Thomas Szasz endorsing Janice Raymond's 'Transsexual Empire' (1979)

Previously I wrote about Janice Raymond's Transsexual Empire.

When The Transsexual Empire was first published, the New York Times ran this book review by Thomas Szasz (1920–2012): Male and Female Created He Them (June 10, 1979)

The opening paragraph is:

"In the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asylum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor. my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a “transsexual,” my colleagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him “her.” Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering."

In other words: In the good old days of normalcy, trans people were locked up, but today in 1979, trans people are celebrated. The main problem here is the current threat that all normal-thinking people are likely to be called unflattering names for making old-fashioned anti-trans statements.

45 years later, anti-trans people are still making the same complaint, based on the same falsehood that, supposedly, in some very recent yet thoroughly jettisoned past, trans people weren't allowed to exist. And that today they are allowed to exist, and that this is mainly a problem for people who are righteously transphobic.

Szasz attempts analogies that he proposes as a reductio ad absurdum:

"we might ask what would happen, say, to a man who went to an orthopedic surgeon, told him that he felt like a right‐handed person trapped in an ambidextrous body and asked the doctor to cut off his perfectly healthy left arm? What would happen to a man who went to a urologist, told him that he felt like a Christian trapped in a Jewish body, and asked him to re‐cover the glans of his penis with foreskin? (Such an operation may be alluded to in I Corinthians, 7:17‐18.) * * * If such a desire [to belong to the other gender] qualifies as a disease, transforming the desiring agent into a “transsexual,” then the old person who wants to be young is a “transchronological,” the poor person who wants to be rich is a “transeconomical,” and so on. Such hypothetical claims and the requests for “therapy” based on them (together with our cognitive and medical responses to them) frame, in my opinion, the proper background against which our contemporary beliefs and practices concerning “transsexualism” and transsexual “therapy” ought to be viewed." [emphases mine]

He's saying: Your hypothetical "cognitive" response to a "hypothetical" claim of a person wanting to change in any way, i.e., just whatsoever you happen to think about the person you're imagining, is the "proper" way to understand trans people. This is an act of cis dominance: Anything whatsoever a cis person wants to think about a trans person is the proper thing for the cis person to think about them.

He says that Raymond has "analyzed with great sensitivity and skill" why "transsexualism" is accepted as a disease and that her book is "an important achievement."

He says trans people are "fake" members of our genders:

"Chromosomal sex is fixed. And so are one's historical experiences of growing up and living as boy or girl, man or woman. What, then, can be achieved by means of “transsexual therapy"? The language in which the reply is framed is crucial — and can never be neutral. The transsexual propagandists claim to transform “women trapped in men's bodies” into “real” women and want then to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis). Critics of transsexualism contend that such a person is a “male‐to‐constructed‐female” (Miss Raymond's term), or a fake female, or a castrated male transvestite who wears not only feminine clothing but also feminine‐looking body parts."

But then he acknowledges that the society a trans person lives in may accept them as a member of their gender. This, he says, is "an emblem of modern society's unremitting — though increasingly concealed — antifeminism." The surgeons and psychologists who support gender transition are operating "a Trojan horse in the battle between the sexes, helping men to seduce unsuspecting women, or women who ought to know better, to join forces with their oppressors," Szasz says.

He calls it a "betrayal of human dignity and integrity" to support a trans woman in manifesting

"a caricature of the male definition of 'femininity.' What makes transsexual surgery a male‐supremacist obscenity is the fact that transsexing surgeons do not perform the operation on all clients (just for the money) but insist that the client prove that he can 'pass' as a woman. That is as if Catholic priests were willing to convert only those Jews who could prove their Christianity by socially appropriate acts of antiSemitism."

An obvious problem here is Szasz's equation of "'pass[ing]' as a woman" with "socially appropriate" bigotry or persecution. An essential part of passing is how you are automatically perceived by others. If a new acquaintance doesn't perceive you as a woman, you haven't passed as a woman. Whatever you do (intentinoally or not) to be seen as a woman is not necessarily sexist, nor (if you are sexist) have you necessarily made your sexism "socially appropriate" just because some passerby perceives you as a woman. Szasz equates passing as a woman with caricaturing a woman, and this is a false equivalence.

He also suggests that doctors who provide gender-affirming care are trying to arrange "a phony armistice" in "the war between the sexes." (I don't really know what he means by that.) He furthermore says that the only way to end the war between the sexes is for everyone to "place personal dignity before social sex‐role identity" — implying, I guess, that anyone who primarily cares about being a man, woman, boy or girl is engaging in the war on the other sex, and that those who primarily care about their "personal dignity" (however he defines that) are uniquely positioned to end the war. Of course, the more literal meaning is that he does not want trans people to exist.

The war between the sexes is a part of our, human heritage. It's no use denying It. If that war ever ends, it will be not because of a phony armistice arranged by doctors, but because men, women and children will place personal dignity before social sex‐role identity.