Interesting perspective from 40 years ago.
H/t Funkaccino for sharing:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3538513-I-think-youll-all-find-this-interesting
Male and Female Created He Them
By THOMAS SZASZJUNE 10, 1979
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." (continues)
concludes:
Miss Raymond quotes a Casablanca surgeon, who has operated on more than 700 American men, characterizing the transsexual transformation as follows: “I don't change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient's mind ".
Not quite. Some of the rest is in society's “mind.” For the fact is that Renee Richards was endorsed by Billie Jean King as a real woman and was accepted by the authorities monitoring women's professional tennis as a “real woman.” This authentication of a “constructed female” as a real female stands in dramatic contrast to the standard rules of Olympic competition in which the contestants’ bodily contours count for nothing, their sexual identity being based solely on their chromosomal makeup.
Miss Raymond has rightly seized on transsexualism as an emblem of modern society's unremitting — though increasingly concealed — antifeminism. And she correctly emphasizes that “the terminology of transsexualism disguises the reality ... that transsexuals ‘prove’ they are transsexuals by conforming to the canons of the medical‐psychiatric institution that evaluates them on the basis of their being able to pass as stereotypically masculine or feminine, and that ultimately grants surgery on this basis.” The “transsexual empire” is thus 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.
Still, why should anyone (especially feminist women) object to men wanting to become women? Isn't imitation the highest form of flattery? Precisely herein lies the “liberal” sexologists’ betrayal of human dignity and integrity: They support the (male) transsexual's claim that he wants to be a woman — when, in fact, what he wants is to be 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. Janice Raymond's analysis is bitterly correct. The very existence of the “transsexual empire” is evidence of the persistence of our deep‐seated religious and cultural preju‐dices against woman.
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."
www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-created-he-them-transexual.html