This page is part of Lynn Conway's
"Investigative report into the publication of
J. Michael Bailey's book on transsexualism
by the National Academies"
 
 
It's Fiction!
 
Bailey Admits to Anjelica Kieltyka
that he Fabricated the Key Final Scene in His Book
 
Copyright © 2003, by Lynn Conway and Anjelica Kieltyka
All rights reserved
 
 
Illustration by Anjelica Kieltyka, © 2003
 
 
 
Dateline: lynnconway.com, July 10, 2003
Lynn Conway, Investigative Journalist
Anjelica Kieltyka, Witness to the Events
 
 
After reading Bailey's book, and then stepping back and trying to grasp the overall intended message, many of us are reminded of the story of "Carl" spun by George A. Rekers several decades ago. That was the story of an effeminate boy who was "saved" from becoming transsexual by the interventions of a psychologist (Rekers; see Rekers' Gender Identity Disorder page).
 
That story became the basis for many religiously motivated efforts at aversion therapy and reparative therapy on effeminate boys, motivated by parents' horror that their boy might "turn into either a a gay man or, God forbid, a transsexual". Rekers is a fundamentalist Christian psychiatrist at the Medical School of the University of South Carolina. In Rekers' world effeminate boys can be turned into "normal men" by proper intervention.
 
The story of Danny in Bailey's book seems to closely parallel Rekers' story of "Carl". (Bailey p.24-26 refers to Rekers, but not to Rekers' young patient Carl). However, being researched and documented in the more liberal 1990's, Danny's story trends towards a different outcome than Carl's. Given Bailey's notion that actually there is something biologically inherently wrong with such children, Bailey doesn't try to turn them into normal men as would Rekers, but instead futures them as gay men. In this he follows the recommendations of his hero Ken Zucker (a close colleague of Ray Blanchard's in Toronto, Canada) who proposed intervention along these lines (Bailey, p. 28-30)
 
In the 1990's, parents of effeminate boys weren't so desperately fearful that their boys would turn into gay men as in earlier decades, because that would be sort of OK and nowadays they can explain THAT to their neighbors and friends. However, what still freaked out parents in the 90's was the thought that an effeminate son might become a TRANSSEXUAL and want a "sex change"!
 
Bailey's book appears designed to relieve, give hope to and help enlightened parents of our time cope with such children, and at the same time to ease society's fears that many such children will eventually become "sex changes".
 
Opening with the story of the effeminate boy named Danny, the book then moves on to relatively "compassionate" discussions about gay men and their lives. Linking childhood effeminacy with adult effeminate gayness, the book suggests that the natural future for boys like Danny is as a gay man - a future that is at least sort-of socially acceptable to many parents nowadays.
 
Then the book suddenly shifts to presenting a lurid, prurient, tabloid-like view of what can happen to some effeminate boys if they cling to the dream of becoming girls. It does this by telling anecdotal stories of how such boys first become drag queens, then hormonally modified she-males, and then, driven by an insatiable urges for even more male sex partners, go get a sex change and end up as transsexual prostitutes in the seamy side of town. The book also discusses the "other kind of transsexual" as heterosexual men who have a bizarre autosexual paraphilia surrounding cross-dressing, throwing out a warning to any parents of boys who are not particularly feminine but who are caught crossdressing to be sure to put a stop to that, lest that boy might want a sex change in order to do lurid things with "herself" someday too!
 
Now think about the young effeminate boy Danny from the point of view of parents who are ignorant about gender dysphoria. Bailey teaches these parents what happens to boys who want to become girls: According to Bailey they become sex-changed prostitutes with insatiable appetites for male customers. My goodness, what can parents do to prevent this awful fate for their son - a fate that seems worse than death to them - and besides, how would they ever explain it to their friends and neighbors?
 
Of course, Bailey is most dishonest in his portrayal of these girls' fates. He never reveals the wider story of the many, many transsexual transitioners who go on to success and happiness in their new lives, including in many cases finding life partners and marrying, as seen in the many stories linked-to from the "TS Successes" pages.
 
Bailey conveniently ignores all such successes, leaving concerned parents in the midst of a terrible dilemma based in their ignorance of likely outcomes in the unlikely event that their child does need to transition. Bailey then resolves this deliberately-created imaginary dilemma in his final observations of Danny's future trajectory, as documented in the Epilogue of his book.
 
Bailey observes in the Epilogue that, given the past proper intervention, he is now CERTAIN that Danny has finally gave up the fantasy of becoming a girl, and instead is on the narrow path of growing up to become a man - the GAY MAN that he is destined by nature to become - which of course is a more acceptable outcome to his frightened parents than becoming a "sex change". Bailey's "story of Danny" thus echoes Rekers "story of Carl" of decades ago, only updated for our more modern, liberal times.
 
In writing a book with this theme, Bailey most cleverly acquired the strong support of leading gay male psychologists during the late 90's - gay male psychologists such as Simon LeVay, who were still in the pre-modern stage of non-understanding of transgenderism then common among gay men. Many of these prominent gay psychologists identified as "Fourattists" in their general horror about what they thought were "gay boys" going and getting mutilated as "sex changes".
 
This viewpoint of trans girls, common among the thought-leadership in the gay male community in the 90's, was best articulated by the gay writer Jim Fouratt. Caught up in their worship of maleness, it seems that many of these gay men were set-off bigtime when straight folks, out of their own confusion of gayness and transness, asked them "If you love men, why don't you change sex and become a woman?" Here's a classic statement by Fouratt, which well conveys these gay men's weirdly misplaced paranoia about transsexualism:
 
"Modern medicine is once again trying to cure us of our desire for same sex love. Our gender variant gay and lesbian population is under intense pressure to deny their homosexuality and to take all physical, hormonal and emotional steps in order to be accepted into heterosexual society."
- Jim Fouratt
 
The gay male psychologist Simon LeVay in particular has been among Bailey's strongest of supporters. Although LeVay is merely an untenured instructor at Stanford whose research results on homosexuality have never been repeated, he is widely known as a writer of popular "science" books on homosexuality. A well-connected person, it was apparantly he who got the ear of the National Academies' leadership early in this controversy, convincing them that the trans community reaction to Bailey's book was merely a tempest in a teapot, and assuring them that Bailey's science was totally sound. Many of us tried to warn LeVay that Bailey's work was scientifically unsound and worse. However, perhaps blinded by his own misperceptions about trans women, he dismissed us and backed Bailey to the hilt: "Absolutely splendid" - Simon LeVay, quoted on the front cover of Bailey's book. (For more about LeVay and the larger scientific-ideological context, see this information from Joan Roughgarden.)
 
Therefore, Bailey's reported observations of Danny in the Epilogue, and his certainty that Danny's future is as a gay man, are perfectly in tune with the psycho-socio-ideological contexts in which the book finds its main support and likely markets. University science triumphs again - and rapid commercialization follows!
 
However, as you will discover in the revelations below, the "research observations" behind the ending to Danny's story in Bailey's book are a fabrication ! These key observations of the behavior of his most important research subject simply never happened. As Anjelica Kieltyka reports in her message below, Bailey admitted to her that:
 
THE ENDING TO DANNY'S STORY IS FICTION !
 
What can I say? This is all too fantastic! We leave it to others to decide the full meaning of this incredible admission of the fabrication of key research observations by Prof. J. Michael Bailey, and of the failure of so many "famous psychologists" to see through all of Bailey's nonsense.
 
At the very least, these revelations certainly raise many questions about what else in the book is fiction too!
 
 
Lynn Conway
Investigative journalist
July 10, 2003
 


Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 18:37:10 -0500
To: Lynn Conway
From: Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka
Subject: Danny vs. Juanita : Bailey's Choice

Dear Lynn,

I thought you might be interested in the last meeting I had with Mike Bailey at the beginning of June, and our final face to face conversation and the significance of it......

While his general dictum was still in force, i.e. that we would continue to "agree to disagree"......I still took it upon myself to try and get through to him, that he might still be corrigible....I did not want our ten year relationship to end without finding out how and why it got to this point.....The Mike Bailey I thought I knew was so different from the person who wrote this foul book, and I came to him that day with two questions that I needed answered. I did not yet understand the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nature of his personality, nor the extent of his duplicity.

My questions to him were of a more personal nature.....knowing what he knew about my artistic sensibility and both his and my close relationship with "Juanita" of the book......The first question was in regard to the cover......Knowing what he knew of my own beautiful and sensual photographs of transexual women....How I represented them, as well as myself in portraits strong and beautiful in body and soul.....in spirit and in flesh.......How could he, why would he use such a derisive and derogatory representation to symbolize all of us....especially the transexual women he personally knew and (I thought) cared about, especially "Juanita", the one closest to him other then myself.....

His answer or excuse was : ".....[He] did not choose the cover art.....He was not responsible for it"......Duh ! ! !.....This is his book....his ideas.....his opus.....and, I am certain, his right and position to reject it for something more benign and less malignant.......But no....This was out off his hands..! ! ? ? ? ! !....SO INCREDULOUS ! ! ....SO DISINGENUOUS ! ! !......

And so lame was this excuse, I actually felt pity for the poor bastard, so illegitimate and pathetic was his excuse, his book and now I was beginning to see.....HIS LIFE.....I had yet to discover how profoundly true this all was.......

Momentarily dissuaded by this oblique yet revealing answer....I soon recovered to ask about something else that was really troubling me about the ending to the book.....Not the part about "Cher" being a star.....I already knew that was true ! !.... I meant the ending to the story about Danny, the last scene depicted in the Epilogue, (p. 214 - the last paragraph) :

"....A few moments later, Danny said : 'Mummy, I need to go to the men's room.' I am certain that as he said that, he emphasized 'men's' and looked my way. And off he went, by himself. At that moment, I became as certain as I can be of Danny's future. ".......

 

What had me curious and uniquely troubled about Bailey's description of this final scene was his absolute certainty of Danny's future.....What had me perplexed was this presumptiveness and arrogance that he had displayed throughout his book and his life. ....Now he's playing God or one of his prophets, in telling Danny's future with such infallible foresight.....It was either that or he was some sort of charlatan......But Bailey is an honest and humble researcher......yet, how could he know with such certainty?

Let me re-phrase that....How could he know that Danny was going to turn out a gay man rather than a transexual woman like "Juanita"?.....His whole book was setting up this either/or proposition (leaving out a real third possible future which was Danny committing suicide!).....Either Danny was going to be almost exactly like "Juanita" ....A real possibility because both Bailey and I knew about "Juanita's" childhood and how it closely resembled Danny's, and that being the case how could Bailey not be as certain of that outcome....."How could he be so certain? is what I wanted to know.....

Asking him as I did in my best "National Enquirer" inquisitive tone of voice.....His reply......

"I made it up."...... he said.....

Excuse me, What did you say?.....

"I said I made up that final scene....it never happened "......he replied......

 

I felt like my computer brain did not compute or could not compute this "DATA", and so it just "crashed".....This was even more incredulous then the first answer and I was not even asking whether the scene was true or fabricated ! ! ....I was dumbfounded and he was appearing to be playing both characters in ...Dumb and Dumber.....maybe dumbest of all..... Of greater import, and with grave and serious consequences, he seemed to be playing both insidious and dangerous roles of quack and demi-god ....pretending to do research and creating the results that he predicted beforehand......

I never did get a straight answer from him about the "Danny" or "Juanita" future.....I think Bailey told me everything I ever wanted to know about sex...ology, with that remark....Specifically, his own sexology and his research methods.....and his own future....Go Figure ! ? ! ......

Your friend,

Anjelica, aka. "Cher" ....

 

P.S. Maybe Dr. Money was right all along about the guilty self-sabotaging and basically hanging themselves.....but will they be wearing a dress when they do?

Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. USA

 

 
 
 
If Bailey lied about this,
what else did he lie about?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This page is part of Lynn Conway's
"Investigative report into the publication of
J. Michael Bailey's book on transsexualism
by the National Academies"