Part 3
Stoltenberg’s articles
In his book Duberman tries to paint Dworkin as uncritically pro-trans. Witness testimony, and evidence from one of Dworkin’s later works, however, attest to her capacity to think critically about transsexualism.* Her widower, the gay activist John Stoltenberg, recalls his experience discussing Raymond’s book with Dworkin prior to its publication: “I remember reading [The Transsexual Empire] in the late 1970s when Andrea got a copy of it in bound galleys, and I remember talking with Andrea about it…[W]e were both troubled by what we were learning about the surgeons and psychiatrists, all men, who were experimenting on the bodies of socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals in order to invent sex-change operations to advance their careers…Though medical practice and protocols may have advanced since, the historical fact remains that the men who pioneered medicalizing gender disphoria [sic] had some very problematic, one might say sadistically male-supremacist, attitudes and agendas—and I recall distinctly that it was Raymond’s exposure of the values pervading this medicalizing that Andrea and I both thought was important for people to know and understand” (comment on “#GenderWeek,” 1 May, 2014.)
As we will see briefly, Stoltenberg argues nonetheless that Dworkin was “not transphobic.” One transgender-identifying commenter, replying to the same article by Stoltenberg, is not convinced by his vouching. The commenter, under the name Autumn Sandeen, writes that Dworkin’s strategy, proposed in Woman Hating, of “androgenizing trans people’s end—trans people who come from the inexplicable place of just knowing that we are gendered inside—isn’t…a radically inclusive idea.” In sharp contrast to Stoltenberg, Sandeen sees Dworkin’s words about genders being “fictions, caricatures, [and] cultural constructs,” as anti, not pro-transgender. Ultimately, concludes Sandeen, Dworkin is hardly more “trans-positive” than Raymond (comment on “#GenderWeek,” 17 May 2014). Dworkin’s 1991 novel Mercy contains an oblique reference to transsexualism. Though it has been ignored, it is the most fascinating passage on transsexualism in her body of work. The novel’s first-person narrator is named “Andrea,” and many of her experiences bear an autofictional resemblance to the author’s, so that their voices are hard to distinguish. This remarkable passage is worth quoting in its entirety. Says Andrea:
“I read about this boy that was taken off the street and the man gave him hormones to make him grow breasts and lose his body hair or not get it, I’m not sure; it made me really sick because the boy was nothing to him, just some piece of something he could mess with, remake to what he wanted to play with, even something monstrous; I wanted to kill the guy; and I tried to figure out how to help the kid, but I just read it in Time or Newsweek so I wondered if I could find him or not. I guess it depends on how many boys there are being fed hormones by pedophiles. Once it’s in Newsweek, I guess there are thousands. The kid’s around here somewhere; it said Lower East Side; I hate it, what the man did to him” (116-117).
These words are strikingly prescient in light of today’s transgender politics. Not only does Dworkin acknowledge that so-called transsexual medicine can be used to an individual’s harm, particularly that of a child, but she imagines that the harm can be widespread and systemic, that “thousands” of boys may be “being fed hormones by pedophiles.” Her description of the boy’s estrogenized appearance as “monstrous”—recalling Mary Daly’s comparison of transsexual surgeons to Frankenstein (70-1)—is not likely to win her any transgenderist sympathy. A feminist militant through and through, Dworkin/Andrea does not for one moment consider the possibility that the boy may have “consented” to the feminizing treatment. The use of cross-sex hormones on a child immediately strikes her as perverted, pedophilic, and exploitative. For Dworkin the only adequate punishment for a pedophile was death.† “I wanted to kill the guy,” says Andrea. “I hate it, what the man did to [the kid].”
In his book, Duberman cites John Stoltenberg’s 2014 article as a “persuasive reply” to the charges of transphobia leveled at Dworkin by some activists (309n12). The article, “#GenderWeek: Andrea was not transphobic,” was published on a website (Feminist Times) that shut down two months later, making the article unavailable except in archive. Perhaps in part for that reason, but doubtless owing to the uncanny recurring virality of the trans movement, Stoltenberg published another article in the Boston Review, “Andrea Dworkin Was a Trans Ally,” in 2020. This latter article, as its summary states, was published on the fifteenth anniversary of Dworkin’s death. Thus, in her memory, Stoltenberg, “her longtime partner[,] observes that she is often invoked to support beliefs she actively repudiated in her work.” It seems an odd topic with which to honor one’s late soul mate. Why not honor her with a retrospective look at her activism against pornography, a form of sexist exploitation she made it her life’s mission to fight? Seemingly against all odds, anti-pornography sentiments have a foothold among the youth of today, and Dworkin’s texts are being shared online as brutal teardowns of the sex-for-profit industry, so the subject is topical. But no. Rather than the porn-peddlers, Stoltenberg would rather spend this day chastizing a large and devoted faction of Dworkin’s readers, whom he accuses of being biological (i.e., female) supremacists and implicitly compares to Nazis.
In his 2014 article, Stoltenberg quotes from three works by Dworkin, all written before 1978: Woman Hating (1974), “The Root Cause” (1976), and “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea,” a 1977 speech published in Letters from a War Zone (1989). He quotes the same three works in the 2020 article. Writing in 2014, Stoltenberg erases the ethical and ideological difficulties arising from the forced marriage of radical feminism to
sex-denialist trans activism simply by using the word gender instead of sex. He says, “To my philosophically inclined [sic] mind…the current controversy/conflict turns on an ethical/metaphysical disagreement about the fundamental meaning of gender in the human species.” In one Butlerian move, “gender” is detached from the body and relegated to the realm of ethics and metaphysics. Biological reality is mentioned only to denounce those who speak of it. He hedges—“Obviously I cannot know what Andrea would have to say”—only to find the answer in the next breath: “except that I am certain she would not ally herself with any view that furthers ‘biological superiority.’” Having conflated “trans critical” feminism with a belief in biological superiority, he can confidently stuff the trans activist party line in Dworkin’s mouth.
To support his stance he quotes from her speech on “Biological Superiority.” The brackets are his own helpful gloss:
“It is shamefully easy for us [she means here, I believe, so-called
female-assigned-at-birth women] to enjoy our own fantasies of biological omnipotence while despising men for enjoying the reality of theirs. And it is dangerous—because genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination” (115).
There is no obvious or compelling reason to read this quote, or the speech as a whole, from a sex-denialist lens. Dworkin says here that “genocide begins…in the conviction that classes of biological distinction” sanction discrimination. She notably does not say that genocide begins in the conviction that there are classes of biological distinction, that such classes exist. One section of the speech begins with this sentence: “As a class (not necessarily as individuals), we can bear children” (113). From Stoltenberg’s trans-friendly appraisal, one would have expected much better from her than such disappointing biological reductionism.
It is fascinating to witness the evolution of Stoltenberg’s thinking on this subject. Back in 2014, he was willing to acknowledge some uncertainty in speaking about Dworkin’s hypothetical position on the trans issue, considering that, as he notes, she did not write about it after Woman Hating. Six years later, however, he has discarded all pretense of humility. In 2020, he writes of the radical feminists, woefully miseducated, who “believe sincerely that ‘women as a biological class are globally oppressed by men as a biological class.’” These radical feminists “invoke Andrea’s name on the presumption that, were she alive today, she would believe that too and be one of them. I know she wouldn’t,” he declares. The correlated rise in Stoltenberg’s confidence and in the Western embrace of transgenderism is surely a coincidence.
Not mincing words like he did in the first article, he says that Dworkin “repudiated the sex binary—and the biological essentialism upon which belief in it is based.” In fact, biological essentialism is the ideological interpretation of the sex binary and not the cause of it, despite what Butlerians claim. As I have shown through my reading of Intercourse, I do not believe that throughout her life Dworkin maintained the sex-denialist position she put forward in her first book. Yet if she had, and if her own written testimony proving this were to emerge, she would have been wrong to do so, just as Stoltenberg is wrong to make sex-denialist arguments now. Just because theorists in the past made factual errors does not mean we are condemned to repeat those errors in the present, or that we have to discard their theory as tainted. Ultimately, whether or not Dworkin had a biologically accurate—that is to say, a functional—understanding of sex as a phenomenon is beside the point. The first question for radical feminists reading her today should be: Does her work understand women’s oppression as a consequence of their special role in reproduction? And the answer, supported overwhelmingly by her consistent and emphatic recurrence to the female body, is yes.
Continuing with the 2020 article, Stoltenberg backs up his claim that Dworkin rejected the sex binary by quoting from her 1976 essay “The Root Cause”:
“…while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, ‘by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.’ And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all” (110).
As already noted, Dworkin abandoned the concept of androgyny shortly after writing this essay. This essay then represents an intermediate period between Woman Hating and later work in which she did not promote the notion either of androgyny or a sex continuum. While argumentatively faulty and rather socially naive, “The Root Cause” is a riveting piece of writing which contains the germs of the ideas she would develop into her best-known books, namely Pornography and Intercourse. The most obvious flaw in “The Root Cause” is that its argument is circular. This is because Dworkin is trying to deny sex while accounting for the consequences of sex difference. Hence, the essay suffers from the same vicious circularity as claims by queer theorists that sex oppression “causes” sex category (but what causes sex oppression?). I have already discussed why Dworkin might have wanted to deny discrete sex category in my analysis of the relevant passages from Woman Hating, and I will not repeat those arguments here, but will observe a few things about this essay in particular.
First, it is important to note that the “root” of women’s oppression is identified by Dworkin as “female masochism” (111), i.e., female passivity and identification with the negative, not sexual differentiation itself. Second, despite her repeated denials of the “polar” model of sex (on 97, 109, and 110), here she offers no alternative model. That is, there is no mention in this essay of a sex continuum, indicating that when she wrote it she was already moving away from the framework of androgyny. Third, although she denies the “truth” of sex category, her examples of female oppression tend toward the anatomically specific (the same is true of her examples of acts of male sadism). In other words, despite her denial of the discreteness of sex category, in her writing there is (as there consistently is, even in Woman Hating) a complete identity between the category of “girls/women” and “female,” and likewise with “boys/men” and “male.”
Somewhat bizarrely, Stoltenberg cites his own writing to support his vision of Dworkin as a “trans ally” (something he also does in the 2014 article). In that from 2020, he cites a passage from his 1985 book Refusing to Be a Man, in which he draws an extraordinary comparison:
“The Nazis believed in the idea of an Aryan race—they believed that the Aryan race really exists, physically, in nature. . . . [They] believed that from the blond hair and blue eyes occurring naturally in the human species, they could construe the existence of a separate race. . . . But traits do not a race make; traits only make traits. For the idea to be real that these physical traits comprised a race, the race had to be socially constructed….[But] there simply is no Aryan race. There is only the idea of it—and the consequences of trying to make it seem real. The male sex is very like that.”
This is what is called a category error. For the comparison to be valid, human sex “traits” should be reproductively inconsequential, or else blond hair and blue eyes would have to play a necessary part in human reproduction, which, unlike male sperm, they do not. In conflating
sex-associated traits with sex itself, Stoltenberg is making a mistake typical of transgender activists. The error is apparent immediately upon scrutiny. As biologists Emma Hilton and Colin Wright point out, it would be impossible to identify which traits are associated with which sex, if there were not already-established sex categories with which certain traits, such as height or testosterone level, correlate (28). Human males and females have distinct and mutually-reliant reproductive functions. On the other hand, there is no reproductive or other biological function associated with “Aryanness,” so it is not an irreducible scientific category comparable to sex.
Stoltenberg states of the Aryan/male passage that it was inspired by Dworkin’s observations on the similarities between misogyny and anti-Semitism. He quotes again from her speech denouncing the notion of biological superiority, stating that he has “no doubt” that “Andrea would now be excoriating on similar grounds the biological sex essentialism of anti-trans radical feminists.” He references the point made by radical feminists that, had Dworkin known of the threat posed to women’s rights by trans ideology, she would not have supported it. To this Stoltenberg replies: “Andrea absolutely did know, as a woman and as a Jew, what biologically essentialist scapegoating looks and feels like.”
Indeed there is scapegoating afoot. But who is scapegoating whom here? Stoltenberg declares that the “anti-trans obsession” of certain radical feminists has become a “corruption of the egalitarian ethic and humane vision that underlay Andrea’s life and work.” From this accusation one might justifiably presume that these radical feminists believe women and people who self-identify as “trans” are two different species, or that people who self-identify as “trans” are biologically inferior, or that people who self-identify as “trans” are inherently violent and must therefore all be annihilated. These are all assertions made by some radical feminist separatists about males, which Dworkin referenced and objected to in the speech Stoltenberg cites (“Biological Superiority,” 111); however, in that speech she does not reject the categories of “female” and “male” as such. There is no reply I can make to Stoltenberg’s ham-handed insinuations that radical feminists who reject trans ideology are one step away from being Nazis, other than that, to me, and to the dictionary, “biologically differentiated” and “biologically inferior” have two distinctly different meanings. Until this elementary lexical barrier is cleared there can be no true communication. (Incidentally Dworkin, describing the legacy of postmodernism, writes about the degradation of language, noting that in the late 20th century “it is hard to use language to convey meaning; it is laughable to try to use language to search for truth; the truth itself is laughable” [Scapegoat, 135].)
Stoltenberg does not only try to redefine “differentiated” to mean “inferior.” He also sets out to redefine “gender.” He writes that, in Dworkin’s speech on biological superiority, “she specifically cites ‘biologically fixed,…genitally absolute’ definitions of gender as a tool of ‘social and political discrimination.’” In fact, Dworkin says something quite different. She says, addressing her female audience: “are we to accept [men’s] world view of a moral polarity that is biologically fixed, genetically or hormonally or genitally [absolute]?” (114, italics mine). Dworkin is speaking about gender here, but only one aspect of it. She is speaking about the idea that one’s morals are determined by one’s sex. The idea that males are inherently good and females inherently evil, or the idea that females are inherently good and males inherently evil—these ideas she rejects, not the notion that females and males are physiologically differentiated. To replace “moral polarity” with “gender” extinguishes the powerful moral argument Dworkin was making and turns her words into a bland rehashing of transgenderist slogans.
Stoltenberg levels a final scorching critique at radical feminists (this time he does not bother to specify those who are “anti-trans”). He says that radical feminists’ “obsession” with defining women biologically promotes reactionary political values. Further, sex-realist radical feminism “completely misses the point” about how male supremacy works. According to Stoltenberg, male supremacy functions by constructing the category of the “real man.” This category is constructed “when would-be real men rape; it happens when would-be real men batter; it happens when would-be real men buy sex; it happens when would-be real men consume pornography.” Curious, how all the human objects of these actions are elided. Who is this mysterious Other these would-be real men are all asserting their manhood against? He concludes that “[m]ale supremacy is explicable not by biology but by belief in the delusion of ‘real manhood’ and the concomitant insatiable urge to belong to it the only way one can: by committing acts that violate and subjugate others.”
Stoltenberg has Refused to Be a Man, and it is our duty as radical feminists, as women committed to ending male supremacy, to take him at his word. After all, he is, as he says in his 2014 article, “[l]iving beyond gender.” In The Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond observes that the “androgynous man and the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist deceive women in much the same way, for they lure women into believing that they are truly one of us…in spirit and conviction” (100). Perhaps Stoltenberg is not a “real man,” but a eunuch—figuratively, of course. “Eunuchs,” Raymond says, “were men that other more powerful men used to keep their women in place” (105). Stoltenberg wants to limit what women can say about the work of Andrea Dworkin, his dead wife, and he tries to do this partly by manipulating her words to fit his current beliefs.‡ In his rhetoric he erases the raped women, the battered women, the prostituted women, the women hurt and exploited in pornography—the women, made to suffer by men, whom Dworkin spent her entire life trying to make visible.
Notes
*Apparently Stoltenberg, who owns the rights to Dworkin’s writing, has suppressed correspondence from Dworkin that would contradict his portrayal of her as pro-trans (Bindel).
†See her condemnation of Allen Ginsberg in Heartbreak, p. 47, 2002.
‡Derrick Jensen makes a similar point in his response to Stoltenberg’s 2014 article: “[E]ither intentionally or carelessly you, a man, used your former intimacy with Andrea Dworkin, and even worse, her name and reputation, to legitimize a tool—the word transphobe as applied to women who do not wish to be forced to share their vulnerable spaces with biological males—that is used to silence women. What do you think she would have thought about that?”
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>.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Beacon Press, 1990. Duberman, Martin. Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary. The New Press, 2020.
Dworkin, Andrea. “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea.” Letters from a War Zone. Lawrence Hill Books, 1993, pp. 110-116.
—. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. Basic Books, 2002. —. Mercy. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991.
—. “The Root Cause.” Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics. Perigee Books, 1981, pp. 96-111.
—. Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation. The Free Press, 2000. —. Woman Hating. Plume, 1974.
Hilton, Emma, and Colin Wright. “Two Sexes.” Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader. Edited by Alice Sullivan. Routledge, 2023, pp. 16-34.
Jensen, Derrick. “Response to John Stoltenberg: Andrea Dworkin & Transphobia.” Derrickjensen.org, 7 Feb. 2015.
<https://derrickjensen.org/2015/02/response-to-john-stoltenberg-andrea-dworkin-transph obia/>.
Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Teachers College Press, 1994.
Sandeen, Autumn. Comment on “#GenderWeek: Andrea was not transphobic.” Feminist Times, 17 May 2014. Internet Archive,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160317032310/http://www.feministtimes.com/%e2%80 %aa%e2%80%8egenderweek-andrea-was-not-transphobic/>.
Stoltenberg, John. “Andrea Dworkin was a Trans Ally.” Boston Review, 8 April, 2020. <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/john-stoltenberg-andrew-dworkin-was-trans-ally/ >.
—. “#GenderWeek: Andrea was not transphobic.” Feminist Times, 28 April 2014. Internet Archive,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160317032310/http://www.feministtimes.com/%e2%80 %aa%e2%80%8egenderweek-andrea-was-not-transphobic/>.
—. Comment on “#GenderWeek,” 1 May, 2014.