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The "Empire" Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto
Stone’s essay is a retaliation to arguments such as that of feminist theorists (e.g. Janice Raymond), who were advancing arguments about Transexuality as a “rape” or “appropriation” of female bodies and female spaces. She reviews four autobiographical accounts of male to female transexuality. Each reveal narratives of redemption in which they overcome imperatives of fixed gender and embrace transformation. Stone confronts the ways in which both the medical complex and feminism had been used as a tool for the regulation of gender/sex systems and the management of trans bodies. As of 2007, "The Empire Strikes Back" had been translated into 27 languages and had been cited in publications more than four hundred and fifteen thousand times.
20 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1993
4 people are currently reading
711 people want to read
About the author
Sandy Stone
1 book17 followersAllucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone is an American academic theorist, media theorist, author, and performance artist. She is currently Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS,[2] senior artist at the Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone has worked in and written about film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming. Stone is transgender and is considered a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies. She has been profiled in ArtForum, Wired, Mondo 2000, and other publications, and been interviewed for documentaries like Traceroute.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 12, 2018
both a product and ahead of its time. written in 1991, a posttransexual manifesto is very much 'dated' in many aspects, particularly terms and in how it conceives of trans women as being somehow inherently different to cis women (which is referred to as 'genetic' women). much of this manifesto relies on blaming trans women for not speaking up enough, which seems odd given that by 1991 there were many trans women openly challenging transmisogyny. also relying on jan morris' incredibly racist memoirs of her transition while not touching on her racism critically (then saying something stupidly absurd later in the paper 'what if she said all blacks rape women!') very much angered me.
however, i think this book has more value than simply a time capsule. the medical establishment has sterilized the trans woman, made her into a sexless yet heterosexual parody of herself so that she must come crawling to the gods at the clinics to please give her the treatment she isnt worthy of. the dual cultural narratives of 'trans woman as psychosexual pervert' and 'trans woman as sexless deviant' has its roots in medical oppression. medicalizing gender and sexual identity has only embolded the 'body police' as sandy stone refers to the medical establishment to silence trans women by removing their collective voice by replacing it with a singularly bizarre, hyperfeminine yet sexless narrative.
so this needs to be said: i am not a trans woman or a woman of any kind for that matter. i wont pretend to know what the average trans woman experiences on a daily basis but i read to understand the structural issues behind that oppression. and here is another weakness with the book, although this is a meta problem: i dont believe this will convince anyone who is truly invested in transmisogyny. no matter how much you offer to your oppressors they will always demand COMPLETE AND TOTAL SUBJUGATION AND COMPLIANCE if not TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF YOUR KIND, and i put this in all caps because well, is it not true? you can see reviews of this book around the internet and transmisogynists already go into this book expecting to hate it and smugly declare themselves better than a 27 year old book with a few outdated ideas including a line that basically says that trans women arent women at all. as someone who indeeds trembles when he sees oppression anywhere, its frustrating. how do you get to these people? but i digress.
i recommend this one with the aforementioned caveats and if youre opposed to the very idea of trans women finding their own voices then go fuck yourself.
however, i think this book has more value than simply a time capsule. the medical establishment has sterilized the trans woman, made her into a sexless yet heterosexual parody of herself so that she must come crawling to the gods at the clinics to please give her the treatment she isnt worthy of. the dual cultural narratives of 'trans woman as psychosexual pervert' and 'trans woman as sexless deviant' has its roots in medical oppression. medicalizing gender and sexual identity has only embolded the 'body police' as sandy stone refers to the medical establishment to silence trans women by removing their collective voice by replacing it with a singularly bizarre, hyperfeminine yet sexless narrative.
so this needs to be said: i am not a trans woman or a woman of any kind for that matter. i wont pretend to know what the average trans woman experiences on a daily basis but i read to understand the structural issues behind that oppression. and here is another weakness with the book, although this is a meta problem: i dont believe this will convince anyone who is truly invested in transmisogyny. no matter how much you offer to your oppressors they will always demand COMPLETE AND TOTAL SUBJUGATION AND COMPLIANCE if not TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF YOUR KIND, and i put this in all caps because well, is it not true? you can see reviews of this book around the internet and transmisogynists already go into this book expecting to hate it and smugly declare themselves better than a 27 year old book with a few outdated ideas including a line that basically says that trans women arent women at all. as someone who indeeds trembles when he sees oppression anywhere, its frustrating. how do you get to these people? but i digress.
i recommend this one with the aforementioned caveats and if youre opposed to the very idea of trans women finding their own voices then go fuck yourself.
May 8, 2020
definitely outdated. definitely. but this is almost 30 years old, so of course it is.
sandy stone makes great points about the need for transgender women of the time to reclaim a vast history and break free of the singular, prescriptive, medical definition that was (and still is, for older binary trans people, men and women ime) glues them to a certain history that is largely ahistorical and manufactured, created and simultaneously pathologized by doctors, shrinks, and whomever else.
pretty much all of my complaints revolve around the outdated theories and words put forth in this brief manifesto; of course the colonialist notion of "passing" becomes front and center here; it wouldn't be a late 20th century transgender studies reader without that. additionally, stone's notion that trans women do not experience women's oppression pre-transition is...wrong, to say the least. we know this now. hopefully stone does too.
last year was the 40th anniversary of the fascist janice raymond's publication of the transsexual empire; if sandy stone's views have changed [and i really hope they have], i'd love to see a revised response at 40 years.
I also enjoy stone's warning to trans women that becoming complicit in the prescribed, harry benjamin-esque notions of femininity in gender, they run the risk of reinforcing the long, violent history of transgender people [violence meaning physical, verbal, mental, financial, etc.] in today's world,.things have changed greatly and this is more doable now.
In terms of what the Manifesto sets out to do: to serve as a rebuttal of janice raymond, it wont convince those in the raymond camp, who really just need to continue being deplatformed and shut down at every possible avenue. but if you are interested in an early reader in transgender studies, then sure, this is a good read.
sandy stone makes great points about the need for transgender women of the time to reclaim a vast history and break free of the singular, prescriptive, medical definition that was (and still is, for older binary trans people, men and women ime) glues them to a certain history that is largely ahistorical and manufactured, created and simultaneously pathologized by doctors, shrinks, and whomever else.
pretty much all of my complaints revolve around the outdated theories and words put forth in this brief manifesto; of course the colonialist notion of "passing" becomes front and center here; it wouldn't be a late 20th century transgender studies reader without that. additionally, stone's notion that trans women do not experience women's oppression pre-transition is...wrong, to say the least. we know this now. hopefully stone does too.
last year was the 40th anniversary of the fascist janice raymond's publication of the transsexual empire; if sandy stone's views have changed [and i really hope they have], i'd love to see a revised response at 40 years.
I also enjoy stone's warning to trans women that becoming complicit in the prescribed, harry benjamin-esque notions of femininity in gender, they run the risk of reinforcing the long, violent history of transgender people [violence meaning physical, verbal, mental, financial, etc.] in today's world,.things have changed greatly and this is more doable now.
In terms of what the Manifesto sets out to do: to serve as a rebuttal of janice raymond, it wont convince those in the raymond camp, who really just need to continue being deplatformed and shut down at every possible avenue. but if you are interested in an early reader in transgender studies, then sure, this is a good read.
April 17, 2022
Thank you for kicking us off Sandy. Other reviews do well at picking out the flaws of this text, but I'm thankful enough for it at this point in my life that it gets a 5 regardless.
Interesting quotes:
- "Assyrian king Sardanapalus, who was reported to have dressed in women's clothing and spun with his wives. Later instances of something very like transsexualism were reported by Philo of Judaea, during the Roman Empire. In the 18th century the Chevalier d'Eon, who lived for 39 years in the female role, was a rival of Madame Pompadour for the attention of Louis XV. The first colonial governor of New York, Lord Cornbury, came from England fully attired as a woman and remained so during his time in office."
- "[the] image and the real mutually defining each other"
- "All of reality in late capitalist culture lusts to become an image for its own security"
- "The force of an imperative--a natural state toward which all things tend- -to deny the potentialities of mixture, acts to preserve "pure" gender identity"
- "each of these accounts is culture speaking with the voice of an individual"
- "Bodies are screens on which we see projected the momentary settlements that emerge from ongoing struggles over beliefs and practices within the academic and medical communities"
- "[trans people are] infantilized, considered too illogical or irresponsible to achieve true subjectivity"
- "Here on the gender borders at the close of the twentieth century, with the faltering of phallocratic hegemony and the bumptious appearance of heteroglossic origin accounts, we find the epistemologies of white male medical practice, the rage of radical feminist theories and the chaos of lived gendered experience meeting on the battlefield of the transsexual body: a hotly contested site of cultural inscription, a meaning machine for the production of ideal type"
- "Representation at its most magical, the transsexual body is perfected memory, inscribed with the "true" story of Adam and Eve as the ontological account of irreducible difference, an essential biography which is part of nature"
- "A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription"
- "But it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal"population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history- - learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience"
- "the contextualized and resignified "masculinity" of the butch, seen against a culturally intelligible "female" body, invokes a dissonance that both generates a sexua l tension and constitutes the object of desire"
- "The lesbian butch or femme both recall the heterosexual scene but simultaneously displace it. The idea that butch and femme are "replicas" or "copies" of heterosexual exchange underestimates the erotic power of their internal dissonance"
- "suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic "third gender", but rather as a genre-- a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored"
- "still there are no subjects in these discourses, only homogenized, totalized objects-- fractally replicating earlier histories of minority discourses in the large"
- "Transsexuals who pass seem able to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed the possibility of authentic relationships. Under the principle of passing, denying the destabilizing power of being "read", relationships begin as lies"
Interesting quotes:
- "Assyrian king Sardanapalus, who was reported to have dressed in women's clothing and spun with his wives. Later instances of something very like transsexualism were reported by Philo of Judaea, during the Roman Empire. In the 18th century the Chevalier d'Eon, who lived for 39 years in the female role, was a rival of Madame Pompadour for the attention of Louis XV. The first colonial governor of New York, Lord Cornbury, came from England fully attired as a woman and remained so during his time in office."
- "[the] image and the real mutually defining each other"
- "All of reality in late capitalist culture lusts to become an image for its own security"
- "The force of an imperative--a natural state toward which all things tend- -to deny the potentialities of mixture, acts to preserve "pure" gender identity"
- "each of these accounts is culture speaking with the voice of an individual"
- "Bodies are screens on which we see projected the momentary settlements that emerge from ongoing struggles over beliefs and practices within the academic and medical communities"
- "[trans people are] infantilized, considered too illogical or irresponsible to achieve true subjectivity"
- "Here on the gender borders at the close of the twentieth century, with the faltering of phallocratic hegemony and the bumptious appearance of heteroglossic origin accounts, we find the epistemologies of white male medical practice, the rage of radical feminist theories and the chaos of lived gendered experience meeting on the battlefield of the transsexual body: a hotly contested site of cultural inscription, a meaning machine for the production of ideal type"
- "Representation at its most magical, the transsexual body is perfected memory, inscribed with the "true" story of Adam and Eve as the ontological account of irreducible difference, an essential biography which is part of nature"
- "A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription"
- "But it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal"population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history- - learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience"
- "the contextualized and resignified "masculinity" of the butch, seen against a culturally intelligible "female" body, invokes a dissonance that both generates a sexua l tension and constitutes the object of desire"
- "The lesbian butch or femme both recall the heterosexual scene but simultaneously displace it. The idea that butch and femme are "replicas" or "copies" of heterosexual exchange underestimates the erotic power of their internal dissonance"
- "suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic "third gender", but rather as a genre-- a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored"
- "still there are no subjects in these discourses, only homogenized, totalized objects-- fractally replicating earlier histories of minority discourses in the large"
- "Transsexuals who pass seem able to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed the possibility of authentic relationships. Under the principle of passing, denying the destabilizing power of being "read", relationships begin as lies"
July 6, 2025
At the risk of being melodramatic, it deeply saddens me how many people are dismissing this as “dated” or calling it uninteresting, or otherwise not seeing how this is fundamentally different from most contemporary trans theory. This is, by all metrics, a fantastic essay. It has its flaws (as all essays do, particularly ones going on 40 years old) but I honestly think many reviewers here overstate them. There are two main streams of criticism of this article, both going in totally divergent directions: one, the more essentialist capital-TS transsexual, and two, more represented on here, that comes from present-day queer theory and accuses this text of being somehow “problematic”, or irrelevant, or misguided, or whatever. The first is obviously stupid — as Adorno might say, they think like authoritarians, and this text does a better job at destroying them than I could. The second is, to me, incredibly liberal (are we really mad about the fact she uses the word “passing”?) and profoundly infantilizing.
Her critique of the concept of passing is easily the most important thing here, and most contemporary critiques of the same thing miss its Marx-indebted radicalism pretty horribly. If I can pull the “as a trans woman” card: as a trans woman, I find that this essay both profoundly recontextualizes/reterritorializes/however you wanna say it-s the struggle for trans liberation, but also, very soberly and incisively, doesn’t exonerate trans women and deals *directly* with the agency of trans people within our own oppression. Some people are, understandably, put off by that, but she doesn’t frame it as pure agency or a pure desiring for subjugation. It’s reification, and reification is rarely conscious. The reproduction of oppressive structures is something worth performing a genealogy on and completely challenging, though.
That said, it would be dishonest to frame this as some sort of “self-critique of trans women”. It’s an excursion in how structures are forced *onto* us and how we have, historically, conformed to them to survive. It’s an indictment of medical and intuitional violence. Implicit in this is the feeling that things don’t have to be like this; not just that trans healthcare should be accessible, but that we shouldn’t have to feel like this in the first place. This isn’t a denial of transness, though, this is merely an assertion that defining transness purely based off structures that are inherently authoritarian will never lead us anywhere but, well, authoritarianism. A nomadic, (de)gendered war-machine.
A necessary text for a philosophy and praxis of liberation. A precise materialist analysis, closer to Benjamin or Althusser than contemporary liberal-humanist (even when it pretends to be radical) trans theory. It doesn’t just ask the somehow still-debated question of “how can we be recognized?”, but rather, “what does recognition mean, why do we want it, and why does it require the submission it requires?” More necessary than ever.
Her critique of the concept of passing is easily the most important thing here, and most contemporary critiques of the same thing miss its Marx-indebted radicalism pretty horribly. If I can pull the “as a trans woman” card: as a trans woman, I find that this essay both profoundly recontextualizes/reterritorializes/however you wanna say it-s the struggle for trans liberation, but also, very soberly and incisively, doesn’t exonerate trans women and deals *directly* with the agency of trans people within our own oppression. Some people are, understandably, put off by that, but she doesn’t frame it as pure agency or a pure desiring for subjugation. It’s reification, and reification is rarely conscious. The reproduction of oppressive structures is something worth performing a genealogy on and completely challenging, though.
That said, it would be dishonest to frame this as some sort of “self-critique of trans women”. It’s an excursion in how structures are forced *onto* us and how we have, historically, conformed to them to survive. It’s an indictment of medical and intuitional violence. Implicit in this is the feeling that things don’t have to be like this; not just that trans healthcare should be accessible, but that we shouldn’t have to feel like this in the first place. This isn’t a denial of transness, though, this is merely an assertion that defining transness purely based off structures that are inherently authoritarian will never lead us anywhere but, well, authoritarianism. A nomadic, (de)gendered war-machine.
A necessary text for a philosophy and praxis of liberation. A precise materialist analysis, closer to Benjamin or Althusser than contemporary liberal-humanist (even when it pretends to be radical) trans theory. It doesn’t just ask the somehow still-debated question of “how can we be recognized?”, but rather, “what does recognition mean, why do we want it, and why does it require the submission it requires?” More necessary than ever.
July 5, 2025
volviendo a este texto tiempo después de leerlo por primera vez con miedo de que ya no me gustase y sigue siendo perfecto
veo en otros comentarios que dicen que está "out dated" pero yo no lo creo, también veo en otros comentarios muchas tonterías así que lo mismo no merecen ni mención pero justo esa crítica me sorprende
veo en otros comentarios que dicen que está "out dated" pero yo no lo creo, también veo en otros comentarios muchas tonterías así que lo mismo no merecen ni mención pero justo esa crítica me sorprende
May 20, 2019
sandy stone said liberate trans people
Read
December 5, 2021dissertation reading - it was referenced in two articles I read so clearly I had to go check it out
December 30, 2024
obviously a seminal text but definitely a product of its time/no longer particularly groundbreaking - and certainly dated in some aspects, as other reviews have pointed out
a lot about the medical field and how they reinforce the gender binary in the narratives trans people are expected to present about their gender (the ‘good’ transexual i suppose in the same way there is the concept of the ‘good’ gay) in order to be allowed surgery/recognised as trans and afforded tolerance - but how this is self-fulfilling and the problems with this, denies the diversity of trans experience, prevents full liberation (also interesting how stone noted that it is largely men in the medical field who are reinforcing these stereotypical notions of women - i wonder how different it would be if it was women?)
interesting to see passing viewed as making trans people invisible - not something i had considered before - and recognising that asking trans people to forego this safety/invisibility is a big ask, it is necessary for true liberation by beginning to overcome these binary/rigid ideas and recognising greater nuance/diversity/complexity of transness
also about need for trans voices to be listened to/included/to write their own histories etc - instead of relying on (male) medical staff - who is writing about trans people and how does this influence the narrative of what is being told/shared? of what trans people then are expected to perform? of what other medical people are taught about trans people? and the continuing cycle of this
a lot about the medical field and how they reinforce the gender binary in the narratives trans people are expected to present about their gender (the ‘good’ transexual i suppose in the same way there is the concept of the ‘good’ gay) in order to be allowed surgery/recognised as trans and afforded tolerance - but how this is self-fulfilling and the problems with this, denies the diversity of trans experience, prevents full liberation (also interesting how stone noted that it is largely men in the medical field who are reinforcing these stereotypical notions of women - i wonder how different it would be if it was women?)
interesting to see passing viewed as making trans people invisible - not something i had considered before - and recognising that asking trans people to forego this safety/invisibility is a big ask, it is necessary for true liberation by beginning to overcome these binary/rigid ideas and recognising greater nuance/diversity/complexity of transness
also about need for trans voices to be listened to/included/to write their own histories etc - instead of relying on (male) medical staff - who is writing about trans people and how does this influence the narrative of what is being told/shared? of what trans people then are expected to perform? of what other medical people are taught about trans people? and the continuing cycle of this
May 14, 2018
full of great info
April 26, 2015
In this text, Sandy Stone criticizes the way trans women have been represented in the past. She discusses radical-lesbian-feminists (such as Janice Raymond who personally attacked her in The Transsexual Empire), patriarchal medicine, and trans autobiographies of the 30s-60s. All of these representations have essentially argued that trans women do not have agency and uphold/do not question gender roles. Stone argues that this is not true, that trans women "productively disrupt" gendered norms. She concludes by saying that trans women need to "read themselves out loud" i.e. live openly and as a whole person.
Even considering its importance, it can still be critiqued of course. Stone doesn't really consider race in the text, which is really really important when looking at gender (see "Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization" by Katrina Roen, Spaces Between Us by Scott L. Morgensen, and Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101 by b. binaohan). This article still has done a lot of good I think and has inspired a lot of other theory and practice so I think it's still worth reading even if it's dated and flawed.
Even considering its importance, it can still be critiqued of course. Stone doesn't really consider race in the text, which is really really important when looking at gender (see "Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization" by Katrina Roen, Spaces Between Us by Scott L. Morgensen, and Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101 by b. binaohan). This article still has done a lot of good I think and has inspired a lot of other theory and practice so I think it's still worth reading even if it's dated and flawed.
November 13, 2020
sandy stone was right
July 12, 2023
Read for the second time (for my thesis).
Loved the writing, it felt a lot different from a lot of other academic writing/essays I've read.
Loved the writing, it felt a lot different from a lot of other academic writing/essays I've read.
March 1, 2025
Stone's ideas in this outdated manifesto won't be novel to someone familiar with recent mainstream trans discourse and the history of trans medical gatekeeping. What might be novel is the unnecessarily obscurantist language, influenced by French philosophy, in which those ideas are couched. For example:
Representation at its most magical, the transsexual body is perfected memory, inscribed with the “true” story of Adam and Eve as the ontological account of irreducible difference, an essential biography which is part of nature. A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription.
If it weren't for the context (from which I gather it's trying to say something or other - exactly what, I still haven't quite worked out - about how gatekeepers pushed a stupid narrative about what acceptable transsexuality looks like, and then trans people lied through their teeth to conform to it), this word salad would be completely incomprehensible to me.
February 16, 2025
Jag gick på en av Nisse Christies föreläsningar och hennes emeritus (aka en gammal bög med stil som såklart är doktor i genusvetenskap) berättade om denna, och såklart behövde jag läsa den.
En artikel som behandlar transpersoner i olika litterära verk, och hur transpersoners historia sätt ut. Från att gå från forskning kring mentalt sjuka till att handla om problematiken kring diagnostisering som gjordes på 80-talet. Den handlar även om vad en transperson är i egenhet av sin egen uppfattning, och hur olika perspektiv och synvinklar tar ifrån transpersoner den sidan av de som spelar en roll i deras identitet, nämligen att vara trans.
Hur transkvinnor vill fly sin manlighet och därmed i litteraturen faller under the male gaze, och hur detta ska bekräfta en kvinnlighet. Medan detta inte ses som legitimt då terfs anser att dessa transkvinnor ger bort sina privilegier som män för att minimera cis kvinnor till enbart kön.
En artikel som behandlar transpersoner i olika litterära verk, och hur transpersoners historia sätt ut. Från att gå från forskning kring mentalt sjuka till att handla om problematiken kring diagnostisering som gjordes på 80-talet. Den handlar även om vad en transperson är i egenhet av sin egen uppfattning, och hur olika perspektiv och synvinklar tar ifrån transpersoner den sidan av de som spelar en roll i deras identitet, nämligen att vara trans.
Hur transkvinnor vill fly sin manlighet och därmed i litteraturen faller under the male gaze, och hur detta ska bekräfta en kvinnlighet. Medan detta inte ses som legitimt då terfs anser att dessa transkvinnor ger bort sina privilegier som män för att minimera cis kvinnor till enbart kön.
February 19, 2024
Who cares if this is 'dated'? It's historical -- it's part of the archive of the trans experience. We are lucky to now have enough of a history to consider an essay about transness 'dated'. We need to keep reading essays like this one if we want to understand our own history. The fact that we have, in some ways, flourished beyond the ideas and theories in this essay shouldn't detract from it. This was a fantastic essay and an important read.
Read
July 10, 2023this is quite dated and i'll probably need to come back to this again (which i always say)... but overall i think that there are some interesting points here. i might write something on it in the future once my ideas feel more organised but others have definitely made far more precise reviews on this. so ill just be quiet now😵💫
July 7, 2025
beautifully written but horribly structured. difficult to read due to flipping back and forth between the text and the footnotes.
this provided me with some enlightening queer history that filled in some gaps in my knowledge. the language is quite lofty, though. it does leave out a lot of context and considerations, but it never claims to be more than it is.
this provided me with some enlightening queer history that filled in some gaps in my knowledge. the language is quite lofty, though. it does leave out a lot of context and considerations, but it never claims to be more than it is.
Read
November 12, 2024everyone thank my lesbian professor for assigning this to our class!! i hope the one cishet white dude got a kick outta reading it, bc ik i sure did ❤️
November 25, 2024
Great rebuke to Janice Raymond's transphobia
January 2, 2025
An eloquent and firm refutation of trans exclusionary politics from the standpoint of setting the record straight on transsexualism as a pathology. Whose voices, indeed.
August 4, 2014
"the founding text of transgender studies" indeed: it is available online as a PDF file. It is also pretty far outside my normal "range," but I found it to be another interesting view of understanding our (Imago Dei) common humanity.
I found a reference to this in "What Is a Woman - The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism," in the August 4, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. The fifty-third book/article/etc. that I have finished this year.
If you have not read The Garden of Eden, then you do not understand who Hemingway was. It is not surprising that she killed herself: it is not easy now, and it must have been much harder then to be transgendered and gay (AKA a lesbian trapped in a man's body).
p. 3. [transsexuals as a class] were depressed, isolated, withdrawn, schizoid individuals with profound dependency conflicts. Furthermore, they were immature, narcissistic, egocentric and potentially explosive, while their attempts to obtain [professional assistance] were demanding, manipulative, controlling, coercive, and paranoid.
Does that sound (see above) like any famous author(ess) you can think of?
p. 3. Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception.
p. 7. All these authors replicate the stereotypical male account of the constitution of woman
p. 8. But even after considerable research, no simple and unambiguous test for gender dysphoria syndrome could be developed.
p. 10. There is no mental nor psychological test which successfully differentiates the transsexual from the so-called normal population.
p. 11. What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience, and thereby is lost that aspect of "nature" which Donna Haraway theorizes as Coyote--
the Native American spirit animal who represents the power of continual transformation which is the heart of engaged life.
I found a reference to this in "What Is a Woman - The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism," in the August 4, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. The fifty-third book/article/etc. that I have finished this year.
If you have not read The Garden of Eden, then you do not understand who Hemingway was. It is not surprising that she killed herself: it is not easy now, and it must have been much harder then to be transgendered and gay (AKA a lesbian trapped in a man's body).
p. 3. [transsexuals as a class] were depressed, isolated, withdrawn, schizoid individuals with profound dependency conflicts. Furthermore, they were immature, narcissistic, egocentric and potentially explosive, while their attempts to obtain [professional assistance] were demanding, manipulative, controlling, coercive, and paranoid.
Does that sound (see above) like any famous author(ess) you can think of?
p. 3. Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception.
p. 7. All these authors replicate the stereotypical male account of the constitution of woman
p. 8. But even after considerable research, no simple and unambiguous test for gender dysphoria syndrome could be developed.
p. 10. There is no mental nor psychological test which successfully differentiates the transsexual from the so-called normal population.
p. 11. What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience, and thereby is lost that aspect of "nature" which Donna Haraway theorizes as Coyote--
the Native American spirit animal who represents the power of continual transformation which is the heart of engaged life.
December 28, 2022
Inspirador llamamiento a la transformación post-transexual
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