The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  A coordinated, elaborate effort to run Stone out of Olivia Records had begun. Olivia was about to launch its first national tour—the first national tour of lesbian music, period—hosted and staged entirely by lesbian separatist communities. To save costs, Stone had built most of the touring equipment herself, including microphone stands and mixing boards. Before their departure, the collective received the most specific threat yet: the Gorgons, a radical lesbian paramilitary group, would be coming to the Seattle show to kill Sandy Stone.

  Again, Stone laughed, unable to find credible danger in a transparently ridiculous scenario. But again, as the collective asked around, their mirth was soon edged out by raw fear. The Gorgons, who wore camo gear, shaved their heads, and packed weapons, were a serious threat. Meanwhile, Stone felt forced to inform the collective of a private matter: she had not yet been able to afford surgery, though she was approved for the process at Stanford’s Gender Dysphoria Program. The collective quickly pulled together the remaining funds so long as Stone kept her treatment a secret, and she went under the knife just one week before the tour’s departure.25

  In Seattle, Olivia hired security muscle to screen and remove weapons from audience members—another women’s music first. Stone was nonetheless terrified that she would be shot. In the middle of the event, while Stone sat at the engineering console, someone called out “Gorgons!” Powered by visceral fear, she flew under the table, every hair on her body standing guard. Fortunately, the show continued without incident, but stress, fatigue, and needed time for postsurgical healing pushed Stone to the brink. Soon after, she collapsed from exhaustion.26

  The attacks on Stone continued as the tour traveled south. In Berkeley, Olivia held a meeting with lesbian community members concerned about Stone’s role in the women’s music community. The collective thought an open dialogue would enable them to understand and defuse the rising hostility directed at them. They were to learn that such a goal was futile: TERFs, including the Gutter Dykes, wanted blood, not conversation, and they were organized. A group had even flown in from Chicago to rail against Stone’s role at Olivia.

  The Gutter Dykes and their allies opened the Berkeley meeting with a lengthy statement full of incendiary accusations such that trans women were men raping the women’s community. No one at Olivia had prepared a statement, and the collective looked to Stone to respond. Flustered and on the spot, she sputtered out the first thing that came to mind: “That’s all bullshit!”27

  The room exploded in anger: Stone, many screamed—some while standing on chairs—had exhibited stereotypical male behavior. They demanded she leave. Though the collective initially insisted that she stay, they consented to Stone’s desire to leave in hopes that dialogue might be possible, that there was a rational response Olivia could make that would resolve this fracture jeopardizing its future. But the remaining eight or so collective members found that dialogue was impossible, period. To TERFs, Stone was a man, men were always the enemy, and Olivia had committed treachery.28

  Lisa Vogel, cofounder of the fiercely anti-trans Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, coordinated an open letter condemning Olivia for working with Stone and found twenty-one women to cosign. Olivia responded with a lengthy letter to the lesbian community; both letters were published in the West Coast feminist magazine Sister in June 1977. “Sandy met [the] same criteria that we apply to any woman with whom we plan to work closely,” Olivia Records affirmed. And they rebuffed the repeated charge that the collective had been treasonous in not announcing to the women’s music community that they were working with a transsexual. “To us,” they insisted, “Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue.” But TERFs had created a firestorm. For nearly two years, articles and letters attacking or defending Stone’s right to be in the community appeared throughout magazines like Sister, DYKE, and Lesbian Connection. Emotions ran high. “I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy, a transsexual, as a real woman,” one reader conveyed, while one of Stone’s many, many supporters insisted, “Women can be big enough to accept a convert. I thought we were out to convert the world!”29

  TERFs threatened to organize lesbians into a nationwide boycott of Olivia Records. Stone decided to leave the collective in 1979, for even a small drop in sales would threaten the livelihoods of Olivia members and recording artists. She moved back north to Santa Cruz but found TERF opposition there, too. Around fifty women convened to determine her right to be “allowed into ‘women’s spaces.’”30 The vote was decisive: fewer than three women insisted on excluding Stone, and those few stormed out of the meeting in a fury when they were defeated. The detractors had been vehement enough to trigger the meeting in the first place. But their numbers were tiny.

  The 1970s lesbian-feminist movement wasn’t overwhelmingly anti-trans—it was rather that TERFs tried diligently, yet often failed, to overwhelm the movement. Stone resumed her place in the Santa Cruz lesbian world, returned to the Wizard of Aud, soon met Beth Elliott at a local goddess conference, and became an integral part of the northern California neo-pagan spiritual community. She maintained close friendships with many Olivia collective members that persisted for decades.31

  Sandy Stone, the person, moved on. But Sandy Stone, the fictive rapist of women’s spaces, continued to exert a magnetic draw for some feminists. The fallout would transform the direction of trans politics in the United States.

  In 1979, Janice Raymond published a revised version of the dissertation excerpt she had mailed to Olivia Records. It was now a chapter in her first book, an academic polemic against trans women. Getting the book published had been difficult—many editors wanted nothing to do with her, whom they called “the Anita Bryant of the transsexual movement,” referring to the singer turned anti–gay rights activist. But Raymond had support throughout her writing from prominent feminists including Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, and writer Michelle Cliff; poet Adrienne Rich read multiple drafts of the entire manuscript. When it was released, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male was immediately influential, earning glowing reviews from humanitarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in the New York Times and Gloria Steinem in the pages of Ms. Magazine.32 This early reception set a precedent. Raymond’s book would become the TERF bible for at least the next thirty-five years.

  In The Transsexual Empire, Raymond lambasted sex transition as a pinnacle of male objectification and control over women. Transsexuals, she proclaimed, “are not women. They are deviant males.” Surgeons and the psychiatrists and other specialists who collude with them, she argued, have consolidated into an “empire” that creates false women out of the flesh of men. Transsexuals themselves, who for Raymond are almost always trans women, exist only because they are foolish yet dangerous dupes of sex roles and of modern medicine. Deluded into believing there is an individual therapeutic solution to the problem of restrictive sex stereotypes, “transsexually-constructed” women, she alleged, are merely men who fail to adjust to the social expectations of masculinity. Instead of rebelling against sex role stereotypes altogether, they cling to the most retrograde ideas of femininity and find a ready medical industry willing to “mutilate” them to satisfy their backward desires. For Raymond, “male-to-constructed females” are obsessed with heels, “frilly” dresses, makeup, and the desire to be housewives, behaviors that fetishize, objectify, and fragment real women. They are akin to the atavistic, subservient robot women of the Stepford Wives—Frankensteinian products of scientific modernity that nonetheless rumble to life in order to drag society backwards to the rigid social roles of the 1950s. But as men in disguise, these robots are rapists, not sex toys. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves,” Raymond charged.33

  Though Raymond claimed to have interviewed fifteen transsexuals as part of her research, she seemingly hadn’t encountered someone like Sandy Stone, who foreswore the apron and kitchen for the mixing board and feminist collective. Except that Raymond had encountered S
tone, at least in the lesbian press. Transsexuals, Raymond claimed, were invading and destroying lesbian-feminist communities. Her primary example was Sandy Stone, who she claimed “inserted” himself into Olivia Records, a space “he” now “domina[tes]” and “divide[s].” While at first a paradoxical charge, given her earlier implication that all transsexuals mimic June Cleaver and Donna Reed, Raymond maneuvered around this apparent contradiction by arguing that transsexuals are drawn to women’s spirit and women’s creativity. Since women’s energy is embodied most of all by the lesbian-feminist, the transsexual is vampirically drawn to her. He “feeds off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” she accused.34

  But bloodsucking is the least of their crimes. Stone and other lesbian-feminists, Raymond insisted, seek to subdue and control women and their spaces. “The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist, having castrated himself, turns his whole body and behavior into a phallus that can rape in many ways, all the time,” Raymond extrapolated with barely subdued self-satisfaction.35

  A biological binary motors the TERF universe: men are always the oppressor and women always the oppressed. Trans-exclusionist feminists adhere to a single-axis model of power in which sexism is the basic, underlying, most fundamental social inequality. Capitalism and colonialism, and the racism that fuels their engines, lay relatively inert. Instead, maleness or femaleness alone pins one’s place in the social hierarchy and determines individual behavior. In this simplified cosmos, rape and assault are the primary crimes, and women have a common experience of marginalization, assault, and abuse at the hands of men. Exposing and fighting men’s violence against women was an important element of feminisms of the era, from nighttime marches reclaiming the streets to winning legal recognition of marital rape for the first time. Intersectional feminists also emphasized the pervasiveness of the violence women faced, which was rooted in poverty, overpolicing and other forms of state violence, and lack of healthcare, in addition to individual relationships. Anti-trans feminists, however, seized upon men’s abuse and exploitation of women as the sum total of the violence women faced.

  As a result, TERFs argued that liberation can only take place if men are absent. Theirs is a white feminist separatism—instead of aspiring to occupy the social positions held by white men, as did Stanton, Fletcher, and Friedan, they seek to replace those roles altogether with their own institutions. Lisa Vogel’s annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, for example, which ran from 1976 to 2015, not only banished all men and trans women from the week-long event, but also removed male children over the age of four from their mothers and sisters and sent them to a separate campground. The rationale was that young girls needed a safe space.

  The TERF framework Raymond outlined depends on a familiar underlying premise: that sex oppression is the primary form of oppression. Morgan, Raymond, Vogel, and their allies developed a new iteration of a long political tradition that fantasizes that there is such a thing as a universal female body and experience that has unfairly, and unilaterally, been prevented from flourishing. In the TERF worldview, race, capitalism, and family are all distinctly secondary to the primary fact of sex identity, an identity it insists flows transparently from the body at birth. In this updated version of white feminism, being a girl or a woman is biological, self-evident, and creates a unified political class unto itself. The false universal “woman,” rooted in allegedly similar biology and experience, lies at the center of TERF politics.

  In keeping with twentieth-century white feminism, TERFs insist that women must be allowed to thrive and threats to their success must be removed. Thriving, for TERFs, depends on spaces, such as the feminist collective, or today, the public restroom, reserved strictly for women who were born and raised as girls. Spaces populated only by cis women are by definition safe spaces, TERFs fantasize, free from harm and violence, that allow women to heal from traumatic pasts. Anyone who has ever lived as a male is cast as a threat, violating the sanctity of a world sealed off from men and, therefore, allegedly from the most fundamental forms of violence.

  Raymond wielded the bluntest weapons in the safe space arsenal. She branded transsexuals as threatening specimens of the “various ‘breeds’ of women that medical science can create,” shadowing transsexuals with the specter of race while simultaneously positioning them as fabrications of a decadent medical empire. Lesbian-feminists must banish transsexual women like Stone, she insisted, for they are not “like [us] in quality, nature, or status.”36 Real women are only those with XX chromosomes, she declared, flying in the face of two decades of sexology that identified at least six distinct, sometimes conflicting components of sex, such as hormones and genital appearance.

  Raymond’s essentialist position differed widely from that of non-TERF lesbian-feminists in the 1970s. In 1974, a group of socialist Black lesbians in Boston began developing an “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” The Combahee River Collective developed a simultaneous analysis of race, gender, heterosexism, and capitalism, and they did so while citing inspiration from nineteenth-century Black women including Frances E. W. Harper. Trans studies activist and scholar Susan Stryker has emphasized that the Combahee River Collective specifically opposed sex essentialism in their famous 1974 statement, finding it contrary to their intersectional politics. Lesbian separatism, they explained, “completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression” and assumes that “biological maleness” is itself a threat. “As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic,” the women of Combahee counseled.37

  By contrast, double essentialisms characterize the TERF position: biological essentialism and experience essentialism. The former assumes that women have a common embodiment and the latter that women’s experiences of those bodies are likewise shared. Both positions are two sides of the same white feminist coin. Raymond declared that trans women were “not our peers, by virtue of their history.”38 But what is this singular history of woman? Was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s experience in her body anything akin to what enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs endured, whose bodies became sexual targets and reproduction machines? As Pauli Murray underscored, it is actually Black women, not white women, who are more fully forced into the caste system of sex, for racism compounds the effects of sexism, within both Black and white spaces.

  Or, as Audre Lorde took pains to explain to Mary Daly in an open letter addressing Daly’s racism in the spring of 1979, women do not experience the stresses of female embodiment identically. “Surely you know that for nonwhite women in this country,” Lorde wrote, “there is an 80 percent fatality rate from breast cancer; three times the number of unnecessary eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations as for white women; three times as many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted as exist for white women.”39 Daly’s myth that common biology drives a generic female experience fractures in the face of race and class.

  But Daly, for Janice Raymond, was feminism incarnate. Daly played a powerful role in her mentee’s life and work, as Raymond’s unusual dedication in Transsexual Empire attests. “For Mary Daly,” the book begins, “Who has moved me to the Moors of the Mind.… Who has taught me to feel with all my intellect and think with all my heart.… With Gratitude, Awe, and Love.”40 This steamy inscription—to her adviser—has led observers to speculate that Daly and Raymond were romantically involved while Daly supervised Raymond’s PhD.

  Whether or not this love was consummated, the romance pulsating off the vitriolic pages of Transsexual Empire sounds a larger truth: TERF politics has an erotics. The fantasy of sameness, of universally shared biology and history, is shot through with desire. In this universe, sex difference alone matters; the penis is the primary apparatus that wields power. Extracting the penis, the alleged principal cause of violence to women, thus enables true ardor. TERFs, if we extrapolate from this schemat
ic, not only belong to a safe space—they belong to a sexual space, a refuge in which desire, freed of the violence allegedly inherent to male genitalia, can kindle.

  In Raymond’s vision, trans women haunt feminist space with the “phallus.” By expelling trans women, the TERF sisterhood recommits to white feminism’s fantasy cosmology in which sex is all that matters. In this cosmology, trans women, just like women of color, working-class women, disabled women, and many others, do in fact rupture the white feminist fantasy that all women are identical, that women hold a body and history in common, that the sisterhood has sanded the sharp corners of power all the way smooth, leaving only soft, safe, homogenous desire.

  Convinced that transsexual medicine foists robot-rapists onto society at large, Raymond refused one of its key contributions: the concept of gender. Before the mid-1950s, gender referred solely to the grammatical concept of class or type, such as the practice of calling boats “she.” Gender didn’t take on the meaning of cultural ideas about sex roles until sexologist Dr. John Money and his associates proposed the term in the course of their investigations into intersex and transsexual patients. The first time the term gender appeared in this modern sense in the New York Times, for example, was in announcing the 1966 opening of Money’s Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, the first program of transsexual medicine in the United States.41 In the 1970s, feminists including Ann Oakley, Gayle Rubin, and Andrea Dworkin wrested “gender” away from the patriarchal sexologists at the clinics and transformed it into the vehicle for a feminist analysis of power. But to Raymond, “gender” was suspect on account of its medical origins and its association with transsexuality. It betrayed a therapeutic dimension, allegedly created to enable doctors to solve sex role problems through training and surgeries. Women, not the phenomenon of gender, were the heart of her feminism.