Sandy Stone is a media and academic theorist, performance artist, and author. As a trans woman she is thought to be one of the founders of the academic discipline of transgender studies.
One of Stone’s greatest moments was after she was targeted by transphobic scholar Janice Raymond, whose essay The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male attacked Stone for “destroying the womanhood with ‘male energy’”. Stone shot back to this abuse with The Empire Strikes Back in 1983, a phenomenal rebuttal that advocated for the experiences of trans people and their empowerment. The Empire Strikes Back is a seminal text in trans academia and has been translated into twenty-seven languages.
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