Janice Raymond

Janice G. Raymond (born January 24, 1943) is an American lesbian 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 her controversial work denouncing transsexuality.

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.

Raymond is professor emerita of women's studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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).

She was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst from 1978 on.

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 and calls for their disenfranchisement have been criticized by many (from mainstream media to the LGBT and feminist communities) as transphobic.

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."

These views on transsexuality have been criticized by many in the LGBT and feminist communities as extremely 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 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.

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.

Novelist Jeanette Winterson wrote that "It's a complex, food-for thought book that rewards the time and concentration that it needs."

In her 1993 book, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women's Freedom, Raymond examined how reducing infertility to a disease in the West has helped to promote the use of new reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy.

At the same time, women's fertility is rejected in the East promoting technologies of forced sterilization, sex predetermination and female feticide.

The book was one of the first to look at the international reproductive trafficking of women and children as organized by the adoption, organ and surrogacy trade.

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

Beverly Miller of Library Journal stated that "...it is hard to resist her conclusion that many reproductive experiments can represent another form of violence against women."

From 1994 to 2007, Raymond was the co-executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).

She is currently on the board of directors of CATW.

During her tenure, CATW expanded its international work, especially in the Baltics and in Eastern Europe.

In 1999–2000, as an NGO representative to the UN Transnational Crime Committee, in Vienna, she helped define the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Raymond is a former member of the Sisters of Mercy.

She left the convent and became open about her lesbianism.

Since 2000, Raymond has also served as an adjunct professor of international health at Boston University School of Public Health.

When she retired from the university in 2002, the Boston Globe included her among the several "marquee talents" lost to the campus.

In 2003, Raymond testified before a subcommittee of the United States Congress on "The Ongoing Tragedy of International Slavery and Human Trafficking."

She was an NGO member of the U.S. Delegation to the Asian Regional Initiative Against the Trafficking of Women and Children (ARIAT), Manila, the Philippines, hosted by the governments of the Philippines and the United States.

In January 2004, Raymond testified before the European Parliament on "The Impact of the Sex Industry in the EU."

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

As of 2016, she and her partner, Pat Hynes, an alumna of Chestnut Hill College, had been together for 42 years.