Quotes from Janice G. Raymond

The world is what women make of it. This point is crucial—we must make something of it. This presupposes some kind of location in the ordinary world of human affairs, much of which is male-created. Friendship provides a point of crystallization for living in the ordinary world, not the pretense for exiting from it. Friendship does not automatically convey the means of living in the world or of making women into world-builders, but it does provide a location in that world.

That two women could mean a great deal to each other while they awaited men to lead them to marriage and the real business of life is negligible; that they could believe that the real business of life is in meaning a great deal to each other and that men are only incidental to their lives—is of course frightening.82

An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others—mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is "a silencing of woman's own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer.

The claim for tolerance, based on the notion that transgenderism in all its forms is a form of gender resistance, is alluring but false. Instead, transgenderism reduces gender resistance to wardrobes, hormones, surgery, and posturing— anything but real sexual equality.

Like "the tyranny of structurelessness," the tyranny of tolerance has promoted an ethic of value freedom that has been allowed to stand as an unexamined principle among certain groups of women. From an unexamined principle, it is a short distance to an unexamined life.

Today especially, it is no longer the alliance of church and state that should be feared, that is, theocracy, but rather the alliance between medicine and the state, that is, pharmacracy.51 It is medicine that presently functions as the new secular religion, with the continuous aid of sustained government support.

Obviously, those who take a critical position will be subjected to accusations of dogmatism and intolerance, when in fact those who are unwilling to take a stand are exercising the dogmatism of openness at any cost. This time, the cost of openness is the solidification of the medical empire and the multiplying of medical victims.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the plastic surgery industry, including the association of plastic surgeons, led a campaign to convince women that having small breasts was actually a physical deficiency. According to the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, small breasts are not only a deformity but "a disease which in most patients results in feelings of inadequacy." Thus millions of women have been led to change their breasts, not their image of themselves.

My main point is to show how so-called health values of therapy, hormonal treatment, and surgery have replaced ethical values of choice, freedom, and autonomy; how these same "health" values have diffused critical awareness about the social context in which the problem of transsexualism arises; how more and more moral problems have been reclassified as technical problems

There is no such thing as pure relativism. Anything is seen from the eye of the viewer, from one of many angles or frames of reference. The fact that truth may be relative should not lead to the judgment that all values are on the same scale.

Friendship that is characterized by thoughtful passion ensures that a friend does not lose her Self in the heightened awareness of and attachment to another woman.

A man who decides to call himself a woman is not giving up his privilege. He is simply using it in a more insidious way.