Women Studies Sappho by Surgery

Janice Raymond’s publication “Sappho by Surgery” misrepresents, misunderstands, and misinterprets what it means to be a transsexual person. The conclusions that Janice Raymond reaches are not based on concrete science, psychology, or sociology. It also is not based off of any real interactions with transgender people. Instead, it is based off of stories, second hand reports, media misrepresentations, and weakly strung together pieces of historical fact that have been manipulated to support the author’s thesis. The author argues that the gender binary can’t be denied. In other words, “biology defines gender” and so if you are born with male reproductive organs, you are a male, and if you are born with female reproductive organs, you are a female; this can’t change and gender reassignment surgery is unnatural and wrong (Page 131). This basic idea leads her to make all kinds of conclusions that are full of anti-transsexual prejudice. In the publication “Sappho by Surgery”, Raymond attacks the “transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist”. She uses this term to refer to someone who was born a man but had surgery to become a woman and identifies as a lesbian and a feminist. Raymond’s characterization of the transsexually constructed lesbian feminist as a malicious, deceptive rapist shows a flawed understanding of the biology, mental process, and social factors surrounding transsexual people. The key concept of Raymond’s argument is that whatever sex you are born as, is your true sex. If you are born a man, you are and always will be a man, and if you are born a woman, you are and always will be a woman. In her view, “males who undergo sex-reassignment procedures remain deviant men and never become women” (Page 131). This idea of an inability to identify with any gender other than the one you are born with leads Raymond to make other incorrect and hurtful assumptions about transsexual people, especially male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals. Since she believes that all men biologically want to remain men, she sees their intentions by getting sexual reassignment surgery as malicious and intrusive into women’s lives. She is the type of feminist that hates and distrusts anyone who is biologically male (and so in my opinion, she is not a feminist at all. I will address this in a later section). By believing in the gender binary, she completely dismisses the experiences of people who do not fit in to either the male or female category. Different cultures have long been accepting of various sexual identities, but since America and more broadly the West, the gender binary has still been held up as the ideal for a long time. However, this belief is harmful to people who simply don’t identify in such narrow terms. Not only is it hurtful to them because they struggle with their personal identity, but it also leads people like Janice Raymond to make dangerous conclusions about them, their identity, and their intentions. Raymond’s prejudice against people who don’t fit the male or female categories lead her to classify transsexuals as a threatening “other” entity. She believes that transsexuals should not be allowed access to feminist spaces because they are not truly women. (Or, to put this in other way, she claims to hate transsexuals because they create divisions within the feminist movement, but she wants to divide biological females and transsexuals who identify as female.) Her worst and most offensive claim comes when she says, “all MTF transsexuals are by definition rapists” (Page 131). This is so incorrect, offensive, and disrespectful to transsexuals and actual rape survivors that for me, it discredits anything else she might say afterwards. Transsexuals cannot control the fact that they were born with a contradiction in their biological sex and their gender identity and to equate them with men who forcibly violate and harm women is ridiculous. It shows that the author is not really making an informed argument but is actually just trying to stir up hate against transsexual people. She claims that gender reassignment surgery is appropriation, and she even goes on to make the claim that it is synonymous with cultural and race appropriation. It is not. She claims that because MTF transsexuals did not grow up female and therefore didn’t experience the sexism that women face, they have no right to expect to be allowed into feminist spaces. She then draws a similarity to a theoretical white person who wants to darken their skin and identify with blackness later in their life and asks “To what extent would concerned blacks accept whites who had undergone medicalized changes in skin color and, in the process, claimed that they had not only a black body but a black soul?” (Page 140). This is a false analogy. People can be born with a biological sex that they don’t identify with; this is a biological contradiction within them. In contrast, in the case of culture, people can want to identify with certain aspects of another culture but there is no biological reason for it. False analogies make up the backbone of Raymond’s argument. Raymond’s argument is also characterized by a complete misunderstanding of choice. She thinks that people are born either male or female and that is how they identify, and that MTF transsexuals make a choice to get gender reassignment surgery in order to invade feminist spaces. She quotes the story in Hustler about the man who sneaks into a female-only space and is obsessed with doing it again and dominating and invading a female space. My first issue with this is that it is a straw man argument; this is not something that actually happened, first of all, and second of all, someone who merely dresses up like a woman in a sexually deviant way is not a transsexual. They are a sexual deviant with no biological contradiction between their sexual and gender identities. My second issue with that story is that she quoted a magazine to support her opinion. That shows a lack of credibility and handpicking sources that support her prejudice. The key is that people who truly identify as transsexuals do not choose to feel out of place in their own bodies. They are born that way, and their actions (including gender reassignment surgery) stem from this internal contradiction. Raymond draws another false analogy between transsexuals and eunuchs. She talks about the “long tradition of eunuchs who were used by rulers, heads of state, and magistrates as keepers of women” (Page 134). This is problematic for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, eunuchs are men who were castrated, and not by their own choice. They identified as men, but they were castrated. They still identify with the male gender, but they are missing the related sex organs. Transsexuals, on the other hand, do not identify as men. They identify as women but they have male sex organs. Their goal is not to become “keepers of women”; they want to become women because that is how they identify. Raymond’s argument isn’t credible because she keeps making false analogies and compares things that aren’t comparable. A final issue that I have with Raymond’s argument is that she is inconsistent in her characterization of MTF transsexual power. She claims that men become women to gain power and access to their spaces because “they indeed have discovered where strong female energy exists and want to capture it” (Page 137). And yet even though she says that women’s spaces have all this energy and power, she also characterizes these spaces as so fragile that they can’t handle including people who were born as men but identify (and have undergone surgery to identify) as women. She completely ignores the fact that MTF transsexuals give up a lot of power and privilege that they have because they are seen as men. There are two big problems within the feminist movement that Raymond is a perfect example of: not including all women and refusal to acknowledge equality. The mainstream feminist movement has been criticized for not including or supporting all types of women, including women of color, bisexual women, and transsexual women. Raymond is a perfect example of only wanting the “typical” or “normal” woman to be included in and be the face of feminism. Another issue with Raymond is that she demonizes men. There is a difference between oppressed people calling out their oppressors as a whole while still respecting the humanity of individuals who happen to be born into the oppressive group. Calling out “men” for patriarchy and its dangerous effects is fine, but creating a false image of all men as the enemy is harmful and wrong. This demonization of men leads her to reject a group of women who are in great need of support from the feminist movement: transsexual women. There are many problems with Raymond’s argument, which seems to be based more on prejudice, false analogies, and misinterpretation than on fact and experience. The core of her argument is the belief in the gender binary, which leads her to dismiss all transsexuals as men trying to gain access to women’s spaces. She then uses hurtful and disrespectful words (such as rape analogies and race comparisons) to play to readers’ prejudices against transsexuals and further exclude this group from feminist spaces. Although Raymond claim to be a dedicated feminist, she has done a lot to exclude transsexuals and she has given the feminist movement a characterization of poor research, prejudiced analysis, and exclusion of everyone except the “typical” woman.