Dr. Janice G. Raymond is an American lesbian radical feminist and professor emerita of women’s studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is known for her work fighting male violence against women, sexual exploitation, and the medical abuse of women, and for her steadfast commitment to the sex-based rights of women and girls as a sex class.
Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA) is proud to honor her with this lifetime achievement award. Beginning in 2024, the keynote address at our annual conventions will be known as the Janice G. Raymond Keynote Address.
Watch WDI co-founder Sheila Jeffreys and WDI USA board member Lauren Levey (both lesbian radical feminists) discuss what Dr. Raymond’s work means to them personally in this video:
In 2007, The Herald (Scotland) wrote of Dr. Raymond:
“…she is not a popular woman. Hate mail and death threats are part of her everyday life, and such is the uprising of sheer malevolence towards her from all parts of the world that she cannot give out her address or telephone number for fear it will appear on the internet. “
The reason for such malevolence? Her tireless work against men’s exploitation of and violence against women and girls.
As Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) from 1994 to 2007 (and later as a member of its Board of Directors), Dr. Raymond has been a global leader in the movement to recognize prostitution as central to the subjugation and commodification of all women and as inherently a form of violence against women. She has tackled the issue at every level, from working with victims on the ground to testifying before legislators and international institutions at the highest levels.
A formidable opponent of the legalization of the sex industry, she has advocated instead for legislation and policies to penalize the purchase of women and children, to provide services and alternatives for women in prostitution, and to discourage the demand among men for prostitution.
Dr. Raymond has testified on the topic of the sex industry and human trafficking before the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress. She has served as an expert witness in legal challenges surrounding potential decriminalization of the sex industry, and as an NGO delegate to the Asian Regional Initiative Against the Trafficking of Women and Children. As an NGO representative to the UN Transnational Crime Committee, she helped to define the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.
It is no coincidence that a woman with such insight into male violence against and sexual exploitation of women was one of the first to sound the alarm about the movement to accept men’s claims to be women. Like a pimp or a john, the man who makes such a claim treats women not as human beings, but instead as collections of parts for use and purchase.
In 1979, Dr. Raymond published the groundbreaking work The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, in which she essentially predicted everything that occurred in the realm of transsexualism over the subsequent forty or so years. Raymond noted that “transsexualism” is an ideology that is not grounded in material reality in the sense of actually changing sex or “being born in the wrong body,” and argued that “[t]ranssexualism at this point constitutes a ‘sociopolitical program’ that is undercutting the movement to eradicate sex-role stereotyping and oppression in this culture. Instead it fosters institutional bases of sexism under the guise of therapy” (emphasis in original).
Raymond located her discussion of these matters within the realm of morals, values, and ethics. She was less interested in debating the veracity of the claim that people can change sex (although she made it clear that the answer is no) than in discussing the ways in which transsexualism harmfully reinforces sex-role stereotypes. She is widely and accurately credited with being one of the first feminists to do so. In short, she warned everyone, in 1979, about what was coming.
Raymond published a reprint of The Transsexual Empire in 1994, with a new Introduction, where she addressed the word “transgender.” She said:
The issue of transsexualism has been largely superseded by debates over transgenderism or what has been called ‘sexuality’s newest cutting edge.’ The term, transgender, covers preoperative and postoperative transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, cross dressers, gays and lesbians, bisexuals, and straights who exhibit any kind of dress and/or behavior interpreted as ‘transgressing’ gender roles.
She went on to describe all of the ways in which “transgender,” like “transsexual” and other terminology often used to mean some form of adopting stereotypical sex roles, does absolutely nothing to challenge the political reality—men have political power and women do not. She also discussed the challenges that many lesbians must navigate in the difficult world where women are generally expected to behave in stereotypically “feminine ways,” and she examined the nature of “gender bending,” or, as some might call it today, “gender nonconformity.”
Raymond concluded, “The ideal of transgender is provocative. On a personal level, it allows for a continuum of gendered expression. On a political level, it never moves off this continuum to an existence in which gender is truly transcended. Its supposedly iconoclastic rebellion against traditional gender confinement is more style than substance. What good is a gender outlaw who is still abiding by the law of gender?” Raymond’s predictions have all come true, to the detriment of women and girls as a sex class.
In 2021, she went on to publish Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. From the cover:
In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, Janice Raymond’s new book illustrates 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.
We are ever grateful for her astonishing prescience, analysis, and commitment to women and girls. We look forward to continuing to honor Dr. Raymond’s work with our annual Janice G. Raymond Keynote Address.
Dr. Raymond, thank you.
The WDI USA Board
Kara Dansky
Megan Rose
Lorraine Nowlin
Irene Lawrence
Lauren Levey
Katherine Kinney
Janice Raymond more than deserves this lifetime honouring!
Heart-felt congratulations and thanks to such an inspiring lesbian woman.
Congratulations to Jan! Totally deserved! But please also remember Jan‘s outstanding work as a critic of reproductive technologies through FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) and her book Women as Wombs (Spinifex Press).
Janice Raymonds book “The Transsexual Empire” has been a true, scientific-based revelation when I read it in 2019. She is really deserving the honorary title “prophet”. All of her predicitions have become true (except the sad fact that an increasing number of women are supporting transgenderism, professionally and personally).
Applause to this lesbian radical feminist!!!