assumed to be.
To understand the vehemence of the backlash against Bailey’s book, you also have to understand one more thing. There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: Most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labeled. When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name. The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of
really
becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman. At least in fantasy, the typical autogynephile erotically desires a complete identity transformation—
to be a woman
, not to be a transsexual. So when the autogynephilic psychiatrist Richard/Alice Novic talks about her boyfriend stimulating her genitals, she refers to her “clitoris ,” although anatomically what she has is a penis. The erotic fantasy is to really be a woman. Indeed, according to a vision of transsexualism common among those transitioning from lives as privileged straight men to trans women, sex reassignment procedures are restorative rather than transformative, because the medical interventions “fix” what some call the “birth defect” in their natal bodies. Some even reject the label of transgender or transsexual for this reason; to themselves they are simply women, outside now as they always were inside.
For Bailey or anyone else to call someone with
amour de soi en femme
an autogynephile or even a transgender woman—rather than simply a woman—is at some level to interfere with her core sexual desire. Such naming also risks questioning her core
self-identity
in a way that calling the average gay man homosexual simply can’t. One really must understand this if one is going to understand why some trans women came after Bailey so hard for naming and describing autogynephilia. When they felt that Bailey was fundamentally threatening their selves and their social identities as women—well, it’s
because he was
. That’s what talking openly about autogynephilia necessarily does.
In a nutshell—and this is really indisputable—it was Bailey’s dangerous dissemination of this part of Blanchard’s work that led a prominent transgender woman named Lynn Conway to begin what became a war against Bailey from her base at the University of Michigan, where she was on the computer engineering faculty. As Conway must have understood, Blanchard’s scientific work, always written in rather dry prose and published in hard-to-access specialist journals, could never pose the threat of Bailey’s
The Man Who Would Be Queen
, with its intriguing scope, engaging prose, sex-positive tone, and compelling personalized portrayals. Bailey’s book constituted a serious innovation. It could well bring Blanchard’s taxonomy—including news of autogynephilia—to the masses and change the public perception of women like Conway.
And so, within days of publication of
The Man Who Would Be Queen
, Lynn Conway sent an urgent e-mail to a trans woman ally named Andrea James:
I just got an alert about J. Michael Bailey’s new book. It’s just been published and of all places it’s co-published by the National Academies Press, which gives it the apparent stamp of authority as “science.” . . . As you may know, Bailey is the psychologist who promotes the “two-type” theory of transsexualism. . . . Anyways—not that there is much we can do about this—but we should probably read his book sometime and be prepared to shoot down as best we can his weird characterizations of us all .
You’re probably wondering how I got that e-mail. The answer is that Conway developed what became an enormous Web site hosted by the University of Michigan for the purpose of taking down Bailey and his ideas. There she proudly and steadily recorded her efforts against Bailey,
To understand the vehemence of the backlash against Bailey’s book, you also have to understand one more thing. There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: Most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labeled. When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name. The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of
really
becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman. At least in fantasy, the typical autogynephile erotically desires a complete identity transformation—
to be a woman
, not to be a transsexual. So when the autogynephilic psychiatrist Richard/Alice Novic talks about her boyfriend stimulating her genitals, she refers to her “clitoris ,” although anatomically what she has is a penis. The erotic fantasy is to really be a woman. Indeed, according to a vision of transsexualism common among those transitioning from lives as privileged straight men to trans women, sex reassignment procedures are restorative rather than transformative, because the medical interventions “fix” what some call the “birth defect” in their natal bodies. Some even reject the label of transgender or transsexual for this reason; to themselves they are simply women, outside now as they always were inside.
For Bailey or anyone else to call someone with
amour de soi en femme
an autogynephile or even a transgender woman—rather than simply a woman—is at some level to interfere with her core sexual desire. Such naming also risks questioning her core
self-identity
in a way that calling the average gay man homosexual simply can’t. One really must understand this if one is going to understand why some trans women came after Bailey so hard for naming and describing autogynephilia. When they felt that Bailey was fundamentally threatening their selves and their social identities as women—well, it’s
because he was
. That’s what talking openly about autogynephilia necessarily does.
In a nutshell—and this is really indisputable—it was Bailey’s dangerous dissemination of this part of Blanchard’s work that led a prominent transgender woman named Lynn Conway to begin what became a war against Bailey from her base at the University of Michigan, where she was on the computer engineering faculty. As Conway must have understood, Blanchard’s scientific work, always written in rather dry prose and published in hard-to-access specialist journals, could never pose the threat of Bailey’s
The Man Who Would Be Queen
, with its intriguing scope, engaging prose, sex-positive tone, and compelling personalized portrayals. Bailey’s book constituted a serious innovation. It could well bring Blanchard’s taxonomy—including news of autogynephilia—to the masses and change the public perception of women like Conway.
And so, within days of publication of
The Man Who Would Be Queen
, Lynn Conway sent an urgent e-mail to a trans woman ally named Andrea James:
I just got an alert about J. Michael Bailey’s new book. It’s just been published and of all places it’s co-published by the National Academies Press, which gives it the apparent stamp of authority as “science.” . . . As you may know, Bailey is the psychologist who promotes the “two-type” theory of transsexualism. . . . Anyways—not that there is much we can do about this—but we should probably read his book sometime and be prepared to shoot down as best we can his weird characterizations of us all .
You’re probably wondering how I got that e-mail. The answer is that Conway developed what became an enormous Web site hosted by the University of Michigan for the purpose of taking down Bailey and his ideas. There she proudly and steadily recorded her efforts against Bailey,
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