The unforgivable transing of Andrea Dworkin

Her former partner, John Stoltenberg, along with other trans activists including Catharine MacKinnon, have misrepresented Dworkin's position on sex and gender to suit their own aims

Andrea Dworkin

Who was Andrea Dworkin, and what did she stand for? Dworkin was a man-hater who thought all sex was rape. Dworkin was secretly a right-wing bigot. Dworkin pretended to be a lesbian to curry favour with hard-line feminists but was, in fact, irredeemably heterosexual. Dworkin was consumed by self-loathing, never had any fun, and was permanently filled with uncontrollable rage.

These fictions about the feminist writer and campaigner are upheld not just by misogynists, pornographers, and others bound to detest what she stood for, but also by many women who consider themselves “sex positive.” Those incapable of reconciling their publicly proclaimed feminism with being doormats for men in their private lives continue to take out their frustration on the big, frizzy-haired prophet.

Some of the mythology built up around Dworkin during her lifetime has been dismantled since her death, thanks to collections of previously unpublished writing, a biography, a documentary film, and a play. Dworkin has enjoyed something of a revival, with many commentators—including those critical of radical feminism—reassessing her legacy.

But one form of Dworkin revivalism must be urgently resisted: namely, the effort to posthumously enlist her in the ranks of gender-ideology proponents. One of many recent examples is an article by barrister Charlotte Proudman, in which she lectures the reader on how feminists should put men—transwomen—before women. “Dworkin,” writes Proudman, “understood that a revolution that does not include trans liberation would be no revolution at all.”

Nonsense. Proudman appears to have been misled on Dworkin’s views regarding transgenderism by the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who, like Proudman, appears to have thrown in her towel with the trans extremists.

MacKinnon with Proudman last year

I first met Dworkin in 1996, when she gave a keynote presentation at a conference on violence against women and girls I was involved in organising in Brighton, England. I had heard her speak before, and she was always passionate and eloquent in putting forward her arguments against pornography and other systems of patriarchal abuse. I wasn’t a fan, though. I found her style too histrionic.

In the lead-up to the Brighton conference, I had also received numerous faxes from her, listing demands such as: “I must NOT be put in the same hotel as the other speakers” and “I need my own security arrangements.” Dworkin was a drain on our patience and our limited finances—but we all knew how important her presence at the conference was.

During that week, we became friends, laughing until we cried at the absurdity of men’s behaviour. As you might imagine, humour among feminists who campaign against rape and femicide tends to be quite dark. Pointing to the rabid identity politics of some women, such as those who began every question from the floor of the conference with, “As a working-class lesbian mother…” and such like, we came up with absurdities such as, “Speaking as a headless woman…”

Over the years, we would meet where possible: at her home in Brooklyn, in London, and in various hotels and venues in cities around the world. She had an incredibly quick, smart sense of humour. She was kind and empathetic and passionate about overthrowing all forms of oppression and inequality. I was her friend, and I loved her.

“Every political and intellectual bone in her body would have detested gender ideology.”

Dworkin was a friend to the disaffected, the abused, the oppressed, the maligned, and the misunderstood. She hated bullying and would have extended empathy and understanding to any trans person experiencing it. In that respect, she was indeed a “trans ally”—as am I. But let’s be clear about one thing: Every political and intellectual bone in her body would have detested gender ideology.

Yet today, under the guise of progressivism, she has been rebranded as someone who would wholly support gender ideology. This ideology—which pretends, among other things, that by appropriating grotesque stereotypes men can somehow become women—is profoundly misogynistic. It is an abominable falsehood to suggest that she would have supported the views of trans ideologues.

Dworkin had huge empathy with individuals who attempted to step out of the gender cage, which she recognised as a social construct. She said what radical feminists have long understood: that “gender” as a set of externally imposed expectations should be abolished, because it causes harm to women and girls.

Dworkin was, though, dead-set against the notion that, as part of the project to abolish gender, men could or should identify as women; and she would have been appalled at unnecessary medical “adjustments” to the body, when it was, to her mind, patriarchy as a whole that cried out for “adjustment”—indeed, abolition.

The evidence used by today’s trans activists, including her former partner John Stoltenberg, to “prove” that Andrea supported gender ideology is a small passage taken from her first book, Woman Hating, published in 1974. Here, she wrote the following: “I know of transsexuals in Europe, as a small, vigorously persecuted minority, without any recourse or civil or political protection. They lived in absolute exile as far as I could see, conjuring up for me the deepest reaches of Jewish experience.”

She continued: “Male-to-female transsexuals were in rebellion against the phallus, and so was I. Female-to-male transsexuals were seeking a freedom only possible to males in patriarchy, and so was I.… Every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.”

Every feminist I know understands this desire for freedom. What surprises us now is the claim that “sex-change operations” might have been supported by Dworkin. We must, however, bear in mind that Woman Hating was written a very long time ago. Before transsexuality became transgenderism. Before “transition” became a deeply misogynistic men’s-rights movement. Before transitioning children became big business. Before, finally, it became about the belief trans men really are “men,” and transwomen really “women,” based on outward appearances and, often, pornographic fantasies.

Dworkin’s agenda in 1974 isn’t the agenda of those who would like to rope her, in death, into supporting a position she would never have held. To give but one example: Writing in the Boston Review in 2020, Stoltenberg claimed that Dworkin would have been a “trans ally,” and that her work has been “misappropriated by some to argue—in the name of radical feminism—for a biologically essentialist notion of ‘real womanhood.’” Stoltenberg is keen to ensure that Dworkin appears on the “right side of history” and claims to speak on her behalf.

But reality tells a different story. Dworkin’s fuller views on gender ideology would be well-established a few years after Woman Hating appeared, when she blurbed Janice Raymond’s 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire—the very first feminist critique of a nascent transgender ideology.

“Transsexualism has taken only 25 years to become a household word,” read the opening line of the book. Written in response to the rising rates of sex-change surgery in the United States, Raymond made connections between medical practices that negatively impacted women, such as unnecessary hysterectomies and cesareans, and the medical consequences of the bodily mutilation involved in sex-change surgery, as well as the harmful effects of taking lifelong hormones.

In The Transsexual Empire, Raymond predicted that the handful of gender-identity clinics treating adult transsexuals—the first of which opened in 1967—would become what she calls “sex-role control centres” for so-called deviant female and male children. “Such gender-identity centres are already being used for the treatment of designated child transsexuals,” she wrote, arguing that if this trend were not abated, there would soon be many more.

Dworkin and Raymond got to know each other in the early 1970s, while Raymond was writing The Transsexual Empire. The pair would discuss the ideas and theories involved, and Dworkin’s cover endorsement reads:

Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire is challenging, rigorous, and pioneering. Raymond scrutinises the connections between science, morality, and gender. She asks the hard questions, and the answers have an intellectual quality and ethical integrity, so rare, so important, that the reader wants to think, to enter into a critical dialogue with the book.

Dworkin was well aware, via Raymond, of the medicalisation of gender, and the stereotypes that subtend the fantasy that human beings can truly change their sex. In the earlier Women Hating, where she expressed her less-than-fully-developed views, Dworkin described transsexuality as an “emergency measure for an emergency condition.” I discussed this claim with her at the Brighton conference, because it had always intrigued me. She said, and I am paraphrasing but I recall the conversation very clearly, that until females were liberated as a sex class, and men were no longer required to uphold patriarchal values that harm women, both men and women would seek to escape the system of “gender.”

This is what so many of us have long argued. We would like to see an end to gender—not imagine we could “subvert” it, play with it, and invent 99 additional ones.

But her words, and position on the issue of transsexuality and gender rules have been subverted. After attempting to talk to Stoltenberg about how he was using Dworkin to present himself as some great trans ally, I agreed to do an interview with Transadvocate myself, in an attempt to set the record straight. But after looking more closely at its website I changed my mind and emailed Cristan Williams (a trans identified male) and Stoltenberg, to explain why:

“I previously agreed to an interview with Cristan for Transadvocate. In my naivety I assumed you would be pro-feminist. Certainly, some trans people I know are. But having taken the time to read [Transadvocate] I am appalled at the nasty misogyny and lies throughout. Good feminists who have devoted their lives to end male violence towards women and girls are maligned, abused and misrepresented. Arguments about 'sex essentialism' are twisted and turned inside out, and radical feminists are presented as violent and dangerous.”

“John, I am appalled and disgusted at your alliance with this group in Dworkin's name. Transadvocate is obviously pro sex trade, as well as woman hating. Dworkin would be sick to her stomach at you…using her in this way. My heart is breaking for Dworkin and what you are doing to her legacy, [how you] could use her to support misogyny and give further permission to trans misogynists to torture the very radical feminists that Dworkin mentored.”

The only time me and Dworkin ever argued was about politics. I was horrified by her support for the death penalty, and (even though it featured extremely regularly in my fantasies) thought it a huge strategic error for her to talk about arming women and forming vigilante gangs. The idea that she was some kind of saintly pacifist—as purported by Stoltenberg and some other revisionists that have come out of the woodwork deciding she is worthy of their scrutiny—is nonsense.

Stoltenberg owns the rights to Dworkin’s writing. When Nikki Craft (an old friend and feminist comrade who runs Dworkin’s website) said she would publish correspondence from Dworkin to her in order to show that she had been misrepresented on the trans issue, Stoltenberg retorted that he owns the rights to those letters and postcards also. I was told the same when I threatened to make public Dworkin’s words to me on various matters.

In effect, everything Dworkin ever wrote to anyone, Stoltenberg owns. He has also, it appears, taken ownership of the thoughts and opinions she would have had today.

I wrote her obituary for The Guardian with tears rolling down my cheeks. I was crying over the fact that while she didn’t get what she had wanted in life, she had come so close: A few months earlier, during a trip to London, I had taken her to meet two of my favourite feminist editors at The Guardian with a view to getting her commissioned to write for them regularly, and it went well. Dworkin was commissioned to write several pieces for the paper, the first of which was published shortly after her death. Had she continued to write for British newspapers, perhaps she would have been silenced over her views on trans activism. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the two editors she met, and who were in total awe of her, are now on the gender woo side of there fence. Who knows what would have happened, but one thing I am certain of is that Dworkin would recognise trans activism, the type that condones death and rape threats against those of us speaking up about single-sex spaces and the need for women-only rape crisis centres, as the unbridled misogyny it clearly is.

A version of this article was first published in Compact Magazine on June 2, 2023