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Showing posts with label Nemesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nemesis. Show all posts

21 February 2015

Grant Williams (194? - ) urologist

Grant Williams, urologist, was, early in his career, from 1968 to 1988, Consultant Urological & Transplant Surgeon, Charing Cross Hospital (Fulham). He was not an advocate of the transgender surgery being done at the hospital.

In November 1987 he wrote to the British Medical Journal:
"This week seven patients have been admitted for urological surgery and been sent home because there were no beds for operating lists, but the 26 bed urological ward has two gender reassignment patients in it, despite undertakings from the management that the urological bed complement would not be reduced. One gender reassignment operation takes the whole of one afternoon in the operating theatre. During that time, I could perform 10 cystoscopies or resect four prostates or do three vasovasostomies.
Most people would feel that to pursue gender reassignment surgery in the current climate must be bottom of the list of medical importance. The hospital continues with this, although it is totally against the wishes of the division of surgery."
The next year, 1988, he resigned from Charing Cross citing his objection to gender reassignment surgery.

In 1992 he wrote a Forward for Georgina Somerset's change of sex autobiography:
"It is sad though, that many feel that they can only be fully satisfied when they have a 'sex change'. Sex cannot be changed. ... I have met some delightful young women walking around in a man's body, and I was pleased to help them, but I have to confess that they are a rarity and the vast majority of transsexuals are totally unsuitable for surgery."
In December 2000 when the NHS announced that transgender surgery in England would be tripled, Williams was quoted again in the press:
"It is sad when a patient who can't pass urine is sent home with a catheter because there are not enough beds, while other beds are allocated for transsexual surgery".
Williams' speciality was vasovasostomy, the reversal of vasostomy.
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15 May 2011

Camille Paglia (1947 - ) academic, media pundit.

Camille Paglia is the elder daughter of Italian Immigrants to the US. Her father eventually became professor of Romance Languages at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. Camille was a tomboy who enjoyed dressing as male, and considered for a while that she had been born the wrong sex.  She read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, while still in high school. She graduated with a BA from Binghamton University in 1968, where she wrote her final thesis on Emily Dickinson.

She did a PhD at Yale 1968-72 where she was openly lesbian, and was mentored by Harold Bloom. Paglia taught at Bennington College, Vermont from 1972. One of her students was Judith Butler.

In 1973 Carolyn Heilbrun issued her tepid Towards a Recognition of Androgyny. Paglia, then an unknown, reviewed it anonymously in the Yale Review:
"Heilbrun's book is so poorly researched that it may disgrace the subject in the eyes of serious scholars".
She defended her thesis, Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, in December 1974.

She fell out with her colleagues at Bennington College. After a standoff with the administration, she accepted a settlement and resigned in 1979. She supported herself with part-time positions, and some journalism. She completed the book version of Sexual Personae, but could not get it published. In 1984, she was hired to teach humanities by the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art to become the University of the Arts.

In 1990 Sexual Personae was published by Yale University Press. In it she analyzes Western art in terms of the contrast between Dionysos and Apollo, an approach that had been pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche. Unlike Nietzsche she contrasts masculine, phallic sky religion with feminine, chthonic, earth religion, and portrays culture as a struggle between the two. She find paganism undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, androgyny, sadism and the aggressive Western eye in both classical art and pop culture. Against the feminism of the 1980s she stresses the biological basis of gender differences. She identifies 23 sexual personae which she labels:
Amazon, androgyne of manners, android, beautiful boy, court hermaphrodite, dandy, Decadent aesthete, drag queen, Epicoene, Gorgon, Great Mother, Khepera, lesbian, male heroine, manufactured object, Mercurius, Pythoness, Teiresias, transsexual, twin, vampire, Venus Barbata, virago.
All 23 are androgynous in different ways. The power of androgyny comes through in three key concepts:


Charisma, the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love (p521);

Psychoiconicism, the literary phenomenon where a dominant androgyne so dominates a text that both the plot and other characters lose fictive energy and fade into the background. She specifies the examples of Geraldine in Coleridge's poem 'Christabel'; Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It; Virginia Woolf's Orlando; Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Wuthering Heights and Orlando in particular weaken in their second half once the authors Sexual Metathesis, expressed in a fascination with the central character, is completed and there remains a struggle to complete the plot (p345 );

Sexual Metathesis, the special erotic thrill produced by a change in gender. Several of the literary examples disguise a gay relationship, but the public evasion is no more than a small part. 'An ampler spiritual economy is at work. Sexual metathesis is a metaphysical advance, an expansion of identity through a mentally prolonged erotic sensation’ (p350,455).

All this of course refers to the androgyny inherent in our culture. She says very little about real-life trans persons. The major statement is on p368:
"We are still untangling the legal and and moral problems caused by the invention of a new sex, the transsexual, produced by chemical and surgical manipulations of the body. The transsexual is a technological androgyne whom we are happy to call 'she' out of the courtesy owed to all inspired makers of fiction. Close to transsexual is my favorite technological androgyne, Luciana Avedon, formerly the Princess Pignatelli, who radically resculpted face and body in her quest for beauty."
The book drew strong criticisms, both pro and con. Sexual Personae was nominated for a National Book Award and after being released as a paperback became a best-seller. She said that a second volume focused on popular culture had also been written, but the book has never appeared.

Two years later she released Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays which contains her critical review of Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests, and "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" in which she tackles Foucault, Halperin and their ilk for their ignorance of earlier theorists and their ignorance of culture in general. This essay was much discussed even by classical historians.  She expresses enthusiasm for drag queens:
"I sensed then, and now know for certain, that Madonna, like me, is drawn to drag queens for their daring, flamboyant insight into sex roles, which they see far more clearly and historically than do our endlessly complaining feminists. (p9) ... The castrated, tranvestite priests of Cybele, honored in disco-like rites of orgiastic dance, survive in today's glamourous, flamboyant drag queens. (p23) ...The drag queen has emerged in America in the Nineties as a symbol of our sexual crisis.  A pagan priest whose ancestry is in the ancient cults of the Great Mother, the drag queen defies victim-centered feminism by asserting the dominance of woman in the universe. (p99) ...You know, I'm really happy there wasn't all this talk about sex changes back then, since I probably would have gotten this fantasy that I was a man born in a woman's body, and I think that I might very well have become obsessed with the idea of a sex change, which would have been a terrible mistake.... I've acclimatised myself to to my sex role -- thanks to gay men and drag queens!  Drag queens have influenced me enormously.  Their analysis of the mythology of male and female  and the theater of gender and so on, I've absolutely taken into myself.  (p256)"
She became a media celebrity known for her disagreements with other feminists and media pundits. Because she would not conform to the left-wing party lines, she was dismissed as a conservative, but regards herself as a libertarian Democrat, with pro-choice positions on abortion, pornography, euthanasia etc.

Her first movie was Female Misbehavior, 1992, where she is profiled along with Annie Sprinkle and trans man Max Valerio. In It's Pat, 1994, a street gang have a battered copy of Sexual Personae and accuse Pat of being an androgyne, which s/he is. Paglia has appeared in 38 films, usually playing herself. In 2001 she recorded a commentary track for the DVD of Basic Instinct. She wrote regular columns for Interview Magazine and Salon.

She was partnered with Allison Maddex 1993-2007 and legally adopted Maddex' son.

In 2009 (although the segment was not released until May 2011), in an interview with Xtra, Paglia confirmed the suspicion that she does not really understand what transsexuality is by opposing Chaz Bono's decision about himself, by referring to him as 'she' and 'Chastity', and repeating that when she was young that she was convinced that she was the wrong gender and if it were allowed that she might have done the same.
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Sexual Personae is enormously better than Towards a Recognition of Androgyny.  There is probably an eternal dialectic between transsexuality and androgyny, as there is between gender identity and sexual orientation, and Sexual Personae is still the best book about androgyny. 

Sexual Personae also has a rare enthusiasm not usually found in books on literature, that sends you to read the original texts.  I at least dug out the poems and stories that she discusses to either read them for the first time, or to re-read them.

It was a bit naughty of Xtra in May 2011 to put up the clip of Paglia talking about Bono without mentioning that it had been filmed two years previously.

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05 December 2010

dirtywhiteboi (197?–) Butch activist.

dirtywhiteboi, sometimes Dirt, is a butch activist in the Detroit area. She seems to be the only person in the New Radical Lesbian Feminist front which proclaims:
"We are opting out of the LGBTQI 'gender revolution' and reclaiming our proud heritage as Lesbian Feminists. We believe we were forcibly conscripted into the Brave New World of queer theory. We want out. We reject the gender colonization and appropriation of the Butch-Femme dynamic by the hetero mimicking of queer theory proponents."
She has several blogs, of which the most active is the one at blogspot.com. She writes frequently about trans people, especially those born female, whom she urges not to transition. Her side bar has a link to "The TRUTH about Testosterone effects and transmen", which lists the obvious
"Testosterone will change the smell of your urine"
as well as the inflammatory
"I will add here trans(men) are not above murdering a woman, these crimes often get buried by the trans community as well, some of which have blamed the murdered woman rather than the trans(male) murderer".
The side bar also has An Open Letter to the Trans Community:
"Despite the rising numbers of young women/lesbians who've fallen prey to the trans trend, the dominating numbers of post transition remains straight (white) men. Straight white men, are NOT my, a BUTCH LESBIAN'S community! The gay men who transition because of their pathological internalized homophobia? No, not my community either. The lesbian females who transition, a high percentage of which testosterone alters their lesbian sexuality to that of heterosexuality by way of sex with gay men? Nope, females whether they pass as male or not who screw/partner with men are NOT my community. The lesbian females who transition partnering with screwed up straight women (straight women co-opting and colonizing Femme/lesbians identities and spaces) who are then defaulting to "straight" (thats up for debate-can we say Craigs list)? Umm no, again, heteroville isnt MY community and those bored-I-wanna-be-different-cuz-different-is-fun-and-exciting when your are a bored and not so exciting teeny bopper types who are jumping onto the trans trend? Again, little straight girls chasing gay men? NOT MY community."
She uses 'autogynephiles' for 'hetero MtFs' and refers to trans women as 'MtF men".

She herself is a proud Butch who passes easily as male:
"I pass 24/7 and no I am not flat chested and no I of course do not 'bind'. I'm Butch and Butch women pass a great deal of the time. And this 'passing' isn't a desirable state, it hurts us and it invisiblizes us and personally I hate it."
On 25 November 2010 Dirt wrote an article for The Magazine Project, "Are Trans Trenders the New Goth?" It was removed three days later, but then again reinstated.
"The hugest difference in the female youths who are falling prey to this trans trend is that most of these young women are heterosexual. They begin transition believing that they are and will be ‘gay men’ once transitioned. Many, once on testosterone seek gay male sex/relationship partners knowing little to nothing about gay male culture or how gay male culture functions within gay malecentric spaces."
(The Magazine Project also, a week earlier, posted, removed and re-posted an anti trans women article by Bev Jo.)


* Not Dirty White Boy=Clayton Littlewood, nor the song by Foreigner, nor the wrestler.
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Dirt certainly protests too much that she is not trans.  Butch is certainly a valid and ancient gender variant, and long one that is often confused with being trans.  I think that most of us respect her choice, but are somewhat perplexed about why she does not respect the choices of others.

Her diatribe is against the taking of testosterone and surgery.  I am not clear how her concept of butch differs from being a non-op trans man.  I could not find any comments on her blog about e.g. Leslie Fineberg.  In reading Dirt I kept being reminded of Virginia Prince who also, having personally decided not to seek surgery, then became dogmatic in telling others that they should not either.

Note the objection to gender theory and to being included in the LGBT umbrella.  It is very similar to the sentiments expressed by the HBS people.
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17 November 2010

Jack Donovan (1974 – ) artist, priest, androphile activist.

Jack Donovan was originally from Pennsylvania. He was a New York go-go dancer during the 1990s club-kid scene, and has been an artist.  He has lived in various US cities, and has settled in Portland, Oregon.

As Jack Malebranche, he was an ordained priest and media representative for the Church of Satan for many years.  He resigned this position, on good terms, in 2009.

As Malebranche he wrote the provocative book, Androphilia, A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity, in which he proposed masculine, indeed masculist, homosexuality and separation from the gay scene and stereotypes.  He uses the word ‘androphilia’ in a special way, such that most gay men are not encompassed by it, and we should also mention that most gay men  would not identify with his portrayal of 'gay'.
“The word gay has never described mere homosexuality. Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona—a lifestyle. It’s a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality.”
He in fact develops 'androphilia' as a gender variation although he does not use such a concept. In particular he does not explain how male androphilia is different from male autoandrophilia or male homeovestity.
Returning to his original name of Jack Donovan, he has been active on alternateRight.com and the anti-feminist/men's rights blog, Spearhead.  With Nathan Miller he wrote Blood-Brotherhood And Other Rites of Male Alliance in which he distances himself from gay marriage, which he says carries too much historical baggage, and proposes alternate models for male-male coupling. 

As an over-gendered man, one would presume that he had no interest in trans people.  However he has written several essays particularly on trans women.  His concepts of trans women are pretty stereotyped and would seem if anything to derive from his time as a go-go dancer, much as Bailey's concept of HSTS trans women is also derived from hanging around gay bars.
“Well, actual transsexual males are a whole different ball of wax–they tend to be really scrappy. Despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be women, a lot of them would not think twice about throwing hands. They’re a very confused and angry bunch, in my experience.” (Oct 2009)
“generally drag queens, trannies and transsexuals in all stages of transition were not well. They were often addicted to drugs, had been diagnosed with mental disorders or chemical imbalances, and many had at one point routinely engaged in prostitution. …
Female transsexuality is a different ballgame; it seems to be almost entirely a feminist tom-boy fantasy and it is difficult to separate from feminist politics. At some point I will write something titled ‘Chaz Bono is Still a Fat Chick’, but today is not that day.  …
If a man takes hormones to look more like a woman, or a woman takes hormones to look more like a man, we accept it and legally recognize the switch.  If a man takes hormones to enhance his own natural masculinity, we call it immoral and we’ve made it illegal. We call him a cheater and threaten to put an asterisk beside his name. Why is it so much more acceptable to use drugs to alter your sex than it is to embrace and enhance what you were born with? From the perspective of mental health, isn’t that counterintuitive? …
It is worth noting, too, that many of these individuals occasionally engage in deceptive behavior, ‘hiding’ their birth sex from potential sexual partners. It’s not just a comedy cliché. It happens, and it’s ethically reprehensible. (Dec 2009).
“a large number if not a majority of male-to-female transsexuals were mentally unstable, and that feminists and cultural Marxists were doing these men harm by convincing them that they should try to become something that they could never truly be: women.” (May 2010).
 EN.Wikipedia        www.jack-donovan.com
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There is much in common between the HBS people and Jack Donovan.   Both advocate heteronormativity, and both are dismayed by the variety and difference found among both gays and trans people.

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09 November 2010

Ruth Rhiannan Barrett (1954–) priestess, folksinger.

Ruth Barrett was raised in Los Angeles by Reconstructionist Jewish parents. She read Robert Graves' The White Goddess while still at school, and later became a folk musician. She studied folklore at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1975-6, and joined a goddess spirituality group. 

In 1976 she met Zsuzsanna Budapest and was initiated into the Susan B. Anthony #1 Coven the next St Bridget's Day. She and her husband had a daughter the next year. She founded the feminist newspaper, Themis (later Thesmophoria). When Budapest moved to San Francisco, Barrett became the High priestess of the Susan B. Anthony #1 Coven, but later moved to the Moon Birch Coven. 

By 1985 she was lesbian, and divorced her husband. In 1988 she left Moon Birch and founded the Circle of Aradia, which became the first consecrated circle of the Reformed Congregation of the Goddess in 1993. In 1997 Ruth was honored for her contributions in the area of spirituality from the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. Ruth met her wife at an RCG conference and in 2000 they moved to Wisconsin, where they founded the Temple of Diana which continues the Dianic Wicca tradition articulated by Zsuzsanna Budapest. Ruth is still a singer and plays the dulcimer. 

The Dianic tradition is deviant within Wicca in rejecting trans women as members. As Ruth says in her description of the Dianic Traditions:
"Dianics support all people in finding their path to the Goddess. However, we do not recognize hormonally or surgically altered men as women, and therefore exclude these men, or men who self-define as women, from our tradition. Women's Mysteries cannot be understood nor experienced through chemical or surgical alterations to our human bodies(2008)."
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    Barrett presumably named her paper, Thesmophoria, in that the ancient Greek festival was for women only, actually married women only.  However there is an extant play by Aristophanes called Thesmophoriazusae (= women celebrating the Thesmophoria) which is a play of gender reversals where men dress as women and the women appear to be the equal of men.  This makes Barrett’s position ironic at best.

    There were demonstrations when Julie Bindel was honoured by Stonewall despite her transphobia.  Were there similar demonstrations at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1997?

    Two of the comments on my article about Janice Raymond nominate Zsuzsanna Budapest as equally transphobic.  Budapest would appear to be one of those movement leaders who are careful about their public negativities and leave it to their followers to take the flak.  At least I cannot find any comments about trans women using the Amazon Look Inside feature on Budapest’s books.

    The RCG has added International to its name, but all its circles seem to be in one country only.
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    10 October 2010

    Sanda Davis (1955 - ) psychotherapist, Mother God.

    Romanian-born Sanda Davis, has psychology degrees from the Universities of Bucharest and Ottawa, and wrote a doctorate thesis, Principes a Appliquer en Education Familiale, Surgis du Fonctionalisme Systémique, at the University of Mons, Belgium in 1999. However she is currently listing herself as "Phd Cnd". She published two books in 1995: Multiples in Love and Am I a Man or a Woman? Both by Personality Press which has not published anything by anyone else.

    She takes the concept of 'introjection', a term that has been used by psychoanalysts and Gestalt therapists, but puts her own spin on it. An introjection is an internal image of another person. We all have introjections, and for many they are no more than memories. Many of us have strong introjections where the memory becomes obsessive, especially if it is associated with trauma or abuse. In one of Davis' stronger examples she uses the concept of introjections to explain how abuse victims later become abusers themselves in that the remembered voice of the initial abuser is still inside and controlling the person.

    She sees multiple personalities (dissociative identity disorder) as competing introjections. She sees Gender Identity Disorder (her preferred term) as a special type of dissociative identity disorder in which one of the alternative identities (introjections) has become so dominant that it becomes the major personality.
    "All humans acquire Introjects. Depending on specific factors, Introjects may or may not lead to dissociation, even to severe forms of dissociation. Reflecting the person that is imprinted as an Introject, some Introjects are content with limited control, while others take over completely, using, abusing, and transforming the body. Such is the case with Gender Identity Disorder: a cross-gender Introject takes over the body, and demands gender reassignment.(DIFH:1.2)"
    "In most cases Gender Identity Disorder is a psychological disorder of traumatic origin that usually starts in early childhood, and afflicts millions of people in the entire world. Cross-dressing and transsexuality are the most popular manifestations of this disorder. In reality, GID is a much deeper disorder characterized by confusion, trance states, attention deficit, memory problems, headaches, psychosomatic symptoms,physical numbness, reduced or variable sexual potency, possible impotence, mood swings, reading and learning difficulties, potentially lethal depression, low self esteem, self mutilation and more.(DIFH: 2.1)"
    She explains that most men have introjections of their mothers, sisters, girls at school, wives etc, but in a male with GID these female introjections coalesce and become dominant. This composite introjection comes to think of itself as the true person in the body, and then starts wearing female clothing and proclaiming herself to be woman. Well-meaning friends and relatives make the situation worse by accepting the claim. Davis says that she can cure any case of GID by getting the female introjection to admit that she is not the true personality of the body.
    "Once the 'female' introject that splits the male's personality system is released and the original parts integrate, the male has no more Gender Dysphoria" (Davis, 1995:152).
    An obvious omission from her book is any discussion of religious experience in terms of introjections. However the Ottawa Citizen from 1997 quotes Davis saying that
    "she has seen demons surface in her psychotherapy clients, then laugh and walk out of the office with them. Other clients have been inhabited by the souls of the dead. "
    It also quotes the College of Psychologists of Ontario that
    "Ms. Davis can't legally advertise her services as a psychologist because she is not registered with the college. But she says there is nothing to stop anybody from advertising their services as a psychotherapist, or as a soul worker."
    At that time she was charging up to $80 a hour, and described herself as a "conservative Christian".
    Since then she has had an epiphany and realized that she is The Mother God. On her Blogger profile she says:
    "I am GOD. The Original GOD, in human form with infinite aspects to my being.
    Why are people not engaging in dialogue with me when I tell them who I am."
    She says that she is now able to cure paraplegia, quadriplegia, blindness, HIV, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, Learning Disabilities, Gender Identity Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, The Stockholm Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, Sexual Disorders, Intractable Depression, Battered Women Syndrome, Chronic Pain, Chronic Fatigue, Numerous Psychosomatic Disorders, Chronic Anger, Chronic Violence, and more.

    She is located in Burlington, Ontario.
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      For those of you who think that autoandrophilia was Ontario’s greatest gift to gender theory, here is an unexpected delight.

      Davis lists many Blanchard papers in her bibliography, discusses autoandrophilia in her text,  but neither he nor it is in her index.

      She speaks mainly of female introjects in male bodies, and only briefly of male introjects in female bodies.   She is hardly alone in this bias.

      One of the good practices of psychoanalysis is that all psychoanalysts must themselves be psychoanalyzed.  Has Sanda spoken to another psychotherapist about her Mother God Introjection?

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      20 April 2010

      Janice Raymond (1943 - ) feminist professor.

      ++ Name of Raymond's 1980 paper corrected.

      Raymond did a BA in English Literature at Salve Regina College, 1965, and an MA in Religious Studies at Andover Newton Theological School, 1971. She was then for a short time a member of the Sisters of Mercy, but left and did a PhD in Ethics and Society at Boston College, 1977. Raymond’s PhD thesis supervisor was Mary Daly of Boston College. Daly was writing Gyn/Ecology at the same time. Raymond’s dissertation became The Transsexual Empire, 1979, and it and Gyn/Ecology cite each other, and both were published by Beacon Press which is associated with the Unitarian Church. In 1978, Raymond became Professor of Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

      Raymond’s position is that transsexual women are not women, and she uses male pronouns for trans women throughout. The Transsexual Empire enthusiastically draws on Thomas Kando’s Sex Change; The Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals, 1972, and on Jan Morris’ Conundrum, 1974. Kando restricted his sample to recently-transitioned transsexuals, and Morris wrote within two years of surgery, and so Raymond was easily able to find examples of the gender enthusiasm of new women which she insisted was typical of transsexual women of whatever duration. Raymond says that she supplemented these with 13 direct interviews and found highly stereotypical notions of gender roles, and without the “role strain of normal women”. However Angela Douglas claimed that all the quotes from these 13 are in fact from a letter that Douglas wrote to Raymond. Raymond retells several of the transsexual tales that were in the US press in the 1970s: Angela Douglas’ notorious polemical letter that was a reaction to lesbian separatism; the fuss that some lesbians made about Sandy Stone being the sound engineer at the feminist Olivia Records; Paula Grossman being fired.

      She takes the position that sex is determined by the chromosomes and that if XY one is always male, and if XX always female, and secondly that the historical experience of being raised as a girl and menstruating determines a woman. A constructed-woman has only a history of wishing to be a woman. The primary cause of transsexualism is the sex stereotyping of patriarchal society (no biological, psychological or existential causation is considered), and the secondary cause is the professionals, the surgeons, psychiatrists, counselors, electrologists etc who provide services and persuade foolish persons to change (the opposition of the vast majority of male doctors to the first transsexuals is not considered). She never considers that transsexuals themselves regarded the gender-stereotyped requirements of the gender clinics as a problem. Transsexual men are “the tokens that save face for the transsexual empire”, and are barely considered. The patriarchy has introduced sex changes as a means of controlling gender stereotypes, which act in the interests of men. Once extra-natal conception is introduced, biological women will become redundant.
      “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, and appropriating this body for themselves. [...] Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive”.
      In various places she compares gender surgery to foot-binding, clitoridectomy and infibulation, corset mutilation, unnecessary hysterectomies and radical mastectomies. Several times she suggests but just stops short of saying that transsexuality was associated with the Nazis, and the death camps.

      Whilst Raymond maintains that male-to-constructed-females are more gender stereotyped than biological woman, worse still are those who attempt to be lesbian-feminists:
      "Transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity”.
      Raymond’s call to action:
      “I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” .
      The book was endorsed in a review by Thomas Szasz which is quoted on both its front and back covers (“Raymond’s development and documentation is flawless”).

      Raymond also wrote a paper, Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery, for the US Government. This paper, which is less contentious and inflammatory in its language and thus more superficially plausible, resulted in the removal of US federal and some state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexuals, and provided an example for insurance companies who were pleased to have a feminist telling them that transsexuality should not be covered. This non-coverage included breast or genital cancer where it could be deemed to be a consequence of transsexual activity.

      Carol Riddell wrote the first detailed and critical review of Raymond’s book, and it has been frequently reprinted, which I have drawn upon above.

      Through the 1980s gay academics endorsed Raymond’s book. It was admired by Wayne Dynes (“Impassioned radical-feminist critique”) and Jonathan Katz (“The most profound, extended critique of the medical concept of ‘transsexualism’ ”).   Liz Hodgkinson’s Bodyshock: The Truth About Changing Sex, 1987, while being pro-transsexuals, repeatedly returns to Raymond’s book for explanation.

      Along with Peter Ackroyd’s Dressing Up, also 1979, Raymond’s book became a de rigueur entry in the bibliography of any 1980s book on trans topics, even though many authors did not actually seem to understand what she was saying.

      In 1988, Sandy Stone wrote a manifesto defiantly responding to Raymond.

      Unlike the concept of autogynephilia, very few actual transsexuals identified with Raymond’s position, the one exception being Rachael Webb, a lorry driver cum London Councillor who regarded herself as a radical feminist and as a constructed woman.

      Raymond’s books in the early 1990s attacked sexual liberalism, contraception in the form of RU486, and the new reproductive technologies.

      In 1996, The Transsexual Empire was reissued by Teacher College Press, without any changes although by that time the excessive gender conformity required by gender clinics that she had initially criticized was largely a thing of the past. She expands her criticism in the new Introduction using the new word, ‘transgenderism’, she dismisses gender transgression as a new type of gender conformity, and has specific criticisms of RuPaul, Leslie Feinberg and k.d. lang. So non-surgical gender solutions are not acceptable either as some might have assumed from her book.

      In the late 1990s and 2000s there have been a number of trans writers who have used Raymond’s book as if it referred to other transsexuals whom they don’t seem to like, often referred to as ‘autogynephiles’ or ‘transgender’ or ‘men’, although there is no basis for this in Raymond’s writings: she is as critical of the lesbian-feminist constructed female as she is of the gender-stereotyped constructed female. Notable examples are by Margaret O’Hartigan and Cathryn Platine.

      From 1994-2007 Raymond was the Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and is still on the Board. She retired as a professor in 2002, and is Professor Emerita. In CATW she is strongly against decriminalization of prostitution which has led several sex worker activists to take issue with her. She talks about prostitution as if trans women and men are never sex workers.

      *Not Janice Raymond, Playmate of the Month for December 1974.
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      Raymond has kept her personal life quiet.   Her Wikipedia page has a ‘personal life’ section which says that she is a former Catholic and an open lesbian.  There is no mention of her having a wife.  There are two rumours relating to her private life.  I did not include them above because I could not confirm them, but they are very germane to her writings:  that she had a passion for a trans woman but was rebuffed (Denny, 2002);  and that she and Daly were lovers.  Both suggestions partially explain the intensity of her transphobia.

      My husband was raised a Catholic and is a graduate of the Jesuit Boston College.  On reading this, his major comment was to explain that many ex-Catholics and lapsed Catholics emphasize the one issue that affects them personally – with Raymond it is the non-ordination of women ( Johnson, 1973) – but continue to agree with the Church on other issues.  Raymond’s position is remarkably congruent with the Church of Rome:  trans woman are not women; abortion is wrong; the new reproductive technologies are wrong.

      For all her concern with the “role strain of normal women”, Raymond is indifferent to the role strain of those born male.  Other than feminist  consciousness raising, she rules out – this is made clear in the introduction to the 1994 reprint - any solution that such male-born persons may wish to try: in addition to her proscription of surgical gender change, she also condemns androgynous gender mixing for both men and women.  She denies that women wearing trousers is transvestity  and at the same time denies men any clothing freedom at all.    Like Virginia Prince and some of the HBS people she is insistent that other persons should follow her prescription only and is not interested in what they might think, or in allowing them to be themselves.

      I am a woman, therefore I am a feminist.  This is so obvious to  me.  The great expansion of opportunities and freedoms for all women, trans and cis, over the last 50 years is one of the great achievements of the 20th century.  Raymond attempts to present her flavour of feminism as Feminism, as if there were no others.  But of course there are many feminisms.  One of the best statements of how Raymond is an embarrassment to feminism is found in Califia’s book.   As a feminist I also find Raymond embarrassing.  But there are also trans women who say things that I do not like.
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      28 November 2009

      Ray Blanchard (1945 - ) psychologist.

      Ray Blanchard’s father, an aviation metal smith died in the Japanese attack on the USS Franklin, just before his namesake son was born. The son was raised a Catholic in Hammonton, New Jersey.

      He did an A.B. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967, and PhD in psychology at Urbana University, Illinois, 1973, the year that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of diseases. He had a draft classification of 4-A, the sole surviving son of a service member killed in action, and so was exempt unless war was officially declared, which the US never did against Vietnam.

      He emigrated to Canada anyway. He did post-doctoral research at Dalhousie University investigating learning processes in animals (mainly rats) until 1976 when he became a clinical psychologist at the Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton (now the Brampton Adult Training Centre). There he met Kurt Freund while working with sex offenders. They made plans to collaborate, and in 1980, Blanchard started working at the Clarke Institute in Toronto (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health).

      He did work on male birth order and sexuality and claims that the number of older brothers increases the chance of homosexuality in right-handed men, but not in left-handed men or in women at all. He claims that pedophiles have lower than expected IQs and higher rates of non-right-handedness. He hypothesizes that “these and other correlates of pedophilia reflect some perturbation of prenatal neurodevelopment in subsequently pedophilic males”.

      A lot of his work utilizes phallometric diagnosis. He is best known for his re-presentation of Kurt Freund’s ideas on fetishistic transsexualism which he re-labelled as ‘autogynephylia’. He insisted for many years that there are no gay trans men, and consistently ignored Lou Sullivan’s letters in the 1980s explaining that Lou and many others are indeed gay trans men. Further to this he does not acknowledge autoandrophilia, which is the term that his theoretical system should apply to such trans men. However he now claims to have published two of the earliest reports of gay trans men (but without using that terminology).  He also insists and persists in referring to heterosexual trans women as homosexual, and refuses to use the word ‘androphilic’.

      Blanchard is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto (despite being a psychologist not a psychiatrist), and in 1995, after Kurt Freund’s retirement, he became Head of Clinical Sexology Services in the Law and Mental Health Programme of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). He served on the gender dysphoria sub-working group for the DSM-IV, 1994, and is serving as Chair of the paraphilia sub-working group for the new DSM-V. He is an Associate Editor of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment and a member of the Editorial Board of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

      He supported Michelle Josef’s lawsuit in 1999 to get gender surgery relisted under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. He supplied material to Lisanne Anderson for her Autogynephilia Site.

      He gave a paper at the Third International Body Integrity Disorder Meeting in 2003 comparing BIID (apotemnophilia=desire to have a limb removed) to Gender identity disorder, as did Anne Lawrence. This has fed the usage on the religious right of referring to sex changes as sexual-amputation fetishism.

      Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, 2003, recycles many of Blanchard’s ideas. Blanchard's favourable review of the book is the only review that he ever wrote for Amazon, and he resigned from HBIGDA (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now WPATH) when it criticized the book, an act which he called 'appalling'.

      In 2002 the CAMH GIC was awarded a Presidential Citation from Div 44 of the American Psychological Association.  Ray Blanchard accepted the award on behalf of CAMH.

      The population of Ontario being over 13 million, there should be around 200 trans persons completing transition each year.   Before the suspension of Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) funding for gender surgery in 1998 Blanchard's management had kept the number approved to around 10 per year, and it looks as if the numbers approved since the re-instatement in 2008 will be approximately the same.

      As Blanchard manages a clinic that rejects most of its applicants, and proclaims a universal theory based on the minority that it accepts, it is a reasonable assumption that the majority are rejected precisely because they do not fit the theory.  For this crime of contradicting the theory, they are denied OHIP funding.

      In 2004 he wrote: “This is not waving a magic wand and a man becomes a woman and vice versa.  It's something that has to be taken very seriously. A man without a penis has certain disadvantages in this world, and this is in reality what you're creating" (Jane Armstrong. “The Body within, the body without”. The Globe and Mail June 12, 2004 here).
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      I am not discussing the concept of autogynephilia in any detail here as I have already done so here.

      As his insistence on calling heterosexual trans women ‘homosexual’ shows, Blanchard regards trans women as men, and trans men as women.  This was shown again in the 2004 article in The Globe and Mail.  Blanchard has tried to claim that he is not transphobic, but until he changes in his regard of which gender we are, it is inevitable that many, probably most, of us do regard him as transphobic.  This attitude will probably not change until the next generation take over the gender clinics.   It does appear that Blanchard and Zucker are attempting to solidify their position in the DSM-V, so that it will last for another generation.

      Of course Blanchard supported Michelle Josef’s lawsuit in 1999 to get gender surgery relisted.  The CAMH GIC is a stronger institution when it can offer the carrot of paid-for gender surgery on the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

      Blanchard claims that pedophiles suffered “perturbation of prenatal neurodevelopment”.  The HBS people claim that the same thing happened to them, but don’t phrase it so well.

      Unlike Kurt Freund who was married to a woman and had had children, and unlike James Cantor who is openly gay, Blanchard has been very coy about his private life.  Andrea James’ article of November 2009 is by far the best on this particular topic, but I would maintain that his closetry denies him the right to claim to be gay.

      Being a right-handed eldest child with a heterosexual younger brother, I am not sold on the birth-order effect.

      Blanchard, Zucker and Cantor are all by upbringing American.  That is a bit too many to be all in one Canadian clinic, especially the dominant Canadian clinic on transsexuality.
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