RANSVESTIA

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women's professional tennis as a "real woman." This authentica- tion of a "constructed female" as a real female stands in dramatic contrast to the standard rules of Olympic competition in which the contestants' bodily contours count for nothing, their sexual identity being based solely on their chromosomal makeup.

Miss Raymond has rightly seized on transsexualism as an em- blem of modern society's unremitting through increasingly concealed - antifeminism. And she correctly emphasizes that “the terminology of transsexualism disguises the reality . . . that trans- sexuals 'prove' they are transsexuals by conforming to the canons of the medical-psychiatric institution that evaluates them on the basis of their being able to pass as stereotypically masculine or feminine, and that ultimately grants surgery on this basis." The "transsexual empire" is thus a Trojan horse in the battle between the sexes, helping men to seduce unsuspecting women, or women who ought to know better, to join forces with their oppressors.

Still, why should anyone (especially feminist women) object to men wanting to become women? Isn't imitation the highest form of flattery? Precisely herein lies the "liberal" sexologists' betrayal of human dignity and integrity: They support the (male) transsexual's claim that he wants to be a woman when, in fact, what he wants is to be a caricature of the male definition of "femininity." What makes transsexual surgery a male-supremacist obscenity is the fact that transsexing surgeons do not perform the operation on all clients (just for the money) but insist that the client prove that he can "pass" as a woman. That is as if Catholic priests were willing to convert only those Jews who could prove their Christianity by socially appropriate acts of anti-Semitism. Janice Raymond's analysis is bitterly correct. The very existence of the "transsexual empire" is evidence of the persistence of our deep-seated religious and cultural prejudices against women.

The war between the sexes is a part of our human heritage. It's no use denying it. If that war ever ends, it will not be because of a phony armistice arranged by doctors, but because men, women and children will place personal dignity before social sex- role identity.

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