Was Adrienne Rich Anti-Trans?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
April 16, 2012
http://prospect.org/article/was-adrienne-rich-anti-transBy failing to acknowledge the late author's views on womanhood, feminists risk writing trans people out of the movement.
In the last few weeks, many obituaries have praised the revolutionary poet and feminist theorist Adrienne Rich. While these homages are well deserved, what has been largely ignored in considering the legacy of Rich is her history of transphobia. With the exception of a small group of critics, Rich's ideas about trans identity—and trans women in particular—have gone unscrutinized. It's indicative of the larger inability within the feminist movement to recognize trans voices.
Rich was a tremendous supporter of Janice G. Raymond, author of The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Raymond even cites Rich in a viciously transphobic chapter, "Sappho by Surgery," in which Raymond argues that biological sex is the same as gender (i.e., if someone is born with female body parts, they are always a woman). Raymond also suggests that men who go through sex-reassignment surgery are not real women but deviant men who use female bodies to enter female spaces. As a result, they are committing a type of identity rape.
