 Stone takes up a third position in opposition to both the medicalized view of transsexuality characterized by Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon and the feminist critique offered in Raymond's The Transsexual Empire. The fundamental move of the essay is to see transsexuals as a kind of “oppressed minority.” While Stone does not position transsexuals as a third gender, she does propose that transsexuals “currently occupy a position which is nowhere, which is outside the binary oppositions of gendered discourse” (1991, 295). Because Stone wishes to avoid appeal to a pre-existing class of individuals who are then oppressed, she represents transsexuality as a genre of discourse. The idea is that traditional medical discourse about transsexuality constitutes a distinctive, regulated way of talking and theorizing which Stone calls a genre. (Contrast, for example, traditional medical discourse on transsexuality with Raymond's feminist discourse on transsexuality). Stone is suspicious of appealing to a group of individuals prior to the workings of a particular discourse (that is, one which is conceived of as independent of a particular discourse) since, goes the postmodern worry, such an appeal to this group of individuals would nonetheless be at the same time providing an account of them within a discourse—a discourse which could be shaped by ideological commitments. Instead of trying to make such a move, then, Stone identifies a group of individuals as represented through traditional medical discourse about transsexuality.