"Raymond takes aim at a ‘new age’ of feminism, a shift from radicalism to liberalism, in which women’s ‘agency’ and ‘freedom’ supersede any understanding of the systematic violence committed against them. This movement, she argues, made up of pro-pornography feminists, sexual populists, and reproductive liberals, invokes a language of ‘choice’ and ‘self-determination’, promotes not resistance to oppression but assimilation. For example, in The Politics of Transgender, Raymond criticises the androgynous performances of the musician K.D. Lang, claiming that the famed photoshoot with Cindy Crawford, which was covered by Vanity Fair in 1993, in which Lang poses in a masculine vest, tie and trousers, while making references to penis envy, does not subvert sex roles and gender definitions, but reduces gender to a ‘style’ or performance. For Raymond, feminist politics have been replaced by a new ‘androgynous humanism’, in which the previously divided aspects of masculinity and femininity, instead of being challenged or resisted, are now ‘glued together’ in a depoliticised form of drag."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

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"It is against this specific backdrop that Raymond, and later Jeffreys, highlights the threat of androgynous politics to women, claiming that ‘gender-bending’ performances, in which conventional aspects of masculinity and femininity are combined, obscure and violate the boundaries of women’s biology, history, and life-experiences. Women, she argues, are increasingly encouraged to adopt the new androgyne, merging ‘masculine’ ethics, values, and sexual practices with ‘feminine’ passivity and compliance, a process that inevitably results in female self-destruction and disassociation."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

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"In her most famous and authoritative work, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, originally published in 1979, and which remains a cornerstone in today’s gender-critical feminism, Raymond distinguishes between ‘sex’, as an immutable and binary characteristic, and ‘gender’, as a set of social stereotypes, which are harmful to women and should, therefore, be abolished. This standpoint is subsequently repeated by Jeffreys, and is particularly visible in her development of ‘revolutionary feminism’. Raymond goes on to claim that all transsexuals rape women, violating their sexuality and spirit by appropriating women’s bodies for themselves, and reducing ‘real’ females to mere artifacts. However, her most accusatory comments are directed towards trans women who also identity as lesbians and feminists: Raymond denies their gender identity by arguing that these ‘men’ seek entrance into women’s communities and intellectual spaces, and, even more damning, access to cis lesbian bodies. Following Daly, Raymond states that ‘transgenderism’ is a falsification of reality, with the ‘transsexual empire’—the medical industry which supports and profits from these ‘myths’—promoting the manufactured and dangerous deception that ‘men’ can become ‘women’ if treated with hormones and surgery. For Raymond, and later Jeffreys, female biology and shared bodily experiences, as well as a collective history of living under patriarchy, create an actuality that trans women, being socialised as men, can never acquire."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

#feminism #feministtheory

"Similarly, as Katherine O’Donnell notes, [Janice] Raymond contextualises feminism as a battle against male dominated values, in which the purity of creative women is set against the impurity of destructive men. Thus, Raymond, like Daly, focuses on the development of technologies that are argued to be detrimental to women’s minds and bodies. In Women as Wombs, Raymond states that reproductive techniques, such as women’s fertility treatment, are centred around men and male-dominated interests. Expanding upon Daly’s notion of ‘male motherhood’, Raymond argues that trans women—as biological men—seek access to reproductive technologies in attempts to mimic the capacity for menstruation, giving birth, and breastfeeding. For Raymond, this ‘male desire’ goes beyond womb envy: women’s child-bearing abilities, contextualised as indicative of female cultural and spiritual fertility, are understood as representing a creative strength that is envied and coveted by men. As a result, Raymond continues with Daly’s call for an ethics of separatism, arguing that ‘transgenderism’ is a further example of masculinist attempts to colonise the female body."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

#feminism #feministtheory

"[Mary] Daly’s uncomplicated use of the term ‘woman’ disregards the intersectional power differentials of race, with any criticism of her work dismissed by Daly, and later by Raymond and Jeffreys, as being ‘male-identified’. Therefore, it is not Daly’s attention to spiritualism that Lorde objects to, indeed Lorde herself promotes a brand of mystical feminism, but the differences between women that Daly flattens out. Crucially, the contemporary gender-critical feminist strategy of universalising ‘woman’ in order to distinguish a particular essence that trans women can never acquire, necessarily rests upon racialised and heteronormative constructions of gender."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

#feminism #feministtheory

"As well as being explicitly transphobic, Daly’s universalisation of womanhood and female purity, contrasted against male destructiveness, is implicitly racist. As Audre Lorde’s now famous open letter to Daly highlights, Daly fails to understand the intersectional nature of women’s oppression: the assumption that the herstory of white women can represent the realities and life experiences of all women is prevalent throughout Daly’s texts. Moreover, when Daly does discuss women of colour, they appear solely as victims of patriarchy, their histories, myths, religions, and symbols of strength rendered invisible, ignoring, for example, the powerful African female Gods. Indeed, Elizabeth Hedrick notes that Daly’s adoption of the early modern witch as the ultimate symbol of female power and autonomy in prehistoric matriarchies relies upon a culturally specific context that is Western European and implicitly white. Lorde, therefore, charges Daly with misusing her words, or ignoring the texts written by women of colour altogether, and failing to understand that although all women are oppressed under patriarchy, these experiences are not identical. Indeed, the failure to acknowledge these differences distorts commonalities as well as variations."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

#feminism #feministtheory

"[Mary] Daly states that ‘God’ represents the necrophilic and death-loving force of patriarchy, a dead and inert realm that feeds upon women’s stolen energy due to its incapacity for creating or sustaining its own lifeforce. This is contrasted against the productive opportunities offered by a life-giving and life-preserving Goddess. As Alice Echols notes, this patriarchal ‘death march’ can be understood through a cultural feminist lens. In cultural feminism, biological differences are located within reproductive capacities. In women, these differences are understood as distinct and superior, built upon unity, solidarity, and shared identity, and forming a basis for ‘sisterhood’ and a shared women’s culture. In this way, male violence, as innate and immutable, is viewed by Daly as crystallising into a desire to dominate and destroy, causing cataclysmic damage to the planet, and untold harm to women. The solution, Daly argues, lies in reasserting the female principle, utilising its pacific and nurturing bond to reconnect all elements of life, a philosophy heavily influenced by Gnostic rejections of the material realm, and supersedence of the female spirit.

It is this theological and cultural feminist background that lays the foundations for Daly’s trans-exclusionary politics, and later many of the ideas put forward by gender-critical feminists."

— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259

#feminism #feministtheory