Janice G. Raymond > Quotes

“If women really choose prostitution, why is it mostly marginalized and disadvantaged women who do? If we want to discuss the issue of choice, let’s look at who is doing the actual choosing in the context of prostitution. Surely the issue is not why women allegedly choose to be in prostitution, but why men choose to buy the bodies of millions of women and children worldwide and call it sex.

Philosophically, the response to the choice debate is ‘not’ to deny that women are capable of choosing within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real value, worth, and power these so-called choices confer.

Politically, the question becomes, should the state sanction the sex industry based on the claim that some women choose prostitution when most women’s choice is actually 'compliance’ to the only options available?

When governments idealize women’s alleged choice to be in prostitution by legalizing, decriminalizing, or regulating the sex industry, they endorse a new range of 'conformity’ for women.

Increasingly, what is defended as a choice is not a triumph over oppression but another name for it.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade

“Because transsexuals have lost their physical “members” does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women—women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women so that they seem noninvasive.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“In the studies I have directed, and in my international experience speaking with women in prostitution, the majority of women in prostitution come from marginalized groups with a history of sexual abuse, drug and alcohol dependencies, poverty or financial disadvantage, lack of education, and histories of other vulnerabilities. These factors characterize women in both off and on-street locations. A large number of women in prostitution are pimped or drawn into the sex industry at an early age. These are women whose lives will not change for the better if prostitution is decriminalized. Many have entrenched problems that are best addressed not by keeping women indoors but in establishing programs where women can be provided with an exit strategy and the services that they need to regain their lost lives. There is little evidence that decriminalization or legalization of prostitution improves conditions for women in prostitution, on or off the street. It certainly makes things better for the sex industry, which is provided with legal standing, and the government that enjoys increased revenues from accompanying regulation.”
― Janice G. Raymond

“A man who decides to call himself a woman is not giving up his privilege. He is simply using it in a more insidious way.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“The world is what women make of it. This point is crucial—we must make something of it. This presupposes some kind of location in the ordinary world of human affairs, much of which is male-created. Friendship provides a point of crystallization for living in the ordinary world, not the pretense for exiting from it. Friendship does not automatically convey the means of living in the world or of making women into world-builders, but it does provide a location in that world.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“The sadomasochistic mentality and movement assimilate women into a sexual liberation that is none other than the unrestrained expression of male-defined sexual behavior, where sexual liberation is tantamount to doing whatever one “feels” like doing. We confront again the tyranny of feelings, where feelings are portrayed almost as deterministic sexual drives that must be expressed at all costs. This is a very reactionary mentality which in one sense replicates the cultural conception of male sexuality. Men have always been portrayed as “needing” to express their “natural” sexual urges.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Like “the tyranny of structurelessness,” the tyranny of tolerance has promoted an ethic of value freedom that has been allowed to stand as an unexamined principle among certain groups of women. From an unexamined principle, it is a short distance to an unexamined life.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“The claim for tolerance, based on the notion that transgenderism in all its forms is a form of gender resistance, is alluring but false. Instead, transgenderism reduces gender resistance to wardrobes, hormones, surgery, and posturing— anything but real sexual equality.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“Finally, and I think most important, there are more male-to-constructed-female transsexuals because men are socialized to fetishize and objectify. The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and “drag” enables them to objectify their own bodies.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“In much of the western world, the general effect of the 1980s has been to move back the feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s. It has encouraged a style rather than a politics of resistance, in which an expressive individualism has taken the place of collective political challenges to power. And in the process it has de-politicized gender by de-politicizing feminism. The new gender outlaw is the old gender conformist, only this time, we have men conforming to femininity and women conforming to masculinity.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others—mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is “a silencing of woman’s own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“That two women could mean a great deal to each other while they awaited men to lead them to marriage and the real business of life is negligible; that they could believe that the real business of life is in meaning a great deal to each other and that men are only incidental to their lives—is of course frightening.82”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Andrea Dworkin has written, “Creative intelligence…demands its right to consequence…always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence.”54 Women who work day by day in the world with worldly integrity are the living proof that feminist thought, feminist intelligence, has “consequences.” Their work may not be the kind that is explicitly devoted to the teaching of Women’s Studies, to the campaigns against rape or pornography, or to the writing of women’s literature. However, it is work that clearly shows that women can master physical tasks, ideas, culture, and the wider world. It is an accomplishing work that has its creative roots in the world as women imagine it could be because it breaks women out of the world in which men have constricted women’s power and work. It is work that is involved in the complexity of the world through direct experience of it. Worldly integrity meets the world on its own turf, but not on its own terms.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Transgenderism is an ideology that defines women by essentializing whatever men think women are or should be, and in so doing not only erases our bodies but also our oppression. Women’s oppression cannot be separated from women’s bodies.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“Self-declared women are not women, and attempts to define themselves as such are bogus. Pretending that the female body and the experience of living as a woman are irrelevant — but should be accessible to men — is insulting to women.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“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.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“My main point is to show how so-called health values of therapy, hormonal treatment, and surgery have replaced ethical values of choice, freedom, and autonomy; how these same “health” values have diffused critical awareness about the social context in which the problem of transsexualism arises; how more and more moral problems have been reclassified as technical problems”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“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.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“In the 1980s and 1990s, the plastic surgery industry, including the association of plastic surgeons, led a campaign to convince women that having small breasts was actually a physical deficiency. According to the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, small breasts are not only a deformity but “a disease which in most patients results in feelings of inadequacy.” Thus millions of women have been led to change their breasts, not their image of themselves.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“The ‘transing’ of men, women and children is the new ‘progressive’ version of traditional sex role socialization now supported by a huge gender industry spreading its vast tentacles in influential places.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“The goal in this “triumph of the therapeutic” is supposedly good “health,” but good “health” achieved at the expense of critical awareness and exploration of the oppressiveness of the roles themselves. This goal of good “health” is particularly ironic in light of the fact that the word health originally meant “whole.” As defined by the medical model, “health” values come to mean partial solutions, which go against total integrity of the body, the individual concerned, and society in general.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“The radical feminist critique of transgenderism is a testimony to women, who are neither the products of male conceit nor the man-made ‘other’ of de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“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.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“Obviously, those who take a critical position will be subjected to accusations of dogmatism and intolerance, when in fact those who are unwilling to take a stand are exercising the dogmatism of openness at any cost. This time, the cost of openness is the solidification of the medical empire and the multiplying of medical victims.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“Today especially, it is no longer the alliance of church and state that should be feared, that is, theocracy, but rather the alliance between medicine and the state, that is, pharmacracy.51 It is medicine that presently functions as the new secular religion, with the continuous aid of sustained government support.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“It has always struck me as patronizing when intelligent people caution, in a discussion of transgender, that we must distinguish between trans extremists and the alleged majority of trans-identified persons and activists who do not participate in attacks on women. I think of the multiple times feminists have been reprimanded for speaking about misogyny and, predictably, someone would insist, “not all men are like that.” Or they might accuse us of hating men when the actual problem is woman-hating.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“What is at stake in the transgender conflict is not just an individual person’s ‘feeling’. Rather, this anti-woman and anti-feminist ideology is having a far-reaching impact on legislation normalizing that men can be women, often with no input from women who would be harmed by the legislation. Unfortunately, where transgender legislation is on the docket, public opinion lags behind public policy.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

“Men have established the patterns of language and of meaning in which acceptance of the present state of affairs is known as “realistic” and efforts to create a more feminist or woman-defined world are pejoratively called “utopian.” Thus, women who emphasize the necessity of vision are vulnerable to charges of distracting other women’s attention away from the real problems of women’s oppression and to accusations of romantic simplification or sentimentalizing. Anyone who proposes to speak about vision, especially that of seeing beyond the ordinary faculty of sight, is temporarily daunted by the “vision,” or should I say the “specter,” of being labeled “soft-brained.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Male-to-constructed-female transsexualism is only one more relatively recent variation on this theme where the female genitalia are completely separated from the biological woman and, through surgery, come to be dominated by incorporation into the biological man. Transsexualism is thus the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society. Literally, men here possess women.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“My view is that, using Woodhouse’s own words, the male-to-female transsexual is a “fantastic woman, ” the incarnation of a male fantasy of feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body, the fantasy rendered flesh by a further male medical fantasy of surgically fashioning a male body into a female one. These fantasies are based in the male imagination, not in any female reality. It is this female reality that the surgically-constructed woman does not possess, not because women innately carry some essence of femininity but because these men have not had to live in a female body with all the history that entails. It is that history that is basic to female reality, and yes, history is based to a certain extent on female biology.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male