Janice Raymond

Janice G. Raymond (born January 24, 1943) is an American radical feminist and professor emerita of women's studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is known for her work against violence, sexual exploitation, and medical abuse of women, and for also her work denouncing transsexuality.

Raymond is the author of five books, including The Transsexual Empire (1979). She has published numerous articles on prostitution and lectures internationally on many of these topics via the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Her opposition to rights for trans women have been criticized by some in the LGBT and feminist communities as transphobic.

Early life Janice G. Raymond was born in 1943 to a white working class family in Rhode Island. Her father was a factoryworker and her mother was a bookkeeper and secretary who took occasional jobs and adjusted the family budget to send Janice to a Catholic girls' school. After graduating high school in 1960, Raymond joined the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic religious congregation, and stayed for 12 years. Raymond received a BA in English literature from Salve Regina College in 1965, a master's degree in religious studies from Andover Newton Theological School in 1971, and her PhD in ethics and society from Boston College in 1977.

Academic career Raymond is professor emerita of women's studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst from 1978 on. When she retired from the university in 2002, the Boston Globe included her among the several "marquee talents" lost to the campus.

Since 2000, Raymond has also served as an adjunct professor of international health at Boston University School of Public Health. She has been a faculty member of the Five Colleges (Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst) Professor of Women's Studies and Medical Ethics (1975–78), visiting research scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1990–91), visiting professor at the University of Linkoping in Sweden (1995), and lecturer at the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University, Center for Women Studies, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2002).

Advocacy work From 1994 to 2007, Raymond was the co-executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). She left the convent and became open about her lesbianism. As of 2016, she and her partner, Pat Hynes, had been together for 42 years.

Awards and honors In 2007, Raymond received the "International Woman Award, 2007" from the Zero Tolerance Trust, in Glasgow, Scotland.

In 1986, Raymond's book A Passion for Friends: a Philosophy of Female Friendship was named the best non-fiction book of the year by the UK magazine, City Limits.

Raymond has been the recipient of grants from the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. National Institute of Justice, the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Norwegian Organization for Research and Development (NORAD), and UNESCO.

Women as Wombs, as K. Kaufman wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, "is a strongly written, carefully reasoned critique of ... 'reproductive liberalism'."

Raymond's 1986 book, A Passion for Friends: a Philosophy of Female Affection, deviates from her work on medical technologies into the realm of feminist friendship as a basis for a broader feminist theory and politics. Carolyn Heilbrun in The Women's Review of Books wrote: "Hers is a brave undertaking, and she begins by facing the central issue of women's friendships: the necessary relation of these friendships to power and the public sphere...Raymond's is the most probing and honorable discussion of female friendships we have ...". Published also in a UK edition, A Passion for Friends received the City Limits award for the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1986.

Writings on transsexualism and transgender issues

In 1979, Raymond published a book on transsexualism called The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Controversial even today, it looked at the role of transsexualism – particularly psychological and surgical approaches to it – in reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes, the ways in which the medical-psychiatric complex is medicalizing "gender identity" and the social and political context that has helped spawn transsexual treatment and surgery as normal and therapeutic medicine.

Raymond maintains that transsexualism is based on the "patriarchal myths" of "male mothering," and "making of woman according to man's image." She claims this is done in order "to colonize feminist identification, culture, politics and sexuality," adding: "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves ... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive." In 2014, Raymond expressed regret for having made this comparison, stating that "rape was not a proper metaphor because it minimized the distinct meaning of rape."

These views on transsexuality have been criticized by many in the LGBT and feminist communities as transphobic and as constituting hate-speech against transsexual men and women.

In The Transsexual Empire, Raymond includes sections on Sandy Stone, a trans woman who had worked as a sound engineer for Olivia Records, and Christy Barsky, accusing both of creating divisiveness in women's spaces. These writings have been heavily criticized as personal attacks on these individuals. In response, Stone wrote her 1987 essay, "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto".

In 2021, Raymond's Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism was published. A positive review by Claire Heuchan was published in the gender critical publication Lesbian and Gay News. Heuchan wrote, "With a directness that is characteristic of her work, Raymond cuts through the culture of fear and intellectual dishonesty that defines many discussions around gender identity.

Writings on prostitution and sex trafficking

In 2000, Raymond co-published a study on sex trafficking in the United States entitled Sex Trafficking in the United States: Links Between International and Domestic Sex Industries. In 2002, she directed and co-authored a multi-country project in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Venezuela and the United States, entitled Women in the International Migration Process: Patterns, Profiles and Health Consequences of Sexual Exploitation.

Among the many articles she has published, her work entitled "Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution and a Legal Response to the Demand for Prostitution" has been translated into over 10 languages. This essay looks at the legislative models that have legalized or decriminalized the prostitution industry and the rationales supporting them, and argues that legitimating the sex trade has made its harm to women invisible. Raymond supports the alternative legal model of rejecting legalization and decriminalization of the sex industry, and penalizing buyers of sex while not arresting prostitutes.