Women Are Human shares with our readers the following excerpt from Janice G. Raymond’s newly released book Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, published by Spinifex Press. More of her work can be seen at https://janiceraymond.com. Her previous books have included The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979/1994), A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (1986/2001), Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom (1993/2019), and Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths About Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade (2013).
In a 1989 interview, Dworkin said, “So much of what happens to women happens to us not just in our bodies, but because of our bodies … if you cannot deal with the reality of what it means to physically exist as a woman in this world, then you can’t know anything” (Jenefsky, 1998, p. 105).
If Dworkin spoke those words today, trans advocates would brand her a biological essentialist. In the same interview, Dworkin states that the oppression of women happens, “because” of our material bodies. And when you take away everything else, “what you have left as a woman is your body: it is your commodity, your existence … it’s what people violate you for” (Jenefsky, 1998, p. 105, italics mine). It is women’s body parts, especially breasts, which are hypersexualized and ruthlessly objectified.
I spend some time in this chapter refuting Stoltenberg’s interpretation of Andrea’s opinion on transgender because he has become the mediator of Dworkin’s views; views she did not publicly align herself with after writing her first book, Woman Hating. Stoltenberg’s version of Dworkin as a trans advocate stands in stark contrast to the rest of her writing in which Andrea conveyed that female bodies matter. In a 1989 interview, Dworkin said, “So much of what happens to women happens to us not just in our bodies, but because of our bodies … if you cannot deal with the reality of what it means to physically exist as a woman in this world, then you can’t know anything” (Jenefsky, 1998, p. 105).
In the final chapter of Woman Hating, Dworkin had also affirmed incest and bestiality. Jenefsky wrote that this chapter centered on a multisexual paradigm that Dworkin believed at the time were repressed practices and should be accommodated in an ‘androgynous world.’ Dworkin admitted she was wrong in her last chapter of Woman Hating, so it’s doubly wrong that Stoltenberg is perpetuating an analysis of transsexualism that Andrea would not have affirmed today. Funny, I don’t see him defending her early views on incest and bestiality, both of which Dworkin had supported in her last chapter.
I believe that Andrea, were she alive today, would have recognized and named the dangerous direction that transgenderism has taken and would never have condoned the sexual objectification, sexual abuse, the rape and death threats, the medical mutilation and the denigration of natal women on which the transgender movement is built and which Stoltenberg has decided to disregard.
Source: Andrea Dworkin: Biological Essentialism vs. Political Materialism – Women Are Human
I almost didn’t read this article because of the headline.
(a) because I am sick of reading misquotes about what a dead woman said when she didn’t say them – mostly claims by a sexist pig of a male to whom she was married, and who insists he knows what she thought and would have thought and should have thought. He is the epitome of male arrogance (him and Rothblatt, the inventor of transgenderism and his robot of his wife that he uses to try and harvest and store her thoughts – so he can have the ultimate machine in thought control. This obsession of arrogant men who insist they know women better than women, and have every right to tell women what women think and should think.
(b) because it reminded me of KRudd and his ‘programatic specificity’ wank (using fancy words to big note himself – as if he was superior to the masses who wouldn’t know what he was talking about). To my way of thinking “Biological Essentialism v Political Materialism” can be boiled down to ‘Truth versus Lies’ – fewer keystrokes, and much easier to understand.
But I am glad I read past the ‘off-putting’ headline. If there is one researcher and author who has nailed this transism monster in our midst, it is Janice Raymond with ‘Transexual Empire’. I will be interested to see whether, in her latest book ‘Doublethink’, she forms any link between Maria New and Martin Rothblatt and Stephane Hessel. As Stephane tells us in ‘OUTRAGE!’ when people use their Jewish background as some form of human shield against ever standing accused of crimes against humanity, we all need to take up our pitchforks. Nobody, NO BODY must be deemed ‘above the law’ of everyone else.