Was Andrea Dworkin a Trans Activist?
by Dora Landon
Part 1
Introduction and historical background
In Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), Judith Butler contests the genealogy of present-day radical (or “gender critical”) feminists by maintaining that 20th-century radical feminists were “trans-affirmative,” in particular Andrea Dworkin (139). Her main reference is an article by Jack Halberstam, who asserts that radical feminism is really the precursor to trans*feminism (sic), and dismisses trans-critical feminists in the 20th century as a small, “albeit vocal and powerful” group, in short, “some white feminists [who] were waging war on transsexuals.” Halberstam says that trans*feminists ought to embrace 20th century feminists like Dworkin who, Halberstam says, “understood the category of ‘woman’ to include trans*women” (“Toward a Trans* Feminism”). Halberstam provides no evidence for this claim. On the other hand, Butler quotes Dworkin to show that she did not believe in the importance of sex: “We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete” (Woman Hating, 183). Butler produces one other citation as evidence, an article by John Stoltenberg, Dworkin’s surviving spouse, in which he states Dworkin was a “trans ally.”
Trans activists are in the habit of quoting Woman Hating, along with a select few of Dworkin’s early essays, to prove that, were she alive today, she would be on their side. It is true that some of these writings point to her endorsement of (or at least failure to condemn)
transsexualism and her denial of the sex binary. Yet, all the evidence marshalled by trans activists in support of her sympathy dates from 1974 to 1978. Trans activists thereby suggest (and sometimes claim) that Dworkin’s views on transsexualism and sex remained static throughout her life. By reading Dworkin in this myopic and ahistorical manner, the authors Judith Butler, John Stoltenberg, and Martin Duberman hope to exonerate Dworkin from the radioactive charge of TERFism. But Dworkin had a long literary career after 1978. If her claim in Woman Hating that humanity is a “multisexed species” remained her definitive view on biological sex, one would expect to see that view recur over the course of her oeuvre. One would expect also a retreat from the view of sex as basis of oppression, or at least a polite hedging as concerns the differing genital equipment of oppressor and oppressed. But that is not what textual evidence shows. Rather, throughout her work Dworkin would consistently and repeatedly implicate the binary reality of biological sex—what I will call sex-realism—to explain the particular nature of women’s oppression; in addition, sex-realism would be essential to her central argument in her masterwork Intercourse. My aim in this article is to read Dworkin’s work holistically and historically in order to see what she argued about transsexualism and biological sex, and to see if the queer reading of her body of work—as pro-trans and sex-denialist—put forth by Butler et al. stands up to scrutiny.
The title of this article is a deliberate anachronism. I believe that when Butler and others present Dworkin as a “trans ally” they are guilty of dehistoricizing both the transsexual/transgender phenomenon and the intellectual tradition of radical feminism. Dworkin could not have been a transgender ally because, having died in 2005, she did not live to see the popularization of transgenderism, arguably initiated by Bruce Jenner’s “coming out” as Caitlyn in 2015. By this point transgenderism had ideologically distinguished itself from the earlier
transsexualism, transgender activists framing their cause as a civil rights issue first and a medical problem only incidentally. During Dworkin’s lifetime, so-called “transsexual women” were assumed to be castrates, but such is not the case now that transgender ideology has elevated the importance of gender identity over that of bodily appearance. Medicalization, though still pushed heavily (and perhaps paradoxically) by the transgender lobby, is now optional according to the transgenderist party line. In other words, hormones and surgery have become supplementary of a transgender identity, where before they were causal of a transsexual identity.
The rise of transgenderism has left its scar on our culture in the radical separation of mind and body, of gender and sex. This scar is visible in contemporary radical feminist discourse. For feminists in the 20th century, it was important to stress the similarities between the sexes, to argue that women were entitled to the same rights, pay, opportunities, and social standing as men. In some cases, such as in the work of Andrea Dworkin and Marilyn Frye, this embrace of sex similarity went so far as to deny binary sex category in favor of a “sex continuum.” This position rests on a misunderstanding of the biology of sex, as it attempts to redefine sex in reference to sex-linked characteristics instead of reproductive function, i.e., gamete type. This fact must be stated. Another fact, no less relevant in the present context and no more easily denied, is that the 21st century has proven erasure of sex category a resounding tactical failure for feminism. Sex-denialist trans activism has jeopardized the rights of women and girls as well as their safety and dignity. Keenly aware of this state of affairs, radical feminists today have found it necessary to insist on the reality of sex, to reject the notion of gender identity, and to regard the word “gender” itself with suspicion, as it has become synonymous with a misogynist ideology.
In contrast, radical feminists of the 20th century did not always draw a clean delineation between “gender” and “sex.” For the most part they did not need to. That a woman is a person with female anatomy was an unquestioned assumption in the late 20th century. Even the surgeons who profited from transsexualism conceded that the best that could be done medically was to make a man into a facsimile of a woman. One such case is recorded by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire (1979): “Georges Burou, a Casablancan physician who has operated on over 700 American men, expressed the superficiality of sex-conversion surgery in these words: ‘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’” (10). It is difficult to imagine a surgeon being so forthright today.
The radical feminist response to transsexualism varied from open denunciation to sly ridicule to peacekeeping apologetics. In 1973, Robin Morgan would give a keynote speech to a lesbian-only conference whose leaders had allowed entrance to a male claiming to be a lesbian. She implored her feminist sisters to recognize the insult of such male mimicry and to refuse to tolerate it, asking, “are we, out of the compassion in which we have been positively forced to drown as women, are we yet again going to defend the male supremacist, yes obscenity of male transvestitism? How many of us will try to explain away—or permit into our organization, even—men who deliberately reemphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering as ‘Camp’?” (179-180). The dismissive attitude taken by feminists who were neither pro nor anti-transsexualism—an attitude that assumed transsexualism would always be an obvious masquerade and that the men-parading-as-women would be rare if not unobtrusive—would prove to be a political miscalculation. Those like Raymond, Morgan, and Mary Daly who made no compromise with the ideology or institution of transsexualism, who repeatedly and emphatically denied admittance of males into the category of “women,” would prove prescient in their apprehension of transsexualism and its derivatives as a threat to women.
Woman Hating
In 1974, Andrea Dworkin released Woman Hating. This, her first published feminist treatise, is the only work in which she directly addresses transsexualism. She does so in a short section written with uncharacteristic timidity. Granted, Dworkin was not at the height of her powers as a writer and had not yet developed the confident, brusque diction that would make later works like Intercourse achievements not only in theory but in style. But insecurity as a writer alone does not account for the confused and anxious tone of this section. Its two pages are often cited by trans activists as definitive proof of Dworkin’s wholehearted endorsement of transsexualism and (by dubious extension) transgenderism.
Yet if I were a transgender activist reading Dworkin’s remarks, I would not be impressed. She does not sound like she is quite convinced of her conclusions, or even knows what her conclusions are (although that could be said for the “Androgyny” chapter of Woman Hating as a whole). She begins by saying that “Transsexuality is currently considered a gender disorder, that is, a person learns a gender role which contradicts his/her visible sex. It is a ‘disease’ with a cure: a sex-change operation will change the person’s visible sex and make it consonant with the person’s felt identity” (186). If this is a definition, as the formatting indicates, why is the tone so equivocal? Why the hedging, the “currently considered” and the quotation marks around the word “disease”? The definition raises other questions, such as what is a gender disorder (is it a mental disorder or a physiological one?) and how one winds up “learn[ing] a gender role” in contradiction to one’s sex. She goes on to say that psychiatric judgments on the nature and cause of transsexuality should be questioned, since “we know very little about sex identity” (that she uses “sex” and not “gender” here shows how weak the conceptual boundary once was) and in any case “psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is.” The second point seems to resonate with Raymond’s major criticism of transsexual medicine, i.e., that it does not just promote but institutionally mandates conformity to oppressive feminine or masculine stereotypes. However, she parts from Raymond in stating that, on the basis that it is a dire necessity and required for survival, “every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.”
Trying to fit the phenomenon into her established theoretical schema, Dworkin writes: “Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions.” However, she goes on to say that the establishment of the ideal society for which she is arguing, one based on androgynous identity, “will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it” (186-7). She “clarifies” this prediction by writing that, “Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” Leaving aside the question of what the difference is between “fluid androgyny” and role-less “new modes of sexual identity,” it is difficult to square this prediction of the end of transsexuality with her earlier statement that transsexuality’s “natural development” is currently being hampered by social conditions, unless one assumes that the natural development of transsexuality is its extinction. Which is not the same as Raymond’s conclusion that “the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” (178), but it leads to the same end.
In Woman Hating, Dworkin argues forcefully for the elimination of cultural distinctions between the sexes as the solution to sex-based oppression. Her feminist foresister, Shulamith Firestone, argued something similar in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), a book Dworkin admired and which shows a great influence on Woman Hating. Firestone argues along Marxist lines that the different reproductive capacities of the sexes led to the first division of labor, and that this division, by which she means unequal responsibility in reproduction, is the cause of women’s oppression (9). For Firestone the only way to end women’s oppression was to free them from their reproductive obligations with the use of new (woman-controlled) reproductive technologies. The sex binary is fundamental to Firestone’s argument. She argues for the elimination of the cultural meaning of sex class, but in speaking of her projected utopia she continues to speak of men and women, suggesting that the biological distinction would still be known and visible. Writing of sexual relations in the utopia, she predicts that sexual preferences will persist: “men and women, all else being equal, might prefer each other over those of the same sex for sheer physical fit” (215). Sex difference, though no longer culturally weighted and no longer entailing a division of labor, reproductive or otherwise, would continue to be a factor in intimate relations, meaning it would be recognized. She does not use the term “androgynous” except in referring to aesthetic objects such as literature.
Strangely, Dworkin does not say that complete reproductive control by women is necessary, but rather that it is “congruent” with the establishment of what she calls the androgynous community (191). Dworkin’s radical feminist eschatology is not materialist like Firestone’s. Rather than focusing on freeing women from the material obligation of reproduction,
she talks about the dissolution of traditional roles and attitudes. She says that by “redefining human sexuality, or by defining it correctly” human relationships will be transformed. To define it correctly would mean to recognize that humanity is “a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete” (183). Dworkin argues that not only is universal androgyny ideal, it is currently possible, and perhaps already technically true. Research into hormones, chromosomes, etc. “threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity. That is not to say that there is one sex, but that there are many” (175). A recognition of universal sexual sameness, not a liberation from an unequal sex-based labor division, is what she believes will end sex oppression.
Certainly Dworkin’s argument for androgyny is a sex-denialist argument, in that it disputes the binary nature of sex and denies that sex differences are of any practical consequence except under patriarchal culture. It is also an anti-materialist argument, as it prioritizes the redefinition of concepts over material change. Androgyny is here, Dworkin says, if we would but realize it, if we would only make the discovery that “‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs” (174). Then we could eliminate the sexual power dynamic between men and women, the “primary form” of which is “sadomasochism,” and we could instead practice “sex as community between humans” (183). We could do all this without liberating women via new reproductive technologies because, she argues, sex already is irrelevant. Here Dworkin uses sex-denialism to skip the step of seizing the means of (re)production, the step Firestone had posited as most necessary for women’s liberation. Dworkin even suggests that women “seizing power” would be an ideological mistake: “if women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed,” she writes; however, “if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality—that is the final, and most important, implication of androgyny” (191, italics mine).
Dworkin would revisit androgyny in her 1975 speech “Androgyny” (published in 1976 under the title “The Root Cause”). But she would soon shift her theoretical framework and abandon androgyny as a solution. This is confirmed by her widower, John Stoltenberg, who comments in 2014 that “Andrea stopped using the word ‘androgyny’ soon after she wrote Woman Hating…The notions of ‘fluid androgyny’ or disappearing roles stopped being the way she talked about the big-picture political revolution she saw as necessary” (comment on “#GenderWeek,” 30 April, 2014). An examination of her work post-1976 suggests that along with the concept of androgyny she also gave up the idea of a sex continuum. After Woman Hating she never repeats the idea that humanity is “multisexed.” In fact, over the years, Dworkin’s view of sex grows increasingly dualistic, that is to say increasingly concentrated on physical, usually genital, difference. Dworkin speaks of women’s oppression in bodily, visceral, anatomical terms. Consistently—one might fairly say obsessively—Dworkin identifies the penis as the weapon of the oppressor and the vagina as the raped interior of the oppressed. This obsessive anatomical naming is likely one reason she so disturbed her critics. Her repeated, insistent dramatizing of the violence of intercourse, of the man’s possession of the woman—she repeats five times in Pornography that the meaning of the word vagina is sheath—her repeated protest that being fucked lessened the humanity of women, have more than anything else contributed to her image as avenging fury. Intercourse so disturbed her that she did what no one else had dared to. She wrote the book on it.
Works Cited:
Bindel, Julie. “The unforgivable transing of Andrea Dworkin.” Substack, 10 Jan. 2024. <https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/the-unforgivable-transing-of-andrea?utm_source=publication-search>.
Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Macmillan, 2024.
Chesler, Phyllis. “Woke Andrea Dworkin.” Tablet, 8 April, 2021. <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/woke-andrea-dworkin>.
Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Plume, 1989.
—. “The Root Cause.” Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics. Perigee Books, 1981, pp. 96-111.
—. Woman Hating. Plume, 1974.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Verso, 2015
Halberstam, Jack. “Toward a Trans* Feminism.” Boston Review, 18 Jan. 2018. <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jack-halberstam-towards-trans-feminism/>.
Morgan, Robin. “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. Vintage Books, 1978, pp. 170-187.
Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Teachers College Press, 1994.
Stoltenberg, John. Comment on “#GenderWeek: Andrea was not transphobic.” Feminist Times, 30 April, 2014. Internet Archive,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160317032310/http://www.feministtimes.com/%e2%80 %aa%e2%80%8egenderweek-andrea-was-not-transphobic/>.