Janice Raymond
Janice Raymond is a lesbian TERF well-known for her virulent transphobia. She is a former nun with the Sisters of Mercy before she came out as a lesbian.
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Her attacks on transgender people began with her 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. The book includes the infamous line:
“”All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.[1] |
Her hate speech against trans people almost completely ignores the existence of transgender men, focusing her hate almost exclusively upon transgender women—just like most men who rail against trans people. Huh. In Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond includes sections that viciously attack Sandy Stone, a trans woman who had worked as a sound engineer for Olivia Records, and Christy Barsky. As a result, Sandy Stone and Olivia Records were deluged with hate mail and death threats.[2] Sandy Stone has responded in The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto.[3]
Janice Raymond also stated:
"The problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”
Of course, like any bigot trying to backpedal in a world that has become more accepting of transgender women and much less amenable to the hate speech Janice Raymond has to offer, Raymond now tries to backpedal. On her official website, Janice is trying to rewrite her transphobia and walk it back,[4] forgetting that many copies of her book are still in circulation in libraries across the world. Her 'walkback' consists of her clarifying that she wants to mandate 'transexualism' out of existence, not trans people themselves. It is unclear why she seems to think the two positions are substantially different. (Perhaps she hopes to harness the old evangelical trope of "hate the sin, love the sinner", even though that doesn't fool anyone nowadays.)
She asserts that she is "in the company of" fellow transphobes such as "author Sheila Jeffreys, journalist [sic] Julie Bindel, [...], deceased writer Mary Daly" forgetting the fact that, like her, all of these people have definitively defined themselves as transphobes by their words and deeds.