Janice Raymond has been leading feminist opposition against the ways in which women are oppressed for many decades. Her activist and academic work focuses on ending men’s violence against women: abolishing prostitution and sexual exploitation, and stopping the harms inflicted upon women by the medical industry. She was the co-executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

Professor Raymond is also known for her unabashed analyses and deconstructions of the shape-shifting forms of male supremacist abuse. She is professor emerita of Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics, having been a faculty member at University of Massachusetts in Amherst from 1978 to 2002. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism is Raymond’s sixth authored book and second volume on the subject of gender identity theory. Her first was the landmark 1979 text The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male, which was based on her doctoral dissertation, working with radical feminist Mary Daly. The Transsexual Empire garnered Raymond contemporaneous praise alongside a lasting legacy of infamy in circles resistant to her critique. Her writing and activism is brazenly woman-centred, and her feminist thinking covers everything from ethical issues of biomedical technologies to relationships between women.

In this piece, Janice Raymond answers FiLiA’s questions about Doublethink.

Firstly, congratulations on publishing this new book. Your feminist work on the subject of transgender (previously called transsexual) issues has been hugely influential for over forty years. It also came at great personal cost to you, as you outline in your book. Why did you come to the decision to revisit this contentious subject? Was there a moment you remember thinking “I must write about this again?” And how are you feeling now that the book is out in the world?

I had been a university professor for 28 years and then became a co-director of the international Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) for 13 years. During that latter period, I had almost no time to write a book, other than a new introduction to The Transssexual Empire, which was reprinted in 1994. Friends and colleagues would send me relevant articles about the “new” phenomenon of transgender and especially about the rise in the numbers of girls who were undergoing hormones and surgery.

As I became aware of the ruthless currents of trans self-declaration and the transgender expansion into medicine, education and legislation, I knew that I had to write about it. For me, one of the “helpful” aids at the beginning of the Covid era was that it lessened my distractions. Since the publication of Doublethink, I have been astonished at the interest and the positive reception that the book has garnered. 

Is the very notion that people can self-declare their sex a form of male violence against women? Why?

Declaring yourself a woman doesn’t result in a behavioral transformation. Male privilege and male-dominant conduct don’t end when men identify as women. In spite of all the assertions that a female gender identity change eliminates violence against women — for example when men who identify as women are billeted in prisons with women — self-identification as women doesn’t outdo years of male socialization to violence or abuse of women. In fact, many men who identify as women and their allies are models of male entitlement, especially if you look at social media where some of the most misogynist comments are coming from trans activists. These threats to women are definitely normalizing violence against women, and when trans activists crash women’s events in mobs, they heighten the threat risk. Threats of violence power large segments of the trans community where self-declared women and their allies encourage violence against women on a constant basis.

Doublethink presents testimony from young (mostly lesbian) women, and what happens to them psychologically, emotionally and physically as a result of the idea of gender identity theory in practice. Those segments were particularly harrowing. Why is it important for feminism to focus these young women, these survivors?

It is important for feminism to focus on survivors of transgenderism because in many feminist groups and organizations that address violence against women, the violence experienced by these women has not been recognized and acknowledged as a form of violence against women. In fact, many domestic violence centers in the United States are now assisting “transwomen” (men) who have been abused by their male partners or other perpetrators — places that should be aware of the violence against women who identify as “transmen” or gender non-binary. Men who identify as women or as gender non-binary enact much of this violence in LGBT affinity groups.

When we review the narratives of young girls who reject toxic femininity and who have undergone breast binding, hormones and surgery in their quest to become boys, we find multiple accounts of sexual abuse in their lives, abuse they were attempting to overcome by transitioning to trans manhood.

I wrote in the conclusion to Doublethink that like survivors of prostitution who have taught us that there is no essentializing of prostitution, i.e., women are not prostitutes by nature nor do they enjoy the sex of prostitution as punters imagine, and who have also rejected the rationalization of prostitution as sexual freedom and sex work.  Survivors of transgenderism, especially young women who are now de-transitioning, are telling us that they have rejected the system of transgender that has kept them in a situation that exploits them biologically, psychologically, sexually and economically. Like the sex industry, the transgender industry feeds on sexual exploitation, especially of young women who have been sexually objectified and abused.

Young women who identified formerly as “transmen” and have de-transitioned are asking perceptive questions that challenge trans dogmas. Survivors of transgenderism are the authoritative voices of women harmed by transgender ideology, practices and outright sexual violence.

One difficulty that many women might be facing with this subject is language. Already the words used in the media, Internet and public conversations about gender identity theory, always framed as though they are about “transgender rights,” are confusing and obfuscatory. For example, when violent rapists are referred to as “she” by the media in articles alongside mugshots of male criminals. Feminists disagree on whether women should be polite and comply with people’s preferred terms of address. Some argue we should be very clear about language: to name women as women, and men as men. You would not use non-sex-based pronouns, but in your book do have constructions like “self-declared men” or “trans-identified men (women)” to mean females who identify as men. Similarly, “self-declared woman” or “trans-identified women (men)” mean males who identify as women. Given the centrality of language to Doublethink, indeed even in its title, could you explain your choice of terminology for transgender concepts? How did you decide on these phrases?

The question of language is not insignificant when we are increasingly being called upon to recognize men as women and women as men, and when it becomes law in some places that “misgendering” is a violation. To conform to the trans lexicon requires doublethink, as Orwell phrased it — a conquest of one’s own memory by a system of “reality control” that envisions women as “cis women,” “menstruators,”  “chest feeders,” and ultimately where the term “female” is, as one trans extremist wrote, “offensive and obsolete.

In discussing language, I don’t want to mimic the trans pronoun police and its language dogmas. But I do think it’s important to reject this abusive trans control of language and name it for what it is, basically self-declaration that presents itself as biological and where we are told that men have female brains and female penises. We are then compelled to honor these self-declarations that erase women’s existence as truths, when in fact they are lies. So yes, I favor the critical honesty of terms such as “self-declared women” or “self-declared men” that foregrounds the utter self-affirmation involved. As Andrew Sullivan has written, transgenderism “takes the experience of less than one percent of humanity and tries to make it explain the 99 percent… It’s nuts and it will confuse children, particularly gay children.”

People say they just want to be polite by using the language that self-declared men or women call themselves. But I don’t believe it’s respectful to call people something they are not. What is at stake here is not just an individual person’s feeling but a pronoun ideology that has had a far-reaching impact on legislation, to the extent that a person can be legally faulted for “misgendering” a self-declared man or woman.

In the book, I use the example of Rachel Dolezal, the US white woman who declared she is Black and wants to be so named. Her insistence that she is Black is relevant to trans assertions about purported womanhood. Although trans activists reject any analogy between transgender and what Dolezal has called trans-black or trans-racial, calling yourself a trans woman or man is just as inaccurate as calling yourself trans-black.

Many African American commentators view Dolezal’s claim to be both arrogant and insulting. African American artist and writer Pippa Fleming argues, “Imagine if white folks ran around claiming they were black or demanded access to our affinity spaces. They would be called deluded racist fools.” Unfortunately, with the transgender intrusion into women’s spaces, reality is reversed, i.e. those who ‘run around’ claiming they are women and demanding access to women and women’s spaces receive accolades and public approval, including the approval of many women.

Your book mentions that this is a wedge issue. Given that there are so many other issues facing women today, including the sexual exploitation industries of pornography and prostitution, to what extent is this vexation of whether women even exist in their own right a complete distraction from feminist work? Certainly, it seems disproportionately to have impacted your legacy. What current challenges other than gender identity theory would you advise women to keep their focus on?

I don’t believe that the debate about transgenderism is a distraction from other feminist work such as our campaigns against pornography and prostitution. Rather the rapid rollout of transgenderism has undermined feminism by dividing feminists. If we can’t agree on who is a woman, what can we agree on? When women collude in giving away our womanhood to men, as Germaine Greer has said, “it strengthens the impression that perhaps they too identify themselves as not-male, the other, any other.”

When a woman begins to examine the tenets of transgenderism, she realizes that there are many connections between transgenderism and violence against women, not only in LGBT circles that I mentioned but also in our campaigns against pornography and prostitution.

Trans pornography is a substantial part of the pornography industry, which feeds on women’s hatred of our bodies. For a number of girls, eating disorders, cutting and the sexting that has become a free trade in teen pornography are a prelude to the mutilations they see as necessary to identify as male. Pornography also serves as a template for young men who want to acquire the feminine bodies they idealize.

The trans activists who are shouting the loudest are often the same ones who are “pro-sex work” and campaigners for decriminalization of prostitution. Trans activists demean feminists who oppose the sex trade by branding us as SWERFs, an offshoot of TERFs, both used as slurs to undermine feminists. And they have joined in opposition to the feminist campaigns to abolish prostitution and pornography.

As there are alliances between trans activists and pro-sex work campaigners, there is much crossover between feminist activists fighting to abolish prostitution and the sex industry, and those opposed to transgenderism and the transgender industry. Organizations such as the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) in the United States and Women’s Declaration International (WDI) are both committed to promoting women’s sex based rights and to abolishing prostitution and pornography.

What kind of actions can women take?

Join WoLF or WDI, or other such organizations, and contribute to their work.

Speak up. The most honest position one can take is to be openly gender critical. Otherwise we engage in a passive tolerance that reinforces a gender-defined society and a gender industry that is currently doing vast damage to children. Principled people must be willing to speak out and say “enough” to the repudiation of reality that transgenderism perpetuates.

Encourage young people to challenge sex roles without changing their physical bodies or declaring to be someone they are not.

Do due diligence and educate yourself and others about transgenderism. Join the WDI Feminist Question Time when it features discussions about women’s sex-based rights.

Read Doublethink: a Challenge to Transgenderism!

It can also be purchased at:

Australia - Spinifex Press

UK and Europe – Gazelle Books

North America – IPG Independent Publishers Group

Worldwide - Amazon

Women can follow my work at Janiceraymond.com