Recall that OHTA said the NCHCT “was directed to consider broadly the implications of new and existing medical technologies, including their legal, ethical and social aspects.” The OHTA report explicitly claims that Raymond’s NCHCT report functioned to support this purpose. We can safely conclude that the policies Raymond helped create contributed to the death and suffering of trans people. When confronted by such charges, Raymond asserts: Although not everyone who opposes trans rights shares her views, her writing remains a key influence on anti-trans activism. Anti-trans groups today don’t say that no trans person should be able to medically transition, but they lobby for restrictions on transition-related healthcare, or bombard services with so much hostile attention that they become impossible to run effectively. Chris Coffman, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, wrote that Stone’s essay staked "a claim for transgendered people within feminist theory and culture." Coffman noted that Stone’s work, along with other queer theorists, countered previous constructions of transgender identity by medical institutions and opposed academia that presented transgender people as psychologically abnormal. [13] The rhetoric Dworkin denounced continues today. Trans people, particularly trans women, continue to be portrayed by some as deceitful threats to cisgender women’s safety. Even among those who are not actively antagonistic to trans people, there is a tendency to treat this question as an unsolvable paradox – that trans rights and women’s rights are irrevocably opposed, and one must be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

The American writer Janice Raymond’s 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire, is in many respects a foundational text of the anti-trans movement. She argued that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact” (although she expressed regret, 35 years later, that “rape was not a proper metaphor because it minimised the distinct meaning of rape” this doesn’t to my mind remove the insult against trans people). She saw medical transition with surgery as a manifestation of “sexist, social conditions” that she called “transsexualism”, which, she said, “would be best served by morally mandating it out of existence”. Recognising that “the elimination of transsexualism is not best achieved by legislation prohibiting transsexual treatment and surgery”, Raymond advocated limiting it, for example by reducing the number of hospitals and clinics that performed gender-affirming surgeries. Raymond believes that “transsexuals ought to be eradicated on moral grounds” (Synnøve Økland Jahnsen, falsely quoting The Transsexual Empire in Klassekampen, August 31, 2013). Fact: The Transsexual Empire was well-received in mainstream media upon its publication, with psychiatrist Thomas Szasz commenting that "[the book] has rightly seized on transsexualism as an emblem of modern society's unremitting—though increasingly concealed—antifeminism." [9] In a 1980 review, the philosopher Sarah Hoagland called it a "fecund discussion of patriarchal deception". [10] It was only after the NCHCT [National Center for Health Care Technology] published Raymond’s bigotry in 1980 that the US government reversed course in 1981 and took up Raymond’s views and rhetoric. Raymond’s hate became the government’s stance. Raymond – a Catholic ethicist, not a clinician – was the architect of the anti-trans stance the US government adopted in the 1980s”It has long been asserted that the iconic TERF opinion leader, Janice Raymond, played a part in bringing an end to the public and private coverage of transgender medical care, resulting in measurable death and suffering within the trans community. Unsurprisingly, Raymond rejects any assertion that she has blood on her hands. Over on TheTERFs.com, Raymond objects to the following assertion: Here, we find the three major contributors to this report: ADAMHA, Janice Raymond, and Health Information Designs. The ADAMHA looked at “efficacy,” which informed the “experimental” claim. Raymond looked at the “social” and “ethical” issues, which informed the “controversial” claim, which left the Health Information Designs company to provide the cost analysis, supporting the “expensive” claim. One-third of the 773 respondents reported that waiting for a gender clinic appointment had contributed to suicidal behaviour. One wrote: “If I hadn’t started self-medicating out of desperation, I’d have hanged myself by the end of 2018.” I cannot help but feel that every word wasted on manufactured debates could have been spent talking about the fact that trans people are being driven to a choice between self-medication and suicide. The overall OHTA report was broken down into the following six sections, four of which references Raymond’s work.

Highleyman, Liz (January 7, 2010). "Feminist theologian Mary Daly dies". The Bay Area Reporter . Retrieved September 27, 2015. My paper was never published by the NCHCT but was treated as a consultative paper among many that were solicited from other experts and groups at the same time.” Namaste, Viviane (December 15, 2000). Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. University of Chicago Press. pp.33–35. ISBN 978-0-226-56810-2. It is clear from this and from other transgender scholarship that the transgender movement is inherently political. Its reconstruction of personal identity is meant to advance a collective political reconstruction or transformation. Some trans activists even view their movement as the future of Marxism. In a collection of essays titled Transgender Marxism , activist writer Rosa Lee argues that trans people can serve as the new vanguard of the proletariat, promising to abolish heteronormativity in the same way that orthodox Marxism promised to abolish capitalism. a b Roth, Nancy L. (1997). "The Transsexual Empire". Women and Language. Urbana, WI: Organization for the Study of Communication Language and Gender. 20 (2): 66–67. ISSN 8755-4550. ProQuest 198810578.

1) Fiction:

This then is the smoking gun. Here we have a private insurer quoting word-for-word a governmental policy which relied on Raymond for 1/3 of its findings; specifically, it’s finding that trans care is ethically controversial. Thus we can easily follow the timeline for Raymond’s part in the decimation of trans care in America: From Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979) Her statements on transsexuality and transsexuals have been criticized by many in the LGBT and fe Providers, generally; physicians; acute facility administrators; long-term care facility administrators; other care givers; health/medical professional associations; consumer associations; employers; unions and other employee organizations; third party payers; government regulators; biomedical researchers; public policy-makers, legislators; policy research organizations; Federal health programs.” [2 ] Marxists spoke of the construction of a “new socialist man” as a crucial task in the broader process of socialist construction. Today, in a time of both rising fascism and an emergent socialist movement, our challenge is transsexualising our Marxism. We should think [of] the project of transition to communism in our time—communisation—as including the transition to new communist selves, new ways of being and relating to one another. The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) began seeing trans clients in the 1960s and developed a trans care program in the early 1970s. Dr. Cole was a resident in 1975 and I briefly interviewed him for this story. He was aware of indigent trans people being served in the early days of that program. “I believe that they did the lab and medical work that way.” He noted that for some of the early patients, their surgical costs were covered. “Some of those surgeries were totally covered.” I also interviewed Dr. Meyer, a founder of the UTMB trans program and past president of WPATH. He too noted that indigent trans clients were served. “I remember one particular patient who was on Medicare and that patient was approved for genital surgery.” He went on to say that this client received publicly insured trans services through UTMB’s program prior to Raymond’s NCHCT paper. “This would have been in the late 70s, maybe 1978 or 79.”