'A High Degree Of Visibility And Also Divides Women': Sandy Stone, Founding Father of Gender Ideology

Examining the author of a foundational text

Sandy Stone at Olivia Records

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Allucquére Rosanne Stone, better known as Sandy Stone, is a highly important figure in the history of trans activism and the development of gender ideology. A lightning rod for controversy over the course of his life, Stone has cropped up time and again in my research and writing about this movement. In gender critical circles, he is perhaps best known for joining the lesbian music collective Olivia Records in the 1970s. Stone is also widely credited as the founder of the field of “transgender studies.”

Stone was born around the year 1936 in Jersey City. He described himself in a 2018 interview with VICE as “one of those very classic literature trans people. I realized there was something wrong when I was five years old.” In a 2000 piece in the Stanford Report, Stone describes how, starting in his adolescence, he would go through cycles of binging and purging women’s clothing typical of many trans-identified men:

By puberty she was in crisis as she tried to suppress expression of her gender. "If you're secretive about it and you're a male-to-female potentially, you buy women's clothing," she said. "You'll hide them in little compartments on the roof. You'll hide them in the car. If you're really daring you start wearing women's clothing under your male clothing. Not everyone can be so daring. And then all of a sudden you wake up one morning and say, 'Oh, my God! What am I doing?' You find it all . . . and you throw it away. Or you burn it. You do some act of excision. You get it out of your life. You close that off forever, rebuild that barrier. 'I'm never going back. Everything is OK now. I'm just another guy.' Oh, it feels so good! That lasts usually for about 90 days."

In the 1960s, Stone began working as a sound engineer and quickly developed an impressive portfolio, working with artists like Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash. “At some point,” Stone told VICE, “I said, I’ve got to do something about becoming who I am.”

In the mid to late ‘60s, Stone began reaching out to the early lesbian and gay rights organizations Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, respectively, noting that neither was “at all interested in trans.” Eventually, he found a doctor in Boulder Creek, California who would prescribe him estrogen and worked out a discounted deal with an electrologist to remove his facial hair.

The exact dates are unclear but, at some point, Stone also got in touch with the gender dysphoria program at Stanford for genital surgery, but he would not go through with it until a later date. According to his own words in the Stanford Report, he was “wearing jeans, engineer’s boots and had a long beard” during his first meeting with the surgeon. At the time, approval was reserved for men that the clinicians thought could convincingly “pass” as women.

By 1974, Stone was identifying himself publicly as a woman. Though he was seeking to leave the recording world, he was headhunted by Olivia Records, a lesbian separatist music collective based in Los Angeles, to join as a sound engineer. The dates typically given for Stone’s involvement with Olivia Records are from 1974 to 1978.

Members of the Olivia Records collective. Source: Pink News.

Stone has always insisted that the collective knew he was trans when they asked him to join, and I see no reason to doubt this story, as it was confirmed by the collective itself. He has, however, also admitted that he did not tell them right away that he was pre-operative.

The first sign of controversy regarding Stone’s involvement with Olivia Records came when radical feminist Janice Raymond sent the collective a chapter of her dissertation, which later became the book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. The chapter in question didn’t mention Stone by name, but it was critical of transsexualism and clear that it was sent because of his presence at the collective. In his retellings of the story, Stone says that Olivia Records then began receiving numerous letters questioning and criticizing his involvement as well.

In December 1976, the collective decided to meet with a group of radical feminists at the Old Wives’ Tales, a feminist bookshop in San Francisco. Outnumbered by their critics, both Stone and Olivia Records founder Ginny Berson describe a chaotic scene that eventually devolved into a screaming match after one woman stood up and said everyone knew transgender people were “really men” and Stone called her statement “bullshit.”

Stone also told VICE, “At some point, near the peak of the transphobic hysteria regarding Olivia Records, I suddenly realized, while they knew I was trans, I hadn’t bothered to tell them I was preoperative. At the time that was a no-no. At the time that was a huge thing.”

He continues:

After a series of really horrible, agonizing meetings with only the core collective, we arranged for me to have surgery in secret, just before the tour. And we chose to do it right before the tour because we were also in the process of moving to Oakland. Part of the collective was in the Wilshire district at the Olivia house, part of it was in Oakland, and people were flying back and forth, and nobody was really keeping track of where anyone was. It would be possible for me to disappear for a week or two without anybody noticing. So that’s what we did…

I had been approved by Stanford before that. I was in Olivia living out my time before I could put together enough money to have surgery I had been doing that, saving up. And Olivia said, “We’ll contribute the balance, just go do it right now, and you can’t tell anybody else. Not our collective, not the women’s community, you can’t tell your family, you can’t tell anybody!” Those were the terms under which I did it. I want to tell you, it was scary. It was fucking terrifying…

I came back from surgery and went right back to the collective and pretended nothing had happened.

Sources conflict but, from what I can tell, Olivia Records moved to Oakland in early 1977. The arguments over Stone continued into the year in the pages of lesbian magazines. For example, the June/July 1977 edition of Sister featured a letter signed by 22 feminist musicians, technicians, producers, managers, and radio women protesting Stone’s presence at Olivia Records as well as the fact that the collective had not been public about his inclusion.

Letter in Sister. Source: Trans Advocate

Olivia Records responded with their own letter in the same issue, defending Stone and their decision to include him, writing:

Sandy is a transsexual, and Olivia is being criticized for not making that fact widely known immediately on beginning to work with Sandy. It is further being said that we are ripping women off by calling ourselves a women’s recording company while working with a transsexual engineer…

Persons like Sandy, who have undergone sex reassignment surgery, are technically known as male-to-female postoperative transsexuals and live lives no different from other women…

Because Sandy decided to give up completely and permanently her male identity and live as a woman and a lesbian, she is now faced with the same kinds of oppression that other women and lesbians face…

As to why we did not immediately bring this issue to the attention of the national women’s community, we have to say that to us, Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue.

Note that much of the letter and much of the collective’s rationale for taking Stone on board was on the basis of “sex reassignment” genital surgery, which he had only undergone months prior.

Despite the vocal support of the collective, under the threat of boycott and, according to Stone, the threat of violence, Olivia Records and Stone soon decided that he had to leave.

He went to go live in Santa Cruz, but the flames of controversy were fanned once again upon the release of Raymond’s book in 1979, where she named Stone and delved into what happened at Olivia Records (emphasis added):

Masculine behavior is notably obtrusive. It is significant that transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists have inserted themselves into the positions of importance and/or performance in the feminist community. The controversy in the summer of 1977 surrounding Sandy Stone, the transsexual sound engineer for Olivia Records, an “all-women” recording company, illustrates this well. Stone is not only crucial to the Olivia enterprise but plays a very dominant role there. The national reputation and visibility he achieved in the aftermath of the Olivia controversy is comparable, in feminist circles, to that attained by Renee Richards in the wake of the Tennis Week Open. This only serves to enhance his previously dominant role and to divide women, as men frequently do, when they make their presence necessary and vital to women. Having produced such divisiveness, one would think that if Stone’s commitment to and identification with women were genuinely woman-centered, he would have removed himself from Olivia and assumed some responsibility for the divisiveness. In Boston, a transsexual named Christy Barsky has worked himself into a similar dominant position, this time coaching a women’s softball team, coordinating a conference on women and violence, staffing a women’s center, and performing musically at various all-women places. Thus, like Stone, he exhibits a high degree of visibility and also divides women, in the name of lesbian-feminism.

[…]

Obviously, women who are in the process of moving out of patriarchal institutions, consciousness, and modes of living are very vulnerable and have gaps. I would imagine that it would be difficult, for example, for Olivia Records to find a female sound engineer and that such a person would be absolutely necessary to the survival of Olivia. But it would have been far more honest if Olivia had acknowledged the maleness of Sandy Stone and perhaps the necessity, at the time, to employ a man in this role.

Stone would eventually answer Raymond in the form of his own essay, though not for another several years. In 1983, he began studying under cultural theorist Donna Haraway in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1987, he wrote “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” the title being a deliberate play on Raymond’s own.

The essay is considered to be a foundational text in the field of transgender studies and, in my opinion, it is a foundational text of gender ideology as a whole.

Though just 26 pages in length, “The Empire Strikes Back” covers much ground. In it, Stone criticizes the established medical and psychiatric approach to transsexualism, questions the “trapped in the wrong body,” narrative, critiques Raymond’s arguments in her book, and challenges the “binary discourses of gender.”

At the outset, Stone describes his essay as being about “postmodernism, postfeminism, and posttranssexualism.”

He begins by comparing the struggles of trans-identified men to the struggles of women while also critiquing feminists that won’t accept them:

As with males theorizing about women from the beginning of time, theorists of gender have seen transsexuals as possessing something less than agency. As with genetic women, transsexuals are infantilized, considered too illogical or irresponsible to achieve true subjectivity, or clinically erased by diagnostic criteria; or else, as constructed by some radical feminist theorists, as robots of an insidious and menacing patriarchy, an alien army designed and constructed to infiltrate, pervert and destroy "true" women. In this construction as well, the transsexuals have been resolutely complicit by failing to develop an effective counterdiscourse.

He then goes on to frame the “transsexual body” as “discourse,” waxing rather poetic about it (emphasis added):

Representation at its most magical, the transsexual body is perfected memory, inscribed with the "true" story of Adam and Eve as the ontological account of irreducible difference, an essential biography which is part of nature. A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription.

Given this circumstance in which a minority discourse comes to ground in the physical, a counterdiscourse is critical. But it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal" population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history-- learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. What is lost is the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience.

In what I first thought was a rather refreshing section, Stone admits that “transsexuals” are not the same as “genetic” women, and says that he does not suggest the two have a “shared discourse”:

Whether desiring to do so or not, transsexuals do not grow up in the same ways as "GGs", or genetic "naturals". Transsexuals do not possess the same history as genetic "naturals", and do not share common oppression prior to gender reassignment. I am not suggesting a shared discourse. I am suggesting that in the transsexual's erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender, which originates from within the gender minority itself and which can make common cause with other oppositional discourses.

However, it quickly became clear that this admission was not done in the interest of acknowledging reality, but rather to unhinge the idea of transition from the reality of the sex binary with the ultimate goal of doing away with any gatekeeping whatsoever:

As clinicians and transsexuals continue to face off across the diagnostic battlefield which this scenario suggests, the transsexuals for whom gender identity is something different from and perhaps irrelevant to physical genitalia are occulted by those for whom the power of the medical/psychological establishments, and their ability to act as gatekeepers for cultural norms, is the final authority for what counts as a culturally intelligible body.

At least in part, we have Stone to thank for such ideas as the “female penis.” By helping to separate “gender” from “sex,” he helped usher in the idea of self-identification and the myriad of problems that followed.

Stone ends his piece with a call to action, encouraging transsexuals to live more openly, take charge of their own discourse, and instigate a transformation:

I want to speak directly to the brothers and sisters who may read/"read" this and say: I ask all of us to use the strength which brought us through the effort of restructuring identity, and which has also helped us to live in silence and denial, for a revisioning of our lives. I know you feel that most of the work is behind you and that the price of invisibility is not great. But, although individual change is the foundation of all things, it is not the end of all things. Perhaps it's time to begin laying the groundwork for the next transformation.

Stone’s manifesto inspired a generation of trans activists, including Davina Anne Gabriel, the man who led the first protests against the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. It was even the impetus behind the founding of Gabriel’s magazine, TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism. In fact, the 8^th issue of TransSisters featured a lengthy interview with Stone himself, where he further explains the purpose of his essay:

What I was trying to say in the manifesto — what I’m still trying to say — is no matter how you may do it, when you seal off a part of yourself, when you deny a part of yourself, you drain off a large amount of your energy into maintaining that denial. And the way to free up that energy is to be uniquely yourself, and to accept the consequences, to be willing to take the risk of being who you really deeply are — a wonderful, beautiful, shining being — and to be ready to accept the light that pours out of you. When you shine like that, people will open to you in a much deeper way, in a much more complex and more loving way than they will ever meet you when you are holding back.

If only this was really the case—if only Stone was actually encouraging people to be who they are. But, through the use of postmodern word games, what he has really done is encourage people to deny one of the most fundamental aspects of who they are: their sex. We are as wholly male or female as we are human. A denial of one’s sex is nothing less than a denial of one’s humanity.

Raymond likewise critiqued Stone’s new ideas in the introduction to the 1994 edition of her The Transsexual Empire, writing:

It seems that Stone has gotten himself a thorough postmodernist education, and he now theorizes that, after all is said and done, the transsexual is really text, or perhaps a full-blown genre…

In this postmodernist tour de force, Stone uses the language of postmodernism to mystify and distract from the real material and political questions of surgically turning men into women.

As Stone would have it, the power of transsexualism is in simply acting… But transsexuals are not simply acting, nor are they text, or genre. Unlike impersonators, transsexuals are not participating in a performance in which the audience suspends disbelief for the duration of the show. They purport to be the real thing. And our suspension of disbelief in their synthetic nature is required as a moral imperative.

Stone went on to acquire a doctorate degree and continued to enjoy an extensive career in academia. Despite identifying as a lesbian, he married a man named Jeffrey Prothero (who went by Cynbe ru Taben) in 1995. The two remained together for 20 years until Prothero’s death.

In 2006, Stone began touring a performance of “The Neovagina Monologues.”

Stone from the cover image of the 2018 VICE interview

Now in his mid-80s, Stone has left us to grapple with the fallout of his ideas, which I found far more concerning than his involvement with Olivia Records. I do agree that a music collective presenting itself as an “all-women” group should have been transparent about including a man, and I think it was perfectly reasonable for women to criticize the collective’s decision and decide to take their money elsewhere. But I do think the reaction was at times overblown and far too vindictive in nature, with an aim to punish the entire collective for their choice of association.

Stone’s ideas, however, have had a much wider and more lasting reach. In substituting language for reality, he helped contribute to the absolute mess that we are in today. By claiming a “gender identity” independent of their physical body, we now have men, often the very worst kinds of men, demanding access to women’s private spaces, women’s prisons, and women’s sports. We have children picking up and parroting the kind of language pioneered by Stone online, convincing themselves that they have something called a “gender identity,” and ending up sterilized.

We have a whole society upholding a fantasy at the expense of the reality before their very own eyes.