- National Review/June 30, 2003
Lost in the Male
The man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending
and Transsexualism,
- by J. Michael Bailey (Joseph Henry, 256 pp., $24.95)
JOHN DERBYSHIRE
Sexual eccentricity raises difficult philosophical issues for
conservatives. On the one hand, we have a core belief in the
individual and his privacy. Since no form of activity is more
private than sex, our instinct is to let people follow their
inclinations, within obvious legal constraints against, for example,
the corruption of minors. Further, we all have friends whom we
know to be, or suspect of being, sexually odd in one way or another,
and we do not want to say or write things that would hurt their
feelings. On the other hand conservatives remember what much
of the rest of society has forgotten: that even the most private
of acts can have dire public consequences, as witness the epidemic
of bastardy that has ravaged the United States over the past
40 years, and also of course the AIDS plague, spread in this
country mainly by promiscuous homosexual buggery. Religion, to
which most non-Randian conservatives are at least well disposed,
adds another complicating factor, since the sacred texts of all
three major Western monotheistic faiths proscribe homosexuality
in unambiguous terms.
These matters are therefore at the very crux of conservative
thinking as it has developed in this country across the past
half-century. In order to tackle them, it is helpful to have
as much actual understanding of them as we can acquire. Michael
Bailey's new book is a very useful addition to that understanding.
The man Who Would Be Queen has a narrow and well-defined
scope: It is about feminine men. The author has also done research
on masculine women, but decided, he tell us in his preface, that
"masculine females deserve their own book." He has
further restricted his scope by presenting only the psychological
point of view, mostly ignoring the sociological. This is entirely
understandable, as Bailey is a psychologist - to be exact he
is associate professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
Within these chosen and declared boundaries, his book offers
a wealth of fascinating information, carefully gathered by (it
seem to me) a conscientious and trustworthy scientific observer.
The book is in three parts. The first deals with "gender
identity" in infants and young boys, the second with male
homosexuals, and the third with male transsexuals. These three
topics are bound together by the search for answers to common
questions: How do we know what sex we are? Why is it that our
conviction in this regard is sometimes at odds with our physical
bodies? How in such cases do we act on our conviction?
-
- Part One of the book, subtitled "The Boy Who Would Be
Princess, " drives a stake through the heart of the "nurturist"
theory of gender identity. How did I acquire my knowledge that
I am a man? The nurturist would answer: "By indoctrination
during childhood." Bailey refutes this both with statistics
and with striking individual case studies. The most moving of
the latter concerns a male baby whose lower parts were so deformed
- the condition is called "cloacal extrophy" - that
he was surgically changed to a female soon after birth, given
a girl's name, and raised as a girl. It didn't work. The boy
knew he was male, and at age seven dropped the female name and
role.
A few days later Jason said: "The day I became a boy was
the happiest day of my life." He has said that many times
since. He is the best player on his junior-high-school basketball
team, and he has a girl-friend.
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurrat: You may
drive out Nature with a pitchfork yet she still will hurry back.
All the phenomena Bailey writes about seem to be congenital,
not learned. "Congenital" is not the same as "genetic,"
of course. Events at the fetal stage of development are believed
to play some part. For example: On average, homosexual men have
more older brothers than heterosexuals. It seems more likely
that this is in some way a consequence of the mother's immune
system reacting to a succession of male fetuses.
Yet family-tree and identical-twin studies strongly suggest that
there is a genetic component too. This presents a major puzzle
for biologists, since it is hard to see how genes predisposing
against ordinary reproductive roles could persist against the
competitive pressures of natural selection. A number of ingenious
theories, with names like "the kind gay uncle hypothesis,
" have been proposed to explain the survival of such genes.
None of them is very convincing, though, and Bailey easily slaps
them down, leaving us with what he calls "an evolutionary
mystery."
In Part Two, Bailey's researches into male homosexuality yield
many interesting findings. He has discovered, for example, by
carefully controlled experiments, that there is certainly such
a thing as a "homosexual voice." Volunteer listeners
were able to distinguish male homosexuals by their voices alone,
at levels far above random chance. This finding, though indisputable,
is one of the few that have not yet been convincingly fitted
into the large general truth about homosexual men, which is that
they carry a mix of feminine and masculine traits. They are feminine
in their career and entertainment preferences, in their desire
for masculinity in their partners, and in a preference for the
receptive role in sexual intercourse. {That last one creates
obvious imbalances in their social lives, though Bailey says
that the "1000 bottoms looking for a top" complaint
frequently heard at homosexual bars is an exaggeration). On the
other hand they are typically masculine in wanting younger partners,
in their strong emphasis on physical attractiveness in partners,
in indifference to babies, and in their acceptance of casual
promiscuity.
Part Three is the book's most difficult section, because it deals
with the rarest and most puzzling aspect of male effeminacy:
According to Bailey, less than one man in 12,000 is transsexual,
a condition defined simply by "the desire to become a member
of the opposite sex," whether or not that desire has led
to actual surgery. The striking finding here is that there are
two quite distinct types of men who wish they were women, distinguished
by the choice of erotic object. On the one hand there are "homosexual
transsexuals," who desire masculine men-heterosexual men,
for preference-and who dress and behave like women to attract
them. And then there is the "autogynephilic transsexual,"
a man whose erotic attention is fixed on the idea of himself
as a woman.
The strangeness of this latter type is captured nicely in the
title of Bailey's chapter on them: "Men Trapped in Men's
Bodies." An autogynephile is essentially a heterosexual
man whose object of desire is an imaginary feminine creature
which happens to be himself… or herself, depending on how
you look at it. Such a person was usually not effeminate as a
child, has likely been married, and does not show typically homosexual
preferences in career or entertainment choices. The historian
and travel writer Jan (formerly James) Morris, to judge from
her autobiographical book Conundrum, belongs to this category.
The consummation of sexual desire presents obvious difficulties
for the autogynephile. Indeed, it is occasionally fatal: Around
100 American men die every year from "autoerotic asphyxia,"
which seems to arise from a conjunction of masochism and autogynephilia-the
two conditions are related in some way not well understood.
All of these types-girlish boys, male homosexuals, transsexuals
of both types-are of course human beings, who, like the rest
of us, must play the best game they can with the cards Nature
has dealt them. No decent person would wish to inflict on them
any more unhappiness than their mismatched bodies and psyches
have already burdened them with. At the same time, there is circumstantial
evidence that complete acceptance and equality for all sexual
orientations may have antisocial consequences, so that the obloquy
aimed at sexual variance by every society prior to our own may
have had some stronger foundation than mere blind prejudice.
Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality
of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established
institutions, especially male dominated ones. The courts of at
least two English kings offer support to this thesis, as does
the postwar British Secret Service, and more recently the Roman
Catholic priesthood. I should like to see some adventurous sociologist
research these outward aspects with as much diligence and humanity
as Michael Bailey has applied to his study of the inward ones.
-
- Derbyshire, J. "Lost in the Male." National
Review, June 30, 2003. pp. 51-52.
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