Blanchard, et al. In fact, it was her own university Web site that largely enabled me to figure out what she had really done and how Bailey had essentially been set up in an effort to shut him up about autogynephilia.
• • •
W HEN B AILEY’S BOOK emerged in 2003, I didn’t pay much attention to the mushroom cloud expanding over Evanston, Illinois, where Bailey was tenured in Northwestern’s Psychology Department. At that time, I was still working on intersex at Michigan State. But people I knew were increasingly trying to get my attention focused on it. Paul Vasey kept telling me he couldn’t believe what transgender critics were doing to Bailey and even to his children and girlfriend, and Lynn Conway herself was calling me to help go after Bailey. In fact, as I found out via Paul, Conway had simply added me to her Web site’s list of outraged allies, apparently assuming I would agree with her.
But in 2003 I waved both Vasey and Conway off. To Paul, I said I didn’t have it in me to feel sorry for a member of the sexology establishment, given what the bastards had done to intersex children. To Conway I was more polite. She was a major donor to ISNA, and we didn’t have a lot of those. Still, I told her to take my name off her list of Bailey opponents—I hadn’t even read the book—and I advised her to just ignore Bailey. Paying attention to him, I told her, will just help sell his book.
Conway and company didn’t give up, however. The mounting pile of national press reports on the scandal made that clear. Whereas at first the complaint was that Bailey’s book portrayed a wrong and offensive vision of men who seek sex changes, soon the complaints became less about his supposedly offensive theory and more about his allegedly unethical actions. The emerging charges looked bad: that Bailey had failed to get ethics board approval for studies of transgender research subjects as required by federal regulation; that he had violated confidentiality; that he had been practicing psychology without a license; and that he had slept with a trans woman while she was his research subject. The wildfire nature of the conflagration made me no more inclined to get near it.
In early 2006—three years after Mike Bailey published his book, just after I quit ISNA, and a few months into my Northwestern position—I made plans to meet Paul in Chicago. We had decided to edit together a special journal issue on the evolution of sex, so we were meeting to hash out the details. But Paul also wanted to use the trip to introduce me to Bailey. Paul had been telling me about him off and on for years, mostly to tell me about the hell he’d been going through at the hands of the transgender activists. Paul said that the whole experience had terrorized Bailey, that he was a different man than before the controversy.
By that time, at Paul’s request, I had read
The Man Who Would Be Queen
. Paul had always insisted that it was a very good book about the range of feminine males. After a careful read, I had responded to Paul that it
was
certainly very original and engaging—and much more explicitly supportive of gay and transgender rights than I had expected—but that it had some truly obnoxious parts in it. Granted, they amounted to just a few lines, but they grated. For example, there was the bit where Bailey claimed he could “know” much about the childhood and sexual orientation of a man he had just met, merely because the man was quite femme ; the line where Bailey called one entire group of trans women (those with
amour de soi en femme
) not particularly good-looking ; and that passage where he suggested that the other group (the transkids) might be especially well suited for sex work because after transition they supposedly possess the perfect combo of traits and interests. There was also one place where Bailey wrote this: “When [the transkid Kim] came into my laboratory, my initial impression was reconfirmed. She was
• • •
W HEN B AILEY’S BOOK emerged in 2003, I didn’t pay much attention to the mushroom cloud expanding over Evanston, Illinois, where Bailey was tenured in Northwestern’s Psychology Department. At that time, I was still working on intersex at Michigan State. But people I knew were increasingly trying to get my attention focused on it. Paul Vasey kept telling me he couldn’t believe what transgender critics were doing to Bailey and even to his children and girlfriend, and Lynn Conway herself was calling me to help go after Bailey. In fact, as I found out via Paul, Conway had simply added me to her Web site’s list of outraged allies, apparently assuming I would agree with her.
But in 2003 I waved both Vasey and Conway off. To Paul, I said I didn’t have it in me to feel sorry for a member of the sexology establishment, given what the bastards had done to intersex children. To Conway I was more polite. She was a major donor to ISNA, and we didn’t have a lot of those. Still, I told her to take my name off her list of Bailey opponents—I hadn’t even read the book—and I advised her to just ignore Bailey. Paying attention to him, I told her, will just help sell his book.
Conway and company didn’t give up, however. The mounting pile of national press reports on the scandal made that clear. Whereas at first the complaint was that Bailey’s book portrayed a wrong and offensive vision of men who seek sex changes, soon the complaints became less about his supposedly offensive theory and more about his allegedly unethical actions. The emerging charges looked bad: that Bailey had failed to get ethics board approval for studies of transgender research subjects as required by federal regulation; that he had violated confidentiality; that he had been practicing psychology without a license; and that he had slept with a trans woman while she was his research subject. The wildfire nature of the conflagration made me no more inclined to get near it.
In early 2006—three years after Mike Bailey published his book, just after I quit ISNA, and a few months into my Northwestern position—I made plans to meet Paul in Chicago. We had decided to edit together a special journal issue on the evolution of sex, so we were meeting to hash out the details. But Paul also wanted to use the trip to introduce me to Bailey. Paul had been telling me about him off and on for years, mostly to tell me about the hell he’d been going through at the hands of the transgender activists. Paul said that the whole experience had terrorized Bailey, that he was a different man than before the controversy.
By that time, at Paul’s request, I had read
The Man Who Would Be Queen
. Paul had always insisted that it was a very good book about the range of feminine males. After a careful read, I had responded to Paul that it
was
certainly very original and engaging—and much more explicitly supportive of gay and transgender rights than I had expected—but that it had some truly obnoxious parts in it. Granted, they amounted to just a few lines, but they grated. For example, there was the bit where Bailey claimed he could “know” much about the childhood and sexual orientation of a man he had just met, merely because the man was quite femme ; the line where Bailey called one entire group of trans women (those with
amour de soi en femme
) not particularly good-looking ; and that passage where he suggested that the other group (the transkids) might be especially well suited for sex work because after transition they supposedly possess the perfect combo of traits and interests. There was also one place where Bailey wrote this: “When [the transkid Kim] came into my laboratory, my initial impression was reconfirmed. She was
Similar Books
