Janice Raymond is a legend, and I was excited to hear she had a new book on this topic coming out. She wrote The Transexual Empire which was published in 1979. While many people mistakenly think that men declaring that humans can transition into the opposite sex only recently became a problem for women and children, Raymond was documenting the problems with this movement more than 40 years ago. With 233 pages plus the references, her new book, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism is good overview of the current feminist opposition to transgender ideology and its consequences for women and girls.
It has six chapters plus the introduction and conclusion:
Introduction: From Transexualism to Transgenderism
1: The New Trans Biologism: Female Brains and Female Penises
2: The Rapid Rollout of Transgenderism: How Did It Happen?
3: Self-Declared Men, Transitioning and De-transitioning
4: The Trans Culture of Violence Against Women
5: Gender Identity Trumps Sex in Women's Sports and Children's Education
6: The Trans Gag Rules: Erasing Women, Pronoun Tyranny, and Censoring Critics
Conclusion
Raymond explains how unproven the medical interventions on trans-identified people are, how much of a lie the suicide rate claims are, and explains how old the falsified justifications for the medical interventions are. Sexologists invented the idea of gender identity, they didn't discover it. The suicide threat was invented to justify the need for unscientific, unproven medical interventions a long time ago. She dives into consequences of the misinformation that is spread and how it is being spread, including in schools.
She lays out the feminist philosophical resistance to transgender ideology and how transgender ideology is gender conformist and imposes gendered norms on children and adults.
She documents a lot of current events and debate, including the claim that Andrea Dworkin would be a TRA, many specific instances of violence committed by TRAs against feminists, the erasure of lesbians, some instances of censorship committed against feminists, and some instances of bias against feminists/women in the media; this is great for putting these on historical record. It's not a complete record, but it's a relief some of this is being published.
A lot of focus is on female transitioners and detransitioners, how they are medically abused and marginalized by the modern LGBTQ+ movement, and how they're resisting.
It's time that we recognize women returning to themselves – post trans – not only as women making a personal choice but also as members of a feminist political movement of survivors. The increasing number of girls and women who transitioned to male but who late de-transitioned have not been fully acknowledged, researched, and written about.
I recommend this for anyone who is new to this issue, anyone who is interested in feminism, and anyone who is interested in this topic but hasn't paid close attention to it for the last few years.
Does the book have citations? It sounds like a great resource, but it's very difficult to cite a divisive text such as this in active discussion. It would be fantastic if it cites primary sources for chapter 4 to make it easier to use.
It has citations. I'm not sure how much "terfy" books and websites and the rare news article are going to be worth in arguments though.
Thank you, I will order it!