Stone’s essay is a retaliation to arguments such as that of feminist theorists (e.g. Janice Raymond), who were advancing arguments about Transexuality as a “rape” or “appropriation” of female bodies and female spaces. She reviews four autobiographical accounts of male to female transexuality. Each reveal narratives of redemption in which they overcome imperatives of fixed gender and embrace transformation. Stone confronts the ways in which both the medical complex and feminism had been used as a tool for the regulation of gender/sex systems and the management of trans bodies. As of 2007, "The Empire Strikes Back" had been translated into 27 languages and had been cited in publications more than four hundred and fifteen thousand times.