The Heretical Transexual

Claire Rae Randall, author of 'The War on Gender: Postmodernism and Trans Identity,' tells Ben Appel why she's in trouble with the transgender lobby.

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You only have to read the opening pages of Claire Rae Randall’s 2022 book, The War on Gender: Postmodernism and Trans Identity, to understand why I’d want to talk to her. “Postmodern gender theory,” she boldly writes in the introduction, “is a sham.”

“[It] sees everything in terms of social power, moral blame, privilege and oppression, things inappropriate to the requirements of biology and evolution from which we sprang,” she adds.

Claire fears that “suggestible people are being led into dangerous territory by the Pied Pipers of Gender Studies and radical trans activism who wish to destroy traditional notions of gender.”

Yes, I’d have to say that I agree with her.

A couple of months ago, I met with Claire over Zoom. During our 90-minute conversation, Claire shared with me her fascinating story, as well as some other heretical beliefs she holds about gender.

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“I was someone who, from the earliest memory, felt that their body was wrong, and however much I tried to correct myself, it was completely irreversible,” Claire, 69, told me. Born male in Sussex, England, Claire has been living as a woman for nearly 40 years.

“People still say to me, ‘Oh, you must've had childhood trauma.’ Well, I was knocked over by a swing when I was three,” she joked. “But I think they're talking about abuse, and I don't recall anything like that at all. I had a very happy early childhood. My father worked in West Africa. I loved it. I was very close with my mother.

Claire’s early memories of wanting to be a girl are vivid. When she was seven or eight, a classmate in her boarding school commented that she had “girl’s hands.”

“I was so pleased,” said Claire.

Claire didn’t start dressing as a woman until 1974, when she went to Leeds University in Yorkshire. Three weeks into her first term, she discovered what at the time was the only transvestite/transexual group in the country.

“I got in touch with them, and that allowed me to experiment,” she said.

The first event she attended was a Halloween disco. She had only been out as a transexual for a few days.

“One of the members got me dressed and made up, and I was terrified. We walked about a mile and half to the discotheque, and actually, it was fine.”

Claire considers herself lucky that she found the group. It was so unlike the “affirmation therapy” you hear about today, she told me, where people are often medicalized too quickly.

“I think it's very important to be able to experiment and be able to try this out,” she said.

Several months into her first year, Claire told the psychiatrist at the student health center that she wanted to go through “the gender change process.” He sent her to the hospital for testing, where it was determined that she did indeed have a Y chromosome, though her estrogen levels were unusually high. After a couple of appointments, the psychiatrist started Claire on female hormones. The dose was low, however, and the effects were minimal. Claire knows now that they would have been more noticeable if she was simultaneously put on a testosterone blocker, but at the time, that treatment option wasn’t offered to her.

When Claire was going into her second year at university, the people who ran the transexual group moved away.

“I was kind of left on my own, which was really difficult,” she said.

She was just turning 20 and didn’t feel like she was ready to continue with hormone treatment, so, she stopped. She remembers thinking at the time, “It’s more important that I get my degree and then I can look at this and work it out.”

In the meantime, Claire gathered information and read as much as she could about transsexualism. A particularly influential text was Jan Morris’s trans memoir, Conundrum. When Claire wrote to Morris, the writer responded with a short note: “Take your time.”

“That was the best advice I ever got, really,” Claire said.

I asked her why.

“Because in the end, I did take my time. I mean, I rushed into it when I met these people at the university. But I was too young and too socially incapable and so lacking in confidence that I simply wasn't functionally capable of dealing with it.” 

Claire knew she needed mental health counseling, but she feared that a therapist would be dismissive of her thoughts and desires. She decided to train as an art therapist, which served as its own kind of therapy. She had a few girlfriends and was even engaged for a short time, although her fiancé broke it off after Claire disclosed her transexual identity.

“This all led me to believe that this was something I couldn’t resolve by being a straight guy. And the idea of being a gay guy really wasn’t suitable for me because that would’ve involved two male bodies.”

It was here in our conversation that Claire mentioned gay people who transition due to internalized homophobia and the difficulty they have living in a society that discriminates against gender-nonconformity. She said that, while these cases are tragic, she wants to be clear that that wasn’t her experience.

“Before I even knew about gays and lesbians, I knew what I wanted,” she said. “It literally emerged of its own accord from my unconscious mind at virtually the earliest stage of my memory.”

Besides, apart from a crush she had on the singer Peter Gabriel when she was young, Claire had always been primarily attracted to girls.

Before I asked Claire the following questions, I told her if they were too invasive, she could just tell me to fuck off. She laughed, saying she knew how important it was for people to know and understand these things.

“Before you transitioned, did you experience dysphoria when you were intimate with women?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Well, it was difficult, knowing what to do and how to cope with it. But I wasn’t disgusted with women’s bodies. I mean, the thing is, male hormones have quite an effect.”

“Were the sexual experiences enjoyable?”

“Physically, sensually, of course. But it created this conflict within me, because I knew this isn’t really what I wanted. What I wanted was to be the woman that was lying on the bed.” She added, “It’s much more about me, about my body.”

In 1985, when she was 29, Claire felt ready to commence with medical transition. She once again went to a psychiatrist, who referred her to a gender identity clinic. After a few appointments, she was put on a testosterone blocker. She didn’t start estrogen until six to nine months later.

I asked Claire if that’s dangerous, to deny the body a natural level of hormones for that long a period of time.

“Well, this was 40 years ago,” she said.

Gender identity clinics were still “kind of new and experimental,” and only about three people per year were completing treatment.

“Today, everybody thinks about long-term effects. At the time, it was just, ‘Let’s try this and see what happens,’” she said.

About a year after she started treatment, Claire began living full time as a woman.

Claire had told the clinicians in the beginning of treatment that, if, after five years, her transition wasn’t going well, she’d seriously consider detransitioning. But as time went on, she continued to be happy with her decision. She relayed an experience she had in 1986, when she witnessed a minor car accident. As the male drivers argued, one of them said, “I know it’s your fault, just ask her,” motioning towards Claire.

“After that, I thought, ‘Well, this is actually going alright.’”

Four years into her transition, Claire had reassignment surgery. She said that the whole process happened slowly, which meant there were no surprises.

“A lot of trans activists today might see that as too much gatekeeping,” I said.

“Obviously, it was frustrating at the time because I just wanted to get on with it,” Claire said. “But in the end, it was, I think, right to, as Jan Morris said, ‘take your time.’ By the time I got to the operation, as I went into the [operating room], the surgeon asked me if I was absolutely certain. I said, ‘I didn’t get this far to turn back.’”

Claire continued, “I think it’s good to have some obstacles to overcome, because those obstacles can actually reveal you to yourself.”

This felt like a proper time to ask Claire about her views on youth medical transition.

“Do you think the transition of minors is ever the right thing?” I asked her.

Claire answered, “As a general rule, you shouldn’t interfere with the development of children. I don’t see any reason to have any kind of medical intervention before puberty at all. Cautious waiting is the most important thing. And the diagnostic criteria that people are using are maybe not as correct as they should be. There might be other things that are being missed.”

Claire compared the prescription of puberty blockers for gender-distressed kids to “using a sledge hammer to crack a nut.”

She said, “It’s now become clear that male children who take these medications early in puberty might never reach any form of sexual maturity and might never be able to feel sexual pleasure. It's a very difficult problem. I can still get sexual pleasure, and I'm grateful for that.”

As far as teenagers are concerned, Claire said that, generally speaking, there shouldn’t be any medical interventions on them either, though she allows that there might be a very small number of cases in which a teenager might benefit.

“Perhaps three percent,” she said. “But even those three percent don’t necessarily need to have [medical] interventions but should instead just be offered therapy. But these days people say even talking therapy is considered to be conversion therapy. I can't see what the problem is, getting people to talk about things before they make irreversible decisions.”

I asked Claire if most of her transexual friends agree with her stance on youth transition.

“I think most [do],” she said. “Although you kind of self-select your friends, don't you? But the group that I hang out with online is aware of how this has kind of gone over the edge in the last decade or so.”

In Claire’s opinion, the teaching of gender theory to kids is especially problematic.

“You know what children are like,” she said. “They see something, they copy it. And I didn’t need to be taught about this. There was me, a very young child in west Africa, and I just knew.”

Claire and her online friends fear the backlash against the trans population that will result from the harm being done to children.

“The people that I hang out with, they understand, this early treatment, this gender ideology, it's getting in the way and it's getting people to think wrong things about us,” Claire said.

She mentioned a comment beneath a podcast on which she recently appeared. A listener wrote something along the lines of, “I’m sick and tired of these freaks, they just want to medicalize children.”

Claire said, “I had to write below it, ‘Did you listen to the interview in which I say that I have deep reservations about these things and about how I have to make myself unpopular with the actual transgender lobby because it's just going too far?”

But they refuse to listen, she said. “The ideas are fixed. All these transgenders, they're all just men who want to invade women's spaces, keep their penises, blah blah blah. And while this phenomenon that they're describing exists, it's not the same as the pre-Judith Butler world of transexuals.”

“The trouble is,” Claire continued, “in recent times, the whole field has kind of got very muddied because there are a lot of being claiming to be transgender who don't want to change their bodies physically, the way that people like me do. If people want to be like that, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to. But I think it's important to distinguish between people who go through the full transexual gender reassignment, which takes several years, and people who don't want to do that. It creates problems for recognition and spaces.”

I asked Claire her opinion on transwomen in female sports.

“Anyone who's gone through testosterone puberty definitely has a muscular skeletal mechanical advantage,” she said, although she thinks that some intersex conditions require more nuanced debate.

“The thing that I find most embarrassing are the non-op people that merely take hormone blockers and think they can compete in women's sports,” she said. “We hear these stories about them going into the women's changing room and disrobing. It’s frightening, really. I'm accused of that kind of thing. I mean, I haven't been in a shared changing room for a very long time. But if I did, well, at least I wouldn't be embarrassed in that way.”

As for women’s prisons, Claire said, “There seems to be a number of people who suddenly decide they're transexual the moment they're sentenced to prison. It's just obvious that this is just a ploy that this is to get access to women's spaces.”

However, if someone has “gone through the proper process that’s taken several years” and had reassignment surgery, Claire said, she doesn’t see a problem with the individual being placed in a women’s prison, “especially for a white-collar crime or a driving offense or something.” She added, “I think it should be fairly obvious to the authorities which people should be allowed in women's prisons.”

Claire’s story got me thinking about gay and transgender identity politics. “I think politically organizing according to identity is important,” I said. “But once you achieve equal rights, your whole identity can’t be politicized. I think there’s such a distinction between people who just want to go on with their lives and be happy and those who want to upend the way things are and change everybody else’s perception of reality. I don’t want to change what anybody else does. I just want to more comfortably exist in society.”

“That’s me,” said Claire. “In fact, this gender theory politicization has been going on for a very long time.”

She spoke about a conference she attended in 1975 for the trans support group, the Beaumont Society. The Beaumont Society began in 1966 as the U.K. wing of Full Personality Expression (FPE), a U.S. organization for heterosexual male crossdressers founded in 1962 by Virginia Prince. Interestingly, for many years, leaders in the heterosexual transvestite community, including Prince, explicitly opposed the inclusion of gay people who desired to live as the opposite sex. In fact, transexuals (those who desired full medical transition) of any sexual orientation were seen by many as outsiders. It is a complex history of which many people today are completely unaware. That is, “trans” has never described one thing, and different trans identities have different underlying causes and motivations.

At that particular conference, Claire said, there was a person in attendance who argued that gender was a social construct and that transsexualism was a political identity.

“I didn’t feel that at all when I was 19 and I don’t feel that now,” Claire said. “Other than legal protections, I don’t wish to change political views on these things.”

Claire said that people on all sides of this issue have politicized it far too much, from “the transgender rights, Judith Butler people,” to what she calls “the gender crits.”

“I get a lot of people online saying, 'Don't you realize you can't change your sex?' And I'm thinking, they're completely missing the point. I never had any illusions about being born as a boy, but it just caused me so much distress, and I couldn't change it no matter how much I wanted to.”

She added, “I do understand the limits of my medical treatment.”