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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Constant and one-dimensional focus on the sharing of pain can drive women away from strong female friendships by obscuring the historical reality that women have been and can be for women in other than sisterly suffering ways. The emphasis on victimism also bolsters the conviction that female friendship can arise only for negative reasons: that is, because men are so bad or in reaction to the atrocities promoted by a misogynist culture. Here female friendship seems spawned by the results of the oppression of women. Thus in a better world, presumably one in which men “behave,” female friendship might not be necessary.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“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

“The female-to-constructed-male transsexual is the token that saves face for the male “transsexual empire. ” She is the buffer zone who can be used to promote the universalist argument that transsexualism is a supposed “human” problem, not uniquely restricted to men. She is the living “proof” that some women supposedly want the same thing. However, “proof” wanes when it is observed that women were not the original nor are they the present agents of the process. Nor are the stereotypes of masculinity that a female-to-constructed-male transsexual incarnates products of a female-directed culture. Rather women have been assimilated into the transsexual world, as women are assimilated into other male-defined worlds, institutions, and roles, that is, on men’s terms, and thus as tokens.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Trans activists who demand that women pledge allegiance to trans truths have launched a new age of inquisition. Women are being silenced, shunned and assaulted for speaking the truth that men cannot be women.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism

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

“[...] The deceptiveness of men without “members, ” that is, castrated men or eunuchs, has historical precedent. There is a long tradition of eunuchs who were used by rulers, heads of state, and magistrates as keepers o f women. Eunuchs were supervisors of the harem in Islam and wardens of women’s apartments in many royal households. In fact, the word eunuch, from the Greek eunouchos, literally means “keeper of the bed. ” Eunuchs were men that other more powerful men used to keep their women in place. By fulfilling this role, eunuchs also succeeded in winning the confidence of the ruler and securing important and influential positions.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“We might say that the body is part of the creative ground of existence, but we are not bound by that structure in the full creative sense. Our spirit is bound to our bodies, as its creative ground, but surpasses it through freedom and choice. The body is present in all our choices, but as total persons, we have the freedom to be other than what culturally accompanies a male or female body.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“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