The Transsexual Empire

Summary

Raymond investigates the role of transsexualism in society – particularly psychological and surgical approaches to it – and argues that transsexualism reinforces traditional gender stereotypes. Raymond also writes about the ways in which the medical-psychiatric complex is medicalizing gender identity and the social and political context that has helped spawn transsexual treatment and surgery as normal and therapeutic medicine.

Raymond maintains that transsexualism is based on the "patriarchal myths" of "male mothering," and "making of woman according to man's image." She claims this is done in order "to colonize feminist identification, culture, politics and sexuality," adding: "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves .... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive."

Reception

Raymond's views on transsexuality have been criticized by many in the LGBT and liberal feminist communities as extremely transphobic, and indeed constituting hate-speech against transsexual men and women.

In The Transsexual Empire Raymond included sections on Sandy Stone, a trans woman who had worked as a sound engineer for Olivia Records, and Christy Barsky, accusing both of creating divisiveness in women's spaces. These writings have been heavily criticized as personal attacks on these individuals.

Writing in The Transgender Studies Reader, Carol Riddell argues that the book "did not invent anti-transsexual prejudice, but it did more to justify and perpetuate it than perhaps any other book ever written."