Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker Penned a Trans Revolution

It's time we followed in their footsteps

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Due to murky policy positions and implicit bans, there are no trans women competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Debates about gender and sex in the context of sports have long animated the news cycle, but this particular story has been reduced to a footnote amidst stories of triumph and accomplishment. While the rhetoric used by groups like World Athletics, the governing body for track and field, or the International Olympic Committee, the group that refused to support trans women, may not precisely mirror the words of, say, J.K. Rowling, the effect is the same. 

The issue of TERFs – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – and of trans exclusion more broadly, such as in the arena of sports, is not new. We can track the movement back to at least 1979, the year a TERF manifesto of sorts was published. Taking a turn that excited many, Judith Butler’s most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, breaks down anti-trans, anti-gender, and TERF arguments with clinical precision. Butler, however, is not the first to propose such a rebuttal. 

To tell that story, we have to start with a woman named Sandy Stone. Brilliant from a young age, Stone started working at Bell Labs when she was just a teenager, and also began auditing classes at MIT around this time. Her interest in technology led her to become a recording engineer, where she worked with some of the greats of the era, including Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Van Morrison. This career path led her to a position at Olivia Records, which is where the story begins to heat up. 

Founded in 1973, Olivia Records was an independent, lesbian separatist feminist music label that produced records from musicians like Cris Williamson, their best-selling artist. In 1988, Olivia restructured their business and became primarily a travel company, hosting Olivia Cruises (made famous to later generations of lesbians due to its inclusion on The L Word). Stone joined the collective at its height, mixing and recording all their records, but it was far from smooth sailing. 

In 1979, Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, a foundational TERF text whose rhetoric is still echoed by contemporary TERFs. “All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves,” reads Raymond’s vitriol. In addition to attacking trans women generally, Raymond zeroed in on Sandy Stone in particular, who she learned worked at Olivia Records. Several years before the book’s publication, Raymond sent a chapter of what was then her dissertation to Olivia Records, after which the group began receiving a torrent of transphobic hate mail. Stone was threatened with violence and eventually left Olivia Records for her own safety and the safety of the collective. 

The victim of one of the first transphobic harassment campaigns in American history, Stone refused to go silently into the night. While Raymond continued to spew hateful, spurious rhetoric, Stone went to work, enrolling in a graduate program at UC Santa Cruz, where she met legendary scholar Donna Haraway. In 1987, Stone presented a paper that is now considered one of the founding texts of transgender studies: “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto.”

Stone directly references Raymond in the paper while presenting a powerful counter-discourse. (Butler also takes up this strategy in Who’s Afraid of Gender.) Stone argues that the narrative of transsexualism that has been told thus far – a narrative prescribed and maintained by the medical establishment – reinforces the gender binary and forecloses any notion of ambiguity. Because of this, Stone actually shares Raymond’s suspicions about the accepted accounts of transsexual experience, conceding that there is a falsity to the rigid distinction between before and after. 

The problem, of course, is that trans people haven’t had a chance to tell their stories on their own terms, Stone argues. Instead, they’ve gamed the system in order to access health care, telling medical practitioners what they want to hear – namely, the accepted rhetoric of the “wrong body” story – with no room for complexity. Stone suggests a turn away from the goal of “passing,” constructed as the only metric of success for those who have transitioned. Stone wants to embrace contradiction, ambiguity, and dissonance as a means of political resistance, which means refusing to deny the “before” of individual trans histories. 

Stone writes: “For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible.” Much like the contemporary rhetoric of gay “coming-out,” Stone urges trans people not to pass or hide behind reworked histories, instead invoking the “intertextual possibilities” of transformation beyond the binary. 

Stone’s text is massively influential, particularly because of the way it blends the personal and the political, the activist and the academic. It’s still satisfying to cheer for Stone’s anti-TERF clapback (perhaps the first of its kind), even 35 years later. Certainly, perspectives on the issue have changed since then. At times, one wonders if Stone is being too harsh on her trans comrades for “failing to develop an effective counterdiscourse,” especially when you consider the massive institutions they were up against. 

Stone’s essay is also one of the reasons transness is now so closely associated with theory and academia, a connection some trans folks have come to resent. As Samantha Reidel writes in Them, “In order to justify our identities to the never-ending procession of skeptical cis people, trans folks are implicitly expected to be well-versed in complex gender theory and multiple schools of feminist thought, despite our tendency to be over-represented in poverty demographics.” Indeed, one could argue that Stone’s references to academic figures like Derrida (implicit in her discussion of genre) aren’t exactly accessible to the trans folks she’s working to mobilize. 

Of course, since Stone published the essay all those years ago, academic language and academic texts themselves have become more accessible to the masses despite institutions keeping them behind a paywall. (Thanks, Library Genisis). For Stone, the most influential author in the making of “The Empire Strikes Back” is not Derrida, but another scholar who can lead us to the next generation of trans theory. 

When Stone met Donna Haraway at UC Santa Cruz, she was working on what would come to be her defining text: “A Cyborg Manifesto.” First published in 1985, the essay takes socialist feminism to never-before-seen locales, namely posthumanism. “A Cyborg Manifesto” reacts against feminist ideologies that foreground identity politics, instead highlighting the possibilities of coalition and affinity. Haraway is interested in dualism rather than dichotomy, seeing the figure of the cyborg as the fusion of imagination and materiality. 

Haraway wants to create a new vision of the self, one that diverges from the normative histories of the nuclear family and the violent ones of military technology. “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code,” Haraway writes, an imperative echoed in “The Empire Strikes Back.” 

Haraway mentions the story of Frankenstein, though she contends it doesn’t quite align with the cyborg myth because the monster desires a connection with his maker. Nonetheless, she underscores the “promise of monsters” and argues for a sort of revolutionary bricolage (to cite Derrida once again), turning away from whence we came. Here she is explaining the project in dialectical terms: “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”

The concept of cyborg writing, and the idea of disruptive monsters like Frankenstein’s creation, lead us quite nicely to another piece of foundational trans theory from the decade following Stone’s manifesto. In “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Susan Stryker delivers a wholly unique decree about the transformative power of unleashing the monster within. Stryker first delivered the essay as a performance piece at a 1993 conference held at California State University, Saint Marcos, and published it as an academic article the next year. 

Stryker’s piece is an inventive and evocative example of what Haraway was getting at with the concept of cyborg writing. Her disruptive intervention is bringing rage into an academic setting, something she did in the performance piece – dressed in what she describes as “genderfuck drag” – and the text itself. Formally, the essay departs from normative institutional conventions. The piece is separated into sections – Monologue, Criticism, Journal, and Theory – each of which approaches the subject from a different angle and prosaic style, harkening back to the numerous perspectives in Mary Shelley’s novel. 

Stryker notes that she’s not the first to make the connection between transness and Frankenstein. In fact, Mary Daly, a mentor of Janice Raymond, explicitly makes such a reference. Instead of refuting the connection, however, Stryker leans into it, suggesting that for TERFs like Daly and Raymond, trans people are akin to Frankenstein’s monster – a shadow self they can’t seem to escape. Stryker doesn’t mince words in this first monologue section, proclaiming: “I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” but arguing for the need to reclaim this monstrosity. 

Stryker contends that monsters reveal something useful to us all. She writes: “Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.” It’s a beautiful passage, so poetic and striking that when I first read it in graduate school, I immediately recognized it as a quote from a Carmilla fanfic. Indeed, this monologue portion of the essay is revelatory for its appropriation of the romantic language of Frankenstein and its divergence from the more academic form of Stone’s essay – not to mention its relevance to sardonic lesbian vampires.

To give you a sense of this gothic, romantic rhetoric, I will quote Stryker here at length:

“Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”

Shortly thereafter, Stryker changes course, using the criticism and theory sections to lay a more theoretical foundation. (The journal portion of the piece describes the birth of Stryker’s child and her own rage-filled reaction to her lack of a natural position in the family unit.) Referencing Butler’s famous theory of gender performativity, Stryker writes: “Unlike the monster, we often successfully cite the culture’s visual norms of gendered embodiment. This citation becomes a subversive resistance when, through a provisional use of language, we verbally declare the unnaturalness of our claim to the subject positions we nevertheless occupy.”

This declarative moment alludes to Stone’s directive to refuse naturalness and cohesion, instead leaning into the ambiguity and contradiction of trans embodiment. Existing in these conditions, Stryker argues, stirs up feelings of rage, and this rage can be propulsive, even transformative. Proposing a framework that would later be taken up by queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz, Stryker writes that “Transgender rage furnishes a means for disidentification with compulsorily assigned subject positions.” 

Just as Stone ends her essay with an invitation to transform, Stryker does the same, imagining Frankenstein’s monster as a figure of destructive empowerment. She concludes: “May you discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish your rage. May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle to transform your world.” In many ways, Stryker echoes Haraway’s final pronouncement that she would “rather be a cyborg than a goddess” – preferring sutures over simplicity. 

Outside of academia, beyond the realm of vocabulary and prose, what is the use of all this? First and foremost, we should be able to recognize that the struggles of trans women and trans people affect us all, both at the level of the material and the ideological (which go hand in hand). As Audre Lorde wrote in her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” – a project that certainly aligns with Stryker’s thesis about rage – “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” 

Thinking even bigger than the lens of shared oppression and coalition, Stone and Stryker both see trans embodiments, experiences, and perspectives as a blueprint for disrupting and expanding all categories of being, potentially to revolutionary effect. In an interview conducted with Stryker in 1995, Stone suggests: “Transsexuality is not the end. It’s just a place to gather your energies so that you can go on to the next thing.”

Stryker ties this trans-formative possibility to era-defining issues like climate change. In a 2019 interview with Them, Stryker explains this potential, and I will once again quote her at length. “If we live in an anthropogenically changing climate, one way to address that is to change what it means to be human. And so [we can] imagine a human subject that desires differently, that imagines its relationship to the environment differently, that imagines sociality to be different, has a different relationship to technology and embodiment.” Stryker argues that trans people are naturally (to use a rather loaded term) equipped to reckon with these changes, and that using trans-ness as a foundational logic can help us make these necessary transitions.

Paying our respects to these pioneers in the field means more than just reading their work – it also means taking up their calls to arms and imagining new ways to live. For Stryker, trans folks embody this paradigm-shifting potential through their continued existence, setting a precedent the rest of us would be wise to follow. 

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