Mick Hartley

Veteran feminist campaigner Janice Raymond wrote her first book, The Transsexual Empire, way back in 1979. It was a groundbreaking polemic, way ahead of its time, arguing that "transsexualism" (as transgenderism used to be called) reinforced traditional gender stereotypes, was based on patriarchal myths, and despite its claims of being progressive was in fact profoundly antithetical to feminism. Her new book, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, carries on in the same vein:

In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, Janice Raymond's new book illuminates the “doublethink” of a transgender movement that is able to define men as women, women as men, he as she, dissent as heresy, science as sham, and critics as fascists. Meanwhile, trans mobs are treated as gender patriots whose main enemy is feminists and their dissent from gender orthodoxies.The medicalization of gender dissatisfaction depicted by Raymond in her early visionary book, The Transsexual Empire, has today expanded exponentially into the transgender industrial complex built on big medicine, big pharma, big banks, big foundations, big research centers, some attached to big universities. And the current rise of treating young children with puberty blockers and hormones is a widespread scandal that has been named a medical experiment on children.Whereas transsexualism was mainly a male phenomenon in the past with males undertaking cross sex hormones and surgery, today it is notably young women who are self-declaring as men in large numbers. The good news is that these young women who formerly identified as “trans men” or gender non-binary, are now de-transitioning. In this book, they speak movingly about their severances from themselves and other women, their escape from compulsive femininity, their sexual assaults, the misogyny they experienced growing up, and their journeys in recovering their womanhood.Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism makes us aware of the consequences of a runaway ideology and its costs — among them what is at stake when males are allowed to compete in female sports and when parents are not aware of school curricula that confuse sex with gender and that can facilitate a child' s hormone treatments without parental consent.

She talks to Julie Bindel at UnHerd:

What motivated her to return to the gender swamp?

“Before I began writing Doublethink, I thought long and hard, knowing that the swarm of trans detractors would gleefully sting me again, only this time it would be more venomous. But I felt that since 1994, when The Transsexual Empire was reprinted and I wrote a new preface for it, I hadn’t really written anything that addressed the takeover of transgenderism and especially the rise in young women who were declaring themselves male. I wrote this book to dispel the myths of transgenderism and to take on the consequences of a runaway ideology whose reach is influencing medical care, legislation, government policies, women’s sports, childhood and university education.”

Raymond traces the progress of trans ideology over the past five decades. She looks at the shift from transsexualism to transgenderism, with a particular focus on the increasing numbers of young women who transition but later desist.

The huge rise in girls and young women who declare themselves male contrasts sharply with the picture in the Seventies, when the vast majority of those seeking sex change treatment were adult men. “Reasons why women transition are radically different from those of the men,” Raymond tells me. “A substantial number of female survivors of transgenderism report that they shifted identities from female to male because of the misogyny they had experienced.”

But, she explains, a significant portion of women who have transitioned were reluctant, because of external negativity, to admit they are actually lesbians…

“The current rise of treating young children with puberty blockers and hormones is a widespread scandal that has been named a medical experiment on children.”

In an effort to cover this up, Raymond explains, activists have framed rapid transgender treatment for children as emergency health care. “Labelling the campaign as a health issue and an emergency was a clever strategy that promoted peoples’ sympathy and support and generated the increased establishment of gender identity clinics also called gender health centres.

“The suicide threat has also been influential in compelling parents to accept rapid gender affirmation for their children. Parents who question these treatments are often subjected to emotional blackmail when cruelly asked, ‘Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?’”

Raymond has long been accused of trying to shut down “medically necessary healthcare” for trans people, which is a very clever ruse by trans activists to frame surgery and hormones as medical as opposed to cosmetic treatment. Her book recounts harrowing stories from young women who were groomed into transitioning, partly by being told that if they didn’t, they would kill themselves….

I first met Raymond in the Nineties when our work to combat the global sex trade and other forms of violence against women and girls collided. In the decades since, I have seen her enter the lion’s den countless times, refusing to back down amid hostility from men’s rights activists.

But this is a battle, as many of us have come to learn, that takes its toll; for the simple reason that transgenderism has persuaded vast swathes of well-meaning liberals into thinking that trans activists are following in the footsteps of the lesbians and gay men who fought for liberation in Seventies and Eighties. Doublethink, perhaps even more than its predecessor The Transsexual Empire, could well be the perfect tool to help those deluded individuals finally see the light.