infamous transsexual empire, looking at Carol Riddell's response, divided sisterly, we're
looking at Emi Koyatma's piece, and then later on Diego will be speaking on the Shotwell
Insanity piece, right? So before we get going, let me just sort of open it up to the floor.
It's certainly, in many ways I agree with that assessment. I'm going to try to salvage
some things from it actually, aside from the fact that this is an important piece to look
at because it's really important in terms of understanding, I think, the roots of trans
studies. I'd also trans politics in the U.S., but yes, I think that your intuitions about
the piece are probably the most part of the rect.
The orthodontist really upset a lot of us. How does she use units to support, because
it's a piece of history that she totally misrepresents, and she basically says that they're mint when
bi-definition units were usually castrated, like four or five. So they weren't raised
as mint. They never experienced life as mint. They didn't belong to the male sphere, and
she represents them over and over again as being mint.
Do you think they were part of a different social category?
Yeah, they were totally, I don't know, repeatedly. They were not mint by these standard definitions
of ancient society. She uses them that way to reinforce her opinion.
We'll quit. Thank you for that. I think that this may be the least of her problems, but
I think that you're right. I think that it's symptomatic.
It's just from the history point of view. The total, it's like the archaeology of the
city altered it just enough to make it look like there are sub-races. Therefore, we have
a right to exclude different of these people. A lot of what they said was true, but they
put just enough, the best lies are those that are totally true.
All right. Good thing. Any other comments, Keith?
I thought it was good for, like, an academic setting, because I think that politically,
this is a level that the discussion proceeds at. Not in, like I was saying last week, where
I think the discussion, I mean, what we need is too high for the way that politics actually
is. So this seems to be, like, that's where people think and talk.
Any people are?
Well, one example, this past election, right, from all these people, whole school of people
who were elected. This is the way they operate. I mean, you've had statements about, you
know, outlawing gays. I just read something about somebody saying that we should hang.
I mean, it's just, and you can actually say that and be elected. I mean, that's...
Okay. Well, good. I mean, I think you're right that certainly this piece is highly political.
Also, here in the comment, I think it's interesting, because what you're doing is you're actually
connecting what Raymond is doing with maybe more of an everyday sensibility.
Yeah? I remember that we talked about the term normal, right, the expression that Garfinkel
uses, right, to refer to those who endorse the natural attitude. And I think that you
might be sort of thinking that Raymond seems like she's articulating normal-asked views,
which I think is kind of interesting. I think it's kind of true. I think it's kind of true.
I think it's kind of interesting, because I think that she would be loath to say any
such thing. I mean, Raymond sees herself as an endorsing, a very, you know, radical feminist
political agenda that is supposed to be overturning sort of the everyday reality of male domination
on its head. It's supposed to be a radical departure from the male-dominated mainstream.
And if your intuitions are that actually she's articulating views that seem very folksy,
if you will, very sort of everyday normal-ask, then one, I think that you're probably right.
And two, I think that's interesting, because it means that in some sense, even though she's
trying to do something radical, unwittingly, one of her feet is stuck in this world.
It's stuck in this world despite her hopes to the contrary.
Because I don't think that she does think that she's sort of like part of the everyday
way of viewing things.
Because I think about last week where you had the statements, you know, the actions of the ENG, right, the judge in the case.
And then even like somebody like Martha Nussbaum, she does this with homosexuality, where she
talks about how judges, there was a case involving some violence towards a homosexual person,
and the judge said, get up your back.
I mean, it's different strata, but still it's...
So it permeates.
That's another fine point, because I think that, you know, this idea of a contrast between
sort of the attitude of the normal, the natural attitude, versus sort of we find sort of people
who engage in, say, theoretical discourse.
You know, I think Garfingel talks about this, the way in which the sort of everyday notions
seep into theory, seep into, you know, what judges have to say, what political folk have
to say, what academic types have to say.
This stuff ends up infecting all these different kinds of discourses, if you will.
Yeah, I think that's also right.
I kind of see what she's going, like, talking about, the Dionysian kind of sexuality.
I thought it was a very weird way to paint this picture, because in the story, right,
like, I forget his name, but the king dresses up in women's clothing to go see what's going on.
He sneaks in, they reveal his identity, and they rip him limb from limb and rip off his head.
I'm thinking, my gosh, what a story.
And she didn't finish the story, she just said, oh, there was this confusion about borders and stuff.
I just thought it was very kind of ironic.
Interesting.
So first of all, why did I make you read it?
I think that, I mean, I have to say, I think that it kind of does read its hateful.
You know, I think that that's sort of taken up in your comment at the end of the story, right, that being ripped apart.
You know, there's a lot of, you know, so why look at it?
Well, just to sort of review a little bit historically how trans studies gets going, this is an important piece, right?
So remember, we have Benjamin's...
I wonder if there's a chalk over there by chance?
I have a crummy little tiny piece of chalk.
We have the transsexual phenomenon, which we talked about, right, where this medical model of transsexuality is articulated in Harry Benjamin's work.
Janice Raymond, in some ways, is playing with this book and responding to it.
She's wanting to investigate this medical model of transsexuality, and she's wanting to critique it.
You don't get all of this in a little bit that you read, the chapter that you read, but the transsexual empire is actually a critique of a medical empire.
Medical empire, which we'll talk a little bit about.
She's critiquing the model basically captured in the transsexual phenomenon.
And so, as you know, Sandy Stone's The Empire Strikes Back, the post-transsexual manifesto, in a way takes both of these on to critiques a medical model of transsexuality,
and also critiques Janice Raymond's, the lesbian separatist feminist view of transsexuality as well.
So we end up with this third way, which sort of issues in trans studies, as we know it now.
So it's worth looking at this and the reactions to it.
I'm also interested in looking at what's going on here for other issues, for a lot of other issues.
One is, so new politics is being articulated in Stone's piece.
And in general, a new politics starts to get articulated in sort of the contemporary current transgender movement,
which concerns gender, oppression, gender resistance.
There's important issues, I think, important questions about how we think through feminist concerns,
and feminist politics with the transgender politics, how those things relate to each other,
and how they connect and how they don't connect, where they intersect and where they don't intersect,
and how a larger vision can be taken, which sort of encompasses feminists and trans.
And with that, and this is an important point that's going to come out in our discussions today,
broader issues of oppression and resistance around issues of race and class and nation and so forth.
That's going to prove to be important.
That's one of the reasons I'm interested.
I'm also interested in looking at it and in response to it because you get with Raymond a particular vision of gender
and its relationship to sex and its relationship to the self that I think is important.
We want to think about, because in this class we're also, I think, thinking of a theoretical level about what gender is
in relationship to, in relationship to sex and in relationship to the self.
So for example, in the Caster and McKenna, basically the gender-sex distinction gets obliterated, right?
For a Caster and McKenna, sex just is basically gender.
There's no difference. Everything is cultural.
There is no sort of biological thing that we can pull out and call sex.
So what is the vision of gender that we see in the empire?
What kind of vision of gender and its relationships to sex do we see articulated here
and in transgender politics more generally?
What kind of vision of gender and its relationship to sex more generally would we need
when we're thinking about the relationship between feminism and trans politics?
There's also that theoretical dimension to it, which at this point, as you know,
has that political spin to it too, of course, because it's very hard to think these issues
sort of devoid of the political context.
Okay. We're good?
So I'll actually want to kind of, so we'll look at
what else, critique of the transsexual empire a little bit.
So I think that in many ways it's extremely easy to beat up on the transsexual empire
because of, well, now we look at it, and it seems, I mean, for the reasons that you articulated, right,
that's your immediate reaction to it.
I mean, but what I want to do is actually look at what's maybe the underlying framework
that is motivating Raymond to say what she says and why she's interested
in defending the view that she does.
I'm actually interested in pulling out maybe some nuggets of truth or wisdom from Raymond.
Not because I'm perverse, but because I think that there's a danger in losing sight of things
much in kind of like a sort of a reaction to the inflammatory rhetoric of Raymond, right?
One wants to push back and go like, when you get something with the transsexual empire,
you want to push back and go, fuck you.
But fuck you isn't going to get you very far, right?
We want to actually see what's there.
Does that make sense?
Okay, good.
I think that what Raymond does in the transsexual empire is part of a larger political moment
that is happening at the time.
So there's other things that happen.
So earlier at a conference in Los Angeles, a West Coast lesbian conference,
a trans woman by the name of Beth Elliott is expelled from the conference in 1973
around sort of similar grounds.
Now actually there's an interesting history to this,
and I wish actually that someone who was involved in the conference, whom I know very well,
could have been involved in a discussion today,
that she could have brought some nuance to sort of the issues.
But what I want to say is that in 1973, a woman by the name of Beth Elliott is expelled
from West Coast lesbian conference in Los Angeles.
And Robin Morgan, a feminist, leading feminist for the day who's there at the time,
speaks out against Beth Elliott.
And she says some of the things that get repeated later on in Raymond and by other folks.
So for example, you get this accusation of deception.
You also get this accusation or this equation of trans women with the rapist.
And we talked a little bit about some of my views on this last time.
Remember the evil deceiver's piece and the full front of morality piece.
You know I have views about this.
I think that these accusations of deception and this identification of deception with rape
are actually connected to a particular way in which gender gets played out.
And I think that it's part of the attitude that normals have about gender.
So here is a way in which I think to go back to your point,
I think that actually these accusations of deception and rape turn out to be part of the attitude of the normals.
The people who hold the natural attitude.
Here is a way in which some of these feminist thinkers are falling prey to the natural attitude
with this sort of everyday conception of trans people.
It gets repeated in other feminist work as well.
So Mary Daly in her work on Ecology also brings up this issue and identifies trans women as sort of boundary violators.
Again, this issue of rape.
And Eugenius Raymond cites Mary Daly.
So my point is there's a larger political context going on here.
And what you need to know, so part of it you're seeing, you're seeing, oh yes, these accusations of deception,
oh yes, these accusations of rape.
This sort of fits in with this model of the natural attitude, this conception of the normals towards gender.
But there's something else going on here because obviously these thinkers and these feminists are not,
they don't view themselves as normals.
The position that they're lining up is not one of the normals.
It's a radical feminist position.
And we need to sort of also, I think, understand what that position is a little bit and where it came from.
So we might want to think about it in terms of paradigms,
or a way of sort of understanding the paradigm, a particular model for viewing politics, for framing politics.
The paradigm in question is lesbian separatism.
And this too has a history.
What is the date? Is it 1970?
The second congress to unite women, a group called radical lesbians rushed the stage.
And they also were issuing pamphlets talking about the woman-identified woman.
And what was going on here was a kind of revolution in terms of how feminism was being viewed.
It was an important moment.
This was a response that was connected to issues around class and sexual orientation,
where lesbian women were not feeling included in the feminist movement.
And this was a reaction to that.
And what ends up happening is a new model is issued in which lesbianism,
heterosexism, particularly, or actually anti-lesbian sentiment,
heterosexism, the priority of heterosexist relationships,
and feminist analysis become very deeply intertwined in the following way.
