Dear friends,
It has only been a few weeks since a small group of transwomen began sending out urgent web-alerts to our community about the implications of National Academy Press having published J.M. Bailey's book "The Man Who Would be Queen". This message is a report on progress since then, and an alert about an important open letter just sent to the Academy by Joan Roughgarden, Ph.D. of Stanford University.
Since the first alerts went out, many transpeople have collaborated in an extended webased activity to learn all we can about how this book came to be, to make a careful analysis of the ideas in it, and to warn people of the many dangers it presents to transpeople everywhere. We are especially interesting in learning how it came to be published by the National Academy Press. Given the apparent imprimatur of elite science in the U.S., the book is poised for wide adoption in undergraduate psychology course readings as an "introduction to transsexualism".
The impending danger of such wide adoption in mainstream college educational circles prompted many of us to take immediate action.In just this short time, we've accumulated an amazing amount of useful information via an expanding web-based collaborative process. Portions of that information are already displayed on Andrea James's B-B-L clearinghouse pages and my Bailey investigation pages, and at the many sites now cross-linked to and from them:
Many detailed readings of the text have led to the tabulation
of annotated weblink references to particular quotes and passages
that will be helpful in further analyses. These links are also
helping many people outside our initially small circle of postop
transwomen to begin to fully comprehend the strangeness of this
book - and to sense the underlying transphobia, homophobia and
misogyny within it.
A great deal has also been learned about J.M. Bailey himself,
his research methods and his research subjects (some of whom are
supplying detailed information on their encounters with JMB).
Additional detailed information is being compiled about Ray Blanchard
and The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry's gender program inj Toronto,
Canada over the years, and about the emergence of the theory of
"autogynephilia" at that clinic - in what appears to
be a co-evolution of that theory within a self-selecting stream
of male fetishistic research subjects. Former Clarke subjects
are also now providing information for our study of the development
of the autogynephilia theory.
We have also confirmed by direct quotes and by triangulating across many of the writings of Bailey and Blanchard that they do not admit to the possibility of the existence of gender dysphoria, or gender identity disorder (GID), and thus they consider all transsexual women to actually be males - whether postop or not. While they "politely use proper pronouns in public", we find that Bailey calls transwomen "transsexual men". Bailey cannot conceive of an apparently male person having a female gender identity - and "thus it cannot exist" (i.e., GID), at least according to Bailey.
Therefore, we have confirmed that Bailey presents nothing more than the old social myth about transsexual women "actually being extremely gay men", combined with a rehash of Blanchard's outdated and generally unaccepted "theory of autogynephilia" to explain "all the rest of them", i.e., those who in Bailey's terms don't pass well enough and aren't sexually provocative enough by his standards (to sexually arouse him?).
| "There is no way to say this as sensitively as I would prefer, so I will just go ahead. Most homosexual transsexuals are much better looking than most autogynephilic transsexuals." (p 180) Why? "Homosexual transsexuals... want to attract men, and they get constant feedback (in the form of propositions from men...) about how they are doing. This allows them to hone their presentations faster than the autogynephilic transsexual, who has spent most of her femme life looking at a mirror by herself." |
The demonization of "all the rest of the transsexuals" who don't pass well, and are thus diagnosed by Bailey (without even knowing them) as "autogynephiles" is then extended in passages like this one:
| "Cross-dressing has also been linked to sexual sadism - although most autogynephiles are not sexual sadists, they are more likely to be sadists compared with men who are not autogynephilic." (p. 171-172). |
Hmm. It would seem that Bailey must still be having nightmares from viewings of Alfred Hitchcock's horror movie Psycho. The sad thing is that Bailey's book caricatures and demonizes transwomen in much the same way that Psycho did regarding the harmless pasttime of crossdressing - and many crossdressers are still trying to live down the images conveyed in that old movie classic, even all these many years later.
We also have released two reports of recent lectures given by Bailey at Stanford University and Emory University, lectures which demonstrate his lack of academic rigor and his deliberate and provocative caricaturing of trans women and indeed all GLBT people.
By showing the sensationalist atmosphere and overall strangeness of his "lecture tour", these reports should begin to cast doubts in the minds of even the strongest a-priori supporters of the academic quality of Bailey's work:
In the report by Joan Roughgarden, Ph.D. on Bailey's Stanford lecture, where 10 faculty members and 100 students laughed and jeered at the images of transwomen and gay men that Bailey presented, we learn that:
|
- - - Bailey went on to ask the audience "what was a woman trapped in a man's body" and someone shouted out "a transsexual" which led Bailey to assert that there are two subtypes of transsexuals, those who are "really" homosexual males, and another type he wouldn't disclose publicly because of being too controversial, but would disclose privately. - - - - - - The transgendered woman was described as "an extremely feminine gay man who decided to become a woman." Then bar graphs were presented (without error bars) purporting to show that gay men and straight men prefer "casual sex" more than straight women, and straight women more than lesbian women. The transgendered woman was claimed (though no data given) to be as sexually active in casual sex as a straight man or gay man, and for this reason had to be considered a gay man "himself." - - - |
As indicated above, Joan has just written an open letter of 5-05-03 to the Presidents of the NAS and IOM, in response to Academy publication of Bailey's book and Bailey's behavior at Stanford (more info below).
Then in the report by Saralyn Chestnut, Ph.D. on Bailey's talk at Emory University, we learn that:
|
- - He made it clear right away that he is heterosexual, as if that were relevant to his talk. - - - I found him to be arrogant, unprofessional (he smelled of alcohol at 4:00 in the afternoon) and absolutely boastful about how "scandalous" and "outrageous" his book is, as if that were more important than academic rigor. I've never heard an academic proudly use words like that to describe his/her work. - - - I argued with him on points that I know something about, and at one point he admitted that much of his data are "anecdotal," but then went on to say that anecdotal evidence is as rigorous as data from controlled studies(!!). - - - - - - He also acknowledged that his research subjects were not randomly chosen--can't remember exactly how he recruited them, but I remember being amazed that he would claim to have arrived at valid conclusions about anything. In fact, his book has virtually no footnotes or bibliography, and does not give any data; it consists mainly of stories about individuals and summaries of studies he and other people have done. - - - |
During the coming months, as hundreds of similarly strange quotes and passages in the book become known and gossiped about, and as Bailey's bizarre behavior in his lectures become widely known, we suspect that many eyebrows will be raised and anger will surface far beyond the small band of transwomen who raised this alert, and even far beyond the GLBT community.
Meanwhile, within the trans community another sad tragedy is being acted out. Over recent years, a small stream of transwomen have transitioned under the care of The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and/or one of a small set of gender counselors and psychiatrists who adhere to Blanchard and Bailey's now outdated non-GID view of transsexualism. Many of these transitioners have adopted the label "autogynephile" when assigned to them as explaining their transsexualism, even though they are not the extreme, classic fetishistic cases that Blanchard based his theory upon. Many of those transitioners have since internalized the AG label as a gender identity - and also as their way to be thought of as "truly transsexual" - all the while struggling without much success to understand what this label "really means".
Many of these AG-identified transwomen are now caught in the awful position of having to either (i) defend Bailey to the bitter end, in spite of the increasingly obvious impossibility of a successful defense, or, (ii) let go of the AG label they have been clinging to as big part of their personal transsexual identity for so long now. This has led to near hysteria and e-mail flame wars in some trans circles and is further evidence of the terrible harm that can be done by bogus science being passed off as fact, and then being used to treat and "label" patients who fall under its spell.
The clear and immediate danger to GLBT people in the larger world is the introduction of a clearly transphobic, homophobic, misogynist "science" book into mainstream undergraduate psychology course reading lists without proper vetting. It is right now slipping through that crack and into adoption as "the definitive introduction to transsexualism" into those mainstream courses next fall due to its appearance under the imprimatur of the National Academies and it's heavy promotion by Bailey in his sensationalist book tour.
I've been posting an overview of the unfolding situation on the investigative report website. That site is my own effort at "sense-making", as I try to figure out how this book happened and then got published by the Academy. My site began less than two weeks ago as a very rough set of brainstorming notes with an invitation to push back ideas and information so as to better illuminate the situation. The development of the site is closely coordinated with others who are constructing similar sites, such as Andrea's clearinghouse:
As a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, I'm trying hard to make sense of the situation and to rapidly share my growing concerns within the Academies. In addition to my concerns about what this publication is doing to transwomen, is a growing concern about what it ultimately may do to the reputation of the Academy itself.
Andrea, Joan, Becky, myself and many other trans women and trans men have collaborated to develop this early response to Baileyism. Many folks dove deeply into Bailey's book and helped us all tease out what the heck is going on in there and in his mind too. Many site-readers caught onto this rough and tumble process - and instead of flaming about what they were seeing emerging on-line, joined in and made wonderful contributions to the expanding investigation.
Of particular value was the keen insight submitted early on by "E", a key participant in our brainstorming sessions: "Could Bailey merely be seeing a distinction between those of us who pass, and those who don't?", she asked.
Using that concept as a starting hypothesis, it became ever clearer upon reading, rereading and triangulating across Bailey's work that the diagnostic distinction being made between "type 1: H" and "type 2: AG" transsexual women was simply one of whether they passed and were sexually attractive to Bailey, or not.
When Bailey sees beautiful trans women who were once boys, he immediately proclaims them to be homosexual men. When he sees non-passables, they are proclaimed to be AG. This is a theme running all through Bailey's and Blanchard's work. It is a kind of "body phrenology" in which someone's appearance predicts which of the two types of "male sexual deviant" they are.
In a bit of my own "pop psychology", I'm beginning to hypothesize that what we are witnessing in these men (Blanchard and Bailey) is their own deep inner turmoil as they confront the fact that they are intensely sexually attracted to those "beautiful women who used to be boys". They can dismiss all the AG's, since they aren't attracted to them; thus there is no cognitive dissonance. The AG's can be simply viewed and explained as male fetishists and that is that.
But the "beautiful transsexuals" still remain, as does the cognitive dissonance in Bailey's and Blanchard's minds. Beautiful transsexual women appear to be hauntingly fascinating to these men. It seems that in order to eliminate their fascination with and arousal by "these people", they must find a way to "turn them back into men". Which they do quite easily by calling them "homosexual men".
What mental disturbance in the Bailey's mind led up to this strange book we'll probably never know - and it doesn't really matter. Many of us now clearly see it for what it us, and have no qualms calling it for what it is: junk science, and sexist propagandist junk science at that. It's a book that caricatures and stigmatizes trans women in the most vicious of ways, and uses us as the lightning rod for caricaturing and stigmatizing all GLBT people and most women too.
However, by being published by the National Academy this book assigns credibility to the book was beyond what it deserves. Therefore, this book will add fuel to the fire already lit by conservative anti-GLBT political forces in the U.S. These forces are alarmed at the recent advances in adding "gender identity and expression" to the human rights and EO protections in many large cities.
In 2002 alone, New York City, Philadelphia, Dallas, Boston and Chicago were among many U.S. cities that added such protections into their legal codes:
The crude, rude, ignorant pushback against these recent stunning successes of the trans-rights movement is coming into focus as we hear a major late-night talk-show host (Jay Leno) utter a horrific joke about a postop transwomen who had recently been honored with a major award. This appalling joke, heard by many millions of viewers, illustrates how wide open the tolerance still is for caricaturing and stigmatization of trans people in the United States - and how few non-trans people dare come openly to our defense:
The Academy publication of the Bailey book places that book front and center in this now hostile atmosphere. It places it into the hands of those who want to defeat the advancement of human rights for trans people in the U.S. These anti's will now most certainly be encouraged by this book to think that what they are doing is "scientifically sound". Such media in our culture will further underpin the confidence of the Jay Leno-like comedians out there - people who sense that they can openly turn an entire class of people into a "big joke", and expect to be publicly applauded for doing so.
Those of you who are concerned about these events, please follow the web pages of Andrea James, Becky Allison, myself, and those of many others in our now spreading collaboration of trans people fighting against Baileyism. Follow the action and then join in and make your own voices known.
In an important development made public today, Joan Roughgarden, Ph.D., Professor of Biology at Stanford University has made her voice known - in an open letter to the Presidents of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine (the two Academies directly concerned):
Read Joan's letter carefully. If you are trans, this is the time for you to write a letter too. You can help by educating people about the realities of trans lives and trans people. This is the very best way to defeat the Baileyan stereotypes.
Make your voices heard within the Academy too. We especially call upon all trans people in academe, the research community and the high-tech community to begin writing to the Academy leadership - tell them your stories, and show them you are not a Baileyan stereotype. For Academy leader's e-mail addresses, see: http://www.nas.edu/president/. If at all possible, attach your pictures to those letters and e-mails if at all possible, so that they see you as real human beings instead of imagining a Baileyan caricature.
Please tell your stories in enough detail so as to break the Baileyan stereotype. We need to be seen for all our wonderful diversity, and not allow us to be dismissed as merely "type 1" or "type 2" of sexual deviant. Tell them about your life, your career and your loved ones.
We realize that the vast majority of trans people live anonymously in stealth, and even those who are not stealth may be very fearful of writing such detailed letters about their stories - fearful about what it might mean for your careers and even your personal safety and that of your loved ones should you be outed somehow. However, if you can possibly do this, perhaps under "confidential" labels, and/or by using first names only, we would greatly appreciate your making your voice heard.
Then ask the Academies' leaders why this book was published by the Academy Press, a book that is so damaging to the lives and hopes of trans people everywhere. Finally ask them, "What are you going to do to correct this injustice being done to us under the imprimatur of the Academies?"
All the best,
Lynn
Ms. Lynn Conway
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Emerita
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2110
Member, National Academy of Engineering
http://www.lynnconway.com