The “Empire” Strikes Back

A Posttranssexual Manifesto

Abstract

In this essay considered to be the founding landmark of American transgender studies, Sandy Stone, analyzing autobiographies of trans women and medical literature, examines and challenges the way in which medical knowledge has historically investigated and cultivated normative conceptions about transsexuality. The author points out cisheteronormative assumptions that guided the production of knowledge by medical professionals about gender variance and connects this field of research and intervention with trans-exclusionary feminist discourses in a fundamental aspect: the thought of trans people as alienated and incapable of understanding and expressing truth about themselves. If at first it can be read as a response to the anti-trans book “The Transsexual Empire” by Janice Raymond, “The Empire Strikes Back” proves to be more than that: it is a critique of the exclusion of trans people from the regime of enunciation about trans subjectivity and experience, and a call for such subjects to appropriate themselves of their transformative and disruptive capacity, participating in the formation of a counter-discursive intellectual, creative and political movement.