Sheila Jeffreys: 'Transgender Activism: a lesbian feminist perspective'

9 June 2012 by hagocrat | 2 Comments

In this blisteringly good read – a 1997 paper published in The Journal of Lesbian Studies – Sheila Jeffreys examines the politics of transgenderism from a lesbian feminist perspective using a human rights approach. She examines how postmodern theory has been used to legitimate the conservative practice of transsexualism criticised by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire, constructing ‘transgenderism’ as an ostensibly progressive practice. Critiquing the postmodern notion of gender as something to be ‘played with’ from a radical feminist perspective, Jeffreys demonstrates that the supposedly progressive politics of transgenderism is as antithetical to the struggle for women’s liberation from male domination as the conservative politics of transsexualism ever was. Furthermore, the politics of transgenderism legitimates the “mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life-threatening continuing treatment” which “violates such people’s rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born” (pp.59-60). This, Sheila Jeffreys argues, constitutes a serious violation of human rights:

It represents an attack on the body to rectify a political condition, “gender” dissatisfaction in a male supremacist society based upon a false and politically constructed notion of gender difference. (p.60)

Download the article: Transgender Activism: a Lesbian Feminist Perspective by Sheila Jeffreys (PDF)

See also:

Janice Raymond (1979) The Transsexual Empire

Ekins and King (eds) (1996) Blending Genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing (Scribd)

Sheila Jeffreys on transgenderism (interview with Meghan Murphy, 7 May 2012)

Sheila Jeffreys on gender and transgenderism (interview with Meghan Murphy, 10 April 2011)

Sheila Jeffreys on the UK Gender Recognition Act (2008)

E. Hungerford and Cathy Brennan (2011) Difference Exists