Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So!

DYKE Magazine on the rise of 'male lesbians' in 1977

In 1977, the editors of DYKE A Quarterly of Lesbian Culture and Analysis were starting to catch wind of male transsexuals “invading the women’s movement,” in their words. So they decided to run a feature called “Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So!” to explore the issue.

Editors Liza Cowan and Penny House were clear about their stance at the outset, writing:

We don't think that cutting off his genitals makes a man a woman, and we do not believe that a woman can be born into a man’s body.

They continued:

We thought at first that the doctors in the gender identity and transsexual field believed that women could accidentally be born into male bodies, and that by operating on them they could correct this mistake of nature. This is the line that is being used by transsexuals and being bought by the straight press and some Lesbians. We read several books by well known "authorities" in the gender and transsexual field… It becomes clear reading the case histories of transsexuals that they themselves know that they are really men, unless they have completely gone off the deep end.

Oh, how things have changed! Not only does a good portion of trans-identified men really believe that they are literally women today, but a good portion of “authorities” in the field push this narrative as well. Hormonal and surgical intervention to make a person’s body match their “gender identity” is now seen as correcting a mistake of nature as well. One has only to look to California which, as evolutionary biologist Colin Wright points out, reclassified normal breasts as "abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects" in gender-dysphoric females.

Things weren’t as bad yet in 1977, but the DYKE magazine editors explained that the law was beginning to recognize and accept transsexuals as women (something which I have previously written about). The media was also confusing the situation by, for example, referring to transexual tennis player Renee Richards as “she and her.”

“The difference between having a feminine gender identity and actually being a woman is not generally understood,” they wrote, and we are still in the exact same situation today.

While some of their readers had expressed that they were “sick of reading and thinking about transexuals,” the editors realized that it was a vital conversation to have. Not only were transexuals trespassing in lesbian communities, but they also note that there are “dozens” of gender identity clinics and “hundreds” of doctors now performing surgeries for anyone who would pay. “There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of male to ‘female’ transsexuals around today.”

“We must deal with them before a trickle becomes an avalanche,” the editors declared. “We need to develop more than just a gut reaction.”

To these ends, they presented two conversations about transsexuals. The first was between Liza and Edna Lerner, “a psychologist who used to do counselling and testing of pre- and post-operative transsexuals.”

Right off the bat, Edna starts by pointing out that the ratio of males to females wanting “sex transformation” was about seven to one. She further explains:

I do believe women are more rooted in their bodies than men are. I think you have to be crazier as a woman to want to be physically a man, than a man has to be to want to be a woman, and I found that to be true. As a matter of fact, I tested only one woman to man, and she was absolutely psychotic.

I wonder what she would say about the fact that the sex ratio has been completely turned on its head in the younger cohorts, with far more adolescent girls than boys seeking to transition.

Next, Edna explained that some transsexuals did indeed believe they were actually women, or that they could at least become women, saying “the transsexual’s craziness is in this little narrow defined place where they think that if they get rid of their penises and have the operation, they will be women.” She described one patient who had to go through several operations after being “messed up” on the first one. The patient become psychotic and really believed that he would be able to have a baby.

Edna also noted that some of her patients wanted to become women because they were narcissistic and wanted to be taken care of. They thought that life would be easier as a woman.

And, though she was aware that transexual men were invading the women’s movement, she was quite taken aback when Liza informed her that some of these men were calling themselves lesbians. “To hear that they are attracted to women I find bizarre,” she said.

Liza also told her that it was not even just the post-operative men calling themselves lesbians, but that “it has reached such contortions that pre-operative transsexuals, who still have a penis, who have not had the operation, are calling themselves ‘women,’ calling themselves ‘Lesbians.’”

When asked if she could explain that, Edna could only reply:

Well, you know a transsexual who feels that he is a "woman" and has a feminine gender identity, then moves to try to give himself a feminine body. In my mind that is psychotic but at least it is consistent. It is less psychotic than saying "I am a Woman" and waltzing around with a penis. Which is truly bizarre.

Their conversation on the page was interspersed with some surprisingly graphic illustrations of how vaginoplasty is done.

The DYKE editors then listened to the Edna tape with filmmaker Janet Meyers and singer-songwriter Alex Dobkin, both lesbians, recording this second conversation as well.

Janet, Liza, and Penny were on point right off the bat, and I thought it best to simply share their insightful words in full:

Janet: What is so incredible is that a lot of Lesbians seem to be saying to transsexuals, "If this is the way you want to think about yourself, I guess I am obligated to participate in that illusion, because far be it from me to get on anyone's case, to make a judgment about the self-deception that you are involved in." That is what is so weird to me, what I find so scary about the way a lot of Lesbians have reacted to the transsexual issue. The attitude seems to be that however someone presents themself, that is the way you are supposed to see them. You are supposed to suspend your perceptions of that person and completely accept, in some kind of mindless way, that person's evaluation of who they are. It seems to me that this is a very dangerous way of looking at the world and a very passive way of looking at the world. No distinction is made between respecting someone else and suspending your own perceptions. It is always tempting to be passive.

Liza: It is also very tempting to be generous. I think that a lot of Lesbians say they have gone through such a hard time being accepted as Lesbians and now these poor transsexuals are having such a hard time and here we are in the same boat, both oppressed by the same culture. If we recognize them as our sisters it helps everybody. It is very generous and I appreciate that in women, but it is really shortsighted.

Penny: It is misguided. The fact is that you have always in life to make distinctions and judgments. It is not in itself destructive to make a judgment, to make distinctions, to have a conception of right and wrong. Not just right and wrong, but to have any kind value.

The women continued to discuss that the claims made by transsexuals about having a “woman’s soul” or being in the wrong body are not only nonsensical but galling. Janet astutely points out that this may be “preparatory to dispensing with women entirely.”

I think that women, Lesbians, should be very clear about whether we really are willing to say that a man can go to another man, that some sort of technological exchange can go on between them, and then one of them will walk out of the room as a woman. If women are willing to say that these sort of hospital frat parties can produce sisters, I think that is really nuts. I can't believe that there is that response from Lesbians, even though I understand that it comes out of generous impulses.

To illustrate this harrowing point, the editors include a reprint of a column that appeared in Sister Magazine that same year, where a proud transsexual named Angela Douglas Berkeley discusses how “genetic women” are becoming obsolete.

(The “Sandy Stone controversy” refers to the fact that Olivia Records, an avowed all-women record label, had hired a trans-identified male, Stone, as a sound engineer.)

The women then described how transsexual surgeries are a transaction between two men, and that the surgeries would therefore keep happening whether women want them to or not. However, they mince no words when it came to the way that the lesbian community had allowed itself to be infiltrated by trans-identified men. As Liza puts it: “it means you do not have an understanding of what is male and what is female, and you don’t understand you have the right to be in a group that is all women.”

They also lament that a lot of women seem to give these men a pass because they have given up their male privilege:

Liza: It is also that somebody has renounced something, therefore he is equal to you.

Penny: He has come down. A man who has come down to a woman's level. All that prevents women from being men is being given the privilege of being men. If we had the privilege that men have, would we be men? No!

It is sad to read these words from more than four decades ago and realize how much worse the problem is today, as well as how little has changed in the rationale given for why some men are actually women. In fact, more people than ever are parroting these ridiculous ideas.

But it is also heartening to know that, even though many lesbians did give away the community, others have been thinking, speaking, and writing clearly on this topic since the beginning.

On the last page of the feature, the editors chose to include an excerpt from the book Sex and Gender Vol. II, The Transsexual Experiment by Robert J. Stoller. They titled the passage, “If This Had Been a Woman They Would Have Locked Her Up,” and they were probably right. It is a jarring but unfortunately accurate representation of some of the types of men they were dealing with at the time and that we continue to deal with today.