In 1979, the lesbian feminist scholar Janice Raymond mounted an ad hominem attack on Stone in
The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (New York 1979: Teachers College Press). Raymond called Stone out, naming her specifically and accused her of plotting to destroy the Olivia Records collective and womanhood in general with "male energy", which was at the time a common opprobation. In 1976, prior to publication, Raymond had sent a draft of the chapter attacking Stone to the Olivia collective "for comment", apparently in anticipation of outing Stone. Raymond appeared unaware that Stone had informed the collective of her transgendered status before agreeing to join. The collective did return comments to Raymond, suggesting that her description of transgender and of Stone's place in and effect on the collective was at odds with the reality of the collective's interaction with Stone. Raymond responded by increasing the virulence of her attack on Stone in the published version of the manuscript:
Masculine behavior is notably obtrusive. It is significant that transsexually constructed lesbian feminists have inserted themselves into positions of importance and/or performance in the feminist community. Sandy Stone, the transsexual engineer with Olivia Records, an "all-women" recording company, illustrates this well. Stone is not only crucial to the Olivia enterprise but plays a very dominant role there. The...visibility he achieved in the aftermath of the Olivia controversy...only serves to enhance his previously dominant role and to divide women, as men frequently do, when they make their presence necessary and vital to women. As one woman wrote: "I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy...as a real woman. Afer all his male privilege, is he going to cash in on lesbian feminist culture too?"8
The collective responded in turn by publicly defending Stone in various feminist publications of the time, e.g.,
On Our Backs, etc. Stone continued as a member of the collective and continued to record Olivia artists until political dissension over her transgendered status, exacerbated by Raymond's book, culminated in 1979 in the threat of a boycott of Olivia product. The collective believed the threat to be credible and potentially ruinous. After long debate, Stone left the collective and returned to Santa Cruz.
Subsequently while Stone was studying for her doctorate with Haraway and James Clifford, she produced the seminal essay
The Empire
Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.12 The work was influenced by Haraway's
A Manifesto For Cyborgs (later retitled "A Cyborg Manifesto" and first published in
Social Text, 1984) and by the turbulent political foment in feminism of that period, but primarily as a reaction to what Stone perceived as a transphobic strain in feminist academia exemplified by Raymond's book. Stryker and Whittle (
Ibid.) situate Stone's work in the turbulent events of the time as a response to Raymond's attack:
Stone exacts her revenge more than a decade later, not by waging an anti-feminist counterattack on Raymond, but by undermining the foundationalist assumptions that support Raymond's narrower concept of womanhood, and by claiming a speaking position for transsexuals that cannot be automatically dismissed as damaged, deluded, second-rate, or somehow inherently compromised.11
An important point of the essay was that transgendered persons were ill-served by hiding their status, and that coming out...which Stone called "reading oneself aloud" -- would inevitably lead to self-empowerment. Thus "
The Empire
Strikes Back" rearticulated what was at the time a radical gay-lesbian political statement into a transgendered voice. The importance of this move lay in the political circumstance of the 1980s vis-a-vis mainstream gay and lesbian political action at the national level in the United States. During this period, mainstream gay and lesbian activists generally suppressed transgender issues and visible transgendered activists, fearing that they would frighten the uncertain and still shaky liberal base during a delicate period of consolidation. At this critical juncture, and against mainstream efforts to silence fringe voices, "
The Empire
Strikes Back" galvanized a largely scattered and disorganized population of young transgendered scholars and focused the attention of this demographic on the need for self-assertion within a largely reactionary institutional structure.
"
The Empire
Strikes Back" later became the center of an extensive citation network of transgendered academics and a foundational work for transgendered researchers and theorists. Stryker and Whittle, writing in
The Transgender Studies Reader, refer to "The Empire Strikes Back" as
the protean text from which contemporary transgender studies emerged...In the wake of (the) article, a gradual but steady body of new academic and creative work by transgender people has gradually taken shape, which has enriched virtually every academic and artistic discipline with new critical perspectives on gender.³
As of 2007, "
The Empire
Strikes Back" had been translated into twenty-seven languages and had been cited in publications more than four hundred and fifteen thousand times.