Analysis Of Janice Raymond's Transgender Polemic

My intention here was to read both Janice Raymond’s cisgender polemic on sex-differentiated politics and oppression and Sandy Stone’s now seminal response back-to-back to better appreciate the debate they are engaging and explore the gendered demarcation they construct. Yet, by employing the queer feminist analysis that tracks the converges-to-divergences of seeming disparate identities as suggested by Huffer (2016), what becomes apparent to me is that, in arguing against the other’s gendered politics, Raymond and Stone return to similar outcomes. (And neither result in locating agency in transgender identities or bodies.)

Raymond’s makes clear the pro-feminist stance that underscores in her anti-transsexual argument early on: “Transsexualism

It is critical to note she was employed as a sound engineer by Olivia Records, which was disparaged at the time by Raymond and others for ‘harboring’ a ‘male-to-constructed female’. She refutes Raymond’s generalizing charges that transsexuals are a constructed class in service of the imperialistic hetero-patriarchy with a number of counter-arguments: that transsexual narratives (the ‘wrong body model) are constructed less to promote hetero-patriarchy than to satisfy the institutional medical/surgical gatekeepers; that cisgender women are held to the same standards that trans-women are (10); and that therefore Raymond’s use of a “true” sex overlooks how patriarchy similarly responds to both cisgender and transgender women

Likewise, it is critical to recall both are responding to the Benjamin Standards of Care (SoC) for transsexuals - an ethic of care that, by seeking to protect the transitioning transsexual from anticipated harms by erasing their pre-transition past inadvertently reinforced the beliefs and mechanisms that would create those harms – that was codified during this same period. Raymond successfully highlights the revealing alignment between the SoC and the overarching hetero-patriarchal ideology it was created within, even though that alignment does not fully explain transsexual phenomenology and imperatives. Paradoxically (if not ironically), Stone envisions the potential for repurposing that alignment to challenge the essentialism of both Raymond’s argument and the binarism of gender – yet at the unremarked cost of objectifying and totalizing transsexuals. This convergence of means to reach divergent ends is too notable to leave