin, 1978, as cited in Duberman, 2020, p. 161). From what Duberman quotes from her letter to Raymond, Dworkin expressed compassion for males “in rebellion against the phallus” and females “seeking a freedom only possible to males in patriarchy” (Dworkin, 1978, as cited in Duberman, 2020, p. 161). Based on the quoted material, however, the letter does not support Duberman’s claim that Dworkin deplored Raymond’s view and told her off. Instead, her 1978 letter seems more like Dworkin was explaining her view to Raymond following Raymond’s 1977 critique of Woman Hating.5 Dworkin remained compassionate toward others’ suffering, an empathy ironically prevalent among feminists, including Raymond, condemned as “TERFs”: “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” Dworkin’s sense of identification with others’ suffering was not irreconcilable with critiquing how transsexualism insufficiently responds to gender polarity through medicalizing it.

Among suspicious cases of “forgetting,” Stoltenberg, MacKinnon, and Duberman have minimized Dworkin’s professional and personal connection with Raymond and have strategically ignored evidence suggesting otherwise. In other words, they have made an obvious but ultimately ineffective effort to negate the friendship between Dworkin and Raymond. “For a time in the seventies,” Duberman (2020) writes, Dworkin was “somewhat friendly with Janice Raymond” (p. 161). Duberman’s framing is that Dworkin and Raymond were “somewhat friendly” during the 1970s and, upon publication of The Transsexual Empire in 1979, Dworkin cut ties with Raymond in protest of her being “transphobic,” holding a view Dworkin “deplored.” Duberman’s use of that 1978 letter implies an end to Dworkin and Raymond being “somewhat friendly.” But this is not what actually happened. After Raymond critiqued Dworkin in 1977 and after Dworkin’s 1978 letter to Raymond clarifying her view, Dworkin wrote a book endorsement for Raymond’s Transsexual Empire in 1979. While Duberman includes Dworkin’s 1978 letter to Raymond, framed very dubiously, he excludes Dworkin endorsing Raymond’s book published one year later. Endorsing Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, Dworkin writes:

Janice Raymond asks the hard questions and her answers have an intellectual quality and ethical integrity so rare, so important, that the reader wants to think, to enter into critical dialogue with the book.

Beyond Dworkin’s endorsement of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, their collaborative relationship included Dworkin being acknowledged in relation to “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist,” in The Transsexual Empire (see Raymond, 1979/1994, p. viii). Two years later, Dworkin (1981) acknowledged Raymond in Pornography: Men Possessing Women among “people [who] helped me substantially,” listed alongside friends like Kathleen Barry, Gena Corea, and H. Patricia Hynes, Raymond’s long-term friend and collaborator (p. 225). Raymond’s Transsexual Empire also appeared in Dworkin’s bibliography for Pornography, though not specifically discussed in the body of the work (see Dworkin, 1981/1989, p. 268). Dworkin’s 1981 critique of men colonizing lesbians through pornography corresponds with Raymond’s 1979 critique of heterosexual males as “lesbian feminists” in “Sappho by Surgery.”

In fact, Dworkin’s friendship with Raymond extended far longer than Duberman implies. Just a few years later, again contrasting Duberman’s characterization of their relationship as only “somewhat friendly” during the 1970s, Dworkin appears in the acknowledgments for Raymond’s 1986 book A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. “The courage, work, and friendship of Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, and Kathy Barry have been a source of inspiration and strength to me,” Raymond (1986/2001) writes. “They remind me that radical feminism lives and thrives and that female friendship is indeed personal and political” (p. ix). Unsurprisingly, then, Raymond’s A Passion for Friends appears one year later in the bibliography for Dworkin’s 1987 book Intercourse, with Raymond’s work not critiqued as “transphobic” but referenced as informing Dworkin’s analysis (see Dworkin, 1987/2007, p. 293). Into the 1990s, Raymond’s 1993 book Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom includes Dworkin among “[o]ther friends [who] have helped in a variety of ways” (p. xiv). Finally, Raymond appears referenced positively by Dworkin in her 2000 book Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation related to Raymond’s work with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), with the proofs for Raymond’s Women as Wombs also cited in Dworkin’s bibliography (see Dworkin, 2000, p. 329, p. 407.). Contrary to what Duberman claims, available published evidence, as provided here, indicates a lifelong friendship between Dworkin and Raymond that extended to ongoing collaboration in their work. Obviously, Dworkin and Raymond were not just “somewhat friendly” during the 1970s.

Very interestingly, in a reply to TransAdvocate founder and editor-in-chief Cristan Williams, dated May 1, 2014, from the archived version of Stoltenberg’s original Feminist Times piece, he (2014) quotes Dworkin’s blurb saying “Crucial reading” but excludes the full text of her book endorsement. To Williams’s question, which Stoltenberg weirdly prompted Williams to ask, Stoltenberg provides a convoluted explanation, asserting that Dworkin “never retracted” her view put forth in Woman Hating.6 His attempt at explaining himself includes the interesting claim that he and Dworkin agreed with Raymond’s Transsexual Empire on surgical and hormonal interventions—except, now, this medicalization, more widespread than in 1979, no longer reinforces gender polarity. Stoltenberg (2014) adds:

We did not foresee that upon publication the book would become anathema to trans people—for some of whom those selfsame surgical/hormonal inventions would be beneficial and necessary.

However, in the very same paragraph, Stoltenberg explains (2014) “the historical fact remains that the men who pioneered medicalizing gender disphoria [sic] had some very problematic, one might say sadistically male-supremacist, attitudes and agendas.” To what extent has the medical landscape truly changed that he can argue what was “very problematic, one might say sadistically male-supremacist” has become “feminist”? Referencing the men who pioneered, Stoltenberg appears to be referring to male sexologists like Harry Benjamin (1885-1986) and John Money (1921-2006), a collaborator with the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), founded in 1979.7 HBIGDA rebranded to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2007, a name change that did not undo the attitudes and agendas Stoltenberg found problematic decades ago. Stoltenberg (2014) explains that “it was Raymond’s exposure of the values pervading this medicalizing that Andrea and I both thought was important for people to know and understand.” How can Dworkin have “deplored” Raymond’s view in The Transsexual Empire, as Duberman claims, since 2014 Stoltenberg’s account contradicts 2020 Stoltenberg’s one?

To date, Williams has not questioned Stoltenberg’s otherwise questionable explanation and, instead, has uncritically propagated this “editorial surgery on Dworkin’s sexual politics.” When confronted with the evidence, actually called by Stoltenberg to explain things to me, Williams (2021a) claimed, “Even sandy stone reviewed TS Empire [The Transsexual Empire]. A mere review =/= a repudiation of her trans friends, her commentary on JR [Janice Raymond], or her trans-inclusive legal work” (emphasis added).8 The problem is that Dworkin’s endorsement for Raymond’s Transsexual Empire was not a review, and Sandy Stone’s essay was, clearly, not an endorsement—also not even a review. Nor is there any “commentary on JR” where Dworkin actually disagrees with Raymond, other than the 1978 letter, as discussed above, dated before Dworkin endorsed The Transsexual Empire in 1979. And the “trans-inclusive legal work” Williams attributes to Dworkin was the inclusion of “transsexuals” in the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance among those who could use the civil rights framework if harmed through pornographic exploitation. Raymond never objected to so-called “transsexuals” being able to utilize the Dworkin-MacKinnon civil rights framework. Williams calling it “trans-inclusive” seems misleading when it describes “[t]he use of men, children, or transsexuals in the place of women,” as specified in the Ordinance (MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1997, p. 429). All-inclusive, the Ordinance totally separates the category “transsexuals” from women and men, which ironically can be read as dehumanizing, and does not validate men as women and women as men. Criticized for gaslighting, Williams (2021b) replied to me:

I think perhaps you’re the one doing the gaslighting. Either Olivia [Olivia Records] and Sandy Stone reviewed TE [The Transsexual Empire], and sent their replies to JR [Janice Raymond] as Dworkin did or she didn’t. Which is it? Either Dworkin wrote that she didn’t agree with JR’s overall take on trans people or she didn’t. Which is it?

But the discussion had nothing to do with Sandy Stone and Olivia Records, both very explicitly opposing Raymond’s lesbian feminist critique of Stone as a heterosexual male, a self-identified “lesbian feminist,” colonizing lesbian feminism. As extensively noted, Dworkin and Raymond corresponded about Woman Hating during the late 1970s—and Dworkin agreed with Raymond after the 1978 letter Duberman references, further indicated by her endorsement of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire in 1979. I stopped replying to Williams, since I had already quoted Dworkin’s endorsement in full—and the difference between an endorsement and a review should be more than self-evident to Williams, a published scholar. Relying wholly on Stoltenberg, MacKinnon, and Duberman, Williams has published works like “Radical Inclusion: Recounting the Trans Inclusive History of Radical Feminism” (2016) and, very ironically titled, “The Ontological Woman: A History of Deauthentication, Dehumanization, and Violence” (2020). Williams has been one of the leading “activist-scholars” in the “academic” field of transgender studies, seen in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), who has contributed significantly to “knowledge” of “trans history.” Misrepresentation breeds misrepresentation.

Conclusion—Whose Story Is It Anyway?

It is easy to say it another way. I will refuse.

—Gertrude Stein, “Saving the Sentence,” How to Write9

Andrea Dworkin should be treated with respect, which necessitates truth. “Pornography tells lies about women,” Stoltenberg (1981/2000) writes. “But pornography tells the truth about men” (p. 106). Pornography is not all that tells lies about women and truths about men. How male historians do their research on women can tell lies about women. Returning to Mies’s vital point, women’s historiography must search for “areas of the female existence which so far were repressed and socially ‘invisible’” (Mies, 1983, p. 121). For instance, Nikki Craft and I have talked about Dworkin’s work giving helpful comments on a paper of Craft’s during the late 1980s into the late 1990s critical of John Money and his promotion of “sex change.” Dworkin felt the paper deserved publication so much so that she sent it to Psychology Today. On July 10, 1989, the editor wrote the following to Dworkin:

Thanks for sending me Nikki Craft’s review of the John Money book [The Destroying Angel: Fitness and Food in the Legacy of Degeneracy Theory, Graham Crackers, Kellogg's Corn Flakes and American Health History (1985)]. Unfortunately, were we to publish it, it would be five years after the book came out. But I learned a great deal from reading her analysis to inform my thinking in this area. Language can indeed be a powerful distancing tool.

Sending the rejection letter to Craft, Dworkin wrote, circa July 1989: “Dear Nikki,— Sorry. It was worth the try. Love, Andrea.”

Looking at how these men have written on Dworkin, all done with the collaboration of MacKinnon, it really seems worth asking: Whose story is it anyway? Within a Burkean rhetorical framework, strategic ignorance and symbolic matricide share elements of the dialectic of the scapegoat. There is a “chosen vessel,” ritualistic alienation, and “the unification of those whose purified identity is defined in dialectical opposition to the sacrificial offering” (Burke, 1962/1969, p. 406). There is “a rebirth of the self,” as Burke (1962/1969), terms it, as the real Dworkin must be negated to advance others’ interests, as they present their falsification of her image as her (p. 407). Research for women requires applying feminist methodology to give as close an idea of the real woman as one possibly can without doctoring her into nonbeing.

To no surprise, Stoltenberg, MacKinnon, Duberman, and Williams, among many others, have not discouraged this investigation of the politics of knowledge—and what it means not only for Dworkin but also for other women. It would be comforting to think the various omissions and distortions have been a series of “accidents” that just so happen to support a peculiarly institutionalized narrative. However, this analysis has indicated more of a conspiracy to hide otherwise significant details, strategically ignoring them or symbolically murdering them, to make an otherwise false narrative true. From Duberman to Williams, biographical accounts on Dworkin have been falsified through excluding inconvenient evidence. An ethical approach would involve (1) acknowledging Dworkin’s change of view from 1974 to 1979 and (2) releasing the unedited correspondence between Dworkin and Raymond about The Transsexual Empire. Given the discrepancies, it would be worth readers being able to have knowledge about what Dworkin and Raymond actually said in those letters, how these women’s ideas really developed—and not merely what men have made of them. If a man truly seeks “gender justice,” then why persistently lie about a woman to make her in his image?

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Raymond, J.G. (1993/2019). Women as wombs: Reproductive technologies and the battle over women’s freedom. Spinifex Press.

Raymond, J.G. (2021). Doublethink: A feminist challenge to transgenderism. Spinifex Press.

Spender, D. (1981). Education: The patriarchal paradigm and the response to feminism. In Spender, D. (Ed.), Men’s studies modified: The impact of feminism on the academic disciplines (pp. 155-173). Pergamon Press.

Stoltenberg, J. (1989/2000). The forbidden language of sex. Refusing to be a man: Essays on sex and justice (pp. 102-106). UCL Press.

Stoltenberg, J. (2014, April 28). Andrea was not transphobic. Feminist Times. https://web.archive.org/web/20180801010005/http:/archive.feministtimes.com/%E2%80%AA%E2%80%8Egenderweek-andrea-was-not-transphobic

Stoltenberg, J. (2020, April 8). Andrea Dworkin was a trans ally. Boston Review. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/john-stoltenberg-andrew-dworkin-was-trans-ally

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How essential it is that we should realize that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

- Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas1

Andrea Dworkin’s “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left,” printed here from the 1977 pamphlet, first appeared in a November 1973 supplement for American Report. Like other underground newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s, American Report published work opposing the Vietnam War and fighting the New Left’s many -isms: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism. Covers featured caricatures of Nixon—“July 4, 1973: From King George to King Richard” (vol. 3, no. 2, July 7, 1973)—and pieces about the Middle East like “The Fourth Middle East War: Digging More Graves” (vol. 4, no. 1, October 15, 1973).

American Report mostly covered anti-war topics, with typical leftist attention to labor issues—minus women’s housework as work, of course. Seriously acknowledging male violence against women likely appeared divisive to a unified left, many know today, and men from right to left have relied on women’s unpaid, exploited labor. Seldom, then, did the publication give women’s issues serious political analysis, so women got an eight-page “special supplement” in which Dworkin’s essay appeared. Mostly, however, the serious list of -isms made the covers, and the women, so it seemed, had no real issues that could not be fixed by the end of the above -isms, namely capitalism. Seriously, not too much has changed in half a century—from the No Kings protests to the perpetual Middle East war and the men waging the wars because their wealth depends on their warmongering.

By 1977 when “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals” appeared in pamphlet form by the Frog in the Well collective, Dworkin had two books—Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality in 1974 and Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics in 1976. Radical feminist writing during the 1970s and 1980s did not appeal to mainstream interests, contrasting work that stroked bourgeois academic sensibilities, as seen in the shift toward psychoanalysis by the 1980s and postmodernism by the 1990s. Analyses like Dworkin’s did not fit what mainstream publishing wanted, so collectives like Frog in the Well published work by outsiders to dominant ideologies, where radical feminism has continuously existed at the margins. Two examples include her 1977 pamphlet, as reprinted here, and her 1980 short story collection titled the new womans broken heart. Dworkin’s struggle for publication underscores why independent feminist publishers came into being—which happened because of the women’s movement, because of feminists, because of women’s work.

Introducing both the supplement and Dworkin’s essay, Esther Cohen and Debrah Wiley, editors for the women’s supplement, describe it as “provocative because it provoked emotional, involved discussion within our staff.” Dworkin argues that war follows the model of dominance and submission in the supposedly “natural” relation of man to woman, which is a distinct social relation with a material basis in history. In her view, ending war necessitates ending the sex roles that have reproduced imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and racism throughout the world.

The man—artist and husband, wanting to be a saint, on the path toward the renunciation of all power, all wealth, all violence—managed not to cut off his nose to spite his face.

- Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse2

At the beginning, Dworkin quotes passages from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, dated 1938, followed by a quote from Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell dismissing the connection between women’s rights and war. Dworkin describes Woolf’s Three Guineas as “the first feminist analysis of what war is and how to stop it,” the work of “a serious revolutionary thinker” subjected to condescension. Woolf connects “the tyranny of the patriarchal state” with “the tyranny of the Fascist state,” her actual phrasing in 1938: the patriarchal state as the fascist state.

According to Woolf, as Dworkin quotes, “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” Here is Dworkin summarizing Woolf: “She insists that the Nazis and the Englishmen who despise them are a brotherhood with a shared appetite for illegitimate power war games, uniforms, wealth, conquest: in a word, dominance.” Dominance in private, man’s sexual relation to woman—or, rather, his unjust dominion over her—ultimately extends to the dominance of one nation over the other.

Right or left, a defense of patriarchy is a defense of what Dworkin calls “that imposing leftist litany: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and, for the ladies, sexism.” As much as the left theoretically or symbolically opposes its evil -isms, even making some effort to acknowledge “sexism,” it holds onto its unquestioned patriarchal alliances in practice. What explains revolutions from the French Revolution to the Iranian Revolution making lofty promises of justice but not fulfilling them for women as for men? The women participated and led in active roles in resistance to monarchy—and the men forgot political equality for the women after the climax of each revolution. If simply addressing the relations of imperialism and capitalism has been the solution, tried and tried and tried, then why has it not worked? Like capitalist regimes, communist ones have devolved into totalitarianism beneath the patriarchal state as the fascist state. How did “trans women are women” and “sex work is work” occupy the modern left in the reassertion of women as sex commodities? Patriarchy has social, political, and economic conditions observable throughout history, cross-cultural in women’s historical situation as a distinct class with distinct interests. Women come last if they ever do.

Dworkin’s “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals” appeared before Woman Hating, and both reference Woolf for epigraphs. However, only Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, dated 1929, appears in the 1974 book. There is Woolf’s creation of Judith Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s sister of equal talent and imagination, who suffers from sex-class-specific disparities of a systemic kind rather than experiencing a sex-neutral world. Whereas Dworkin’s 1973 article deals very explicitly with the connection between patriarchy and war, no such critique appears in Woman Hating, implying such analysis did not make the cut for publication by Dutton in 1974. Recognition of what happened in Vietnam as genocide, as Dworkin acknowledges, was no doubt still controversial by the early to mid-1970s for the masses in denial. Connecting the oppression of women to Dachau, Hiroshima, and Vietnam, too, would have been heretical in the eyes of virtually all publishers at the time. Like Woolf’s Three Guineas, Dworkin’s analysis was—and still is—revolutionary.

If we were not invisible to ourselves, we would also see that we have always had a resolute commitment to and faith in human life which have made us heroic in our nurturance and sustenance of lives other than our own. Under all circumstances—in war, sickness, famine, drought, poverty, in times of incalculable misery and despair—women have done the work required for the survival of the species. We have not pushed a button, or organized a military unit, to do the work of emotionally and physically sustaining life. We have done it one by one, and one to one. For thousands of years, in my view, women have been the only exemplars of moral and spiritual courage—we have sustained life, while men have taken it. This capacity for sustaining life belongs to us. We must reclaim it—take it out of the service of men, so that it will never again be used by them in their own criminal interests.

- Andrea Dworkin, “The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage,” 1975, in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics3

Going from 1973 to now, analyses of war and militarism have remained the same: Everything comes down to imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism—always these -isms—and women and men should unite against these evils, and everything will be fixed. When the relations between women and men do not improve, it seems like it always gets put onto “nature,” the profound complexity of human relations, or some other -ism—capitalism, for instance, an easy catch-all.

Conveniently, the failures of male-dominated communist regimes around the world, totalitarian and oppressive—starvation and murder of millions under Mao, for instance—remain the fault of capitalism. Anti-capitalist solutions forget communist outcomes like Mao’s Great Leap Forward killing between twenty and forty million of his own people between 1959 and 1961.4 When resistance to imperialism throughout the Middle East has devolved into totalitarianism and oppression, worse for women, it remains the fault of Western imperialism. Anti-racist struggle in the United States has been marred by splits, including between women and men, remaining the fault of racism, also very conveniently. Political theorists neglect that men’s tyranny over women going unaddressed has poisoned every social movement on earth, transfiguring life to come into mass death.

Despite the title being “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals,” neither Marx nor Gandhi appears quoted or discussed in Dworkin’s article, so the text does not explain the title in detail. Marx and Gandhi have interesting sexual histories, despite being understood as “feminist.” While married to his wife Jenny, née von Westphalen, Marx fucked their housekeeper Helene Demuth in 1850, impregnating her with a son. At the time, Jenny was pregnant with their fourth child and seeking money to support Marx’s work—since his writing made no sufficient income. Marx’s collaborator Engels kept the secret by claiming paternity of the child, which meant lying to Jenny to keep her in the marriage. Biographical accounts indicate that Jenny did remarkably thankless labor to support her philandering philosopher husband, who fathered children he could not even support financially. Marx and Jenny had seven children together, but only three daughters lived to be adults, two of whom—Eleanor and Jenny Laura—died by suicide.

While few know of Marx’s sexual history, Gandhi’s has been more widely known, including sleeping naked beside naked women and girls—like his grandniece in her late teens—for “celibacy tests.” He would even say that “he was half a woman,” with historian Vinay Lal describing “Gandhi’s vulva envy.” Sexually, Gandhi was like Tolstoy in his revulsion for intercourse, which translated to envy and contempt for women as sexual beings.5

Woman hating is, as Dworkin writes, “the warp and woof of the world,” this historical situation of sex-class antagonism between women and men known as patriarchy. To quote Gerda Lerner, in “the conviction, shared by most feminist thinkers”: “The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end.”6 In a pattern so widely pervasive yet strategically ignored, men against oppression become oppressive themselves and then mysteriously escape responsibility for how they fail women and children sacrificed to men’s superficial appeals to freedom. Why has it not worked? From over fifty years ago, Dworkin’s article communicates a terrible truth: Past and present, so-called “revolutionary” thinking has continued to nurture the pathology of woman hating.

“Revolutionaries,” she writes, “are out to destroy that system of oppression, the source of a million tyrannies, called patriarchy.” Reactionaries protect its machinery on the basis of distortion, mistaking any -ism for the whole story rather than a part of it and denying reality itself when most convenient. Platitudes about just telling men and boys to be more respectful and for women and girls to develop a better sense of agency become the equivalent to arguing the rich should just respect the poor. The feminist analysis of patriarchy has been about power. Thinking positive thoughts will not overthrow this system any more than it will end those -isms treated as the real issues. But refusing to question the system of patriarchy and the ideological denigration of women and girls throughout man-made civilization may as well be collaboration perpetuating worldwide atrocities. Our history continues to be what it has been in the past—Dachau, Hiroshima, Vietnam, man’s dominion over woman reproduced in seemingly endless dead bodies and ruined houses.

Every woman raped during a political nation-state war is the victim of a much larger war, planetary in its dimensions—the war, more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage against women.

- Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality7

On the Epigraphs

Apart from the initial epigraphs from Woolf and her nephew Quentin Bell in the first section, Dworkin includes epigraphs from poets like Sylvia Plath, Marge Piercy, and Adrienne Rich—with no specific poem titles or their collections named in the pamphlet. For the reader, I have identified the poems Dworkin includes. The second section references Piercy, “In the men’s room(s),” 1972, in To Be of Use, 1973; and Rich, “August,” 1972, in Diving into the Wreck, 1973. The third section references Plath, “Three Women,” 1962. The fifth section’s two poetry epigraphs come from Rich, “Phenomenology of Anger,” 1972, also in Diving. Finally, the sixth section references Piercy, “Address to the players,” 1969, in Hard Loving, 1969.

Other than shorter poetic works, a few longer ones appear in Dworkin’s epigraphs as well: R.D. Laing’s 1967 The Politics of Experience and Phyllis Chesler’s 1970 Women and Madness. Her novel references include Monique Wittig’s 1969 Les Guérillères in section four and Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude in section five.

Beyond the more identifiable works, Dworkin gives us hard-to-find treasures. For instance, I could not find the original location of the line from the man speaking to nineteenth-century English suffragist Emily Davies. When she appealed for possible funding to women’s education, the reluctant industrialists—all of them being men—would insist they were not enemies of women. These men would add they find women useful “as labourers or in other menial capacity”—the latter being the home, women’s unpaid domestic labor in the private as men work for wages in the public. Women seeking education would hear about serving best as mothers, that labor not considered labor, but men seeking education did not hear the equivalent about fatherhood.

Another less easily identifiable text is the epigraph from Robin Morgan. It resembles part of her 1970 “Goodbye to All That” piece: “Two evils pre-date capitalism and have been clearly able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism.” The text, as printed in Morgan’s Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (1977) and earlier versions printed in Rat (February 6-23, 1970) and It Aint Me Babe (vol. 1, no. 5, April 7, 1970), does not match Dworkin’s quotation from Morgan. In “Goodbye to All That,” Morgan discusses what Dworkin quotes, but the text quoted here does not come from that work. Comparing these texts, the quotation in the pamphlet may come from a personal correspondence between Dworkin and Morgan rather than a published essay.

I note these works for the reader because, now decades later, these 1960s-1970s texts seem unread today—with the exception of Márquez’s novel more frequently assigned on high school and college literature syllabi.

Rich’s Diving into the Wreck and Chesler’s Women and Madness appear understood as “feminist classics,” but I would not say many students do seriously read them anymore in university. Judith Butler takes precedence on course syllabi. Many younger readers only know of Piercy through her poem “Barbie Doll,” if they know of her, but virtually no readers know of “The Grand Coolie Damn” from Sisterhood Is Powerful—now distant from second-wave feminism. Wittig’s novel seems very rarely, if ever, assigned for reading, although her shorter works, like “The Straight Mind,” have been appropriated within the domain of “queer theory.”

Women’s literature appears increasingly misrepresented when not ignored entirely, as does women’s pioneering work—which is to say, the original, the innovative, the experimental. Courses taken after 1990 can seldom be called “Women’s Studies,” baptized in the so-called “feminism” of “queer theory,” à la “gender performativity.” Into the 1990s, this ideological takeover coming from academia has been significant with the postmodernist war against women knowing about their own lives and the lives of women before them. Reading Dworkin’s 1973 essay over half a century later, readers find a map of influences and ideas looking into her epigraphs. We learn about what she had been reading, considering how not only Woolf but also contemporaries, such as Piercy and Wittig, contributed to Dworkin’s theoretical framework.

We are told women’s liberation is a secondary issue, to be dealt with after the war is won.

- Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” 1969, in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan, 19708

Here is the text of Dworkin’s “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left,” as it appears printed in the 1977 pamphlet from Frog in the Well.

Dedicated to the memory of Virginia Woolf

1. The Problem

They [feminists] were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you were fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state. . . . And abroad the monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain, is now apparent to you.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

‘Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon employers giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.’ Place beside it another quotation. ‘There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.’ One is written in English, the other in German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the Dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison . . . in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that ‘the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis’ will spring? And is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms . . .? And must not that fight wear down her strength and exhaust her spirit? Should we not help her to crush him in our own country before we ask her to help us to crush him abroad? And what right have we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the week eggs like these?

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

It is the figure of a man, some say, others deny, that he is Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man certainly. His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies— men, women, and children. . . . [I]t suggests a connection and for us a very important connection. It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. . . . It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

Three Guineas was published in June 1938. It is the product of a very odd mind and, I think, of a very odd state of mind. It was intended as a continuation of A Room of One’s Own, but it was written in a far less persuasive, a far less playful mood. It was a protest against oppression, a genuine protest denouncing real evils and, to the converted, Virginia did not preach in vain. A great many women wrote to express their enthusiastic approval; but her close friends were silent, and if not silent, critical. Vita did not like it, and Maynard Keynes was both angry and contemptuous; it was, he declared, a silly argument and not very well written. What really seemed wrong with the hook—and I am speaking here of my own reactions at the time—was the attempt to involve a discussion of women’s rights with the far more agonising and immediate question of what we were to do in order to meet the ever-growing menace of Fascism and war. The connection between the two questions seemed tenuous and the positive suggestions wholly inadequate.

Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography

I have quoted at some length from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas because it is unlikely that those on the Left who consider the causes of war and act to end it know the book. It was maligned as silly drivel by Leftists in 1938 and today it is, let us be polite, ignored by most political people. In 1938, Virginia Woolf was a prominent (though endlessly condescended to) artist of the first magnitude. Even though her formal preoccupations allied her with James Joyce, as a woman she was placed without effort at the end of a very short list: the Brontë sisters, Austen, the two Georges, Woolf. Even though her political preoccupations entitled her to recognition as an original mind, as a serious revolutionary thinker, both the quality and the content of her analysis went ignored. In 1938 Woolf was 3 years away from her last conscientious act, suicide, the last resort of many a prophet without any real community.

Three Guineas is the first feminist analysis of what war is and how to stop it. Woolf is relentless in her insistence that war is a male activity not only because men make war, but because war is a direct extension of masculine values and behavior. She outlines, relentlessly, the total exclusion of women from all the institutions of decision-making and power in a patriarchy. She describes what machismo is (though she did not use the word), and how its public manifestation in war-making is a somber accurate reflection of its presence in what she calls “the private house,” the house where men rule and women serve. She shows how the heterosexual man-woman model is the basic model for patterns of dominance and submission which we characterize in the public sphere as tyranny. She demonstrates that the Führer and Il Duce are Husbands, violating without conscience nations of women. She insists that the Nazis and the Englishmen who despise them are a brotherhood with a shared appetite for illegitimate power war games, uniforms, wealth, conquest: in a word, dominance. She says that to stop war men must change the behavior of men. In her analysis, humankind must destroy patriarchy itself.

It is no wonder then, that Keynes and other prominent Lefties of that time were angry. After all, a crucial part of the war dynamic is the conviction that there are good guys and bad guys. Woolf made clear that, in fact, there were bad guys and worse guys. Life under the bad guys was bad, and under the worse guys it would be worse.

The attitude of the Left has not changed very much since 1938. Sexism, it is true, is affixed with liberal good will onto the tail end of that imposing leftist litany: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and, for the ladies, sexism. Woolf’s original analysis and subsequent feminist analyses go, let us be polite, ignored, not assimilated, not acted upon. The citizens of the male-dominated Left are still complicit in the institutions which oppress women, still accept the phallic identity of dominance (maleness) which demands, in order to continue to exist, submission (femaleness); still actively perpetuate the patriarchal forms of husband-wife, family headed by a father, church, and state; still demand privilege and confuse it with freedom. To the extent that the Left is committed to patriarchal forms, that is, to a very great extent, it cannot help but perpetuate the values it purports to oppose. To the extent that the Left is not consciously and conscientiously feminist, that is, to a very great extent, it cannot help but perpetuate the same forms of dominance and submission that it purports, in other areas, to oppose. To the extent that Leftists do not recognize the real dimension of their patriarchal alliances, that is, to a very great extent, they cannot help but perpetuate patriarchy, that system of male ownership which is the parent form of fascism.

As feminists, we must view the nonfeminist Left as a reform movement. We must marvel at its moral bankruptcy at the poverty of its revolutionary consciousness. Humankind is still, for that movement, mankind most literally. The Worker is still, or increasingly, a metaphor for phallic hero muscle, the center of the leftist preoccupation with images of virility. Women are ignored, or patronized. Liberal gestures of good will are made, when we are shrill enough or where we are fashionable enough, as long as we do not interfere with the “real revolution.” Increasingly, we understand that we are the real revolution.

2. Patriarchy and Sexism

Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh

watch who they beat and who they eat,

watch who they relieve themselves on,

watch who they own.

The rest is decoration.

Marge Piercy

[my nightmare] looks like a village lit with blood

where all the fathers are crying:

My son is mine!

Adrienne Rich

Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands . . . [F]or the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church.

Ephesians 5:22-239

Sexism is a new word, one which has been assimilated with remarkable ease into common usage. It is meant to refer to systematic cultural, political, and psychological prejudice against women. It denotes biological differentiation/inferiority, just as racism denotes racial differentiation/inferiority It was coined so that we could refer to the general cultural, political, and psychological conviction that women are inferior to men, and that womanly or female, qualities (as a male-supremacist culture defines them) are inferior to manly, or male, qualities. Since in our culture homosexual men are associated with femaleness, or femininity that is, in being penetrated they take on female stigma, the word “sexism” early on came to denote prejudice against homosexual men. In fact, the word is used so promiscuously that its meaning has become entirely vague: most often it denotes prejudice against a person on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, with no intrinsic reference to male supremacy or female inferiority. As a result, “I hate all men,” or “I hate all faggots,” or “Women? I guess they ought to exercise Pussy Power” are all in some sense sexist.

This wonderfully confuses things, and we can begin to understand why the word “sexism” is affixed without pain to the list of leftist no no’s. Properly manipulated, the word is meaningless because it no longer makes any reference to the actuality of power. Anyone can be against it, and not many are for it. One can be against it without changing one’s identity or behavior as the oppressor—which is, of course, what we mean when we talk disparagingly about liberals. Just as liberals are against racism but refuse to give up power which derives from their own white supremacy, so Leftists are against sexism but refuse to give up power which derives from their own male supremacy. How then do we separate the feminists from the boys?

Men are powerful and women are powerless because we live in a patriarchy. Pater means owner, possessor, or master. The basic social unit of patriarchy is the family. The word “family” comes from the Oscan famel which means servant, slave, or possession. Pater familias means “owner of slaves.” Common fathers and ordinary priests derive their authority as paters.

“Patriarchy” is the name of the political and cultural system which oppresses women. To be for the liberation of women is to be against patriarchy—no lesser commitment is a serious one. In a patriarchy all civil and religious authority (power) belongs by birthright to men. Patriarchy is a system of ownership wherein women and children are owned. Patriarchy is the original authoritarian model, the molecular totalitarian model, and every tyrannical form is derived from it. To be against tyranny and for freedom is to oppose, to resist, to refuse to be complicit in, patriarchal institutions. The destruction of the master-slave political scenario, however we describe it (capitalist-worker, white-black, rich-poor, etc.), requires the destruction of the source of that scenario: patriarchy. The destruction of the psychologies and behaviors which we call dominant (master male) and submissive (slave, female), or aggressor-victim, demands the destruction of the source of those mental sets and behaviors—patriarchy. Ending forever the war of the powerful against the powerless—and ending the smaller wars of bad men against worse men—means dismantling the machinery of patriarchy.

Liberals, god bless them, are against sexism and for some measure of positive reform. They want the bad men to stop fighting worse men here and there; they want The Workers, men mostly, to control the means of production. Revolutionaries are out to destroy that system of oppression, the source of a million tyrannies, called patriarchy.

3. Patriarchy and Violence

I am the center of an atrocity.

Sylvia Plath

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

R.D. Laing

We talked of the League of Nations and the prospects of peace and disarmament. On this subject he was not so much militarist as martial. The difficulty to which he could find no answer was that if permanent peace were ever achieved, and armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed, and that human physique and human character would deteriorate.

from the biography of Anthony (Viscount Knebworth) by the Earl of Lytton

Violence is interwoven into the social fabric because it is the substance of sexuality as we know it. Dominance and submission, he and she. Aggression, conquest, and brutality are the defining masculine characteristics. War, feminists believe, is a function of masculine (phallic) identity. The vocabulary of war—aggression, conquest, dominance—is the vocabulary of “healthy” male virility. We talk of the rape of a country, and it is not an accident that when soldiers rape a country, they also rape its women. The Viet Nam genocide was characterized by massive, repeated attempts to defoliate the earth, Mother Nature herself. Nixon’s Christmas bombing message used language which was highly sexual and sexist. We know that these connections exist, and anyone who is concerned with violence and ending it as the substance of human relation must speak to them.

It is incredible to feminists that the notion of violence as a function of male sexual identity is not of pressing, burning concern to those who are against, they say, violence. How we ask, can one be against violence without being against the common, daily violence which defines male-female relation? How can one be against war there and celebrate it here, on our bodies? Real opposition to violence would necessitate specific attention to crimes of violence against women. Wife-beating and general physical assault by men against women are endemic in Amerika as elsewhere. Wife-beating, in particular, is a crime which remains invisible, sanctioned by laws which give the husband authority over the wife. Violent rape is rife on city streets, epidemic; and it is also common in so-called private, personal relationships between men and women. Women are raped, and women are forced to prostitution, and women are assaulted, and acts of violence against women everywhere on every level are common, so common that they are not worthy of notice, so common that they are called “normal” and romanticized as love.

How is it possible, we ask, to act against war without acting against violence? And how is it possible to act against violence without acting against male violence against women? Feminists do not think that it is possible and yet when we look for those on the Left who oppose violence, they say, in our ranks, we do not find them.

4. The Means of Production and the Original Capital

We know that two evils clearly pre-date corporate capitalism, and have post-dated socialist revolutions: sexism and racism—so we know that a male-dominated socialist revolution in economic and even cultural terms, were it to occur tomorrow, would be no revolution, but only another coup d’etat among men.

Robin Morgan

I assure you I am not an enemy of women. I am very favourable to their employment as labourers or in other menial capacity.

an industrialist to Emily Davies, who wanted help in funding a school for women10

In one world the sons of educated men work as civil servants, judges, soldiers, and are paid for that work; in the other world, the daughters of educated men work as wives, mothers, daughters—but are they not paid for that work? Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a daughter, worth nothing to the nation in solid cash?

Virginia Woolf

The women say, shame on you. They say you are domesticated, forcibly fed, like geese in the yard of the farmer who fattens them. They say, you strut about, you have no other care than to enjoy the good things your masters hand out, solicitous for your well-being so long as they stand to gain. They say, there is no more distressing spectacle than that of slaves who take pleasure in their servile state. They say, you are far from possessing the pride of those wild birds who refuse to hatch their eggs when they have been imprisoned. They say, take an example from the wild birds who, even if they mate with the males to relieve their boredom, refuse to reproduce so long as they are not at liberty.

Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

On the Left, bright young men are fond of saying that women will be liberated when workers control the means of production. It is very hard for us to explain, though it does seem perfectly obvious, that sexism is not a function of capitalism. Corporate or monopoly capitalism is this era’s manifestation, sophisticated and virtually uncontrollable, of patriarchal ownership. Men owned women, women were capital; men owned women and the children that women produced; men owned women as wives, concubines, slaves, and whatever women produced, men owned. There was one man and he owned several women and their children and whatever they all produced. There was one man and he owned families who worked his land, and in those families women were owned first by the man who owned the families, then by the man who headed her particular family. He was the master, and master became his title, then a common form of address. Women were capital; later other commodities, then money, substituted for women occasionally, then more often. Today there is corporate capitalism in Amerika and state capitalism in Russia. When we look at the failure of the socialist revolution in Russia, we see clearly the inability of patriarchs to give up the ownership of women. When that basic totalitarian form of ownership survives, wherever it survives, the whole motley gamut of totalitarian behavior survives with it.

When we look at the Left in Amerika here and now, what we see strikes terror in our hearts: mostly there is capitalism—the private ownership of women with token reform in the division of labor; where there is socialism, there is the collective male ownership of women, usually without even token reform in division of labor.

I am convinced, as I ponder why Leftists are so absolutely and blissfully stuck on the notion that freedom for all is when the workers control the means of production, that the Left has an almost pathological attachment to the mythic notion of The Worker as a figure of virility. There, think intellectuals, he is: driving trucks, laying bricks, building roads, working heavy equipment—a real man—The Working Man. Certainly it cannot be denied that he is the left-wing hero, and if we have learned anything it is to keep our distance from left-wing heroes.

How does one come to such a conclusion? I begin with the proposition that the means of production must be in the hands of the people; that freedom, dignity, and nonalienated work are the rights of all people. I look to those who articulate those propositions. But in fact, or in effect, they say: the means of production must be in the hands of men; work must stay in the hands of men; money must stay in the hands of men; freedom, dignity, and nonalienated work are the rights of men. They say: men have these rights and if there is anything left over—jobs, or money, or some excess freedom or dignity—we will parcel it out among the women. Needless to say, there is nothing left over, ever.

We must consider here women who work, women who do not work, and “women’s work.” Women who work are underhired, underpaid, first fired, excluded from trade unions, not given promotions or raises or training, are discriminated against in every way. Let working men make these complaints and the Left is involved, concerned, yea, outraged—picket lines are joined, books are written. The fact that the Left is mute on the wretched situation of working women is not accidental. On the contrary, it is a manifestation of male alliance to protect male power and male privilege: however poor men are, women must be poorer and thus dependent on male favor, in a state of economic, and therefore sexual, bondage.

Many women do not work at all in the labor market, particularly poor women who are imprisoned by the welfare system, children, lack of marketable skills. Here the classic concern of the Left for the poor and unemployed vanishes—women are not thought of as poor or unemployed on their own; no, they are thought of as the wives of the poor and unemployed or they are not thought of at all.

What is most astounding is how left-wing economists totally ignore, as if it did not exist, so-called “women’s work.” Most women do domestic labor and are not paid for it. Most women do child rearing and are not paid for it. Women do slave labor, unrewarding, repetitive, involuntary, unskilled, unvalued, menial work that the poorest man will not do. Where are the left-wing writings on how women are the most viciously exploited labor force on the planet? We do not support capitalism (women’s identity is not invested in capitalism), but we too must survive under it. To survive, we must be paid for the work we do.

That, of course, is not enough. Domestic work and child rearing are not women’s work—we reject that precious birthright along with the bullshit male rhapsodies which sentimentalize it. Scrubbing floors and washing shit off babies and out of diapers are not functions of gender fate or identity, unless only women have hands.

Last, the Left, its economists, historians, and philosophers, have seemingly not yet noticed that we are the means of production. We are, in our bodies, the worker and the means of production. Never has there been such alienated labor. For us, control over our bodies is control over our lives. We are deprived of that control by a system of laws, customs, and habits which exploits us so viciously and absolutely that the real exploitation of The Worker pales by comparison. Why, we must ask, is his situation crucial to you, and ours invisible? It could not be because The Worker is poorer, or more exploited, than, for instance, his wife who either works or does not work at paid labor, and in either case does domestic labor and child rearing for no money and is herself the means of production. It must be that he is a real man, that working class hero. She, as ever, is only a real woman. Clearly, self-proclaimed Marxists and communists of all ideologies remain capitalists, bosses, and shameless exploiters until they develop serious feminist consciousness and commitment.

5. Feminism and Fucking

‘The only real love I have ever felt

was for children and other women.

Everything else was lust, pity,

self-hatred, pity, lust.’

This is a woman’s confession.

Now, look again at the face

of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,

the Judith of Chartres

with her so-called smile.

Adrienne Rich

Every act of becoming conscious

(it says here in this book)

is an unnatural act

Adrienne Rich

. . . I’m a lesbian, right? And I don’t have to love ’em, I don’t have to fuck ’em, and I damn sure don’t have to depend on ’em, and that is freedom . . .

Shirley, from Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness

The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Women’s oppression, body and soul, takes place every day. It is the fabric of daily existence, unceasing, unrelenting, built into law, custom, and habit. Women survive by submitting, by learning the slave mentality and glorying in it. Women advance in this society by being good women (i.e., cunts, chicks, pieces of ass, etc.) just as blacks advance by being good niggers.11

When one stops playing the slave’s game, the world falls apart. Nothing is left. Nothing that one learned before works anymore. How does one walk, talk, dress, play, think, love, differently? Each minute, how and what does one do? The world becomes a very dangerous place. When one stops playing the slave’s game, one must start to invent every minute of one’s life. There are no forms which already exist to show how, and there are no liberated communities where exemplary people lead exemplary lives. One lives on the edge of a personal world collapsed, in direct opposition to the whole world of reality and power, and what then can one do except invent?

The point here is that we do not have the luxury of being able to abstract our protests or resistances—we must live in our bodies and our bodies must live in patriarchy, subject to continuing violation, harassment, and contempt. There are no neutral areas—areas in which “sexism” does not matter. In particular, sex, the home, and “romance” are not neutral areas. Nothing is more political to a feminist than fucking—nothing is less an act of love and more an act of ownership, violation; nothing is less an instrument of ecstasy and more an instrument of oppression than the penis; nothing is less an expression of love and more an expression of dominance and control than conventional heterosexual relation. Here the war mentality makes a visitation on our bodies and the phallic values of aggression, dominance, and conquest are affirmed.

To transform the world, we must transform the very substance of our erotic sensibilities, and we must do so as consciously and as conscientiously as we do any act which involves our whole lives. There are two emerging feminist erotic models: lesbianism and androgyny. Lesbianism is a celebration of womanhood, the core erotic act in an emerging women’s culture. Androgyny has to do with the obliteration of gender distinctions and sex roles, and ultimately of gender itself. Both of these models must compel those who understand that systems of oppression are cancers which grow from and originate in the twisted sexual model, which is the patriarchal notion of normalcy, called dominance and submission. We say, oppression begins where life begins, in the act of fucking, and revolution must begin in the same place, or it has not begun at all.

6. Conclusion

There is only one choice. Call it freedom.

Marge Piercy

Grace Paley was telling me about her trip to Russia and she said—

anti-Jewishness is the pathology of Russia, and of the whole of Western Europe, just as anti-blackness is the pathology of Amerika, and being anti-woman is the pathology of the world.

The pathology of being anti-woman, or woman hating, is the warp and woof of the world. Cure it, and the world as we know it—its cruel and systematized oppression, the suffering of its wretched multitudes—must collapse. Cure it, and we transform human life and create human community. Continue to nurture that same pathology, to call it love and normalcy, and our history will be in the future what it has been in the past—Dachau, Hiroshima, Viet Nam; rape, sexual torture, women in chains.

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Published by Uncommon Ground Media in October 2019, this piece originally had the title “Do We Truly See Her? Homophobia and Gender Dysphoria”—technically using “Heterosexism” in place of “Homophobia” but changed, as I explain. From high school into undergraduate studies, I noticed more young lesbians socially and medically transitioning. Non-feminine females came to believe it better to “pass” as “straight men” rather than live as lesbians. Into my senior year of undergraduate studies, in spring 2019, I talked with so-called “friends” about my concerns—quite a mistake. Their view was that lesbians being socially and medically transitioned could be considered homophobic, maybe—except it was “their choice.”

I grew discontent. I discovered a pervasive liberal view that all individuals apparently make “informed” choices, and these choices should be “affirmed” without any consideration to how social conditions shape individual choices. Put more abstractly, if a lesbian or any woman desires to remove her breasts, and if mastectomy could bring her “joy,” so it goes, then why illiberally “police desire” with “Big Sister” feminism being dictatorial about desire? Not political analysis but perverse liberalism has engendered the “new” antifeminism. Strategically ignorant and selectively illiterate, the “new” antifeminists really do not care about reality and the consequences for real women living real lives in the real world.

Back in my early twenties, from about 2016 to 2019, I started reading more about young lesbians, in particular, driven toward social and medical transition. Julia Diana Robertson and Claudia Lucas Robertson, a lesbian couple, founded The Velvet Chronicle in March 2019.1 At the time, I did not know them, but I read their work—including Julia Robertson’s piece, dated July 9, 2019, about Jaah Kelly, R. Kelly’s daughter. Robertson quotes her saying, “I knew that I was a girl who liked other girls. But because of what I was taught, I felt like the only way you could like another girl is if you were a boy” (emphasis added). “We’re living in a time where the human rights of gay and lesbian children are being violated by the very institutions that were once set up to protect them,” Robertson explains.2

The social and medical transitioning of young lesbians has demonstrated what lesbian feminists have written about the conditioning of women. It seemed obvious to me that Kelly’s negated sense of female selfhood and lesbian selfhood could not be attributed to “individual choice” divorced from social conditions. What seemed obvious then has only become more obvious now. Social values matter. Why, then, does the emphasis on the individual and individual choice still eclipse accounting for the society and its social values?

Inside the university, I found no real critique—not expressed openly, at least. I found “sex-positive” rhetoric glorifying prostitution and pornography as “sex work,” academic monographs and edited anthologies glamorizing the sex industry. Critiquing prostitution for being sexually and economically exploitive meant opposing so-called “autonomy.” I found book after book arguing for “subjectivity” through body modification in the gender industry. Critiquing transgenderism for being sexually and economically exploitive, again, meant opposing that so-called “autonomy.” I found radical feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Janice G. Raymond, misrepresented—and even misquoted—without any concern for truth. Among radical feminists, lesbian feminists have critiqued the sex industry in understanding sexual economics. Dating back to the 1970s, lesbian feminists were the first to critique the gender industry. Anybody truly investigating these issues understands the intertwining of the sex industry with the gender industry.

Certain self-identified “investigative journalists” have taken “their” research from feminists, including lesbian feminists, while ironically falsely accusing others of “theft,” so it makes sense why they would “forget” inconvenient facts. How the feminist critique of the sex industry remains essential to the critique of the gender industry “suddenly” escapes their notice in throwing feminism away over petty envy. They never truly understood these critiques themselves.

Thinking of lesbian feminists Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, this piece had used the term “heterosexism,” but there was confusion among readers within the first day of it being published—“Heterosexism and Gender Dysphoria.” I remember comments stating the very obvious: Not all heterosexual relations are necessarily oppressive. Sexuality is not inherently oppressive, no more so than labor, but it always occurs under particular social and political conditions undeniable to anybody not lying. One’s sexual being relies on social values that influence the individual and cannot be considered natural beyond external influence. Sexuality may not appear oppressive, even when alienating—and may even be considered a source of “joy.” Labor may not appear oppressive and may even be considered a source of “joy” for individual laborers. Such partial imagery, however, does not mean there is no class hierarchy or that alienation from labor has ended, or can end, by virtue of enjoying it away.

Throughout the essay, the word “homophobia” appears, but it does not fully or even correctly articulate sexual hatred—in particular, woman hating—being a social and political phenomenon rather than a psychological and personal issue. “Heterosexism” was initially meant to communicate this distinction, but that wording did not work either, not as intended. “Homosexuality,” in general terminology, appears in the essay with reference to biological and physiological differences between the sexes. Although its typical use in “homosexual community,” like “gay community,” denies significant cultural differences between lesbians and gay men, its use here aims to emphasize the sexed body. Alongside “lesbians and gay men,” the language of “homosexual people” here was my attempt to reorient “lesbian” and “gay man” back to the sexed body from queer alienation dissociating us from our flesh.

As collected in her 2024 collection Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence, Susan Hawthorne has a 2003 piece titled “The Depoliticising of Lesbian Culture,” that discusses the homogenizing use of “female homosexuals” and “male homosexuals” to deny cultural differences between lesbians and gay men.3 Such denial has extended to denying that lesbians, rather than just being “gay women,” a mere counterpart, also have distinct interests necessary to understand. Yet the concept of “gay rights” over the years has certainly not paid equal attention to lesbians—despite them supposedly being half of the so-called “gay community.”

Certain gay men do remind lesbians they have not been criminalized for “homosexuality” like homosexual males, rendering invisible how laws criminalizing female resistance to male authority have effectively criminalized lesbians. Every written and unwritten custom, creed, and code enforcing the heterosexual marriage contract, where the woman’s body has been the man’s property, has persecuted lesbians as women. The claim that lesbianism has not been criminalized, therefore, relies on a misperception seeing lesbianism as the veiled female sexual counterpart to male homosexuality and denying the specificity of lesbian existence. In retrospect, I see why I used language like “homosexual people” and “homosexual youth” in resistance to alienating “lesbian” and “gay” from our sexed bodies. Now, even more so than before, I see how the imagined “community,” unfortunately, can be—and often is—used to cover up lesbians and negate their interests.

Sexual hatred structures life beyond sexual relations. Terrorism has not been understood as overwhelmingly when not exclusively male violence, often involving men perpetrating sexual violence and disregarding the humanity of women and children. Men’s “revolutionary” violence continues to be romanticized without critique as to how nationalism sacrifices the lives of women and children for “the revolution.” Lesbian existence is not why men wage their wars against other men, what structures imperialism and colonialism—non-Western kinds included—and why men around the world take pleasure in murdering not only men but also women and children. Irrational contempt for lesbian feminists, à la Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with fundamentally absurd deference to warmongering men, brings to mind Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority in 1979, blaming feminists and lesbians for 9/11. Here is Falwell:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’4

Feminists and lesbians overlap as women disloyal to civilization defined according to men on men’s terms overwhelmingly when not exclusively operating against women’s interests in favor of men’s desires for “revolution” and “nation.” “Which lesbians have an army at their command?” Hawthorne asks. “But lesbians retain their monstrous qualities. These days lesbians are terrorists.”5 Following some criticism, Falwell released a statement, as quoted in The New York Times: “Despite the impression some may have from news reports today, I hold no one other than the terrorists and the people and nations who have enabled and harbored them responsible for Tuesday’s attacks on this nation.” The problem, Falwell claimed, was that his “thoughts” had been “reduced to sound bites,” decontextualized, as if selective quotation explains why he said what he really said. Starting with “I really believe,” Falwell’s statement gave quite the impression that nineteen male Islamic fundamentalists committed terrorism because of pagans, abortionists, feminists, gay men, and, of course, lesbians. From men terrorizing civilians to heterosexual marriage and childbirth not always bringing women security or that much-lauded “joy,” women remain scapegoats. Being such objects of contempt, then, it should not surprise us when any lesbians turn sexual hatred on themselves.

Anyway, being twenty-eight years old now, I was twenty-two when I began writing this piece in the summer of 2019 and was twenty-three when it appeared in October after I tried elsewhere for months. Uncommon Ground Media published it after I sent it—thinking it may as well appear somewhere. There was no money for this writing, that “joy” of independent journalism.

Donovan Cleckley, June 12, 2025

Donovan Cleckley, “Do We Truly See Her? Homophobia and Gender Dysphoria,” Uncommon Ground Media, October 28, 2019, https://uncommongroundmedia.com/do-we-truly-see-her-homophobia-and-gender-dysphoria.

I ask myself why so few people truly care about non-feminine lesbian girls and non-masculine gay boys to the point that such people would collaborate with—or be complicit in—systemic medical violence against them. Lesbians and gay men have lived and died under at least thousands of years of tyranny. Around the world, we, as homosexual people, have seen it all, with our lesbian sisters experiencing the worst of misogyny and homophobia. Tyrants have used our bodies and our lives, our experiences under homophobia, as mere fodder for their ideologies, which is why I cannot hear them speak anymore. I see only their silence.

Members of our society assume that male children must be “masculine” to be male and female children must be “feminine” to be female. This point of view, which is pervasive, corresponds to how society itself, by and large, also pathologizes gender-nonconforming children, all of whom become deemed as being deviant. For the sexes to be different, biologically and physiologically, does not deny similarities in terms of activities, behaviors, and clothing choices between males and females. Sex denialism harms more than it helps because the problem never has been sex. Rather, it has been how, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, gender “prescribes how we ‘should’ be rather than recognizing how we are.”6 However, non-masculine male youth and non-feminine female youth remain seen as somehow not their respective sexes, simply by virtue of their gender nonconformity.

Among the more politically “conservative,” some seek to “fix” the mind to match the body, while, among the more politically “liberal,” others seek to “fix” the body to match the mind. Unnecessary medical interventions, performed under false pretenses to farm profits, would constitute a severe human rights violation. Such circumstances, if found to be true, would be worthy of fully defunding and shutting down every single organization associated with the practices being performed. Every day, I see enemies, from “the right” to “the left,” that lesbians and gay men face in this fight for our freedom from both misogyny and homophobia being forcibly fed to us all. We should ask ourselves why.

To define the lesbian as ‘virile’ because of her desire to ‘imitate man’ is to doom her to inauthenticity. I have already said how psychoanalysts create ambiguities by accepting masculine-feminine categories as currently defined by society. Thus, man today represents the positive and the neuter—that is, the male and the human being—while woman represents the negative, the female. Every time she behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the male. . . . The great misunderstanding upon which this system of interpretation rests is to hold that it is natural for the human female to make a feminine woman of herself: being a heterosexual or even a mother is not enough to realize this ideal; the ‘real woman’ is an artificial product that civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past . . . Woman feels undermined because in fact the restrictions of femininity undermine her. She spontaneously chooses to be a complete individual, a subject, and a freedom before whom the world and future open: if this choice amounts to the choice of virility, it does so to the extent that femininity today means mutilation.

- Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex)7

Economically disadvantaged, women—whether waitresses or professors—endure sexual harassment to keep their jobs and learn to behave in a complaisantly and ingratiatingly heterosexual manner because they discover this is their true qualification for employment, whatever the job description. . . . A lesbian, closeted on her job because of heterosexist prejudice, is not simply forced into denying the truth of her outside relationships or private life. Her job depends on her pretending to be not merely heterosexual, but a heterosexual woman in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of ‘real’ women. . . . The fact is that the workplace, among other social institutions, is a place where women have learned to accept male violation of our psychic and physical boundaries as the price of survival; where women have been educated—no less than by romantic literature or by pornography—to perceive ourselves as sexual prey. . . . It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women’s sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional—therefore economic—access to women only on women’s terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.

- Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4, Summer 19808

Lesbians, in this so-called post-colonial world, remain dispossessed of culture. Many still believe that lesbians have no culture. The dominant heterosexual discourse, such as that of my colleague, perpetuates the myth that there is no such thing as lesbian culture. And the mainstream media does not recognize the work of lesbians until they are well and truly entombed and any relatives scared of the repercussions have also died. . . . The only exclusion is being born male. Many will say, aah but that has now changed since even men can be lesbians these days. If that is so, these lesbians are the only ones to pay for the privilege of being lesbians, and the more likely explanation is that capitalism will capitalise on every want and desire and will commodify even the operation for transsexualism. Such desires can be fulfilled. But would you accept me as an Indigenous person just because I had an operation to change my skin colour? I think not. The possibility that MTF transsexualism can be read as a simple sex change only exists if one denies the existence of lesbian culture.

- Susan Hawthorne, “The Depoliticising of Lesbian Culture,” Hecate 29, no. 2, October 20039

Jaah Kelly, 18, daughter of R. Kelly came to identify as “male,” that is, she came out as a “transgender man” a few years ago, when she was just 14. This past summer, as covered by Julia Diana Robertson in The Velvet Chronicle, now 18, Jaah “has come forward revealing that she was a lesbian that had struggled with internalized homophobia as a kid. She was taught that the only way she could like another girl, was if she was a boy.”

Only a 14-year-old, not even yet legally an adult, Jaah created a now-removed video on her Ask.fm account, during which she came out as a “transgender man.” “I believe I am a boy and want surgery and the medication to help me be who I was supposed to be,” she said at the time.

We must consider that, first, Jaah has been sexually oriented toward members of the same sex, that is, homosexual, as well as gender-nonconforming. Being gender-nonconforming seems typical of most homosexual people, since, by nature of us being homosexual, we exhibit a degree of deviance from gender expectations. It would follow, then, that our perceived gender expressions tend to differ, sometimes quite significantly, from those of our heterosexual counterparts who share our same sex.

And so, Jaah arrived at the conclusion that being “male,” instead of female, would allow her to more acceptably hold relationships with other females. In addition, being “male” would allow her to exist, more acceptably, in a less feminine way than expected of females. Yet, this view of herself as a “male” instead of a female did not help her; indeed, she grew even more depressed, perhaps disillusioned, after coming out as a “transgender man.” Jaah reflects on her feelings:

When I was younger, I always felt like I had to make a choice. I knew that I was a girl who liked other girls. But because of what I was taught, I felt like the only way you could like another girl is if you were a boy. (emphasis added)10

She felt as if she was unable to be “correctly” female, because she was a non-feminine female and did not feel sexually oriented toward members of the opposite sex. This sense of herself as both homosexual and gender-nonconforming resulted in a felt sense of pressure, an idea that she could never be like most other females. To me, it would seem a bit too simplistic to assume that Jaah’s case is extraordinary, given the stories of other lesbians who have expressed similar sentiments to hers.

“No Child Is Born in the Wrong Body”

Homophobia seems to be a largely undiscussed factor in the mental health condition known as “gender dysphoria.” It seems to me that, although both psychological and sociological factors seem to be at play, much of the conversation about gender dysphoria reduces it to the individual psyche. Where did Jaah’s initial sense of incongruity between mind and body come from if not from rigid social expectations of sex roles associated with her sex? For her, gender dysphoria was far more about her developed discomfort with socially existing as a non-feminine female homosexual than about her having been “born in the wrong body.” In “No Child Is Born in the Wrong Body,” coauthored by endocrinologist William J. Malone, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, and Robertson, they write:

Consequently, an adolescent female may find her behavior, personality traits, and preferences more ‘masculine’ than most girls and most boys. This could lead her to incorrectly conclude that she is the opposite sex. That child’s parents could become confused as well, noticing how ‘different’ their child’s behavior is from their own, or from that of their peers. That child simply exists at the end of a behavioral spectrum, and ‘sex-atypical’ behavior is part of the natural variation exhibited both within and between the sexes. Personality and behavior do not define one’s sex. […] What is being called ‘gender identity’ is likely an individual’s perception of how their own sex-related and environmentally influenced personality compares to same and opposite sexed people. Put another way, it’s a self-assessment of one’s stereotypical degree of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity,’ and it’s wrongly being conflated with biological sex. This conflation stems from a cultural failure to understand the broad distribution of personalities and preferences within sexes and the overlap between sexes.11

Although pervasive, the assumption that non-masculine male children are “non-male” and that non-feminine female children are “non-female” is as misogynistic as it is homophobic. It has become institutionalized under the theory that somebody observed one sex at birth truly can be the opposite sex by virtue of a perceivably atypical gender expression in childhood. The social construction of “trans kids,” aside from hiding how social transitioning itself facilitates medical transitioning, hides both its misogyny and homophobia. Assuming that a feminine boy might be a “girl” or that a masculine girl might be a “boy” is itself both misogynistic and homophobic in the treatment of gender nonconformity as a pathology.

This pathologizing, what seems to be an extension of the medicalization of homosexuality, has been naturalized and normalized as central to “progressive” politics. Politically “progressive” critics refuse to consider how misogyny, homophobia, and capitalism intersect in this medicalizing of gender-nonconforming youth. Perhaps the pain of collaborating in misogynistic and homophobic medical violence would be too much to ponder, but, even more than that, the profits being made are too great to pass up.

War on the Lesbian Body

Applied to Jaah’s experiences, we see how she saw the external pressure upon her sense of self as her own individual problem for which medicalization would be her best solution. But, instead, what she felt was, in fact, directly correlated with homophobia that is itself a social problem unsolvable through an individual buying a new body. In Jaah’s case, her feelings of being non-female did not arise from her being a straight man trapped in a lesbian body. Rather, as she says herself, her distress was rooted in her being a lesbian who deviated from the expectations of femininity expected of females. Given such a case, it would be critical for us to consider the impact of homophobia on the gender identity development of homosexual youth who exhibit an atypical gender presentation in childhood and adolescence.

According to the gender affirmative model, a child observed one sex at birth, who exhibits an atypical gender expression for that sex, becomes seen as potentially the opposite sex. Following this assumption, if the child feels discomfort from his or her deviation from sex-based gendered expectations, he or she must be affirmed as the opposite sex. Then, social transitioning follows, with the child learning that medical transitioning is merely a natural and normal part of the process to self-actualization.

Under the gender affirmative model, which now dominates both the U.S. and the U.K., mental health professionals cannot investigate the deeper causes of symptoms associated with gender dysphoria. Such an attempt at investigation would itself be seen as “conversion therapy” under the current guidelines. In a case like Jaah’s, clinicians must agree with the patient’s initial self-diagnosis of herself as the opposite sex, affirm her as “male,” prescribe her cross-sex hormones, and write her letters for surgeries. There would be no question, lest these professionals be outed as “conversion therapists,” as happened to Kenneth J. Zucker, for seeking to explore if hormones and surgeries would be helpful or not. They cannot ask whether or not the young person, even a fourteen-year-old lesbian, is truly “the opposite sex” and, somehow, a heterosexual male “trapped” in a lesbian body. We see no mention in the coverage on Jaah of how the gender affirmative model would have negatively impacted her sense of self. As Robertson adds:

[I]n many states, such as New York, doctors wouldn’t legally be allowed to look into causes, such as internalized homophobia, if Jaah had come to them. That they’d be legally required to immediately affirm a child as trans, day one, and proceed accordingly.12

Imagine if Jaah, then only 14 years old, had been affirmed from day one as the opposite sex to become “who she was supposed to be,” only to feel more alienated from her own body. Such circumstances would, as it seems, worsen her mental health, likely further contributing to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Contrary to the assumption of medicalization being helpful rather than harmful, then, affirmation itself would lead to alienation as opposed to alleviation.

Artificiality Being Mistaken for Authenticity

In Dave Rubin’s interview with the sexologist Debra W. Soh on The Rubin Report, in 2018, she talked about the relationship between external pressures on gender-nonconforming children and the desire for social and medical transition. This exchange between Soh and Rubin included her discussing the child’s internal desire for social and medical transitioning being tied to unexamined external factors. As we see in Jaah’s case, because of what she learned, she thought that females could not be either sexually oriented toward males or non-feminine. Homophobia can lead a homosexual young person to feel as if the only pathway toward authenticity can be achieved through artificiality.

Soh brings to attention the underlying homophobia behind some parents truly not wanting non-masculine male children growing up to be gay men or non-feminine female children growing up to be lesbians. She reflects:

What people also aren’t talking about is that, for these kids, in some cases, the parents don’t want a gay child—and this is what upsets me the most. So, if you have a little boy who’s very feminine, he’s likely going to grow up to be a gay man. But, if you take that same little boy and allow him to transition to female, when he grows up, he’s going to appear to be a straight woman. And so, these parents are being lauded as progressive, when, really, they’re homophobic.13

Fears of being labeled “transphobic” have led to the institutionalized and systematic subordination of the best long-term interests of gay and lesbian youth. In academia, critical inquiry has been suppressed as far as scrutinizing how “gender identity,” as a concept, conflicts with sex and sexual orientation.

Sexuality Being Dissociated from the Sexed Body

Homophobia contributes to homosexual youth, from a young age, idolizing the masque of heterosexuality. Sex and “gender identity” appear conflated in most writing, so much so that words like “lesbian” or “gay” have become confusing with regard to trans-identified people. With how “gender identity” presides over sex and sexual orientation, males (“MtFs”) can be “lesbians” and females (“FtMs”) can be “gay men.”

It is significant that we remember that most trans-identified people, like most of the general population, are exclusively sexually oriented toward members of the opposite sex. Regardless of how activists feel about Ray Blanchard’s decades of work, he has observed that the majority of trans-identified males (“MtFs”) have previously lived their lives as heterosexual males—neither homosexual nor bisexual males. The minority of trans-identified males are either homosexual or bisexual. This observation, applied to trans-identified females (“FtMs”) seems likewise to be true, that most of them are sexually oriented toward members of the opposite sex.14

Therefore, most trans-identified people are heterosexual people being misrepresented as “lesbian” (for heterosexual “MtFs”), gay (for heterosexual “FtMs”), or, in the vaguest of terms, “queer.” “Queer,” in fact, can mean anything, being itself a term conceptualized, vis-à-vis queer theory, to be vague, very much not particular, in its usage. The term “queer” neither has to refer to lesbian, gay, or bisexual people, exclusively, nor must it even do so; indeed, it can refer to heterosexual people who are “kinky.”

The conflation of sex and “gender identity,” the false claim that “sex is a spectrum,” and the breaking down of sexual boundaries vis-à-vis queer theory has undermined sexual orientation being on the basis of sex at all. As such, homosexual people, who are exclusively sexually oriented toward members of the same sex, can no longer define ourselves as separate from members of the opposite sex. If members of the male sex can be “lesbians” and members of the female sex can be “gay men,” then actual lesbians and actual gay men lose our boundaries as homosexual people. “Gender identity” being used to violate the sexual boundaries of homosexual people is, in and of itself, homophobic in nature, since it disputes sexual orientation being sex-based.

Pathologizing Homosexuality—Again

Why should we call non-masculine male youth “female” and non-feminine female youth “male,” instead of expanding what it means to exist as male (including feminized males) and female (including masculinized females)? Boyhood can include activities and clothing associated with girls, just as girlhood can include activities and clothing associated with boys. Preferences for objects associated with the opposite sex do not make somebody the opposite sex. Nor does one’s sense of self regarding one’s own body, or even one’s sexual orientation in relation to the body of someone else, make one into some other sex than one is. This assertion that sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity” should be separated as concepts, in both theory and practice, does not dehumanize anybody. The conflation of sex and “gender identity,” however, prioritizes trans-identifying people, most of whom are heterosexual, at the expense of homosexual people. Refusing to recognize this conflict itself contributes to homophobia.

That one can be “born in the wrong body” depends on a mind-body dualism in which the mind can exist as separate from the body. It follows, then, that medicalizing gender nonconformity can “fix” the body and allow somebody to be “reborn,” this time with the body “fixed” to fit the mind. This point of view is as false as it is profitable for the medical-industrial complex.

Whether diagnosed, or even self-diagnosed, homosexual youth, most of whom are gender-nonconforming, learn to see medicalization as the method for “solving” their “problem” vis-à-vis hormones and surgery. By far, in both theory and practice, it becomes comparable to pathologizing homosexuality itself, beyond gender nonconformity. Indeed, most homosexual people rebel against gender norms, a rebellion that homophobia itself suppresses.

Caught Between “Fixing” the Mind and “Fixing” the Body

At present, the dominant conflation between sex and gender does not help expand our ideas about what it means to live as either male or female. Instead, conflating sex and gender ends up undermining challenges to masculinity for males and femininity for females. Also, this conflation essentializes social and cultural sex-based gender stereotypes as if interchangeable with biological and physiological sex traits. As Robertson likewise observes:

If only ‘LGBTQ’ institutions and media would stop intentionally conflating the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender,’ and start teaching people that we need to expand our idea of ‘girlhood’ to include buzz-cuts, toy trucks, playing with worms, digging and spitting. If only they’d teach people that ‘gender’ is just a set of roles and expectations, a hierarchy positioning girls and women as objects for male consumption. That lesbians have a long history of flipping off the rules of ‘gender,’ and we do it long before we even understand what it is we’re fighting against.15

Unfortunately, “gender identity” politics has only posited a reversal of the conservative notion that maleness signifies innate masculinity and femaleness signifies innate femininity. Instead, this queer homophobia posits that masculinity signifies some innate “maleness” and femininity signifies some innate “femaleness.” Then, presumably, the sexed body must be “fixed” to match “the gendered mind,” medically altering that sexed body to transfigure it into the opposite sex. That, through artifice, one might discover “the authentic self.” Ideologically, both perspectives, on changing the mind or changing the body, constitute dangerous forms of essentialism that put straightjackets on the diverse, human personalities of gender-nonconforming people. Whether “conservative” or “liberal,” neither point of view truly helps the little boy or little girl struggling with his or her developing sense of self. Nor does either ideological position—“fixing” the mind to match the body or “fixing” the body to match the mind—help his or her formation of individual identity in relation to others.

Medicalizing all gender nonconformity in children will not help the majority of these people who will most likely not be ideal candidates for medical intervention in attempts to alleviate gender dysphoria. It remains questionable deciding who exactly constitutes an ideal candidate. Yet, no evidence indicates that most gender-nonconforming children need social and medical transitioning in order to survive. In fact, as seen in the cases of desisters and detransitioners, social and medical transitioning can negatively affect both physical and mental health. Furthermore, the way in which suicide has been wielded as a weapon in such debates has violated standards regarding the reporting of suicide.

Transitioning from Menacing Silence to Meaningful Dialogue

Above all, homosexual youth, most of whom are gender-nonconforming, need love from their guardians, their caregivers, and their peers. They need to feel comfortable in their own bodies, no matter what clothes they choose to wear or what activities they choose to do. As we have seen, it is far more convenient to the status quo, and much more profitable indeed, to reduce gender dysphoria to an individual problem, with a medical solution. Few wish to consider it as a social problem produced by the prison of gender itself, where a sense of distress can come from social conditions. We desperately need nuance in all public discourses on gender identity development. Nothing should be oversimplified. We need honest conversations about the complexity of human growth as it pertains to sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.”

Oversimplification perpetuates our problems. We truly need to draw distinctions between what we mean by sex versus gender since plenty of the problems in these debates come from a failure in definition. The biological and physiological should not be conflated with the sociological and psychological, although this confusion continues. We must not continue failing gender-nonconforming youth by conforming to one ideology or another that essentially prevents us from being both compassionate and critical. Academics and researchers should not feel too intimidated to share research on the development of children, adolescents, and adults. No longer should menacing silence possess the rightful place of meaningful dialogue.

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Vickie Cleckley, April 2016:

When I was graduating from high school, I lived with my oldest sister. They had moved to Louisiana. I graduated down there—Thibodaux High.

I was so sad because I was graduating and I thought: How unfair, how unfair, and for me not to have my mother here, of all the people! Why couldn’t have you just left my mother and taken somebody—anybody else but a mother?

I was just crying and, all of a sudden, I felt wet lips touch my face and push down.

Talk about dry up your tears in a hurry!

I stopped. I called out my sister’s name. I said, “Jo Anne?” No answer.

I got myself up out of that bed, turned on the light, looked under the bed, checked the back door. No, it was locked.

I went to my sister’s room through my niece’s room. She said, “No, Vickie, I wasn’t in your room.”

I slept with my light on the rest of the night.

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Professionals of Neurotics

“Theory” can be very misleading in selling confusion as “clarity.”

Psychoanalytic theory and its derivatives have been symptomatic of “theory,” in a religious fundamentalist key, working against clarification, even going as far as imposing obvious mistranslations as “remedies” based on “symptoms.” So-called “cures” become situated on advancing theoretical speculation rather than actually responding to reality. Freud’s “Wolf Man” case, for instance, was an early indication of Freud being a fraud and psychoanalysis being, at best, terrifically speculative along the lines of such long-discarded “sciences” as phrenology.

In psychoanalytic sessions with Freud doing “analysis,” Sergej Pankejeff (1886-1979) discussed having a dream about lying in bed and seeing six or seven white wolves through an open window. Based on his “reading” of “the unconscious,” known for his Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud “interpreted” Pankejeff’s dream as being a manifestation of childhood repressed trauma. The group of wolves, Freud claimed, must have been Pankejeff’s parents fucking, which Pankejeff allegedly witnessed in childhood—and which, according to Freud, must have left trauma lodged in “the unconscious.”

Following sessions of analysis with Freud from February 1910 to July 1914 and, briefly, from November 1919 until February 1920, Freud claimed Pankejeff to be “cured,” publicizing this case study as part of psychoanalytic theory’s “success.” Interviewed by Karin Obholzer in the 1970s, toward the end of his life, however, Pankejeff claimed that Freud’s interpretation was “terribly far-fetched”—and Freud knew as much.

Nevertheless, Freud publicized his “Wolf Man” case as indicating the “success” of psychoanalytic theory in treating his patients. Despite his “Wolf Man” case being an obvious failure, Freud utilized these “findings” in his psychoanalytic theory of psychosexual development. In other words, Freud’s claims about “the unconscious” could not be empirically proven and were subjective enough that he could bend “symptoms” to whatever conclusion for publishing as he desired.1

The Fathers and Freud successively established confessionals for neurotics, and it will not be long before they are fitted with domestic appliances.

- Mina Loy, “Conversion,” c. 19302

Feminists have understood the “science” of sexology to be, ironically, about obscuring sexuality from analysis, therefore regulating actual knowledge about sexual relations. Sexology’s obscurantism has been replicated in psychoanalytic theory since Freud, although psychoanalysis has tended more to “the unconscious.” Psychoanalysis and its derivatives have been more professionals of neurotics than confessionals for neurotics.

What with their habits and mode of life, reality is too close to those women to allow them to believe in fantasies. If I had based my theories on the statements of servant girls [sic], they would all be negative. And such behaviour fits in with other sexual peculiarities of that class; well-informed persons assure me that these girls are much less diffident about engaging in coitus than about being seen naked. Fortunately for our therapy, we have previously learned so much from other cases that we can tell these persons their story without having to wait for their contribution. They are willing to confirm what we tell them, but one can learn nothing from them.

- Sigmund Freud to C.G. Jung, June 14, 19073

What is theory, anyway, distinct from “theory”?

Theory should have some evident relation to living reality. When it lacks this quality, it seems worth questioning its purpose and whether it serves more to obscure than clarify understanding the world. The most fundamental problem with theory is the problem of understanding. In a lesser-known 1979 essay, Andrea Dworkin discusses what theory should do—and what it should not:

The purpose of theory is to clarify the world in which we live, how it works, why things happen as they do. The purpose of theory is understanding. Understanding is energizing. It energizes to action. When theory becomes an impediment to action, it is time to discard the theory and return naked, that is, without theory, to the world of reality. People become slaves to theory because people are used to meeting expectations they have not originated—to doing what they are told, to having everything mapped out, to having reality prepackaged. People can have an antiauthoritarian intention and yet function in a way totally consonant with the demands of authority. The deepest struggle is to root out of us and the institutions in which we participate the requirement that we slavishly conform. But an adherence to ideology, to any ideology, can give us the grand illusion of freedom when in fact we are being manipulated and used by those whom the theory serves.4

If theory’s purpose, as Dworkin explains, is clarification toward understanding followed by action, then, ideally, theorists should be neither the enslaved nor the enslavers. Those enslaved by “theory,” living in bondage to expectations alienated from their lives, claim their slavery can free the masses from “symptoms,” despite the fact their own theories merely reinscribe social relations at their worst. Theory at its best is not a word game played to dazzle party guests.

In 2012, Noam Chomsky remarked on “theory,” in quotation marks, and the popularity of Lacan and Žižek throughout academia—its trappings, its mold, its fashion:

What you’re referring to is what’s called ‘theory.’ And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing—using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So, there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So, I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in a while. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.5 (emphasis added)

Theory is what it does. If it does nothing, then it is nothing. Appropriations of Freud/Lacan/Žižek can very quickly turn into “theory” in “posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do.” With Dworkin, Chomsky agrees that theory should involve clarification rather than confusion. In other words, the point should not be “the fancy words” being symbol without substance.

Mina Loy was right, in a way, that tools of all kinds, domestic and otherwise, would be fit to psychoanalyze.

Sheila Jeffreys (1985, 1990) and Margaret Jackson (1984a, 1984b) have both argued that certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of sexuality were elaborated in the face of feminist gains, and served to organize hostility to women who were autonomous socially and sexually. The work of Havelock Ellis [1859-1939] in particular can be seen as a response to growing feminist campaigns against male sexual violence. Sexology was elaborated to reinforce and restabilize masculine supremacy Flight from the masculine paradigm was labelled sick and deviant, now it is simply called essentialist. . . . We could substitute ‘Lacan’ for ‘Ellis’ to see what this new French sexology corresponds to, and how it responds to our contemporary feminist campaigns against sexism in the media and in language, and writings on feminine pleasure. Lacan tells us that women are biologically incapable of representing the phallus, are eternally secondary citizens in the symbolic order, and can only come through the phallus.

- Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism6

Postmodernism has utilized sexology and psychoanalysis as theories of sexuality in ways that frequently go misunderstood outside radical feminist critiques of postmodernism. The linguistic domination throughout academia has been part of a thorough effort to deprive women of what Mary Daly has termed “the power of naming.”7 Female erasure under the symbol of femininity in postmodernist discourse follows theories of sexuality that have naturalized the idea of women as not only inferior to men but also existing for male expression.

Word Salad Bar

Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named in an original moment whose perpetual recreation Freud’s genius detected in a child’s game. And from this articulated couple of presence and absence—also sufficiently constituted by the drawing in the sand of a simple line and a broken line of the koua mantics of China—a language’s [langue] world of meaning is born, in which the world of things will situate itself. Through what becomes embodied only by being the trace of a nothingness and whose medium thus cannot be altered, concepts, in preserving the duration of what passes away, engender things. For it is still not saying enough to say that the concept is the thing itself, which a child can demonstrate against the Scholastics. It is the world of words that creates the world of things—things which at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all in the process of becoming—by giving its concrete being to their essence, and its ubiquity to what has always been: κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί. Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man.

- Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 1953, in Écrits8

In Lacan, as in Irigaray’s post-Lacanian reformulation of Freud, sexual difference is not a simple binary that retains the metaphysics of substance as its foundation. The masculine ‘subject’ is a fictive construction produced by the law that prohibits incest and forces an infinite displacement of a heterosexualizing desire. The feminine is never a mark of the subject; the feminine could not be an ‘attribute’ of a gender. Rather, the feminine is the signification of lack, signified by the Symbolic, a set of differentiating linguistic rules that effectively create sexual difference. The masculine linguistic position undergoes individuation and heterosexualization required by the founding prohibitions of the Symbolic law, the law of the Father. The incest taboo that bars the son from the mother and thereby instates the kinship relation between them is a law enacted ‘in the name of the Father.’ Similarly, the law that refuses the girl’s desire for both her mother and father requires that she take up the emblem of maternity and perpetuate the rules of kinship. Both masculine and feminine positions are thus instituted through prohibitive laws that produce culturally intelligible genders, but only through the production of an unconscious sexuality that reemerges in the domain of the imaginary.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity9

Fantasy positivises lack. It provides a name and cause, and therefore a solution: ‘You suffer because of X. If X were removed or overcome, you would finally be free, fulfilled, or complete.’ This is the libidinal logic of fantasy. It does not deny lack, it narrates it. In Lacan’s formula for fantasy (S̷ ◊ a), the split subject (S̷) has an imagined relation to the objet petit a (the object-cause of desire) the interchangeable stand-in for the Thing that was never possessed in the first place. Any object can become an objet a for the libidinal economy. In feminism, The Patriarchy plays this role. It becomes the imagined obstacle. The X that stands in the way of women’s liberation, wholeness, or full recognition. The fantasy promises: Only when The Patriarchy is fully dismantled will women become free, autonomous, complete subjects. And yet, this moment never arrives. The Patriarchy always recedes, shifts, multiplies. Because the truth is: no-thing will ever fill the negativity that constitutes the subject. Alienation is not a bug, it’s a feature of social reality.

- Tara van Dijk, “Enjoy Patriarchy!” Savage Minds, May 5, 2025

Freud is unnecessary to the future.

- Mina Loy, “History of Religion and Eros,” c. 195010

Tara van Dijk has been published to Jennifer Bilek’s 11th Hour Blog and Julian Vigo’s Savage Minds with the following essays: “FEMINISTS TO THE PATRIARCHY: WE HATE YOU, DON’T STOP!” and “Feminist’s Fetishistic Disavowal.” For interested readers, I have made a point of using Internet Archive links to deny Bilek and Vigo more clicks to their publications. These are both the same piece, but the shorter version appeared on Bilek’s 11th Hour Blog on February 9, with the longer version appearing on Vigo’s Savage Minds on March 9. Dijk’s most recent piece, from May 5, is titled “Enjoy Patriarchy!”—also published to Vigo’s Savage Minds.

Invoking the imagery of a man raping a woman, Bilek shared Dijk’s work to Substack on March 9 claiming that it “rips the bodice off feminism.” In an email to Renate Klein of Spinifex Press, which Bilek shared publicly on her Facebook page in the comments on May 7, Vigo claimed, “The Patriarchy [as a concept of analysis] has been deracinated and its ruse obviated.” “Why not publish Tara’s series [‘A Pervert’s Guide to Feminism’], which ultimately will be an excellent book, under Spinifex Press?” Vigo asked Klein. In a comment to Klein on May 8, Dijk replied, “If you can’t handle critique, stay in the kitchen.” Dijk’s comment recalls Bilek herself writing, on April 6, “Don’t leave the kitchen if you can’t handle the heat. I’m serious. You WILL hurt yourself. LOL.”

Bilek, Vigo, and Dijk have trashed feminism and feminists and have viciously taunted and mocked anybody who questions their obvious bad faith. They have claimed what they have been doing qualifies as “critique,” intended for “conversation,” but their online behavior has suggested otherwise. How Bilek, Vigo, and Dijk have trashed other women demands that women and men who have supported them ask hard questions about integrity. It seems worth questioning why long-time critics of transgenderism like Bilek and Vigo have become so enamored with Lacanian psychoanalysis in Dijk’s trashing of feminism and feminists. What does Bilek’s audience think of her facilitating and enabling unwarranted attacks on feminists like Renate Klein and Genevieve Gluck in the name of a “critique of feminism”?

Don’t leave the kitchen if you can’t handle the heat.

I’m serious. You WILL hurt yourself. LOL.

Stay human.

@11thBlog

- Jennifer Bilek (@bjportraits), X, April 6, 2025, 8:16 AM

https://x.com/bjportraits/status/1908871363109978338

Is it a mating ritual to enjoy or oppression/submission paradigm that needs to be excised?

Stay human.

@11thBlog

- Jennifer Bilek (@bjportraits), X, April 5, 2025, 11:26 PM

https://x.com/bjportraits/status/1908738085153546510

Here is Bilek complimenting Dijk on how she is “brutal”—adding “But it may be necessary at this stage”:

[laughing emoji] you’re brutal! But it may be necessary at this stage.

- Jennifer Bilek (@bjportraits), X, April 5, 2025, 11:57 PM

https://x.com/bjportraits/status/1908745853637976219

Almost too good for Substack, but perfect for Savage Minds. Tara Van Dijik [sic] rips the bodice off feminism. Hooray!

- Jennifer Bilek, Substack, March 10, 2025

Here is the full text of Vigo’s email sent to Klein:

Greetings, Renate,

I wanted to respond to you on Jennifer Bilek’s Facebook wall, but it would seem that you blocked me. I was going to make a suggestion: Why not publish Tara’s series [“A Pervert’s Guide to Feminism”], which ultimately will be an excellent book, under Spinifex Press? You have, I am afraid, completely lost the plot in your interpretation of her work. She is not anti-feminism (or anti-feminist for that matter—she is making a robust critique of the ‘cat ate my homework’ for feminism. The Patriarchy has been deracinated and its ruse obviated. Many feminists (not all) pull this rabbit of The Patriarchy out of the hat whenever in a tight corner. What are feminists doing to address violence? Not only violence to women by men, but violence to other groups, including men, and violence BY women? Feminism that adheres to this rhetorical model falls flat and enters into an aporetic space of excuse-making: ‘Men are also affected by The Patriarchy!’ and ‘Woman [sic] aren’t responsible for their violence because of The Patriarchy!’ And then when you have a man who comes along and tells men to check their shit out, to make their bed, to stop being violent (eg, Jordan Peterson), what do these feminists do? They call him a misogynist and a Patriarch because these feminists can’t and/or won’t listen to his Jungian patterns of analysis which is [sic], at the very least, interesting...and often true. I fear, Renata [sic], your intractibility [sic] to respond coherently to Tara’s piece is just more evidence of what she has claimed. I will repeat my offer here, and it is a robust offer, that you submit a riposte and I will run it solong [sic] as it is devoid of all ad hominem and logcial [sic] fallacies. I think that if you truly believe that The Patriarchy is real and not ideology, than [sic] I would expect that you can comfortably defend your ideas. Saying that you have studied feminism for forty years and written books on The Patriarchy is what is called a tautology. So too have the TRAs written many books on why lesbians have peni [sic] and why sex is a scientific complot. A robust feminism should surely be able to withstand critique. I will hopefully find your piece in my inbox soon.

In solidarity!

Julian Vigo

There is a lot in this wall of text, so I will point out (1) how much I hate the word “robust,” as Vigo keeps repeating it, and (2) the sheer arrogance to write to Klein in this way. My favorite part is the word “logical” being misspelled. Given Vigo’s use of the disaster in Gaza for Savage Minds commentary, talking about “Zionism,” it surprises me that she thinks so highly of Jordan Peterson teaching men “to stop being violent,” that she actually names him as some exemplar above feminists who critique him. In a widely shared post on X, on October 7, 2023, Peterson wrote, “Give em’ hell, Netanyahu”—which seems like something Vigo would keep in mind, seeing as Savage Minds has published work condemning Israel—work also shared by Bilek. So much for those “Jungian patterns of analysis” ending militarism.

Responding to Klein’s comment expressing shock at Bilek and Vigo platforming Dijk’s “cheap attack,” which has been a trashing of feminism and feminists, Dijk replied:

Pot, meet kettle. I only analyzed your public comment to me—which is fair game. If someone serves up a perfect example of the very argument I’m making, there’s no ethical reason not to use it. It was a teachable moment, to use the parlance of our times. If you can’t handle critique, stay in the kitchen. (emphasis added)

Here is Dijk’s published work to Bilek’s and Vigo’s platforms, all converted to Internet Archive links, as noted above:

• “FEMINISTS TO THE PATRIARCHY: WE HATE YOU, DON’T STOP!” The 11th Hour Blog, February 9, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250304105839/https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/feminists-to-the-patriarchy-we-hate-you-don-t-stop.

• “Feminist’s Fetishistic Disavowal,” Savage Minds, March 9, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250310113637/https://savageminds.substack.com/p/feminists-fetishistic-disavowal.

• “Enjoy Patriarchy!” Savage Minds, May 5, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250506234155/https://savageminds.substack.com/p/enjoy-patriarchy.

From the start, Dijk argues that “capitalism smashed the patriarchy because a regime of fixed sex-based roles, rigid hierarchical authority, and paternal control over both household and women’s sexuality were incompatible with its forces of production.” This is nonsense. Dijk provides no sufficient evidence to support the claims she makes in either version of her essay—and, ironically, the longer one actually clarifies even less, despite its length.

I sent a critique to Bilek on February 22, but she claimed that she very conveniently went on “a beautiful sabbatical” right after publishing Dijk’s piece to The 11th Hour Blog on February 9—and, since then, has interestingly blocked me on social media.

Since she published my essay titled “Transgenderism and the Scapegoating of Feminism,” critiquing Matt Walsh in 2023, I figured that, in the spirit of “conversation,” Bilek would be willing to publish an opposing point of view alongside Dijk’s. However, she would not consider my piece for The 11th Hour Blog and claimed she would “eventually” get to reading it. Bilek insisted that I had to publish my critique on Vigo’s Savage Minds.

I already had some writing at The 11th Hour Blog, so why should I have to publish elsewhere to write a response to what appeared on The 11th Hour Blog?

Or, Bilek “generously” suggested, I could talk with Dijk on the Morbid Symptoms “podcast” that virtually nobody cares about, having a “conversation” about what seemed to me then and now to be posturing. “She is a gracious host as long as she is not attacked,” Bilek assured me—which I knew was bullshit. The fact that Dijk’s work trashes feminism and feminists under the guise of “critique” makes it difficult not to point out the irony in demanding good faith in response to bad faith.

Having a “Conversation”

Here is my own exchange with Dijk on X, where she reposted my post recommending aurora linnea’s Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life and claimed that she intended on reviewing linnea’s book:

DIJK: So, the Feministas have moved on from applying their patriarchy test to a mischaracterization of Foucault to applying it to one of Sartre.

This book sounds so bad it’s good, like Rings of Power.

Look forward to reviewing it [devil horn emoji] @spinifexpress

CLECKLEY: I really hope you will make an extra effort to do the reading, but, given your “analyses,” I very seriously doubt it. The irony must escape you that you quite blatantly mischaracterize radical feminists. Perhaps that is your own “morbid symptom”—apart from your narcissistic rage.

DIJK: [pointing finger emoji] Feministas keep banging on about my reading of feminist desire and the structure of feminism’s libidinal economy, but not one has actually published a response. If it is so off the mark, it should be easy work to dismantle. [woman shrugging her shoulders emoji]

Thesis: the whinge and defensiveness show that I struck a direct hit. [target emoji]

And all they can do is toss out logical fallacies to protect themselves from confronting the truth that without “The Patriarchy” Feministas got no-Thing. Exhibit 24: Renata [sic] Klein of Spinifex’s hysterical outburst, which I will post my reply to below.

CLECKLEY: Speaking of mischaracterization, I am curious: Where did you read that Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) opposes stay-at-home moms and “decenters” mothers, thinks all men are “enemies,” and champions “political lesbianism” for straight women? What are your actual sources?

DIJK: And now, a desperate goalpost move from the barely-beta Feminista man-scot. The image showcases a sample of public Feministas—not every one exhibits all these traits, but the pattern is real, persistent, and easy to spot. [butterfly emoji]

DIJK: Donnie, if you keep teeing these up like this, the Feministas are gonna start thinking you’re a double agent [laughing emoji].

Since you tagged her, I’ll just take this opportunity to note: The Gluck is a textbook pervert—psychoanalytically speaking, of course. [butterfly emoji]

CLECKLEY: Provide your sources. Making claims without support is your very “morbid symptom,” playing Lacanian word association without any evidence. Is any woman who critiques the sex industry, like Gluck, “a textbook pervert—psychoanalytically speaking, of course”?

DIJK: Tell us you know nothing about the critique of ideology without telling us, Donnie.

Thanks for the QT [kissy face emoji]

CLECKLEY: Comments are not quote tweets, very surprisingly enough—not that pesky little facts ever get in your way. Anyway, I am curious: Are you liking your own comments with your other account? This is just really hilarious—not supporting your claims is “the critique of ideology”? [clown face emoji]

This woman is who Bilek and Vigo, known for their “investigative reporting,” have published to The 11th Hour Blog and Savage Minds—despite the fact that Dijk openly admits her “critique of ideology” amounts to claims without support.

Refusing to Read by Degree

Renate Klein has pointed out that Dijk obviously lacks pretty basic knowledge of feminist books written over the last half century, such as Maria Mies’s 1986 book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. Mies’s book is one among many, written over decades, especially since the 1980s, sufficiently addressing Dijk’s “new” claims about patriarchy and how capitalism developed after it. Instead of considering her lack, however, Dijk’s reply has been her minor in Women’s Studies, which she has referred to as her “entry pass into the sacred circle of feminist discourse.”

Do those with majors or minors in other fields of study typically flash their degrees when it seems they lack knowledge in the sense of actually having learned anything while at university? Having a degree is evidently not the same as knowing how to read. Universities have produced more than enough formally “educated” illiterates.

Anyway, here is some of my critique that Bilek would not publish to The 11th Hour Blog:

A leading women’s historian, quite widely referenced during the Second Wave, Lerner did not argue [in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)] that male dominance is ‘a timeless, universal force,’ and her view of patriarchy as a historical system was common among feminists of the 1970s and 1980s. As much as she quotes Lacan and Žižek, two male thinkers, Dijk provides no quote from any second-wave feminist thinker whatsoever claiming that patriarchy is ‘a timeless, universal force.’ Setting aside the Lacanian dressing Dijk uses, we have misrepresentation as the basis for her ‘argument,’ simply just ignoring evidence that contradicts it. Dijk asserts her claim and then presents her reassertions as the supporting ‘evidence’ for her claim. Speculation through psychoanalytic theory comes to cover up what Dijk’s ‘argument’ lacks in serious engagement with the ideas of the Second Wave.

On February 18, Bilek shared Dijk’s essay titled “The Perverse Feminist” about Genevieve Gluck and wrote the following:

I find these posts, and analysis of feminists [sic] attachment to “The Patriarchy” absolutely fascinating.

I’ve seen myself in the first two, though not so much here.

This one reminds me of a book by Jane Caputi, ‘The Age of Sex Crimes,’ [sic] where she points out how the very promotion and scintillating stories about serial killers actually caused their proliferation.

Stay human.

@11thBlog

- Jennifer Bilek (@bjportraits), X, February 18, 2025, 5:47 PM

https://x.com/bjportraits/status/1891998005596725467

Bilek further commented, in reply to a woman saying she loves Dijk’s posts about women, that the word “jouissance” (just Lacanian jargon) is “perfect”:

Me too. They’re a slice of genius.

- Jennifer Bilek (@bjportraits), X, February 18, 2025, 6:01 PM

https://x.com/bjportraits/status/1891998005596725467

Bilek seems to think that critiquing sexual objectification, as Gluck does, contributes to its “proliferation,” which is not what Caputi argues in The Age of Sex Crime, a book that Bilek seems not to have read—given Caputi’s discussion of patriarchy.

The Politics of Shapeshifting

I could have ignored Bilek and Vigo being suckers for poorly argued work since they have form not exactly having great editorial standards at The 11th Hour Blog and Savage Minds. Dijk’s writing comes off as soulless and mindless, as if AI-generated—or, at least, partly AI-generated, since she already has used AI for “her” woman-hating “artwork.” As noted above, Renate Klein and Genevieve Gluck have been two of Dijk’s targets. Dijk has branded Klein “a textbook feminist hysteric,” repeated on Vigo’s Savage Minds (ironic that Vigo demands no ad hominem in response), and has branded Gluck “a textbook pervert—psychoanalytically speaking, of course.” In fact, she has written her “perverse feminist” writing on Gluck, in particular, content that Bilek has shared, as documented above.

Although only a few women actually engage in trashing, the blame for allowing it to continue rests with us all. Once under attack, there is little a woman can do to defend herself because she is by definition always wrong. But there is a great deal that those who are watching can do to prevent her from being isolated and ultimately destroyed. Trashing only works well when its victims are alone, because the essence of trashing is to isolate a person and attribute a group’s problems to her. Support from others cracks this facade and deprives the trashers of their audience. It turns a rout into a struggle. Many attacks have been forestalled by the refusal of associates to let themselves be intimidated into silence out of fear that they would be next. Other attackers have been forced to clarify their complaints to the point where they can be rationally dealt with.

- Joreen/Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms., April 197611

Although Bilek and Vigo seem very unaware, I happen to know that, as late as fall 2024, Dijk attempted to use a radical feminist analysis, but she was not finding the desirable clicks/cliques, so Dijk shapeshifted into February 2025.

Over the past few years, I have seen Dijk online in “gender-critical” spaces trying to make a name for herself by being overly friendly, in a very parasitic fashion, toward writers with larger platforms. In retrospect, Dijk’s flattery has seemed like a strategy in finding a host to parasitize, any sizable figure narcissistic and gullible enough to be used. One of her prospective hosts was actually Genevieve Gluck, whom Dijk went from claiming to admire to despising—partly, I think, because Genevieve clocked Dijk for being manipulative and disingenuous.

Narcissists pivot from idealization to devaluation, admiration to contempt, typically coinciding with not receiving the attention they desire or not finding affirmation for their grandiose sense of self-importance.

As recently as August 1, 2024, Dijk critiqued a man who scapegoated feminism for transgenderism:

There is plenty of blame to go around, Auron.

Feminists, small in number, are VERY divided on this issue. And I don’t f*ck with transmaids.

The beating heart of this issue is men’s desires, not women’s.

@Genevieve_Gluck’s work makes this crystal clear.

So you are just another whinge beta who can [middle finger emoji] off. (emphasis added)

Auron MacIntyre wrote:

This is why, despite her selective outrage on trans issues, Rowling is just a temporarily embarrassed lib

Men do not want this, feminists laid the groundwork and women are the ones who have defended the trans movement

This is a self-inflicted wound

Prior to branding Gluck a “perverse feminist,” Dijk referenced her alongside Jennifer Bilek “for systematic looks at how we got here” on August 22, 2023.

The piece Dijk linked in her post is Gluck’s essay “How Pornography Forged the Trans Movement.”

On June 23, 2024, Dijk quoted Gluck positively, similar to having endorsed Gluck’s critique one year before:

On February 8, 2025, one day before her “FEMINISTS TO THE PATRIARCHY: WE HATE YOU, DON’T STOP!” essay appeared on Bilek’s 11th Hour Blog, Dijk recommended Gluck alongside Bilek and Dansky, noticeably missing Helen Joyce, whom Bilek has falsely accused of plagiarism.

Following the publication of Dijk’s piece, Bilek insisted that feminists need to “explore these ideas”—like Dijk claiming that women fantasize about being oppressed, and women’s oppression is their “fetish.” To which Gluck thoughtfully replied:

You published a poorly written opinion piece which, in a transparent appeal to authority, leans heavily on quotes from male postmodernists—while simultaneously arguing that feminism isn’t based in material reality. Then you accuse critics of behaving irrationally.

- Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen), February 9, 2025, 11:25 PM

https://x.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1888821481616064974

Genevieve Gluck @WomenReadWomen (ironically enough) just pulled another ‘Gluck and Duck.’ [emoji of a trophy] I accept her surrender.

The PatFems (Patriarchy Feminists) are a hoot! [laughing emoji]

‘Your argument is so weak I won’t engage with it’—right after knee-jerking twice.

‘Engaging is a waste of energy’ aka ‘I can’t actually refute this, so I’ll pretend I’m above it.’

- Tara van Dijk (@TaravanDijk7), X, February 10, 2025, 10:41 AM

https://x.com/TaravanDijk7/status/1888991798908821902

Jumping to April 10, 2025, Dijk has this piece titled “Hey Ladies—Are You in an Abusive Relationship with the Feministas?” (Internet Archive link) with a collage featuring the faces of women, including Gluck, as symptomatic “breeds of woman.”

This essay came to mind when I asked Dijk where in Gluck’s work she argues for anything Dijk charges in her “critique of ideology” that merely trashes women of very different views and refuses to separate them ideologically. To quote Joreen’s essay on trashing again:

There is, of course, a fine line between trashing and political struggle, between character assassination and legitimate objections to undesirable behavior. Discerning the difference takes effort. Here are some pointers to follow. Trashing involves heavy use of the verb ‘to be’ and only a light use of the verb ‘to do.’ It is what one is and not what one does that is objected to, and these objections cannot be easily phrased in terms of specific undesirable behaviors. Trashers also tend to use nouns and adjectives of a vague and general sort to express their objections to a particular person. These terms carry a negative connotation, but don’t really tell you what’s wrong. That is left to your imagination. Those being trashed can do nothing right. Because they are bad, their motives are bad, and hence their actions are always bad. There is no making up for past mistakes, because these are perceived as symptoms and not mistakes.12 (emphasis added)

Dijk’s “critique” addresses these women as “new breeds of woman,” among epithets about what they are rather than what they do, obviously divorced from critiquing what they have actually written. Unconscious of the profound irony, she writes, “Choose reality over conspiracy theory and gender delusion.” Apparently, this level of nonsense is what Bilek and Vigo consider “a slice of genius” and “robust critique.”

Politics as Performance

Here is a public post from Dijk’s Facebook, under the name “Tara van Dyke,” dated July 9, 2022:

It’s amazing how gendermentalists (aka Feminists in Name Only) know nothing about women as a sex-class.

Patriarchy and misogyny posit and treat women as a sex-class because women produce all the people (sons, daughters, LABOR). This is why society tries to control women and why there are gender norms/stereotypes. Acting ‘as if’ this is not the case, when it still very much is, is BAD for women.

#SexNotGender13 (emphasis added)

The worst thing that ever happened to Women’s Studies is Gender Studies (aka third wave - keep the name -feminism).

It went from critiquing gender roles/stereotypes to reifying them (gender identity) and casting the hawking of synthetic gender identities via pharmaceuticals and surgical body modifications (Big Gender) as ‘stunning and brave.’

But ya gotta give the devil they/their due - it was quite the passive/palace revolution.14

Contrasting 2025 Dijk, 2022 Dijk acknowledged that people who “self-identify” as “feminists” can be “feminists in name only,” implying an understanding that not everybody “self-identifying” as “feminist” is feminist. Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, for instance, have been aware that Hillary Clinton’s contradictory so-called “feminism” has been a marketing campaign to draw in liberal women. Since the 1970s and 1980s, radical feminists like Mies have opposed militarism and imperialism, understanding their relation to patriarchy. More have been aware of women “self-identifying” as “feminists,” such as Judith Butler, who privilege male sexual desire and men’s sexual access to women and girls.

In 1983, despite noting the value of Women’s Studies as spaces for women, Renate Klein underscored that “we all know women who are ghastly, unsisterly, and anti-feminist ‘social males.’”15 Now, we really know them. We know there can be “Marxists” and “communists”—so-called “radicals,” in general—who simply pretend their politics and, when most convenient, shapeshift. They “self-identify” from one politics to the next, like miraculous conversion, all depending on a variety of motivations—namely, personal and financial, narcissists and grifters.

On Dijk/Dyke’s public Facebook page, the first “gender-critical” post appeared on January 17, 2022, with Dijk/Dyke sharing the “stylized” dictionary definition of woman made popular under the activism of Kellie-Jay Keen/Posie Parker.16

In another post, dated May 19, 2022, without any likes, Dijk/Dyke took Dworkin’s 1981 Pornography: Men Possessing Women and, perhaps in Paint, edited the cover to read “Transgender: Men and Capital Possessing Women”: “Updated for the #GenderWars.”17

Another post without any likes was Dijk/Dyke, on July 5, 2022, criticizing Judith Butler “and other poobahs of Queer Theory,” like Michel Foucault and Gayle Rubin, for being apologists for child sexual abuse.

Btw Judy, and other poobahs of Queer Theory (Foucault, Rubins [sic]) posit ‘age of consent’ and the sexual boundary between child/adult in general (stigmatization of pedophilia)as [sic] power/knowledge constructs (norms) that need to be deconstructed or rethought (aka queered). This doesn’t end with the attempt to “queer” the man/woman binary that is the goal of transGenderism

- Tara van Dyke, Facebook, July 5, 202218

Miraculous Conversion

Speaking of miraculous conversion, we may consider 2025 Dijk in contrast to 2022 Dijk. According to 2022 Dijk, “Patriarchy and misogyny posit and treat women as a sex-class because women produce all the people (sons, daughters, LABOR).” Feminists have understood patriarchy in terms of the male control of female (re)production, a social and historical phenomenon, which has politicized sexual relations. Of course, feminists were not the ones who first politicized sex, any more than Marxists politicized class relations under capitalism. The politicization existed before the political analysis.

The radical feminist analysis has posited that women have become a “sex class” through exploitation and oppression that derive from the social and sexual division of labor, which has not been timeless and universal. In this analysis, sex-role stereotyping, often euphemized as “gender norms,” serves the purpose of social control exerted on the sexes to uphold patriarchy. Denial of the political relations between the sexes does not make this reality into a fantasy—despite narcissistic and ironic fantasies declaring otherwise. Although very simplistically, 2022 Dijk grasped at least the outline of the radical feminist analysis that 2025 Dijk now totally misrepresents in trashing feminism and feminists. Dijk’s miraculous conversion from 2022 to 2025 really makes no sense—except, perhaps, as some kind of prank being played on Bilek and Vigo.

Since at least the late 1970s into the 1980s, radical feminists have recognized that sexual and reproductive technologies colonize women’s bodies, which Bilek has actually ignored to present herself as this pioneer. Bilek has intellectually cannibalized the very women she now dismisses, including the radical feminists like Renate Klein now branded as “conspiracy theorists” for critiquing patriarchy. In 1975, Andrea Dworkin called for women “to question the development of technology in relation to women,” explicitly referring to medical violence.19 The radical feminist analysis has long understood technological advancements to be part of the evolution of patriarchy. This evolution has been analogous to how capitalism has evolved.

Capitalism from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when it emerged, was not the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution from the eighteenth into nineteenth centuries. It would be absurd to think capitalism today, also called “technocapitalism,” is exactly how it was when Marx wrote about capitalism—or that all workers live under the same conditions.20 Though few seem very aware, in his Grundrisse (1857-1858), Marx argued that outsourcing labor to machines would “free” the laborer from the labor, making the laborer an “overseer” for the machinery doing the labor.

Women’s Increasing and Decreasing Participation in the Labor Force

In her nonsensical argument that Bilek and Vigo endorse, Dijk argues that “capitalism smashed the patriarchy” and provides a figure indicating women’s growing labor force participation from 1900 to 2000. Therefore, she claims, feminists continue “misrecognizing the real subsumption of patriarchal relations by capital.” Put simply, Dijk argues that capitalism has subsumed patriarchy, and she gestures to more women participating in the labor force as her evidence. A significant flaw, however, is that more women participated in the labor force in the sixteenth century, during the 1500s, than in the nineteenth century, during the 1800s. Dijk’s argument neglects social development before the 1800s-1900s, including how women’s participation in the labor force decreased before increasing.

Prior to industrialization, women’s labor force participation was actually higher than into the Industrial Revolution, where women increasingly became relegated to the domestic sphere. Before this period, women did not singularly exist as mothers confined to the home and doing what Engels has termed “private housekeeping.”21 Into the 1800s, bourgeois domestic ideology and the naturalization of the stay-at-home mother coincided with the increasing “housewifization” of women, as Mies explains—“the housewife as an agent of consumption.”22 There is no consideration of these facts in Dijk’s arguments that, again, Bilek and Vigo should have investigated further. That women’s labor force participation decreased from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century and has increased does not indicate that “capitalism smashed the patriarchy.”

I have elaborated on the Marxist concept of labour, the Marxist views on technological progress and the communist vision of a true society because these ideas are shared by most socialists, as well as by many feminist socialists. Particularly the view that unlimited progress of science and technology is a kind of ‘law of nature’ or history, and will be the main force to transform human society and social relations has become a new faith with many people. Even people who are seriously looking for an alternative to destructive capitalism still base their blueprint of a new society on the wonders of technological innovation.

- Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour23

Understanding capitalism in isolation has not translated to understanding the full implications of technological development and its unintended consequences for laborers—especially the development of technology in relation to women.

Studying under Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Alfred Schmidt explains in his 1962 book Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (The Concept of Nature in Marx): “He had in mind the total automation (Verwissenschaftlichung) of industry, which would change the worker’s role more and more into that of the technical ‘overseer and regulator.’”24 In Marx’s view, technology would be essentially positive for the worker: It would produce machines that would do the worker’s labor more efficiently.

According to Marx, the laborer’s role as “overseer and regulator” of a machine would translate to more time for the laborer and less time spent laboring. However, Mies has noted that the vision of “total automation” neglects the necessary labor of caregiving, still performed almost exclusively by women—alongside whatever other labor they may do.25 Living in the twenty-first century it seems obvious how technology increasingly has not made the laborer an “overseer” but rather, far more realistically, has quickly been rendering the laborer obsolete.

Man invented the machine in order to discover himself.

- Mina Loy, “The Oil in the Machine?” 192126

“Asking for It”

According to 2022 Dijk, “Acting ‘as if’ this [women’s exploitation and oppression as a sex class] is not the case, when it still very much is, is BAD for women.” By contrast, 2025 Dijk argues that patriarchy has been dissolved into capitalism and that “The Patriarchy” is a “fetish” among feminists unwilling to let the “fantasy” of male dominance die. Here are passages from her Savage Minds piece:

Unconsciously, feminists enjoy their symptom: The Patriarchy. The real libidinal drive lies not in achieving the stated aims, but in the fight itself. What feminists truly desire is the jouissance (a term Lacan uses for the addictive pleasure found in suffering—especially the satisfaction derived from repeatedly not getting what one thinks they want) of battling an undead foe. Without The Patriarchy, feminism would have to confront much messier truths: that sex-based differences and inequalities are not the result of a patriarchal conspiracy, but a shifting interplay of biology, the mode of production, and human desire. (emphasis added)

This is the psychoanalytic irony: the more you try to rationalise and sanitise desire, the more obscene and uncontrollable [technically, it should be “obscener and more uncontrollable”] it becomes. Feminism couldn’t bear the chaotic reality of sex—its ambivalence, its capacity for aggression, play, power, and surrender. So sex had to be flattened into a bureaucratic flowchart. Yet in chasing sexual freedom, feminism ended up promoting a castrated sex—a sex stripped of libido, tension, and risk, reduced to a sterile performance of consent and compliance. But desire doesn’t work that way. Sexual attraction thrives on tension, difference, and the unpredictable interplay of dominance and submission. Feminism’s current moral-managerial stance cannot tolerate this because it exposes the very thing feminism’s fantasy of The Patriarchy exists to cover up: that sex itself is not a blank slate to be rewritten, but a site of irreducible contradiction. A collision zone where biology, culture, and unconscious desire meet in ways no political program can ever fully control. And thank God/dess for that! (emphasis added)

Traversing the fantasy [“The Patriarchy”] does not resolve sex-based antagonisms. It means ceasing to stage the Father—or his spectral remains—as the cause of every discomfort, and instead recognising that sex itself is inherently conflictual, ambivalent, and excessive. Sexual relations can never be fully transparent or egalitarian. This is not because men secretly conspire to oppress women, but because, as Lacan put it, there is no sexual relation. There is no preordained harmony between the sexes—only an ongoing, fragile, and often messy negotiation of desire, power, vulnerability, and difference. (emphasis added)

Dijk’s work uncritically reproduces the “asking for it” principle evident in theories of sexuality deriving from sexology and psychoanalysis—Havelock Ellis to Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan. The fundamental argument is that women experience oppression, which manifests in sexual terms, because they desire to be oppressed in “the unconscious.” Whereas oppression is a social reality for women as a sex class, in fact, the “asking for it” principle relocates it to the individual woman’s mind as “fantasy.”

Discussing psychoanalysis as such is not an easy undertaking. Like all religions—Christianity or Marxism—it displays an unsettling flexibility against a backdrop of rigid concepts. Sometimes words are taken in their narrowest meanings, the term ‘phallus,’ for example, designating very precisely the fleshy growth that is the male sex organ; at other times, infinitely broadened, they take on a symbolic value: the phallus would express all of the virile character and situation as a whole. If one criticizes the doctrine to the letter, the psychoanalyst maintains that its spirit has been misunderstood; if one approves of the spirit, he immediately wants to limit you to the letter. The doctrine is unimportant, he says: psychoanalysis is a method; but the success of the method strengthens the doctrinaire in his faith.

- Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex)27

In her 1990 novel Mercy, Andrea Dworkin wrote a parody of the kind of arguments produced through Lacanian psychoanalysis, as seen in Dijk’s writing:

Simple-minded feminists, of course, object to a nuanced approach to rape but we can only presume that their response to the abduction of Persephone would have been to picket Hell. To understand a woman’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure dimensions of pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs—the clothes that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent conformity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency of signs, an obdurate appearance of conformity that simply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs.28 (emphasis added)

Reading 2025 Dijk’s argument in contrast to 2022 Dijk’s argument, we find that patriarchy was definitely here in 2022—“BAD for women” to act “‘as if’ this is not the case, when it still very much is”—but, somehow, gone by 2025. Patriarchy and misogyny relocated from social reality to “the unconscious” just in time for Bilek and Vigo to publish Dijk for her to find desired attention trashing feminism and feminists. Dijk never explains how the exploitation and oppression of women as a sex class ended, somewhere between 2022 and 2025, and turned into a “fetish” that feminists have “fantasized” into existence. As “investigative journalists,” surely Bilek and Vigo would be able to see there is something off about Dijk. The lack of integrity evident in Dijk’s work speaks for itself.

To a large extent in recent times the role of religion in supporting the sexual caste system has been transferred to the professions of psychiatry and psychology. Feminists have pointed out that it is by no accident that Freudian theory emerged as the first wave of feminism was cresting. This was part of the counterrevolution, the male backlash. Psychiatry and psychology have their own creeds, priesthood, spiritual counseling, rules, anathemas, and jargon. Their power of psychological intimidation is enormous. Millions who might smile at being labeled ‘heretic’ or ‘sinful’ for refusing to conform to the norms of sexist society can be cowed and kept in line by the labels ‘sick,’ ‘neurotic,’ or ‘un-feminine.’ Together these professions function as ‘Mother’ Church of contemporary secular patriarchal religion, and they send missionaries everywhere.

- Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation29

The Psychic Life of Pretend

Speaking of integrity, when looking at the period, around 2022, where she began her “gender-critical” trajectory, I noticed that Dijk admired Noam Chomsky, at least in May 2022. In an email dated May 4, 2022, which Dijk posted publicly to her Facebook page on May 5, 2022, she wrote kindly to Chomsky, “I continue to learn from your work and be inspired by your integrity.”30 Given that he holds Lacan, far too generously, to be “a total charlatan,” we may wonder how Chomsky would view Dijk’s work relying on Lacan the way it does in her trashing feminism and feminists as “theory.”

If she continues to admire Chomsky, then perhaps Dijk may consider why he clocked Lacan’s charlatanism—and what Dijk’s parasitic attachment to Lacanian psychoanalysis indicates about her own work. Dijk’s views and influences shapeshifting this drastically over three years does not suggest organic intellectual development. If she has been playing a joke on Bilek and Vigo to expose their narcissism and gullibility, then it seems that we have very long passed Dijk’s unveiling moment.

She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us—this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power—that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

- Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic, February 22, 199931

Reading Nussbaum’s criticism of Butler, it seems queer how Dijk’s arguments resemble Butler’s 1997 Psychic Life of Power, which, alongside her other 1990s works, follows Gender Trouble in using Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here is a passage from Butler’s book:

The Althusserian use of Lacan centers on the function of the imaginary as the permanent possibility of misrecognition, that is, the incommensurability between symbolic demand (the name that is interpellated) and the instability and unpredictability of its appropriation. If the interpellated name seeks to accomplish the identity to which it refers, it begins as a performative process which is nevertheless derailed in the imaginary, for the imaginary is surely preoccupied with the law, structured by the law, but does not immediately obey the law. For the Lacanian, then, the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive—that is, symbolic—constitution of identity. Identity can never be fully totalized by the symbolic, for what it fails to order will emerge within the imaginary as a disorder, a site where identity is contested.32 (emphasis added)

What Nussbaum writes of Butler seems applicable to Dijk’s view of women “fetishizing” men oppressing them and “fantasizing” their oppression as women into existence. The view that we all eroticize oppression, but can never overcome it, derives from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and has been expressed in postmodernist approaches to oppression at the expense of the oppressed. Dijk may see herself in opposition to Butler, but these two women’s appropriations of Lacan actually lead them to similar conclusions in opposition to feminism and feminists—despite these women claiming otherwise. In other words, Butler and Dijk have bought their drugs from the same dealer, so it should be of no surprise when their work operates along similar lines. Reading Freud, Lacan, and Butler, it seems more than evident that Dijk has reproduced, perhaps unconsciously, the worst from their work.

Since Jennifer Bilek and Julian Vigo do “investigative reporting,” why have they not investigated the serious issues with Dijk’s “critique of feminism” they have gleefully promoted and enabled in trashing feminism and feminists?

Hitherto it has been said that a period of sexual liberty precedes a period of degeneration— The present tendency toward sex liberation should—understandingly and purely directed—inaugurate a period of regeneration.

If as Freud infers—Religion and Sex are interchangeable—why not reintegrate both giving the people an impetus toward the equilibrium they require?

Sexual myths become the masters of civilization.

- Mina Loy, “Censor Morals Sex.” c. 192033

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With Britain’s highest court ruling that the definition of “woman” in equality law cannot include men who claim to be women, some conservative men, like Sohrab Ahmari, have acknowledged women’s labor in this outcome.1 Unsurprisingly, however, Matt Walsh represents the male demographic who argues that, having “been in this movement for many years,” “conservatives led this charge.” In reality, Walsh came relatively late to this movement, compared to, say, Janice G. Raymond with her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.2 This work was the first book-length critique of transsexualism—and decades of work by radical feminists, especially lesbians, have been ongoing. As women have pointed out, Walsh was born in 1986, and his What Is a Woman? One Man’s Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation came out in 2022.

Walsh has reiterated his claim that “feminism laid the groundwork for gender ideology,” an unsurprising scapegoating I have discussed here. It seems very convenient, now, to point at women like Judith Butler (1956-) with her 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, with her misinterpretation of Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” Of course, this narrative overlooks the male sexologists, like Harry Benjamin (1885-1986), known as “the father of transsexualism,” who relied on conservative sex-role stereotyping to invent “transsexualism” in the twentieth century. While Butler’s Gender Trouble entered the scene in 1990, Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon came out in 1966—and Benjamin was neither a feminist nor did his work reference any feminists. Indeed, Benjamin’s work was based on the earlier work of Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), two of the fathers of modern sexology. A fellow sexologist named John Money (1921-2006) carried on Benjamin’s work in the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), in 1979, that rebranded as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2007.3 Today’s medical and legal institutionalization of “sex change” has its origins in the efforts of male sexologists working to establish its credibility through medicine and law.

Given that transsexualism actually originated within sexology, primarily among men, the rapid-onset historical amnesia scapegoating feminism clearly serves the social, political, and economic interests of the men hiding its true origins. In vampiric fashion, a number of latecomers to critiquing modern transgenderism have used women’s labor, sustaining themselves on female support only to betray the very women who made them. Movement career parasites, these fictively constructed “self-made” creatures have shown up to capitalize on women’s labor and, when most convenient, throw women away—especially radical feminists. If “conservatives led this charge,” then why were conservatives, especially conservative men, not publishing book-length critiques of transsexualism as Raymond did with hers in 1979? The reality is that radical feminists—especially lesbian ones, like Raymond—were the first to deal with transsexualism, experiencing its emerging tyranny before it became a widely accepted “culture war” issue for conservatives like Walsh to monetize.

Below, I have provided selections from X:

Social conservatives have to reckon somehow with the fact that it wasn’t us who struck the decisive blows against gender ideology—but uncompromising, biology-first feminists.

- Sohrab Ahmari, X, April 16, 2025, 6:47 AM, https://x.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1912472976865341598

This is not true at all. I’ve been in this movement for many years and the vast majority of the people fighting alongside me have been conservatives. It may be a little different in the UK, but in the US there just is no question that conservatives led this charge.

- Matt Walsh, X, April 16, 2025, 9:13 AM, https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1912509539057860691

The death of gender ideology is perhaps the greatest and most decisive conservative cultural victory this century. I have no idea why Sohrab would want to counter signal it or give the credit to feminists, which is an asinine claim.

- Matt Walsh, X, April 16, 2025, 9:14 AM, https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1912509945011982831

More importantly, feminism laid the groundwork for gender ideology. Some of them helped fight back against it in the end, but their movement also created this problem to begin with.

- Matt Walsh, X, April 16, 2025, 9:19 AM, https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1912511176849629541

To be clear: I’m referring to the UK, where I believe the decisive blow was struck.

I’ve appreciated your efforts and, of course, I include myself in the ‘us’ in my tweet. But the blow here hasn’t been nearly as decisive. Yet. Onward!

- Sohrab Ahmari, X, April 16, 2025, 9:15 AM, https://x.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1912510115804033415

Fine, but you should specify that. More importantly: feminism laid the groundwork for gender ideology. Feminists in the UK may have helped to defeat it, but they also created it. Another important distinction.

- Matt Walsh, X, April 16, 2025, 9:17 AM, https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1912510717921493113

You have sourced our work at @ReduxxMag many times.

My work has been cited in a US Supreme Court case regarding WPATH and the transitioning of minors.

You are attempting to credit your own political agenda for work that, internationally, has been forged by women of various stripes.

Not beholden to conservative or liberal agendas, but working together, under great duress, against a harmful ideology that deeply impacts us.

- Genevieve Gluck, X, April 16, 2025, 11:19 AM, https://x.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1912541477617692809

It will be a cold day in hell before I thank men who’ve made a career out of the gender ideology debate for supposedly freeing us from its weight.

Men who came along with large budgets and agendas to serve, profiting from the labor and emotional turmoil of women, many of whom continue to experience ostracism, and financial costs in addition to their loss of friendships, simply for defending themselves and other women.

Men who were lionized while women were ignored; men who will, or do, show open contempt for women after this issue becomes unprofitable for them.

They will move on to the next issue, and women will still have to reckon not only with the fallout, but with the myriad of issues which uniquely impact females that don’t garner so much attention: sexual violence, porn, prostitution, surrogacy, for example.

- Genevieve Gluck, X, April 16, 2025, 12:09 PM, https://x.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1912554074190540973

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The woman who possesses love for her sex, for the world, for truth, justice, and right, will not hesitate to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under what guise of age or holiness it appears.

- Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State1

I had intended on attending the launch for linnea’s Man Against Being toward the end of February, although we became busier at the laundromat than expected. Such is work. However, as always, I am thankful to Spinifex Press for providing videos of the launches, like this one, available online for those who cannot attend or who may wish to review.

There is reason to watch this book launch, if not also read it—and, even more importantly, read linnea’s book. Man Against Being is a vital work for our time, a call to recognize that man’s dominion over woman, over nature, is the root of the ongoing war against reality, what drives man’s hunger to escape his own flesh through his technology. What use would it be, for instance, to acknowledge the capitalism of transgenderism and recent technological advancements but not address the more inconvenient fact that mind-body dualism predates modern capitalism and has operated independently of any industry behind it? Mistaking one piece for the whole picture, a typical error, creates only a partial, distorted view of what has actually coincided with the social order—inside and outside Western philosophy and culture. Transgenderism leading into transhumanism does not contradict the ideas of Western thinkers following in Plato’s view of the body as a prison which the soul must transcend. Only radical feminists, like linnea, have investigated deeply enough below the surface, tracing the history, while too many others have wallowed in the superficial. Where radical feminism has been castigated as being atrophied, supposedly not further developing its analysis since the 1970s, linnea’s work strongly indicates otherwise.

Although Mary Daly and Susan Griffin stand out as two of linnea’s intellectual foremothers/foresisters—apart from Andrea Dworkin, who almost goes without saying, such is her tremendous influence—I see another, deeper into the past: Matilda Joslyn Gage. Daly writes of women—Hags doing Hag-ography and Hag-ology—who “must continue in the spiritual tradition of such visionaries as Matilda Joslyn Gage, continuing to uncover our past and paths to our future.”2 Upon reading Man Against Being, I have no doubt that linnea lives/writes in the tradition of the Great Hags.

I have transcribed remarks from Susan Hawthorne, Lierre Keith, Ariel Salleh, and Renate Klein. However, I have reproduced, as noted below and linked, linnea’s own text of her remarks, with page numbers added here for the passages referenced. Including linnea’s own text makes the most sense to respect her choices in punctuation and paragraph breaks. When transcribing elsewhere, I have worked to maintain the integrity of each woman’s voice. Notes at the end function more as extra commentary on some points to be visited after reading.

For the sake of not having as many notes, the text has in-text page references for quotes from linnea’s Man Against Being and other points in the notes at the end, such as noting the Sado-Ritual Syndrome in Daly’s Gyn/Ecology.

HAWTHORNE: Welcome, everybody, to this launch of Man Against Being by aurora linnea, and it’s fabulous to have you here, so let me just thank you and begin with a welcome.

We respectfully acknowledge the wisdom of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their custodianship of the lands and waterways.

The lands on which Spinifex offices are situated are Djiru, Bunurong and Wurundjeri, Wadawurrung, Gundungurra, and Noongar.

We also acknowledge the many women throughout history who have fought for women’s freedom and the freedom of lesbians, often at the cost of their lives.

Today, Lierre Keith is launching aurora’s book. You can see it there. Lierre is the author of seven books, including The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability [2009], and it’s been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She is co-author, with Derrick Jensen and Max Wilbert, of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It [2021]. She is the founder of WoLF, and you’ll see “WoLF” written across her chest. WoLF—the Women’s Liberation Front—is a radical feminist nonprofit which is suing the state of California on behalf of women forced to share prison cells with men. She lives in the Redwoods with an enormous pack of enormous dogs. Welcome, Lierre.

KEITH: Thanks for inviting me. I feel quite honored that I was asked to present a little bit on this book.

This book is basically a descendant of both Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology [1978] and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature [1978]. Coming from me, that’s about as high praise as you could get, because those are two of my favorite authors ever—and absolutely foundational to radical feminism as we know it. I feel like aurora has just taken the ball and run with it in a really amazing way. This is the beautiful cover of the book, and this is the table of contents. I’m just going to give you an overview of what you can expect if you read it.

Her basic thesis is that men hate—and I shouldn’t say “men”; she uses the word “Man,” and she does that very specifically, so I’m going to try to use the same language. “Man,” meaning men as a class, their whole framework that they’ve created under patriarchy—that’s “Man,” which is different than individual men. I get that distinction, so I’m going to try to use “Man” the way that she did.3

Man is horrified at the idea that he’s alive, because someday he might die, and, also, he feels very powerless at this, so instead of embracing the joys and the sorrows of the human condition, you have these patriarchal cultures—including ours—where everything that reminds him that he might one day die, and that he has a vulnerable body, sets up this tremendous response where he has to try to deny it. Others, the scapegoats, the people who are in a subservient position, then, become the bearers of mortality and of life and of the material. This battle is never over because, of course, you can’t deny reality. At the end of the day, we are all material creatures, and we are all going to die, so he’s horrified at his body. She uses all of these different examples of it, in a very compelling way, to show that just across the culture—and this is around the globe; it’s not even just Western culture—how Man has this horror that he’s alive, and how much he really hates it.

The second part of this is called “Severed Heads Forever,” and it’s about this sort of Cartesian dualism, essentially that the mind exists and the body does not. Once you’re split like that, you have to constantly be reinventing that split, because it’s not real, but they want it to be, so they keep doing this over and over. And then, of course, you’ve got “Others//Bodies,” so you have to have the scapegoat who takes on the role of the embodied.

“Mastering the Body by Proxy” is the chapter where I felt like it most matched Mary Daly, because, in Gyn/Ecology, she saw this pattern that she named the “Sado-Ritual Syndrome”—and this is all across the world.4 When she looked at the horrendous things that men do to women, she saw a pattern, and so she named the seven different things that are always present when this happens. I feel like aurora did something very similar here. She’s chalked out the different parts of this, the way that they hate the body and the things that they do to physical bodies—their own and others—and she also acknowledges that this is a ritual; she points that out, so very parallel to Mary Daly.

“Life After Life: Post-Embodiment Fantasies of the Terminal Man” is all the crazy stuff about how we can modify our bodies, how we can “trans” our bodies, how we can “become computers” and go live in the internet somewhere—just trying to leave the body as far as we possibly can. Finally, her prescription for this, how we’re going to get out of it, she calls “resurrectionary feminism.” The end chapter is really worth the journey; it’s a hard journey, but the end is so beautiful and so hopeful that it really makes up for what you have to endure in the middle. Because she gets into the details here, and it’s patriarchy, so it’s not any fun:

In the urgency of my heartbreak as a ravaged world succumbs to plunder and the killing won’t slow but only accelerates with the unstoppable surge of years, I write because I want to scream it: men hate life. By ‘life,’ I mean the substance of creation, the creatures that men themselves are, their existence as bodies and the matter from which their bodies are made. Life is being alive on the earth, being an animal, being a body. . . . [O]ne finds that what is truest is always rather shockingly and painfully simple. It is an oversight to shrink from what is clear to see. So we observe that men have spent thousands of years articulating their hatred for life and acting on it. Men have made themselves clear—why not take them at their word? (p. 3)

This is another way of saying, “When Man shows you who he is, believe him,” because they have done nothing for the last 10,000 years but show us how much they actually hate life, so we’re not making this up. I know we get called “manhaters” and whatever nasty things, but aurora just shows you, in their own words and their own actions, how much they actually hate being alive—and other living creatures. Here’s a twelfth-century monk:

Worldly life, future death,

Permanent ruin,

Worldly life, evil thing,

Never worthy of love

. . .

Life, stupid thing

Accepted only by fools,

I reject you with all my heart.

For you are full of filth. (qtd., p. 3)

And that pretty much sums it up.

[Christian] [w]riters taking up this theme breathlessly catalogued the profusion of horrors that made life such a scourge: dirt, bad smells, flies, fleas, cold, heat, hunger, thirst, worms, wild animals, fire, lightning, fierce winds, poisonous plants, hard labor, poverty, deprivation, surfeit, fear, desire, sex, childbirth, disease, injury, aging, death, decay. (p. 4)

There’s just this list of reasons why life is terrible. This is fully embraced into Christianity, at a certain point, and then is still with them today.

In the centuries that have passed between the Middle Ages and now, men have given lavish, violent display to their rejection of the life they called stupid, evil, and unworthy of love. They have razed field and forest, felling trees by the thousands, grinding them into sawdust, clearing the land for cities and suburbs and feedlots, leaving the earth scarred, the creatures who once lived in and amongst the trees displaced, the air thinner for the loss of the trees’ enlivening breath. . . . And where men have erected cities to house themselves in isolation from the world they abhor, the earth enervates interred under miles of tons of concrete, today the single most abundantly used substance after water. (p. 5)

I did not know that about concrete, so that’s a lot of concrete, and its purpose is just to cover the earth so nothing can grow.5

And the oceans are dying. The guts of fish, turtles, and seabirds bloat clotted with plastic dregs. And countless gallons of unknown, unknowable chemicals leach into the soil and into the groundwater, so humans and other animals are born deformed and diseased and rapidly decline. Forests turn arid into tinder and catch fire, polar ice melts, the permafrost thaws, topsoil erodes. We breathe the ashes, our lungs blacken. A mountain’s peak is blown to rubble, so men can mine for coal to keep electric lights burning in vacant office parks. . . . Grasslands desiccate into deserts. Then nothing grows, then nothing eats, then nothing survives, nothing lives. (p. 6)

Our one and only beloved planet is just being wrecked by this.

And as the living world thrashes in its death throes, men intoxicate themselves placated with self-soothing fantasies of excarnation, ascension, myriad raptures both religious and technological. They are convinced that they can live without their lives. That they will be better off without them. And the killing continues apace. (p. 7)

I think she’s got that pretty well wrapped up.

Fearing death, insulted and affronted by it, men have hardened themselves against life, for in mortal material reality there is no living without dying. Yet to scorn life and to wage war against it sets men at no safer distance from mortality; they have not preserved themselves but, by damaging the creation their lives depend on, only expedited their own demise. By disavowing themselves as animals, the beings they are by nature, they have harshened their own suffering, for now their lives are spent in paranoic denial. (p. 7)

Then we get to the chapter on body horror, and she goes through different kinds of cultural avenues where you will see this over and over—this terror that men have, the disgust they feel toward physical embodiment. Some of it is pop culture, some of it is serious philosophy. You’ve got the Blob, you’ve got Sartre, you’ve got Harlan Ellison, Plato, all the way back to the Greeks, The Exorcist, Lovecraft—all kinds of examples of just how much they hate the animal body.

Whatever the Blob is, it’s obscenely organic. Anatomically speaking, it most resembles the mesentery: that membranous ruffle of connective tissue that holds our bowels contained within our abdomens. But then in other scenes it is more placental, a sack of jellied blood spat from the black-hole womb of the universe. Like a cancer, the Blob metastasizes into a writhing fabric of cysts, polyps, abscesses. It is tumorous, its constant growth malignant. The Blog is a diseased organ gone rogue, sentient but severed from any reasonable rational mind that might temper its frenzy. (p. 14)

We’ve got this Cartesian dualism absolutely going on here. Then she quotes Sartre, and the thing that was interesting to me, about this particularly, is I remember way back when I was a teenager, at that age when people start reading serious philosophy. Some of my friends had taken up Sartre, and I hated it. I started to read Being and Nothingness [1943], this whole thing about “slime”—I was so repelled by how much he clearly hated life.6 I was like, “Why is anybody reading this?” So, it was quite clear to me the misogyny involved in this, that he associated the “slime” with this sort of “feminine” ooze. I was like: You wouldn’t be alive without a woman’s body. We menstruate and, yes, birth is bloody, and it involves some “slimy” parts, but so what? That’s just what’s inside your skin—this is just what being alive is, this is your blood and your nerves and your guts and your everything, and I don’t why do you hate being alive so much. I had a hard time taking him seriously after that, and, in fact, I couldn’t finish reading the book, and I got into fights with some of my friends about it. So, I was very happy to see this quote in here, because this is exactly what turned me off that whole group of philosophers was this:

I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy, and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me . . . It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking. (Sartre, 1943, qtd., p. 15)

It’s always women’s fault, right?

And then Plato: Elizabeth Spelman diagnoses Plato with the syndrome that she has called “somatophobia”: “a paranoid terror of the mortal material biological body characteristically expressed as abhorrence for all things physical” [linnea’s sharper, applied definition of Spelman’s concept].7 She argues that this is all across the Western philosophical canon, this antipathy for human bodiliness. The soul is associated with “the immortal” and the ethereal, and it’s above the terrible, slimy, awful suffering body; you have to split them off—and only one is ever going to be good.

We have another Christian—St. Peter Damian (1007-1072/73 CE)—saying the body was corruption itself, that it’s always been rotten, we just see it at death, but it’s always been there the whole time (“human flesh . . . the rottenness which it has always been,” qtd., p. 23). Martin Luther (1483-1546 CE) called the body “maggot-sack” [“Madensack”], filled with the “vilest worms, adders, toads, and snakes,” just all this repulsion for the animal body (qtd., p. 23). Here’s Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex [1949], and, as you may know, she was in a long-term relationship with Sartre:

He would be inevitable, like a pure Idea . . . and he finds himself shut up in a body of limited powers . . . This quivering jelly which is elaborated in the womb . . . evokes too clearly the soft viscosity of carrion for him not to turn shuddering away . . . Because he is horrified by needlessness and death, man feels horror at having been engendered; he would fain deny his animal ties; through the fact of his birth murderous nature has a hold upon him. (Beauvoir, 1949, qtd., p. 24)8

She recognizes the same thing as what he feels, except she’s clearly stepped back from it, and she’s analyzing it. Instead of nature being amazing and beautiful and miraculous, this incredible gift that we get to have, that we’re here, that we get to experience all of this, they really see it as some terrible, awful, horrifying, revolting place that they’re stuck. They have acted that way, so we do have to believe them, but I just thought it was interesting that, even though she’s involved with him long-term, this was the love of her life, apparently, she got this about him and about men and about the philosophy that they were engaged in together. She’s able to step back and analyze it.9

Another medieval Christian was more concise: ‘After man comes the worm. After the worm, stench and horror.’ (p. 33)

This is what they think about being alive.

Terrorized by the brute fact of his body, Man pits himself against material reality, initiating what Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (1973) calls Man’s ‘revolt against existence itself’ (p. 84). Reality defies and defiles Man, denies him the power to exist indefinitely in his own immortal image, clean, and pure and spiritualized. Unstigmatized, unindebted. Thus he abhors reality as adversary and oppressor. (p. 41)

This is the battle they’ve been fighting.

“Severed Heads Forever: Disembodiment and Immortal Manhood” is all about Cartesian dualism, “the decapitation,” that we only exist in our minds; we don’t exist in our bodies, and the mind is the pure thing that might last forever. The body is just absolutely going to die, and that’s a terrible thing, not just the inevitable sadness that becomes life again. “Any data one receives through these channels is open to doubt” (p. 46) [linnea paraphrasing Descartes], so he’s saying that our bodies are not trustworthy in any way. All we know is that we have thoughts and those truly exist, so that’s where we’re going to put all our chips on that side of it. This is called Cartesian dualism.

I did not know this about Descartes: His mother died when he was quite young [just over a year after his birth], so he didn’t have a mother. He also was quite sickly as a child, probably with tuberculosis, so he had a hard childhood. I found some forgiveness in my heart after reading that about him that, without that really primary bond of the maternal matrix of love and protection, of course, he was going to end up like this. This fills in the rest of the story for me, why he ended up hating being alive so much. I think there was a primary wound that, when that’s not filled at a very young age, there’s not much to repair it when you’re that young, so I think he had a hard time. It’s there in his philosophy.

Men have to be reborn because they hate that they came from women. They hate their bodies so much. You will see around the globe all of these horrendous initiation rituals that men put boys through to make them into men. They basically have to completely reject the soft, “womanly” body that they were born from, and they have to go numb, “not cry out when wounded” (p. 73). That’s the only way to be worthy. And aurora goes through a bunch of pretty horrendous rituals that men do to young boys to get them to become this: “War, of course, is the consummate, quintessential, and most spectacular rite of violence by which Manhood is established and affirmed” (p. 73).

Now, this chapter [“Others//Bodies”] is about all of the scapegoating, how the hatred of the animal body is then projected onto women, animals, and racialized people—anybody who’s considered beneath and “Other.” So, here’s the dualism:

mind / body

soul / body

spirit / body

essence / substance

immaterial / material

immortal / mortal

pure / impure

culture / nature

analogue / digital

heaven / earth

sacred / profane

light / dark

light / heavy

good / evil (pp. 79-80)

This is the world that they’ve set up, the dualism ecofeminist Val Plumwood calls patriarchy’s mantra of radical exclusion: “I am nothing at all like this inferior other” (qtd., p. 81). “Radical exclusion dictates that what the Other is, the Self is not” (p. 81).

In the social hierarchy Man has scaffolded, the Other functions as ‘the material bottom beneath which one cannot sink’ [Andrea Dworkin, 2000]. As a negative reference point, the Other provides man with a reliable reservoir of relative self-esteem: if the Other is on the bottom, then man gets to see himself on top. Since his self-concept as discarnate hence undying hence omnipotently Godlike depends on the other being held low, Man is obliged to enforce the others debasement and denigration. (p. 81)

Then, we get into Marx and Freud, and it’s basically the same thing. It’s “by controlling nature rather than being controlled by it that Man [according to Marx] becomes ‘human,’ by which he means ‘superior to an animal’” [Marx, Das Kapital (Capital), vol. III, 1894] (p. 88). The far left does it just like the far right. Freud, of course, wasn’t so sure that man could actually master this, but his whole thing was that there’s this terrible conflict between “civilization” and “not civilization,” that man has to control all of these urges in order make civilization happen. But [according to Freud] there’s always going to be this conflict in our minds because we’re at war with ourselves—between these terrible urges that we have and the sort of better, higher way that that we want to try to be. So, the “animal drives” [according to Freud] have to be mastered through “repression” and “sublimation”: “[I]f we let them have their way, they would infallibly bring us to ruin” [Freud, “My Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus,” 1932/1964] (p. 88).10 This is really what he thinks about human beings.

There are the Buddhist counterparts, and it’s exactly the same:

That these Christian men’s Buddhist counterparts were no less repulsed by the female is made clear in the Maharatnakuta Sutra [707-713 CE]:

‘As the filth and decay of a dead dog or dead snake are burned away, / So men should burn filth and detest evil. / The dead dog and snake are detestable, / But women are even more detestable than they are.’ (p. 97)

It’s filth; it’s decay; it’s worms; and it’s all “evil”—and [according to ancient Buddhist scripture] “women are even more detestable than they [the dead dog and dead snake] are” is the punchline to all of this. No matter where you go in patriarchy, it’s the same story.

“Mastering the Body by Proxy: Rituals of Corporeal Control and Punishment” discusses the rituals of control and the punishments that are inflicted on women on animals—and that men do on themselves. In this chapter, she makes some very good points that I wish feminists would make more. I was very impressed with this chapter as well. First of all, to ritualize:

By the rituals he invents and executes and repeats obsessively, Man labors to reconfigure reality. Joseph Campbell defined ritual as ‘the enactment of a myth’: the practice of bringing a myth to life, lending it concrete presence in the world, through methodical, purposeful, symbolically significant actions. (p. 113)

That’s what they’re doing every time they commit these horrors: they’re reenacting that myth. Man is trying “to make real his sacred myths,” and it’s “a course of escalating violence, the compulsion to overpower the mortal material body twisting into a bitter urge to punish it for its crimes against him, as he grows increasingly desperate to believe in the fantasy to which he has hitched his salvation” (p. 114). She has this list, where I think it really is parallel to Mary Daly: “Mortification, mutilation, humiliation, consumption, replacement, torture, annihilation” (p. 114). This is the “progression” of it through the course of patriarchy, and these are the rights that Man performs—and he has done this obsessively for thousands of years. We see the “glorious” results around us: We’ve got a half-dead planet. So, we need to take Man seriously. This chapter is hard to read, of course, because you’re going to read about torture and rape. I won’t lie to you: She doesn’t pull any punches, but we do have to face this, and I think that her framework is quite sound and really will be helpful to radical feminism going forward.

In “Life After Life: Post-Embodiment Fantasies of the Terminal Man,” we have all of these ridiculous fantasies that Man has now about how he can get out of his body, that you can surely alter your body so much that it will finally fit your fantasy, which is absurd. Of course, humans are not made out of Lego blocks; you can’t do this, but then, ultimately, the goal is to go live in computers and conquer the universe through that. This is a perfect paragraph:

The Self uses the Body. The Self controls the Body. The Self communicates through the Body. But the Self never is the Body: the two remain forever divided and estranged. Because it preserves the dualistic structure, the body-as-avatar model that informs the rhetoric of body-mod ‘empowerment’ neither transgresses nor rages against mainstream patriarchal ideology, but in fact reinforces it, regardless of how superficially unconventional the body modifier’s chosen aesthetic may be. In reality, the pierced, tattooed, scarred, implanted, branded, cosmetically nipped and tucked body symbolizes a selfhood in lockstep submission to Man’s somatophobic alienation from biological reality. (p. 174)

And then:

The edgy reinvention of dualism inaugurated by the 1990s body-mod craze is in the midst of a renaissance, locked into place now as transgenderism’s guiding theory. The ‘transgender’ person, we are informed, repeatedly and with evangelical zeal, has suffered the cruel misfortune of being ‘born in the wrong body.’ This individual’s body is wrong because it is one sex, male or female, while the individual’s interior True Self is the so-called ‘opposite’ sex or maybe no sex at all . . . The interior sense of one’s sex is named ‘gender identity’ and enshrined as integral to the True Self, to whose expression the biological body is an unfortunate impediment. (p. 175)

Everything else that’s wrong with transgender ideology, to me, this has always been the main problem. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have felt such tremendous grief at the amount of just the hatred of the human body that is involved in this movement. They are willing to mutilate the bodies of even pretty young kids. How much do you hate being alive that you just want to remove their capacity for sexual function and destroy their reproductive organs before they’re even mature? It’s filled me with such grief to see this across the culture being celebrated as some kind of “freedom” when it is really just a hatred of the human animal. I don’t understand why, even if you felt that, why you wouldn’t fight it. That’s the thing: Do we have no loyalty at all to our animal selves? And I guess the answer is ‘No,’ at this late stage of patriarchy. So, Man has to cast off his corporeality:

‘Freed from our frail biological form, human-cum-artificial intelligences will move out into the universe,’ writes machine intelligence pioneer Earl Cox [1996, qtd. in Noble, 1997/1999]. Postbiological Man, as a fathomless formless unbounded absolute intelligence, will saturate all matter and energy, and all things that exist anywhere and everywhere in the universe will be converted into a medium of computation, streaming with data, with math. Man, having cast off his body, makes his return to matter only to invade it mercilessly, no longer restricted to any one static form or vessel but suffusing all things, colonizing the substance of creation. And in this way he enlivens the universe with intelligence, which shall be the redemption of matter itself: the dead stuff dumb as it was will gleam permeated and penetrated by Man’s mind. (p. 205)

This is brilliant: She’s exactly right about what these men are trying to do. The universe is dead to them, and, if they can infuse it with male consciousness, it will be “alive,” and it will be “perfect,” and it will be “wonderful.” And it’ll all be worthwhile because, on its own, it’s terrible and awful and the best you can say about it is that it’s just “blank”—and, at worst, of course, it’s the “slime,” all of that, but this is their goal. If you haven’t read Martine Rothblatt, who’s a major figure in trans ideology and a billionaire, he created a whole religion, and this is the point of that religion called “Terasem.” They think that they’re going to go out into the universe in computer mind somehow and going to be omniscient and omnipotent and absolutely everywhere and they’re going to somehow colonize it all and make it good. Because of their “sacred” presence, because it’s not good as it is—it’s never good as it is [according to Rothblatt’s transhumanist ideology]. So, I think she’s absolutely nailed it. This is just another perfect paragraph from the book.

Finally, in “Resurrectionary Feminism: Revitalize, Reintegrate, Resensitize, Revolt!”, this what she thinks is the way forward because she does not leave us hopeless. The last section of this book is so beautifully written; it’s just pure poetry. For “resurrectionary feminism,” as she calls it, the body is essential—this is the first principle:

As we struggle for women’s liberation from male dominion, we cannot allow ourselves to be conned into trailing after Man on his quest to be freed from ‘the tyranny of biology.’ In the words of Somer Brodribb (1992), ‘[W]hat would it mean to be integrated into our own negation, except the realization of patriarchal fantasy. To pursue an anti-mat(t)er, anti-physic approach is to repeat patriarchal ideology’ (p. 133). We are not oppressed and degraded by our bodies, but by the regimes of delusional men who have projected dread bodiliness onto women as they thrashed vainly to escape themselves, holding us captive sequestered on reserve to serve as their scapegoats, fodder for patriarchy’s murderous role-play game of immortal male mastery over material reality. (p. 217)

I think she’s exactly right. Then, she writes:

Jane Caputi, a student of Mary Daly, argues that newly minted mythologies, or pre-patriarchal ones unearthed and resuscitated, have the power to reorient human consciousness in the direction of a more feminist mode of being. Specifically, Caputi calls for a rekindling of goddess mythologies—an enduring favorite within feminist circles, for obvious reasons—as a ‘way for human beings to know and understand cosmic processes of thought, creation and destruction’ (2004, p. 233). The troubling implication therein, however, is that human beings have no wav of understanding these processes without recourse to our own inventions. It is inconceivable that we might grasp the living world directly, by experiencing it, by simply being in it and a part of it, alive and alert, feeling, listening, tasting, watching attentively. Inconceivable, too, that we could revere winter simply for the snowed-in cold of it, and love spring for its flowers, and die because we must. And so, because experience tells us nothing we need to know, we require myths, and religions, and secular dogmas like the scientific reductionism that enlightens us to the fact that all the world is quarks. We turn away from material reality and quest after truth in goddess spirituality, Mariology, Taoism, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Wicca, Hinduism, Indigenous folktales of trickster coyotes and moon rabbits. There is much to treasure in these mythic traditions, and I am as enchanted by the ancient lore as anyone. But they are products of human minds, and when we mistake them for keys to reality, we remain enthralled primarily with ourselves. Are we to take it that the living world has no organic intrinsic magic of its own to enrapture us? (p. 220)

This is why I’m just in love with this last chapter. She’s just completely nailing it all the way through: “Reality’s magic dwells in imminence: there is nothing to transcend so sense again that the life in you is your own tameless divinity” (p. 225). She calls us to radical empathy:

Accepting ourselves for the vulnerable bodies we are, reawakening to our own fleshly sensitivities, we can feel our way out of numbness and back into an awareness of corporeality as the basic, fundamental condition shared by all earthly creatures. (p. 242)

So, we’re all kin in this, we’re all alive, we’re all sentient, we’re all part of each other:

Resensitization to the unity of the living world beckons us back to our native grace. The empathetic urge to care begets an instinctual morality, its principles sourced not from any handed-down catechism but from the capacities of our sentient animal bodies. . . . [W]hat is needed is a willingness to feel without inhibition, fostered by a humble praxis of attention and responding with care to the world as we encounter it. (p. 244)

She’s calling for something really new, and I think this is just a wonderful clarion call to this this new form of justice that she’s envisioned for us. But she’s not forgetting that things are bad here:

What is necessary, then, is to name the killers, the rapists: the engineers of mass desecration. It is necessary, too, to diagram the machinery that the destroyers have instituted, every mechanism that has enabled them to be as viciously efficiently industrious as they have been in their devastation of the world. . . . [O]nce we have studied that system’s daily operations and its equipment, once we understand how it functions, how it is maintained, then we will be ready to put our empathy to work. (p. 246)

It’s not just about sitting around and feeling the beauty of the world. We have to fight for it. We have to fight for it before it’s too late. So, this is her plan:

First, we refuse to collaborate. To the fullest extent possible we remove ourselves from participation in the misery industries, no longer living in collusion with the Master class.

Second, we provide sanctuary to the wounded . . . We shelter the victimized, tend to their injuries, leaving no/body behind . . . Yet there is a crucial difference between tending to the wounded and ending the war.

And so our third program of empathetic action is directed towards the slaughter itself. To abort atrocity rather than chase after it laboring to palliate the scorched earth in its wake, nothing less than organized political resistance will serve.

Radical empathy’s imperative, then, is plain: stop the war. (pp. 246-247)

And that’s it.

HAWTHORNE: Thank you, Lierre. That is a brilliant summary of what is a very complex book, actually, and a wonderful book. I agree with you that aurora is kind of a descendant of Mary Daly and Susan Griffin. That’s fabulous.

Now, it’s my chance to introduce aurora. aurora describes herself as “a radical ecofeminist writer committed to poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to male dominion.” You probably picked up on that during Lierre’s talk. She has authored poetry books, poetry chapbooks, horror stories, and zines and contributes regularly to the media disruptions of Women’s Liberation Radio News (WLRN). In the past, she has served women as a shelter worker and rape crisis advocate. aurora says she is “no longer in collusion with the predator.”

So, over to you aurora to talk about Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life.

LINNEA: First, I just want to take a minute to express my gratitude for all of the women of Spinifex not only for giving me this opportunity to share my work but, more crucially, for keeping radical feminist publishing, and therefore radical feminist literature, alive.

Thank you to Renate and to Susan, to Pauline, Rachael, Caitlin, and Danielle, and thank you, too, to Deb, Helen, and Belinda, for making Man Against Being a far lovelier and more polished production than I could have ever imagined when it was mostly like scribbles and notebook corners and on the edge of library receipts and things like that. I’m really very appreciative for all of you.

I also want to thank Lierre for taking the time to speak about the book tonight and all of this really lavish praise that I don’t know quite what to do with. Just for you to have read it really means the world to me. So, thank you.

Now, I have a couple of things to say about the book:

What follows is linnea’s own text of her remarks, published on February 25, 2025, which can be read at her website Holistic Anti-Atrocity Feminism, with page numbers added here for the passages referenced.

HOLISTIC ANTI-ATROCITY FEMINISM

2/20/2025: Spinifex Launch of 'Man Against Being'

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a year ago · 1 like · aurora linnea

Man Against Being is a simple book, simple in its premise and in its plea. As a writer, I have sometimes been embarrassed of my own simplicity, worried that, because things often seem to me straightforward, I must be simple-minded, a synonym for stupid. As if the marker of intelligence were a baroque complexity and ambiguity drifting the mind ever farther from common sense: the facts as we sense them in our direct experience of this world we share in common. Yet I’m more and more confident that what is discredited as “simple-mindedness” is better termed “clarity.” In the epilogue to her novel Mercy, Andrea Dworkin writes of her proposition, scorned as simple-minded by more academic feminist peers, that “bad things are bad.” Really, though, “bad things are bad” is a perfectly valid moral principle; it would take us a long way if we were serious about it. A simple but clear morality is not necessarily the inferior of a complicated, vague one. The same can be said for simple ideas, simple concepts, straightforward thinking grounded in the simple observation of one’s reality.

Man Against Being is the product of such a simple observation. Having lived thirty odd years amongst humans in the United States of America, and having read a great deal, and watched films, and spoken with people and listened to them, it occurred to me that, in this society, we hate being bodies.

Soon I was seeing this hatred of organic, physical, biological bodiliness everywhere. And indeed, for many years, a disgusted loathing of the body I am dominated my own life; I knew the hatred intimately. From there the line of thinking I followed was straightforward: to hate being a body is to hate being a biological organism is to hate being alive on earth, is to hate living, to hate being. It seemed clear to me that this was the basic patriarchal psychopathology, the foundational defect in the ideological framework of society as men have wrought it.

When I tell people that I write about hatred of bodies in patriarchal society, they tend to assume that my topic is the standard liberal feminist hobby-horse of women’s dismal body image, the result of a misogynist capitalist culture which deluges women with imagery of artificialized female bodies-as-sex-objects and then assails us as the target market for a legion of commodities promised to grant us that painted plastic manmade-woman look. Obviously the hatred that women and girls are programmed to feel for their bodies as imperfect sex objects is a serious problem, and a source of real pain. But what I am getting at, in writing about body hatred, is not so circumscribed. Instead, my concern is what the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Spelman in 1982 termed “somatophobia,” which she defined as the fearful abhorrence for the biological body integral to the worldview of the patriarchal west. Spelman’s particular subject was the somatophobia that runs through the work of Plato, for whom the body was a grave in which the soul is buried, a prison in which the soul is caged, and an “impediment” which thwarts the soul in its quest for pure knowledge. With this, Plato set the tone of western thinking on bodiliness back in the fourth century BCE. The state of opinion has hardly improved since then.

Somatophobia is the common theme that binds together manmade civilization’s apparently disparate yet uniformly patriarchal religious, philosophical and scientific belief systems as merely varied riffs on a single monolithic ideology. In contemporary popular culture, somatophobia finds its expression in horror movies, transgenderism, New Age spirituality, cyberculture, technofetishistic transhumanism, and even certain strains of feminist thought. With Man Against Being, I try to make evident just how pervasive somatophobia is, and how invisible, so entrenched at this point that it easily escapes notice. Just because the body-as-grave formulation has been so normalized that we rarely consciously or explicitly articulate it for ourselves, the manmade culture we inhabit has by no means outgrown its somatophobic bedrock. The ruling male Master class is no less terrorized by being bodies than Plato was. What has changed over the last several thousand years, however, is that today, when men lash out in horror and hatred, their coping mechanisms are possessed of a greater destructive power than ever before.

In the book, I write:

Body horror churns septic at the core of Man’s delusional mentality, from which fear leaches steadily out congealing into the anxious alienation and anguished rancor that pollute to pathological the sum total of Man’s relations with the living world and its creatures, his fellow Man and himself not least of all. The revolt he launches against his own being is the original war, the primary antagonism that turns Man against the world. (p. 41)

The war is ongoing, a constant smoldering just beneath the surface, until, vented as men’s violence against women, animals, and the biosphere, it reignites. We are all living in the war zone. Simply put: this is why our world is burning.

It is not difficult to understand Man’s fear. Bodies die, after all. As bodies, we are wounded, we sicken, we age unto infirmity, we die and decay back into the earth. Death is nonexistence, is the sudden cessation of oneself. It’s a frightening prospect. I cannot blame the forefathers for being spooked. But what they do deserve blame for is their total failure to reconcile themselves with the reality of mortality, turning instead to delusions of control, domination, and revenge. Ernest Becker, in his 1973 book The Denial of Death, theorized that the fear of death, and the stratagems devised to evade and to vanquish it, is what makes Man human, supreme over all other creatures. Becker writes, too, that manmade civilization has from its inception been molded by this nonacceptance of mortality. In his view, Man has created culture as a fantasyland within which he tries to insulate himself from the realities of his condition as a biological organism. On this count, I agree with Becker. I disagree, however, that Man’s anxious rejection of mortal material reality is the natural, reasonable, right and good response to death. I would likewise dispute Becker’s claim that this rejection is what makes men human. More correct would be to say that it is what has made the male into Man as we know him. In other words: Manhood, or masculinity, is an outgrowth of death-denying body horror. Like most developments rooted in the avoidance of reality, it is not reasonable or positive or helpful, but dangerously dysfunctional. Masculinity, defined by the craving for power and control, a hardening of the body, the desire to become steel or stone, is an armor that men don dreaming it can shield them from mortality. For Man, ideally, in his own mind, is immortal. Desperate to realize this fantasy, he devotes himself to grasping after disembodiment and dominion.

Mind/body dualism is the ideological prerequisite for both masculine disembodiment and male dominion as strategies of self-immortalization. If Man means to believe he’ll live on despite the demonstrable perishability of biological bodies, of which he is one, he must first convince himself that he is in fact something other than deathly flesh. What he has settled on as that other thing is the soul, or the spirit, or the mind. Whatever he calls it, it is an immaterial essence figured in opposition to the body, set down at the opposite pole. The logic holds that if the body is mortal, then the soul and mind are immortal. Thus by identifying himself with the soul, or the mind, Man saves his own eternal life.

If the first phase of the dualistic defense against death is Man’s assertion that he is the immaterial immortal mind/soul, the second is to project the material mortal body onto beings designated as Not-Man, or Other. Within the western cultural model that has historically dominated and has metastasized within the last century into a truly global white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the readymade Others have been nonhuman animals, women, and racialized peoples. They are used as scapegoats, conscripted to carry the hated body on Man’s behalf, their presence the concrete proof he needs to trust in his own liberation from bodiliness. As proxies for the body, these scapegoated Others can also be dominated and abused in ways providing Man with a soothing sense of mastery over material reality. I write in the book,

Man lines up his scapegoats for the sacrifice. He is the Self and they are the Others . . . Identified with sex, filth, stupidity, excrement, sin, disease, decay and degradation both physical and social, Others become the earthly matter that Man rejects, the biological squalor, the dirt, the evil and the End; they are the deaths Man refuses to die. . . . [And so] Man rises, for now he has disburdened himself of the terrible weight that once polluted him, and now he can reign on earth as in heaven, the immortal MasterMind over all. (p. 110)

So there you have it, that’s my theory, very simple, as I said. The ruling fathers of male dominion, unwilling to make peace with mortality as their creaturely reality, have rejected bodiliness, projecting it as a base condition onto Others they could overpower and avenge themselves against. By doing so, they have imagined themselves transcendent masters over the earth, above biology and self-snatched from nature’s murderous jaws. Body horror, and the delusional denial of our human nature as organisms, festers as the ideological foundation for patriarchal society, the conceptual root of this sick civilization’s attendant atrocities and architectures of oppression. Because Man hates what he is, he has mutilated life on earth into a hateful ordeal, increasingly unlivable for creatures of all kinds.

But what do we do with this understanding, practically speaking? How can we apply it, incorporate it into a daily praxis of living in resistance against patriarchal madness and male violence?

Being the daughter of two veterinarians, it is my conviction that if we cannot render an accurate diagnosis of the disease, we have zero hope of curing it. What I love about radical feminism is its matchless efficiency as a diagnostic instrument for probing the buried heart of the malignancy known as manmade civilization. If we determine that the causative pathogen is a bad ideology, and its symptoms are manifold forms of male violence accelerating unto world murder, then we can conclude that, to become well, to save the world, our task is to purge the contaminating ideology from our culture, a process which will necessarily involve purging it from our own consciousness. If we do not, we will remain vectors of the disease, and we will risk reproducing it in our own strivings toward cultural transformation.

Mind/body dualism is therefore to be resisted rigorously. Many of us thrash against the recognition that we are flesh-and-blood animals, and not some mysterious ghostliness temporarily tenanting a corporeal vessel, because we’ve been trained that to be a body is diminishment and disgrace, degradation to a subhuman state. I’m asking you to slow your thrashing. Try to sit with the possibility that there is no soul, that consciousness is bodily, that the self you are will not outlast the earthly matter that is your substance, because between self and substance there is no dividing line. Overcoming patriarchal body horror demands that we accept the creatures we are.

Which of course means accepting that we will die. Feminists who desire an end to male dominion cannot succumb to the temptations of masculinist immortalism. Any and all dependency on the anodyne delusions of manmade civilization compromises us. Simone Weil wrote, “There is not any love of truth without an unconditional acceptance of death.” She wrote, too, even more simply: “Truth is on the side of death.” Death not as in killing, not the necrophilic infatuation with the unalive, but death as in mortal material reality. Somehow, we have to get on its side. Male dominion is a DisneyWorld turned wasteland by fantasies doomed to spoil. Feminists need to live in the real world, wholly committed to reality. For the real world is the living world, and feminism fully realized is a vital revolt against male dominion’s vast morbidity. Fully realized our movement is a loving, lively defense of all vulnerable mortal bodies targeted as Man’s sacrificial scapegoats. This means every body, our own bodies, the body of the living earth. All the cruelties men inflict to degrade, dominate, desolate, dispossess and destroy what he calls corporeal are to be recognized as male violence and repudiated. Which means knowing that male violence is rape and pornography and femicide, yes, but also animal experimentation, and deforestation, also militarism, and pesticides, and nuclear power, nuclear war. Recognizing the full scope of male violence, and its roots in body horror, feminism is the choice to live gently, reverent of the shared sensitivity that unites all creatures as kin. And where male dominion is somatophobic, biophobic to the point of mass-extinction-level suicidality, feminism, fully realized, is a conscious disciplined delighting in aliveness.

I’d like to close by reading from my book again, to leave you with the invitation that is all, in the end, that I have to offer. It’s an invitation into life as it is, not as men have perverted it, but life on earth in its real—real, yet how unbelievable—material biological organic earthbound beauty, which even Man in his wrath has not succeeded in snuffing out:

. . . [I]t is a simple thing but it will take practice, to see the world clearly again, to re-enter into intimate relation with reality. Such a homecoming requires the humility to fall quiet. The ecofeminist Deena Metzger suggests a meditation: ‘Allow yourself to be a tree and let that be sufficient.’ Can you stay still, just be here awhile? The bloodsea tidal inside you, the thick sap of it: listen. . . .

Learn to take your own pulse, fingertips finding your throat’s most plainspoken cleft. Trace the swerve of veins that blues your slender wrist. Rest your hand over your breast and let your heart rise to it, as it plaits its ancient melodies of systole, diastole – the birth music. Close your eyes and let the darkness glide red down your optic nerve, now float a moment in that incarnadined lull. . . .

And can you remember the scent of your own sweat? Never be ashamed. Can you remember the taste of your own rhythmic bleeding, the monthly slick of it glossing warm your fingers, or a lover’s mouth? Who would dare make you ashamed? Let your own flesh, its wending nerves and venous filigree, its miles of gut held safely coiled, the matrix of womb and marrow, let this lavish profusion of cells become irresistible to you, all that you desire, and worship the simple miracle of your aliveness.

Thank you.

HAWTHORNE: Thank you very much, aurora. Now, I have to sit down and reread your book, even though I’ve already read it several times. It’s a book with such richness. Does anybody want to quickly say something? Otherwise, we’ll pass to Renate for thank yous.

For the very brief Q&A, understandably short due to time, sociologist Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (1997/2017), posed a thoughtful question on the origin of the splitting, where the child—the male child, in particular—comes to fear the mother’s power and, from his dread, finds himself driven to overpower the mother, therefore extending his dominion over all women.11

SALLEH: Thank you for a wonderful synthesis of ecofeminism—plus—absolutely marvelous. I apologize; I had trouble getting into the Zoom, and I missed your beginning, so would you please indulge me with just one or two sentences on what is the original splitting moment, what is the reason for that? I do apologize that I came late.

LINNEA: The original moment—do you mean a historical moment, because I’m not sure that can be—

SALLEH: Well, it would have to be historical, of course, because we’re talking about a civilization. What is the trigger that sets this masculinity reaction formation going?

LINNEA: Mortality, the ephemerality of living, being a vulnerable body that dies, is the reality they recognize, is the origin point for all of this masculine flailing against reality, I would say.

SALLEH: Okay, that’s helpful. There have been feminist accounts, psychoanalytic accounts, suggesting that the power of the mother over the infant boy child was the trigger of the reaction formation. That would be one. There were a few other things, but did do you take that on?

LINNEA: I don’t take that on in this book. I have read that. I tend to find that psychoanalytic accounts inherit a great deal of the misogyny of psychoanalysis. So, I don’t tend to focus there. I think it’s much broader than the individual reaction to the mother and the mother’s power. Though I have read that—and interesting accounts of that—I’m loath to blame mothers for anything.

SALLEH: Thank you.

HAWTHORNE: Renate, I think we should pass over to you for our thanks.

KLEIN: Thank you very much, Susan. My first thanks go to Lierre for a really fantastic presentation. You actually showed us how one can use PowerPoint to very good effect. It was great that we could see this fantastic language that aurora is using and read for ourselves, so thank you very much for actually doing that. It was very inspiring how you summarized aurora’s book.

My second and enormous thanks go, of course, to aurora for writing this book. I remember reading the first manuscript when you sent it, and I think I said, “Oh, it’s a grim book, aurora.” And, in fact, you even incorporated that word into the introduction. The one chapter that I noticed Lierre was also sort of skipping over a bit that it has got so many examples that sometimes you just put the book down or the manuscript down—or my iPad down, rather—and just wept.

I don’t really have the words to thank aurora for your absolutely monumental work, what you have done, and it is, really, in the footsteps of Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, and also Andrea Dworkin. The language you use is just amongst the most powerful but also poetic. I think when you read something, and you think it can’t get much worse, and then there is a turn of phrase or a sentence that is so beautifully written that it just of gets you into a different frame. So, I can’t thank you enough for doing this book. I think it is actually one of the best books we’ve ever published, and some women have mentioned Nothing Mat(t)ers by Somer. Susan and I recently did a very good rendition, I might say, of Somer’s book on Women’s Declaration International (WDI), and they have it on YouTube. It’s a brilliant book, and it’s a travesty that Somer was prevented by patriarchy, I should say, and some not-very-nice women to not continue what would have been an absolutely brilliant career.

But now, on to the rest of my thanks. As I always say, a book doesn’t just make itself. There are a number of people involved, women involved, and we have an absolutely splendid Spinifex team. We are now into our into our thirty-fifth year, and it’s fantastic to be able to continue publishing such great books.

Susan, of course, is our powerful mother, our powerful goddess, our powerful whatever-you-want-to-name-her—tyrannosaurus, also. She bosses us around—and does so with very good effect. Without Susan, there would not be any Spinifex.

Then, Pauline who sadly can’t be here because she actually works in a bookshop on Friday. Pauline is a fantastic editor, and we have had many discussions over this book—and, of course, all books, but this book has just provoked so many discussions. aurora, you would be pleased of the effect that you had on Susan, Pauline, and I editing your text. It was really mindboggling, actually.

Then, Danielle—nothing would happen without Danielle. She sends books out, she keeps us online, she reminds us of meetings—even when Susan and I are hopeless with the times.

Then, of course, there is Caitlin, our wonderful social media person, who has battles with X and Instagram, and I don’t think we’ve made it onto TikTok—and I don’t know if we should—but, of course, also Facebook. So, thank you, Caitlin, for always being there. We are all in different time zones, you might be interested to know, and sometimes that is very funny and sometimes it is quite difficult.

And, last but not least, Rachael McDiarmid, who has to be the best publicist ever and the most friendly, nice, kind woman that always tells us what idiots we are and tries to make it better—and she mostly can. She also does wonders on our web, and I can’t thank Rachael enough for working with Spinifex, and you have done this now for a number of years. That’s the best thing about the Spinifex team. We have been a team for a very long time, and we value all of our team. We also value, very much, our authors.

I just want to tell you that our next launch is going to be the launch of Donna Johnson’s book Shattered Motherhood. It is about mothers who have lost a child to suicide, so a totally different topic but incredibly moving. Donna has written a very powerful book. Janet Fraser, whom you may know from her very beautiful book Born Still, which was her own experience of having a stillborn child and then being crucified for it, virtually, in the media, and everything, she will launch Donna’s book. And that’s on the 13th and 14th of March.

Thank you all for being here, which I thought was a fantastic experience, and thank you, again, to both Lierre and to aurora for your fantastic presentations, and, again, to all of us at Spinifex, I’m so very happy that we have published this book. Thank you.

Here is the launch for Johnson’s Shattered Motherhood, a work that, I would say, relates more to linnea’s Man Against Being than it seems:

Readers seeking to purchase linnea’s book can do so at the following link to the Spinifex Press website:

https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/9781922964120

I call for woman’s rights because I am convinced that all the misfortunes in the world come from this neglect and scorn shown until now for the natural and inalienable rights of woman. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to have her educated, and woman’s education depends upon man’s in general, and particularly the working-class man’s. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to obtain her rehabilitation before the church, the law, and society, and this rehabilitation is necessary before working men themselves can be rehabilitated.

- Flora Tristan, L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), trans. Beverly Livingston1

With this 2025 International Women’s Day passing, yet another one, let us remember Flora Tristan (1803-1844), who preceded Marx in arguing for workers to unite in their collective interests against their exploitation. Five years before Marx and Engels’s 1848 Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto), in 1843, Tristan wrote “Workers of the world unite!” in her L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union). At this time, when he was about twenty-five, Marx remained a liberal democrat. In her work, Tristan conceptualized a labor union that would give the workers both political and economic power, where, together, their contributions could apply to any collective purpose in favor of their betterment. Although Marx was aware of Tristan’s work before him, he actually chose not to recognize her—perhaps due to her Christian theological perspective on socialism.

Flora Tristan saw in women the force which would either keep the whole working class back or lead it forward. She knew what a political deadweight a mass of ignorant women, brutalized by oppression, could be. She had on several occasions been insulted by such women, who resented her efforts to organize them, and her influence over their men.

- Marie M. Collins and Sylvie Weil-Sayre, “Flora Tristan: Forgotten Feminist and Socialist,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 1, no. 4, Summer 19732

Excerpts from Flora Tristan, L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), 1843, trans. Beverly Livingston, 1983, 75, 77-80, 82-83.

Workers, you my brothers, for whom I work with love, because you represent the most vital, numerous, and useful part of humanity, and because from that point of view I find my own satisfaction in serving your cause, I beg you earnestly to read this with the greatest attention. For, you must be persuaded, it concerns your material interests to understand why when I mention women I always designate them as female workers or all the women.

* * *

What happened to the proletariat, it must be agreed, is a good omen for women when their “1789” rings out. According to a very simple calculation, it is obvious that wealth will increase immeasurably on the day women are called upon to participate with their intelligence, strength, and ability in the social process. This is as easy to understand as two is the double of one. But, alas! We are not yet there. Meanwhile, let us take a look at what is happening in 1843.

The Church having said that woman was sin; the lawmaker that by herself she was nothing, that she was to enjoy no rights; the learned philosopher that by her constitution she had no intellect, it was concluded that she is a poor being disinherited by God; so men and society treated her as such.

Once woman’s inferiority was proclaimed and postulated, notice what disastrous consequences resulted for the universal wellbeing of all men and women.

Those who believed that woman by nature lacked the strength, intelligence, and capacity to do serious and useful work, very logically deduced that it would be a waste of time to give her a rational, solid, and strict education, the kind that would make her a useful member of society. So she has been raised to be a nice doll and a slave destined for amusing and serving her master. In truth, from time to time some intelligent, sensitive men, showing empathy with their mothers, wives, and daughters, have cried out against the barbarity and absurdity of such an order of things, energetically protesting against such an iniquitous condemnation.

On several occasions, society has been moved for a moment; but when pushed by logic, has replied, “Well then! Let us suppose that women are not what the wise men have believed, that they have great moral strength and intelligence. Well, in that case, what good would it be to develop their faculties, since they would not be able to employ them usefully in this society which rejects them? What an awful torture, to feel one has force and power to act, and to see oneself condemned to inaction!” This reasoning was irrefutably true.

So everyone repeated, “It’s true, women would suffer too much if their God-given talents were developed, if from childhood on they were raised to understand their dignity and to be conscious of their value as members of society. Then never would they be able to bear the degradation imposed upon them by the Church, the law, and prejudice. It is better to treat them like children and leave them in the dark about themselves: they will suffer less.”

Follow closely, and you will see what horrible consequences result from accepting a false premise.

In order not to stray too far from my subject, even though it is a good opportunity to speak from a general standpoint, I am returning to the question of the working class.

In the life of the workers, woman is everything. She is their sole providence. If she is gone, they lack everything. So they say, “It is woman who makes or unmakes the home,” and this is the clear truth: that is why it has become a proverb. However, what education, instruction, direction, moral or physical development does the working-class woman receive? None. As a child, she is left to the mercy of a mother and grandmother who also have received no education. One of them might have a brutal and wicked disposition and beat and mistreat her for no reason; the other might be weak and uncaring, and let her do anything. (As with everything I am suggesting, I am speaking in general terms; of course, there are numerous exceptions.) The poor child will be raised among the most shocking contradictions—hurt by unfair blows and treatment one day, then pampered and spoiled no less perniciously the next.

Instead of being sent to school, she is kept at home in deference to her brothers and so that she can share in the housework, rock the baby, run errands, or watch the soup, etc. At the age of twelve she is made an apprentice. There she continues to be exploited by her mistress and often continues to be as mistreated as she was at home.

Nothing embitters the character, hardens the heart, or makes the spirit so mean as the continuous suffering a child endures from unfair and brutal treatment. First, the injustice hurts, afflicts, and causes despair; then when it persists, it irritates and exasperates us and finally, dreaming only of revenge, we end up by becoming hardened, unjust, and wicked. Such will be the normal condition for a poor girl of twenty. Then she will marry, without love, simply because one must marry in order to get out from under parental tyranny. What will happen? I suppose she will have children, and she, in turn, will be unable to raise them suitably. She will be just as brutal to them as her mother and grandmother were to her.

* * *

I repeat, woman is everything in the life of a worker. As mother, she can influence him during his childhood. She and only she is the one from whom he gets his first notions of that science which is so important to acquire the science of life, which teaches us how to live well for ourselves and for others, according to the milieu in which fate has placed us. As lover, she can influence him during his youth, and what a powerful influence could be exerted by a young, beautiful, and beloved girl! As wife, she can have an effect on him for three-quarters of his life. Finally, as daughter, she can act upon him in his old age.

Note that the worker’s position is very different from an idle person’s. If the rich child has a mother unable to raise him, he is placed in a boarding school or given a governess. If the young rich fellow has no mistress, he can busy his heart and imagination with studying the arts and sciences. If the rich man has no spouse, he does not fail to find distractions in society. If the old rich man has no daughter, he finds some old friends or young nephews who willingly come and play cards with him; whereas the worker, for whom all these pleasures are denied, has only the company of the women in his family, his companions in misfortune, for all his joy and solace.

The result of this situation is that it would be most important, from the point of view of intellectually, morally, and materially improving the working class, that the women receive from childhood a rational and solid education, apt to develop all their potential so that they can become skilled in their trades, good mothers capable of raising and guiding their children and to be for them, as La Presse says, free and natural schoolteachers, and also so that they can serve as moralizing agents for the men whom they influence from birth to death.

Are you beginning to understand, you men, who cry scandal before being willing to examine the issue, why I demand rights for women? Why I would like women placed in society on a footing of absolute equality with men to enjoy the legal birthright all beings have? I call for woman’s rights because I am convinced that all the misfortunes in the world come from this neglect and scorn shown until now for the natural and inalienable rights of woman. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to have her educated, and woman’s education depends upon man’s in general, and particularly the working-class man’s. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to obtain her rehabilitation before the church, the law, and society, and this rehabilitation is necessary before working men themselves can be rehabilitated. All working-class ills can be summed up in two words: poverty and ignorance. Now in order to get out of this maze, I see only one way: begin by educating women, because the women are in charge of instructing boys and girls.

Workers, in the current state of things, you know what goes on in your households. You, the master with rights over your wife, do you live with her with a contented heart? Say, are you happy? No, it is easy to see, in spite of your rights, you are neither contented nor happy. Between master and slave there can only be the weariness of the chain’s weight tying them together. Where the lack of freedom is felt, happiness cannot exist.

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You have seized, in the name of God, the

Child’s crust from famine’s dole;

You have taken the price of its body

And sung a mass for its soul!

- Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gods and the People,” 18971

Children figure most curiously into politics and religion, filling the role of canvases for others’ desires rather than anything truly of their self-determination. A child learns that she or he cannot exist without existing for somebody else, finding herself or himself denied being in a fundamental way. In her 2012 book Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl observes that adults subject children to fantasy and fiction. “In narcissistic childism,” she writes, “children are blank pieces of paper on which an adult’s story is written.”2 They become more doll than human, more artificial than authentic in the search of “the true self” by way of aesthetics. The child becomes one who desperately seeks the validation of identity from those around her or him, lacking a sense of self. The body and mind become used to “being” in nonbeing—and the child feels lost, with childhood stolen.

The concept of “transcendence” by social and medical transition certainly seems well-marketed to an extreme degree—and increasingly seductive to children. Jennifer Bilek observes that the commercialization around the practice of transitioning amounts to “the glamorization of body dissociation.”3 The rise in young people effectively disabling themselves and removing healthy body parts coincides with the industry and its technology. But the melody has been one played long before. We may think of Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a Child’s Story,” in which he dramatizes the folktale involving the Pied Piper. In short, the children of Hamelin become the payment to the piper, entranced and following his song “with shouting and laughter.”4

In her recent investigative work for Reduxx, Genevieve Gluck has written about how the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) has included the category of “eunuch” among potential “gender identities.”5 She has explored the historical background involving the castration of children for adults—mostly a cultural practice serving male sexuality. For historical evidence, Gluck references Laura Engelstein’s 1999 book Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom in which Engelstein writes of the Skoptsy.6 Having emerged in the 1760s from the flagellants, the Skoptsy drew their inspiration from the Bible, particularly Matthew 19:12, which reads:

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

Led by men regarded as “sacred” and served by its most devout women, this religious cult subjected human beings to “fiery baptisms,” which involved mutilating genitalia and, for women, removing breasts. The drive to be dismembered originated in a fundamental hatred of the body’s sex and sexuality, made subordinate to religious identity. It became illustrative of the triumph over the flesh, thereby allowing “transcendence” from nature, or imperfection, toward “holiness”—perfection. Previously, Bilek had drawn startling parallels between Kondratiy Ivanovich Selivanov, a founder of the Skoptsy sect, and Martine Rothblatt, an instrumental figure in the legal institutionalization of “gender identity.”7

A moment from Engelstein’s 1997 essay “From Heresy to Harm: Self-Castrators in the Civic Discourse of Late Tsarist Russia” seems especially applicable to the dynamic of the Pied Piper. On the children involved with the Skoptsy, Engelstein writes:

There are also many examples of children being put to the knife, sometimes by relatives who adopted the faith. Children also came into contact with the Skoptsy after being hired from their parents to work as apprentices and servants. Once among the sectarians, the children were raised in the spirit of the creed and allegedly kept from contact with their families. When questioned in court, almost all said they had sought castration of their own free will, as the road to salvation.8

The separation of children from their families had been to effectively control them. It remains so today. A difference between then and now, however, is the industrialization, which has given a greater power to what originally had been an isolated cult practice. Social media has been another critical development in the mainstreaming of today’s more technological ideology of castration. With both profit and propaganda, the old dynamic has been radically magnified in new ways. Techno-idolatry, which I have previously discussed, has replaced, in a secular form, the original religious justification.9

When Stella Perrett sent me the illustration to accompany this essay, she brilliantly noted that, in the traditional folktale, the children do not meet a cruel fate. They are neither maimed nor murdered. Rather, as Perrett wrote, they “ended up re-emerging in a neighboring country and starting a new village, but with no memories of where they came from.” However, she added, “in our dystopia,” as we may well see it, the same good fortune will not be ours. “Very few,” Perrett wrote, “will re-emerge, and none without damage.”10

Far more than childhood will have been cruelly stolen, for the harm done to the body will remain long after the song of transcendence has grown hollow and, then, ended in silence. Victims will soon become survivors, advocating for better care, demanding more ethical treatment, not only for themselves but also for others. But, for so many, it will be much too late—that I know. Let us recall a line from Blake’s 1794 poem “A Little Boy Lost”: “The weeping parents wept in vain.”

“In war, children are stolen,” Hawthorne writes in her 2020 book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy. “Colonisation results in the theft of children and their acculturation to the colonising culture.” This ideology, she argues, appears present in the kind of deified technology seizing children under transgenderism. Hawthorne writes:

Children caught in this neoliberal cultural revolution underpinned by queer theory, lose not only their past (interrupted by massive numbers of medical and psychological appointments which makes them medically dependent for life) but also their future.11

And, no, the new theft of children is not even remotely like teenagers aging into young adulthood and coming out as lesbian and gay, usually after years of feeling different from peers. First and foremost, homosexuality does not involve becoming a lifelong medical patient. The analogy between being homosexual and being medicalized for so-called “gender dysphoria” always has been false. How the clear and present difference has not been obvious has illustrated the power of forced teaming.12

In fact, the early gay liberation movement opposed precisely this kind of pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific regime that, in the guise of psychiatry, largely targeted homosexual nonconformity to sex-role stereotyping.13 However, medical violence has become increasingly mainstreamed, for great profit, now sold to the masses as “mental health care” and “suicide prevention.” But we must object buying into the straight lie that makes our bodies into commodities. The industry merely wants to make capital from our very flesh and discard us when there remains nothing left to be harvested.

There will be those of us who perpetrated, collaborated, witnessed, and, most vitally, protested this medical violence. Unlike in the folktale, where every child forgot, remembrance will be a haunting thing for society’s new child—and for us all.

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I suppose that I should preface this “old” piece with a note that, as of February 9, 2025, Jennifer Bilek/The 11th Hour Blog has joined in scapegoating feminism—particularly radical feminism—not for transgenderism but for patriarchy itself.

See Tara van Dijk, “FEMINISTS TO THE PATRIARCHY: WE HATE YOU, DON’T STOP!,” The 11th Hour Blog, February 9, 2025, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/feminists-to-the-patriarchy-we-hate-you-don-t-stop.

TITLES IN ALL CAPS ARE VERY CURIOUS, but I digress.

Referencing Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, with no specific references to any second-wave feminist thinkers, this strange lack, Dijk argues “that sex-based differences and inequalities aren’t the result of a single system but a shifting interplay of biology, capitalism, and human desire” (emphasis added). As understood today, the concept of patriarchy, she asserts, “emerged in Second Wave Feminism (1960s-70s) as a retroactive fantasy,” where feminists “projected it backward, rewriting history as if male dominance were a timeless, universal force.” Which second-wave feminist thinker specifically argued that male dominance constitutes “a timeless, universal force,” presumably without a beginning or an ending? She never says. What a strange omission there! Finally, at least, thanks to Dijk, we have something apparently much clearer than patriarchy: “a shifting interplay of biology, capitalism, and human desire”—a “human nature” explanation modified by Marxism. Contrary to Bilek’s insistence on Dijk as “an extremely educated woman,” I cannot find it demonstrated, certainly not in the caricature and neglect of feminist writing that she purports to have researched.

A funny line from Dijk, from the social media screenshots taken in dark mode, is this one: “You’d think that by now, feminist scholars and researchers would have developed a definition that connects male dominance to specific historical, cultural, and structural mechanisms.” As past and present examples, I am thinking of Gerda Lerner’s Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Susan Hawthorne’s Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (Spinifex Press, 2020)—easily accessible texts. For an overview, there is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (Basil Blackwell, 1990), which gives a survey of decades of literature covering distinctions among radical feminists, Marxist feminists, and those incorporating Freudian/Lacanian thought. Why does the obvious body of literature by feminist scholars and researchers, over half a century’s worth, suddenly disappear in favor of Lacan and Žižek taking up space? By simple necessity, the scholar must consult the literature.

I am not bothered, as Bilek has put it, with her publishing “an opinion that counters current common radical feminist thought,” given that Dijk counters nothing. The idea that the subjection of women originates in capitalism—or, rather, derives solely from economic conditions or wealth—is at least as old as the late nineteenth century, with Marx’s collaborator Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in 1884. And Dijk’s use of “biology” and “human desire” is not different from the Lacanian development into the 1970s and 1980s modifying Freud with consideration of culture but remaining essentially bound to his conceptual framework. No, I am bothered that Bilek, whose publisher is Spinifex Press, does not recognize what Renate Klein rightly calls “nonsense” in Dijk’s piece—starting with an obvious lack of research. It is not for lack of the writing being written that Dijk has refused to read it.

Donovan Cleckley, March 6, 2025

Donovan Cleckley, “Transgenderism and the Scapegoating of Feminism,” The 11th Hour Blog, August 19, 2023, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/transgenderism-and-the-scapegoating-of-feminism.

Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.

- Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776

There has been a rising tendency among critics of transgenderism, not all of whom are even critical of gender, to scapegoat feminism. Women have been prototypical scapegoats à la “wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman” (Ecclesiasticus 25:19). Representing the right-wing point of view, Matt Walsh argues that feminism provided the necessary foundation for transsexualism and transgenderism as its more contemporary incarnation. Walsh asserts:

Feminism set the stage for trans activists by insisting for years that there are no significant or inherent differences between men and women apart from anatomy. They are the ones who came up with the idea that most differences between the sexes were ‘social constructs.’ Now the ‘gender critical’ feminists want to pretend to be the leaders in the fight against trans ideology, all while refusing to admit that it is a direct descendent of their own ideology. These women will absurdly try to flip this around and claim that those of us with more ‘traditional’ views on sex are the ones who somehow set the stage for transgenderism. But our view was dominate [sic] for millennia and transgenderism never existed during that time. Feminism comes along and trans ideology follows almost immediately behind it. Try to piece this together, ladies. It’s not a coincidence.1

Yes, ladies, let us try to piece this all together, as best we can. Most feminists have argued that women and men experience different socialization on the basis of sex from birth to death. By nature, women’s bodies and men’s bodies differ, with clearly differing needs, medically and otherwise, but their behaviors do as well. To what extent socialization versus biology influences these differences has been debated among feminists. In The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, first published in 1979, Janice G. Raymond wrote the first extensive critique of transsexualism, precursor to modern transgenderism, from a feminist point of view. She addressed the question of “the real differences between men and women,” which men have continued pressing upon women to answer. Raymond writes:

Men, of course, have defined the supposed differences that have kept women out of such jobs and professions, and feminists have spent much energy demonstrating how these differences, if indeed they do exist, are primarily the result of socialization. Yet there are differences, and some feminists have come to realize that those differences are important whether they spring from socialization, from biology, or from the total history of existing as a woman in a patriarchal society. The point is, however, that the origin of these differences is probably not the important question, and we shall perhaps never know the total answer to it. Yet we are forced back into trying to answer it again and again.

Raymond continues:

No man can have the history of being born and located in this culture as a woman. He can have the history of wishing to be a woman and of acting like a woman, but this gender experience is that of a transsexual, not of a woman. Surgery may confer the artifacts of outward and inward female organs, but it cannot confer the history of being a woman in this society.2

Whatever did womankind do before What Is a Woman? and Walsh opening that jar of pickles? Women actually understood the difference, so there is that fact to be twisted—pickles on the side. Characteristic of developing feminist criticism of the 1970s, Raymond’s analysis recognized that there are significant differences between women and men, whatever the origin of these differences may be. There was a degree of idealism present in early feminist writing of the era, a notable example being Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution in 1970. Women continued to develop their analyses, which, as seen in Raymond’s work, accounted for precisely the complexity that modern commentary willfully overlooks.

To Walsh’s other point, a big part of why transgenderism did not exist millennia ago is the basic fact of burgeoning technological development in recent centuries. Cavemen were not banging rocks together and making breast augmentations to give each other and get their rocks off. One may as well ask why the Renaissance lacked space travel. As Jennifer Bilek has emphasized, the development of “synthetic sex identities,”3 a part of what Thomas Szasz first termed pharmacracy,4 did not come from nowhere. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, Raymond’s 2021 book, puts forth a timely feminist critique, worth serious consideration, though her work has been seriously neglected when not relentlessly caricatured.5

“Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams reminded her husband, a Founding Father and the second U.S. president, who also forgot the ladies. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” she continued. “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” In a memorable line from her letter, she asserts that, if men do not redress such tyranny over women, then “we are determined to foment a Rebelion.” To which John Adams replied, “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.” He wrote that the ongoing American Revolution led to a questioning of traditional hierarchies, “that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Yet he also noted that his wife’s letter “was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented”—that is, women. The ladies have long pieced it together. What is woman to do?

Thousands of years before Adams wrote to her husband in 1776, men treated women as vassals for their sex: property. During this time, marriage was the primary method for men to possess women—apart from prostitution, seen as its shadow. Among the early abolitionists, Sarah Grimké and Ernestine Rose commented on how the wife’s identity became subsumed within that of the husband. Over marriage’s function in civilizing women to death, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments identified how it made women “civilly dead.” Studying how the man’s identity had eclipsed woman-as-wife, spanning much of recent history, modern transgenderism seems like the most logical transition in men possessing women. Where once she became subsumed within man’s identity, possessed, woman herself now becomes an identity for man to possess. Man’s sense of proprietorship over woman not only set the stage but also, still, remains the most jarring pickle.

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It is a conceded fact that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex.

- Emma Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” Anarchism and Other Essays1

Transhumanism derives from the expansion of biotechnology, a thoroughly capitalist venture, driven by man’s desire to subordinate nature to his will. Man has found himself seduced by the idea that he can advance the human species beyond mortality through enhancement by technology.

From a Judaic theological perspective, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson critiques transhumanism as a “secularist faith,” exemplifying what she calls “techno-idolatry.”2 Alienated from the flesh, the human being appears as the automaton to be used and destroyed. Technology becomes deified, therefore godlike, for the body itself becomes a new Manifest Destiny.

Most futuristic scenarios fail to come about and we never challenge the prognosticator after his/her vision has been proven false. Some people are more prone to futuristic thinking than others, but I am not attracted to this mode of thinking. Perhaps this is because I am an intellectual historian and find that inquiry about the past is much more productive for human life than speculations about the remote future.

- Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, in “Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics,” Patheos, March 19, 2022

Jennifer Bilek writes of Rothblatt as “a founding father of the transgender empire”—who, also, just so happened to found his own “transreligion” known as Terasem. Its four core tenets read: “Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, and love is essential.”3

Rothblatt has been a critical figure in not only his philosophical contributions but also, far more importantly, his financial investments in biotechnology. Bilek notes that, from the 1990s onward, Rothblatt has been central to creating the “gender identity” bills currently being passed around the world.

As featured in New York Magazine in 2014, Rothblatt had been described as “a white, Jewish lawyer and also a transgendered woman who is a father of four married to an African-American woman and therefore also, sort of, a lesbian.”4 Picturing Rothblatt, the cover reads: “The Highest-Paid Female CEO in America Used to be a Man.” A heterosexual male can declare himself a woman and a lesbian, and the world accepts it as true—including far too many women among the most devout followers.

Separated, unlisted with these other identities, however, Rothblatt also just so happens to be a multimillionaire, having “earned” $38 million dollars as of 2013. According to Forbes, Rothblatt’s wealth increased from $330 million in 2020, where it had remained between $320 and $340 million from 2017 through 2019, to $585 million in 2021.5

In a lesser-known moment of the 2014 feature, Lisa Miller describes Rothblatt playing in the online game Second Life, where he “appears as a sexy brown-skinned woman named Vitology Destiny.”6

Published in 1995, Rothblatt’s book The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender draws the analogy between racial apartheid and sexual dimorphism. He writes:

Like the apartheid of race, blurring of class boundaries is the gravest offense because it challenges the reality of the division of reality. Hence the old feminist doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ was more acceptable to the male power structure, because they knew that it would never occur. But the new feminist doctrine of sexual continuity is threatening—it destroys the male-dominated power structure completely. If there are no hard and fast sex types, then there can be no apartheid of sex. If there is no apartheid of sex, then there is no entrenched birthright of power—people must achieve on their own. To men threatened by economic and social survival, loss of birthright superiority is frightening.7

Conveniently, males can escape “the male-dominated power structure” by claiming a new proprietorship over femaleness, making womanhood into men’s sexual and intellectual property. I provide the above example from Rothblatt’s book to demonstrate the level of analysis as well as man’s appropriation of feminism as masochism.8

Anne Fausto-Sterling praises Rothblatt’s theorization as “sound,” but he relies on a false analogy. Essentially, Rothblatt contrasts “sexual dimorphism,” which he calls “the old gender paradigm,” with “the new gender paradigm”: “sexual continuism.”9

Yet sex appears conflated with sex-role stereotyping, for Rothblatt writes “[s]ex should really be the sum of behaviors we call gender.”10 One’s body can become redefined by others’ ideas about the body, internalized as one’s sense of self. He claims the commodification of the human body through biotechnology represents human rights, but the opposite seems true. There is no “freedom of gender” there.

Ironically, Rothblatt’s vision does not get rid of sex-role stereotyping; rather, it medically inscribes it upon the body as commodity. Thus, “sexual continuism” has the paradoxical effect of further reifying male-as-masculine and female-as-feminine.

Man claiming proprietorship over womanhood has done nothing to destroy man’s dominion over woman. On the contrary, it reinforces men possessing women, as coverture had made wives subject to their husbands. Men consume women as costumes under Rothblatt’s utopia—which makes a dystopia for women. It may be further considered why there has not been an equivalently well-funded industry constructed around race as there has been for sex. Rothblatt’s analogy does not hold up even here.

Almost two decades following The Apartheid of Sex, in 2011, Rothblatt self-published his newly titled and expanded second edition: From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form. The book’s cover art seems to feature Rothblatt’s “sexy brown-skinned woman” avatar: Vitology Destiny. In a particularly significant new section titled “Is Consciousness Like Pornography?,” Rothblatt writes:

The transhumanist paradigm is that consciousness arises from millions of cross-correlated relationships among general neurons far removed from the basic hard-wired sensory neurons that are like the footings for the skyscraper of the mind. There is nothing magical that makes our brains conscious other than this web of interconnected neurons. Consequently, there is no reason that consciousness cannot exist in software provided the same level of interconnected complexity rooted ultimately to sensory apparatus is provided. This is the challenge to the 21st century neuroscientist and computer scientist. Build minds that pass the pornography test—minds that seem as authentic as our own. Once that is done, sexual identity will be liberated not only from genitals, but from flesh itself. Consciousness will be as free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh body as gender is free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh genital.11

The passage above illustrates Rothblatt’s argument that transhumanism presents the logical conclusion of transsexualism and transgenderism.12 These ideas appear further developed in Rothblatt’s 2014 book Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality.

Woman hating and economic plunder converge in man’s identification as proprietorship over womanhood, as disembodiment embodies his commodification of her. While Rothblatt appropriates women’s liberation and gay liberation, among other progressive social movements, “trans liberation” cannot liberate anybody—most of all women. Techno-idolatry and its fetishism present only new enslavement, not freedom.

Note

When this piece first appeared at The 11th Hour Blog in 2022, a comment questioned the necessity of describing Tirosh-Samuelson’s perspective as “Judaic.” Perhaps it did not seem clear that, being a scholar of Judaism, she applies a Judaic theological perspective to critique transhumanism, so it matters. Given that proponents of transhumanism, like Rothblatt himself, and some critics have argued that it derives from Judaism, it seems necessary to underscore Tirosh-Samuelson’s critique.13

For 2022, according to Forbes, Rothblatt’s wealth lowered slightly to $580 million, from $585 million for 2021, but it then increased to $600 million for 2023—and then $820 million for 2024.

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Here is Momma’s poem that I love:

In the woods, I found her sitting,

beneath a tree, singing softly.

She looked up and began to run,

faster, faster, until she was gone.

I sat down and began to cry.

“Come back. Please. Come back.”

Out of nowhere, she came and questioned,

“Why? Why do you cry?”

“I wanted to listen to your song,

to speak to you.”

She sat down beside me

and began to sing sweetly.

She comforted me and gave to me

a feeling I had never known.

I asked her who she was

and why she was here.

I am a part of man, a feeling

that man has thrown away,

and I must run forever.

She left and began to run,

faster, faster, until she was gone.

I called her by the name—

I knew so little.

PEACE,

Vickie Chandler

January 25, 1971