For our predictive texts series, we have asked our contributors to select a book which sheds eerily prescient light on our lives today. We weren’t after HG Wells or George Orwell, we wanted something less predictable. Here is the foresight so far.
“Transsexualism has taken only twenty-five years to become a household word,” reads the opening line of the 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. The author, Janice Raymond, a renowned academic and feminist campaigner, caused a massive kerfuffle when she published the work, which seriously tackled the theory and consequences of diagnosing the feelings of body dysphoria and the unbearable desire to live and present as the opposite sex.
Raymond wrote TTE as a response to the rising rates of sex-change surgery in the US. She had long been concerned about the medical practices that negatively impacted women, such as unnecessary hysterectomies and caesareans. This led her to question the medical consequences of the bodily mutilation inherent in transsexual surgery, and the detrimental effects of taking lifelong hormones.
She predicted that the handful of gender identity clinics treating adult transsexuals – the first of which opened in 1967 – would become what she calls ‘sex role control centers’ for so-called deviant female and male children. “Such gender identity centers are already being used for the treatment of designated child transsexuals,” she wrote, before arguing that these centres would proliferate.
There are now at least 40 such clinics treating children’s ‘gender dysphoria’ in the United States, and in England there are seven treating adults, and only one at present that specialises in under 18s, but with calls for more. This is in spite of concerns about the effects that such treatment might have on individuals legally considered too young to make most major life decisions.
Small wonder, then, that 40 years after it was first published, TTE is perceived as an important foundation stone in gender critical feminist thinking.
In 1979, the word gender was understood to be separate from the word sex. Sex was what defined a person biologically; gender was understood to mean the sex-appropriate behaviour that was socially constructed. Today, gender has replaced the word sex in common parlance, as if gender itself were biological.
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