Doublethink

A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

Janice G. Raymond

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781925950397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, Janice Raymond's new book illuminates the "doublethink" of a transgender movement that is able to define men as women, women as men, he as she, dissent as heresy, science as sham, and critics as fascists. Meanwhile, trans mobs are treated as gender patriots whose main enemy is feminists and their dissent from gender orthodoxies.The medicalization of gender dissatisfaction depicted by Raymond in her early visionary book, The Transsexual Empire, has today expanded exponentially into the transgender industrial complex built on big medicine, big pharma, big banks, big foundations, big research centers, some attached to big universities. And the current rise of treating young children with puberty blockers and hormones is a widespread scandal that has been named a medical experiment on children.Whereas transsexualism was mainly a male phenomenon in the past with males undertaking cross sex hormones and surgery, today it is notably young women who are self-declaring as men in large numbers. The good news is that these young women who formerly identified as "trans men" or gender non-binary, are now de-transitioning. In this book, they speak movingly about their severances from themselves and other women, their escape from compulsive femininity, their sexual assaults, the misogyny they experienced growing up, and their journeys in recovering their womanhood.Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism makes us aware of the consequences of a runaway ideology and its costs — among them what is at stake when males are allowed to compete in female sports and when parents are not aware of school curricula that confuse sex with gender and that can facilitate a child' s hormone treatments without parental consent.

CHAPTER ONE

The New Trans Biologism: Female Brains and Female Penises

The meanings we create or learn do not exist only in our heads, in ineffable ideas. Our meanings also exist in our bodies — what we are, what we do, what we physically feel, what we physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate from what the body has learned about life.

—Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

In 1979, I wrote that men cannot become women, or women men, via hormones and/or surgery — not only because women or men are born female or male but because of the history, life experience and privilege (male) or discrimination (female) of what it means to grow up in a male or female body.

Amputating a healthy penis or breasts, being dependent on cross-sex hormones, and often embarking on secondary surgical journeys to alter voice or appearance, is a walking tribute to the power of patriarchal definitions of masculinity and femininity, which teach all of us that in a gender-defined culture it is easier to change your body than to change your society.

The traditional understanding of gender was shaped by conservative patriarchal powers. If born a boy, you were allegedly gifted with a biologically assertive and aggressive gender, and if born a girl, you got the crumbs from the master’s table — a passive and emotional set of gendered qualities that were to be used mainly in service to men and male-dominant priorities. The traditional gender chart positioned you according to how well you conformed to masculine or feminine standards of behavior. And if women especially failed to take their proper place in the gender hierarchy, they could be subjected to the worst forms of male violence.

In the conservative calculus, gender roles were based on biology and could not be changed by individuals without in some way being punished for it. This punishment fell hardest on gender non-compliant women — many of them feminists and lesbians — who were disciplined for being different and for adopting ‘masculine’ behavior, considered a hard-wired set of traits intrinsic to male biology. To the extent that men also violated their gendered behavior, they too were chastised but not usually subjected to the sexual violence that women experienced. And if those men who identified as women did experience sexual violence, they were treated as women are treated.

Transgenderism is a contrived ideology born of a regressive biologism that, in its latest version, champions men who claim female brains and female penises. It’s a rogue idea, an unscrupulous philosophy that, to modify Virginia Woolf’s words, serves as a looking glass “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man” back to himself as the woman he aspires to be (Woolf, 1929, p. 35). Self-declared women (men) spend a lot of time in front of any mirror that reflects their idealized women back to themselves.

The promotion of transgender has become a progressive cause with strong backing from groups who now view it as ‘woke’. Progressive organizations have reversed sex and gender, meekly shadowing trans advocates who assert that gender is sex and sex is gender, and thus helping to establish ‘gender’ as a primary identifier on passports, driving licenses and other official documents replacing sex. ‘Sex’ is now considered as something to be altered by hormones, surgery or self-declaration.

In The Transsexual Empire, I quoted transsexual Angela Douglas who proclaimed:

Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. We know this, and perhaps some of you suspect it. All you have left is your ability to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that’s a negative asset (Douglas, 1977).

Some have said this was satire, but Douglas dismissed this interpretation. After serving as an FBI informant whose trans surgery left ‘her’ mutilated, he later reverted to his male status and lived as a homeless man until his death in 2007.

The trans movement today is demanding that women’s organizations, especially those concerned with women’s health, don’t reference parts of the female body because self-declared women feel excluded. Trans activists insist that these groups change references to women’s vaginas or breast-feeding and instead call women ‘front holes’ or ‘chest feeders’. Yet it’s OK for self-declared women to be preoccupied with natal women’s reproductive functions in their quest for womb transplants and ability to breast feed, in trans speak known as ‘chest feeding’. Others define natal women as ‘menstruators, egg producers, breeders, uterus owners, or non-men’, terms that degrade and dehumanize and reduce women to body parts. When feminists resist, we are decried as transphobes. We have come to a point where even those who ‘identify’ as feminists seem eager to cede the definition of woman to men.

Trans academic and extremist Joelle Ruby Ryan wrote that the term ‘female’ is offensive, outmoded, sexist and exclusionary (in Keith and Jensen, 2013). Then why seek female status if you have just declared the term offensive and obsolete? Ryan as a self-declared woman feels entitled to appropriate a womanhood that he just scorned, announcing that it is self-declared women who are the rightful women who will usher in a new day.

The irony of this more contemporary wave of men seeking confirmation of their status as women is that they seem to abhor the female bodies of natal women, except when they want to wear one and ‘do’ woman better. The extremist transgender movement is one more masculinist attempt to colonize women in the interest of appropriating the female body for one’s self. It’s a superficial preoccupation with women’s body parts and with women’s bodily functions — not a respect for women’s selves.

Trying to ‘become’ a woman (or a man) affirms, not challenges, the gender binary that trans activists say they have abandoned. If there are no sex categories of male and female, and only a concept of malleable gender expressed as an identity, then the notion of trans becomes contradictory. If there’s no biological sex such as male or female, then the terms ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ lose their meaning because these modifiers have to modify something.

Transgender claims can affect all our lives. Once biology and the history and experiences of what it means to live in a sexed body is rejected, there is no touchstone especially for children, who are left with the confusion of picking a gender. This confusion encourages a regression to sex-role stereotypes because it’s the sex-role markers that are out there and easier to grab onto, the confusion ratified by the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. If you like trucks and want to be a fire fighter, you’re a boy. If you like dolls and dress up in frilly clothes, you’re a girl.

Self-declared women explain the origin of their gender identity by claiming they possess biological female brains. Or, if these men seek to be recognized as lesbians, they claim to sport a ‘female penis’ that some call ‘lady sticks’. They disparage biological womanhood but then locate their need to transgender in their alleged female brains or in some mysterious essence of femininity.

Gender can’t become biology because men who claim they were born with a female brain have not lived in female bodies, bodies that carry the history and experiences of oppression common to women across cultures. Women retain not only a common biology but also a unique history as an oppressed class that no man has lived through. Men can’t self-identify their way out of their own bodies, history and life experiences into any meaningful definition of womanhood.

Biology trumps transgender in the doctor’s office. Personal health history begins with biology but is also influenced by social, political and economic factors, all of which are key to the medical problems that men and women experience in a lifetime. When trans-identified persons seek medical treatment, they have to ‘deadname’ themselves and reveal they are either a biological male or female. As we grow older, the aging process is a reality check during which gender confronts the health challenges of one’s biological corporeality.

For years, women’s health advocates have campaigned for women’s inclusion in medical research studies and drug trials to ascertain sex-specific risks and reactions. There are multiple health issues that differ by sex, which went unnoticed in earlier medical research.

Women may experience different heart attack symptoms than men. Women and men may react differently to some medications. One study found that “Men who received donor blood from women who had ever been pregnant had a significantly higher mortality rate compared to those who received blood from other men, or women who had never been pregnant” (Starr, 2017). Women have a greater prevalence of autoimmune diseases that are associated with pregnancy or during an extensive hormonal change. When trans persons change their sex identifiers, emergency medical providers may not be able to know immediately the sex of a patient that could delay life-saving medical treatment (Angum, 2020).

When physicians and other clinicians encourage children and adults to undergo transition medicine, it puts these persons in harm’s way. As I have written, “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” (Raymond, 1979, p. 114).

This does not mean that there are no differences in women across cultures. It does mean that men cannot claim they are brain-wired as women. That claim comes from the head of Zeus, the mythical god who ‘birthed’ Athena from his forehead after swallowing her mother Metis, foreshadowing the post-modern mythology of trans biological essentialism.

Science and Pseudo-Science

In The Transsexual Empire, I spent an entire chapter disputing the biologism of sexologist and psychologist John Money who at the time was especially influential in promoting a pre-natal theory of gender identity formation in which hormones activate the brain and set the direction of sex differences. Money stated, “Once a sex distinction has worked or been pressured into the nuclear core of your gender schema, to dislodge it is to threaten you as an individual with destruction” (Raymond, 1979, pp. 63–64). Money’s genderism flies in the face of feminist theory and activism that challenges the immutability of gendered differences.

Money’s work on gender identity formation has led to the more recent rationalizations of the transgendered female brain (although he didn’t invent the female penis). As Lierre Keith has eloquently written:

The strangest part of this whole debate is that feminists are being called biological essentialists … White supremacists are the only people who believe in the ‘Negro brain’. But talk of ‘lady brains’ is completely accepted across progressive communities if it comes from genderists … It’s the genderists who claim it’s biologically immutable … Yet we are called essentialist? (Keith and Jensen, 2013).

Misty Snow, a Democratic candidate from Utah who ran in the US 2016 Senate elections as a self-declared woman asserts, without citing any evidence, “There is a lot of science that supports the fact that male and female brains are different and respond to hormones differently” (Hedges, 2017). To the contrary, there is not a ‘lot of evidence’ that supports the notion of female and male brains. Brain science provides no proof in defence of the gendered brain.

In a 2019 book entitled Gender and Our Brains, author Gina Rippon, a British professor of cognitive neuro imaging, reviews the history of gendered brain studies and examines the recent ‘science’ on brain differences between females and males. Her key thesis is that scientific knowledge of brain plasticity casts doubt on any ‘evidence’ of biological differences in female and male brains because boys and girls are treated differently from birth and any variances that do exist don’t show up in brain imaging. Imaging of brain activity shows no gendered difference at any age, proving that any alleged evidence about gendered brain differences is in effect dubious. “Rather than ‘limitations’ imposed by biology’ we are looking at restrictions imposed by society”(Rippon, p. 92). You can’t examine a brain and distinguish between a girl’s brain or a boy’s brain, or as I would phrase it, gender may reside in one’s head but not in one’s brain.

When asked to explain so-called evidence that men can be women, trans activists often allege a wider range of biological sex than simply male or female. Their claim is that scientists now believe that sex is no longer binary but exists on a broader continuum. Trans activists claim biological kinship with intersex persons who have ambiguous sex characteristics, misusing their status to conclude that transgendering persons are the living embodiment of an evolving sex spectrum.

However, only a miniscule percentage of the population is intersex, and intersex persons do not identify as transgender. To be on a spectrum of sex, you would have to demonstrate that a substantial part of the population is intersex and that these individuals are born with chromosomal and/or hormonal anomalies. As biologists Colin Wright and Emma Hilton have written, “… intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a ‘spectrum’ or a ‘social construct’” (Wright and Hilton, 2020).

Scientists can also be susceptible to transgender pressure to deny empirical facts. A shameful example of denial is the number of medical practitioners who are ready to fast-track affirmation of healthy young transitioning children, prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that could cause lifelong infertility. During the eugenics eras, scientists produced ‘evidence’ that promoted racial inferiority, using the ‘proof’ of ‘scientific’ experiments that sterilized vulnerable populations and left many infertile. Government support conveniently accommodated ‘scientific’ programs and propaganda to justify legislation whose purpose was to eliminate the ‘unfit’. As Donna Hughes has written, “The eugenics movement to breed a better race of people was a fantasy: so too is the trans-sex movement” (Hughes, 2021).

There are scientific outliers writing today in the Lancet, Nature and Scientific American that challenge the binary notion of biological sex lending credence to the idea that men can be women. For example, a 2018 editorial appearing in Nature argues, “The research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female, and gender as a spectrum that includes transgender people and those who identify as neither male nor female” (Editorial, 2018).

The Nature editorial triggered a letter to the editor signed by scientists associated with the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland who stated the following:

Of particular concern to us is the sight of respected scientific publications, such as Nature, now beginning to echo these popular trends … We regard the claim that sex is neither fixed nor binary to be entirely without scientific merit … Such politically motivated policies and statements have no place in scientific journals (Hilton et al, 2021).

How ironic that Donald Trump’s disregard for science has taken root in progressive circles. If progressive groups continue to assert that there is no biological definition of woman or man, then they cannot credibly fault conservatives for attacking science when conservatives deny, for example, climate change. In their denials, many progressive organizations are erasing the lived experience of women when they reinforce the view that anyone who self-declares as a woman is valid and should be acknowledged as such.

Self-declared women are not women, and attempts to define themselves as such are bogus. Pretending that the female b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: From Transsexualism to Transgenderism
• Chapter One: The New Trans Biologism: Female Brains and Female Penises
• Chapter Two: The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?
• Chapter Three: Self-Declared Men, Transitioning and De-transitioning
• Chapter Four: The Trans Culture of Violence Against Women
• Chapter Five: Gender Identity Trumps Sex in Women’s Sports and Children’s Education
• Chapter Six: The Trans Gag Rules: Erasing Women, Pronoun Tyranny and Censoring Critics
• Conclusion
• References