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Janice G. Raymond Quotes

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Famous 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.”

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Book:Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade
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“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.”

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Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“Transgender claims can affect all our lives. Once biology and the history and experiences of what it means to live in a sexed body is rejected, there is no touchstone especially for children, who are left with the confusion of picking a gender. This confusion encourages a regression to sex-role stereotypes because it’s the sex-role markers that are out there and easier to grab onto, the confusion ratified by the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. If you like trucks and want to be a fire fighter, you’re a boy. If you like dolls and dress up in frilly clothes, you’re a girl.”

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Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“Trans activists cite the risk of physical harm to self-declared women in men’s spaces as one justification for appropriating women’s spaces, yet trans activists have no concern for natal women and girls who need our own safe spaces now threatened by legislation. If trans-identified women are afraid of men’s spaces and increasingly being protected by legislation, why don’t women who have been subjected to male violence throughout our lives, get the same legal protection.”

FeminismRadical FeminismGender Ideology
Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“Women have learned a lot about life through our bodies. Our life history has been lived in our sexed bodies. Dworkin knew that the ‘learning’ women gain from our lives is not some feeling, essence, or ‘ineffable idea’ that men can claim. This learning about a woman’s life is not driven by biology but also not detached from our biology, a material condition in which our bodies help shape the circumstances of our lives. Our bodies are the sites of our oppression.”

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Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“[...] incels intentionally work to convince other incels that raping women is a justified response to sexual rejection, so too do the men who claim their penises are ‘lady sticks’. Just as dissatisfied men adhere to the incel creed of beliefs, self-declared lesbians (men) insist that women owe them sex, and that there is something wrong with a world in which women have the power of rejection. There is an incelian feel to the gangs of self-declared women.”

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Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“Women are not only being censored but also attacked for words that make trans activists uncomfortable, starting with the very word woman. Instead of woman we are hammered with demeaning terms such as cis-women, menstruators, front holes and TERFs. Given the fact that women worldwide have traditionally been denigrated by words not of our own making such as slut, cunt, and whore — misogynistic slurs that have belittled us for centuries — we are now being called upon to accept further offense by trans activists who find the actual word ‘woman’ blasphemous.”

FeminismRadical FeminismGender Ideology
Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“By accepting the pro-sex work position that prostitution is a ‘choice’, advocates have consigned prostituted women to a segregated class of women who are kept in systems of sexual exploitation that pass for benevolent institutions, especially in those countries and states where the prostitution industry is legalized or decriminalized. So-called ‘progressive’ LGBT+ organizations are in the vanguard of advocating the decriminalizing of prostitution, where brothels, pimping and sex buyers are the building blocks of an ever-expanding sexual exploitation industry that has ravaged the lives of women through a romanticizing of ‘free choice’, a ‘choice’ that is not free for the thousands of women who are abused in the industry.”

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Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“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.”

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Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“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.”

FeminismRadical FeminismGender Ideology
Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“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.”

FeminismRadical FeminismGender Ideology
Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“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.”

FeminismRadical FeminismGender Ideology
Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“Transphobic’ is an easy word to throw at someone because the label sticks. Branding a person transphobic appears to rank with being called a racist or fascist. When labels turn people into fearful bystanders incapable of expressing an honest opinion, not just individuals but also institutions are given permission to disparage women, and governments are emboldened to draft (and pass) legislation that codifies gender tyranny and erases women’s rights. Many people want to remain ignorant, not the ignorance of innocence, but a chosen ignorance that wills not to know.”

FeminismRadical FeminismGender Ideology
Book:Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism
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“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.”

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Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“Simone de Beauvoir gave us the insight that woman has been fabricated by man as “the other, ” the relative being—relative to himself as the norm. So it should not be surprising that men, who have literally and figuratively, constructed women for centuries, are now “perfecting” the man-made women out of their own flesh.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“However, the other side of fetishization is worship or reverence for the fetish object. In primitive religions, fetish objects were worshiped because people were afraid of the power they were seen to contain. Therefore primitive peoples sought to control the power of the fetish by worshiping it and in so doing they confined it to its “rightful place. ” There was a recognition of a power that people felt they lacked and a constant quest in ceremonies and cults to invest themselves with the power of the fetish object. Thus to worship was also to control. In this way, objectification and worship are two sides of the same coin.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“[...] 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.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

FeminismWomens RightsRadical FeminismGender IdentityWomens Liberation
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

Feminism
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

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Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

Feminism
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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“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.”

Feminism
Book:The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
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