Galileo's Middle Finger (10 page)

It was also obvious that Bailey was completely comfortable with the gay men all around him—including, I soon realized, one of my former students from Michigan State, who was at the next table with his boyfriend and who threw his arms around me and kissed me when he realized it was me yammering away right next to him. Unlike many straight men I knew, Bailey did not seem awkward around so many gay men, nor was he trying hard to prove that he was comfortable. He just
was
comfortable. I recalled that in his book he’d said that the problem isn’t that gay men are, on average, more feminine in their interests and behaviors than straight men; the problem is that we think that’s a
bad thing
and try to deny it rather than accepting it—accepting
them
. Femiphobia, he called it. (Others have called it sissyphobia, a term that I think better captures the problem.) Sitting there, I realized that maybe he was right about lack of acceptance being the problem, because he seemed perfectly at ease with the great variety of masculinity—heavy and light—around us that evening. He seemed like the future of straight people’s full acceptance of gay people.

At some point during that dinner, utterly disoriented, I asked Bailey point-blank if he had slept with a trans woman research subject—the most scandalous of all the charges made against him. He looked very tense and launched into what sounded like a canned legalistic response, saying that, even if he had (and he wasn’t saying whether he had), there is nothing automatically wrong with having sex with a research subject.

Say
what
?
I was intrigued. After dinner, we three walked over to Sidetrack, a gay bar a couple of doors down, and when Paul wandered off into the crowd for a few minutes, I told Bailey I was sorry they had gone after his kids. He just said, “Thank you,” and had another drink.

I couldn’t figure this guy out. How could someone so soft-spoken get into so much trouble? Why would someone so very polite and politically progressive write those few really obnoxious lines in his book? Could it be, perhaps, that he was not homophobic or transphobic (his book certainly wasn’t, nor did he seem to be) and not tone-
deaf
but merely
tone-
dumb
? Maybe he was someone who could
hear
the political music around him very well but lacked the ability to sing along in tune. His book
was
rather like a generally elegant solo performance punctuated by a number of teeth-grinding sour notes.

In the next couple of days, I poked around a bit. I looked up Bailey’s work and saw that most of it consisted of serious peer-reviewed scientific articles, quite different from his chatty and footnote-free book. I came across his old
twin studies
—controversial work that had showed that identical twins are more likely to have the same sexual orientation than are siblings who are not genetically identical, strongly suggesting that sexual orientation may sometimes be inborn. Suddenly I placed his name: I had actually taught my undergraduates criticisms of Bailey’s work on twins many years before. Back in those days, saying gay people might have been born that way, as Bailey was doing, was politically
un
popular among many gay-rights activists and among humanists in the academy, who were fighting any claims of unalterable or predestined “human nature.” Back then, too, Bailey had sounded proudly tone-dumb.

I dug a little more. Knowing that one of Bailey’s book’s critics had claimed Bailey had “abandoned” his wife and children, I took a close look at the personal information portion of his Web site. The Bailey clan appeared to be one of those post-divorce families that is still fundamentally a family. If Bailey was faking that, it was a convincing fake, but his critic’s claim that he had abandoned his wife and children had been very effective in skewing this wife and mother’s impression of him.

As I kept digging, I noticed something even more interesting: Many of the trans people whose scholarship and political work I had most admired in the last ten years had remained strangely silent in the Bailey controversy. They had apparently steered clear. As had I.

 • • • 

T
HAT WAS
F
EBRUARY
2006. In May I got an e-mail from Mike Bailey bemoaning the fact that Northwestern’s Rainbow Alliance, our university’s LGBT group, had invited Andrea James to speak. I confessed to Mike that I had never really sorted out the characters in his controversy and asked him to remind me who she was. He sent me a PDF documenting how, in 2003, Andrea James had downloaded pictures of Bailey’s two children, Kate and Drew, from Bailey’s Web site and put them up on her own site, www.tsroadmap.com. When the photos were taken, Kate was in elementary school; Drew, in junior high. James had blacked out the children’s eyes, making them look like pathology specimens, and asked in a caption below, whether Kate was “a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it.” The text went on to say that “there are two types of children in the Bailey household,” namely those “who have been sodomized by their father [
and those] who have not
.”

I was pretty stunned. Others had told me about this tasteless stunt, but I had never seen it for myself. It was obvious James was trying to parody Bailey’s book, but to what end? What kind of person undermines a rights movement by using this kind of creepy tactic?

So I promptly wrote
to the Northwestern Rainbow Alliance
, first apologizing that I hadn’t previously introduced myself. I explained that being a long-distance part-timer based on the Chicago med school campus meant I had almost no interaction with the Evanston campus, where the Rainbow Alliance (like Bailey) was housed. I offered to speak sometime about intersex, and then got to why I was writing, namely to register my protest at James being invited to the campus. I said I didn’t think she was good for a scholarly institution, nor did I think she was good for trans rights. They didn’t answer. Frustrated, on the day before Mother’s Day in 2006, I blogged about this on my personal Web site. Knowing a bit about James’s tactics, I called the essay, “
The Blog I Write in Fear
.”

Behold the floodgates opening. Now a few people from the Northwestern Rainbow Alliance did write back to me, to take issue with my criticism of their decision, and several trans women did the same. Meanwhile, fan mail arrived from a number of sex researchers and from Bailey’s daughter, Kate, now a college student. Some trans women wrote to tell me that no matter how Bailey was wronged, he deserved whatever he got. A couple more trans women wrote to me that Bailey was
right
about them all, and James knew it—that
that
was the problem.

But the most interesting mail, from my perspective, came from trans women who wrote to tell me that, though they weren’t thrilled with Bailey’s oversimplifications of their lives, they also had been harassed and intimidated by Andrea James for daring to speak anything other than the politically popular “I was always just a woman trapped in a man’s body” story. They thanked me for standing up to a woman they saw as a self-serving bully.

In what in retrospect seems like a stupid move, I also made a point of
writing to Andrea James
to tell her about my blog and to suggest that she tone down her rhetoric lest she undermine the trans-rights movement. Oh, she didn’t like that. She didn’t like that one bit. She wrote back a series of nasty e-mails, including one referring to my son as my “
precious womb turd
.” (Paul soon took to asking after “the precious womb turd” when he called.) She also showed up at my office when she was in Chicago, leaving her card in my mailbox. Then she e-mailed me, subject line “Mommy Knows Best,” saying, “Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seem quite affable, and not as fearful as you. . . . Bad move, Mommy.” She closed, “
We’ll chat in person soon
.” My dean suggested I talk to university counsel, who asked that I check in with the
university police
.

Now that I’d learned a little more about one of Bailey’s chief critics, I knew I had to investigate this controversy. Now I really wanted to know what was going on here.

 • • • 

I
T SOUNDS FUNNY
TO
SAY
,
because I had read Bailey’s book years before I met him, but it was only when I read it again alongside Blanchard’s papers, in order to start understanding the history of the controversy, that I truly became fluent in the division of male-to-female transsexuals into those who begin with homosexual desire and those who begin with
amour de soi en femme.
And as I did, the lives of trans women I knew personally suddenly started to make more sense. In fact, I now found one prominently featured section of Lynn Conway’s Web site—“
Photos of Lynn
”—sort of ironically funny. Here was this woman dedicating most of her life, it seemed, to attacking the concept of erotic arousal from the idea of being a woman as the basis for one form of male-to-female transsexualism, while simultaneously putting up—on
her university Web site
—multiple pictures of herself in a skimpy bikini, shot from various angles. In addition, there were pictures of Professor Conway in miniskirts, in a little black dress, and in her white bridal gown. As if that weren’t enough, Conway gave her measurements (41-32-41) and did not neglect to mention that her hair is light brown/auburn and her eyes are blue. Just your average computer engineering faculty Web site, nothing sexual, right?

But what astounded me even more than Conway’s Web pages was evidence that—before Conway had called them to arms—Conway’s two chief compatriots in the assault on Bailey’s reputation had pretty much acknowledged that they had been sexually aroused by the idea of being or becoming women. One of those two was Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished professor of economics and rhetoric at the University of Illinois, a woman who fell in as the third musketeer to Conway and James. As I started to figure out via my roughed out timelines and character files, at the height of the controversy, McCloskey had led an aggressive charge to deny Bailey’s book a prestigious LGBT literary award for which it
had been nominated
, and she had helped produce at least one of the
formal charges made against Bailey
.

Yet in
Crossing: A Memoir
, published in 1999, McCloskey had written the following about Donald, her pretransition self, in the third person:

When in 1994 he ran across
A Life in High Heels
, an autobiography by Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s group, the parts he read and reread and was sexually aroused by were about Woodlawn’s living successfully for months at a time as a woman, not her campiness when presenting as a gay genetic man in a dress. Donald’s preoccupation with gender crossing showed up in an ugly fact about the pornographic magazines he used. There are two kinds of cross-dressing magazines, those that portray the men in dresses with private parts showing and those that portray them hidden. He could never get aroused by the ones with private parts showing. His fantasy was of complete transformation, not a peek-a-boo, leering masculinity.
He wanted what he wanted
.

An erotic desire for transformation to womanhood? Hello. Reading this passage during my research, I recalled the time I had met McCloskey, well before Bailey’s book came out, when she and I were both invited to speak on a panel at her university. McCloskey is a very smart and witty speaker. As I recall, she began her presentation by startling the audience, saying, “These are my cheekbones.” She paused while we all sat amazed at her very feminine profile. And then she added, “I paid for them.” We laughed at her joke. McCloskey then went on to list other feminine parts she had purchased.

At one point in this anatomical audit, McCloskey talked about how she had had the bone of her forehead surgically shaved back to give her a more feminine head shape. As I remember it, as she explained this, she sort of closed her eyes and talked dreamily about how
thrilled
she had been, the first time she was in the shower and the water ran into her eyes,
as it does on a natal woman
. First off, I never knew this problem had a sex difference to it. But more important—huh? Why was she saying this as though she was recalling a magnificently sensual moment? Shampoo in your eyes as sexy experience?

And then there was this 1998 e-mail from another trans woman, a letter handed to me during my research by its original recipient, Anne Lawrence, a physician and sex researcher who self-identifies as an autogynephilic trans woman. Writing to praise Lawrence’s explication of autogynephilia, the correspondent first acknowledged that many transgender people reject categorization because:

A definition is inherently inclusive or exclusive, and there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t feel they belong in or out of a definition. I got body slammed by the usual suspects in 1996 for recommending a Blanchard book. Sure, he’s pretty much the Antichrist to the surgery-on-demand folks, and I’ve heard some horror stories about the institute he runs [the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, in Toronto] that justify the nickname “Jurassic Clarke.” However, I found many of his observations to be quite valid, even brilliant, especially in distinguishing early and late-transitioning TS [transsexual] patterns of thought and behavior.

The writer then went on to talk about herself:

I have noticed in most TSs, and in “surgery addicts” especially, a certain sort of self-loathing, a drive to efface every shred of masculinity.
While I readily admit to my own autogynephilia
, I would contend that my drives towards feminization seem to have a component pushing me from the opposite direction as well [i.e., away from masculinity].

The author of this 1998 letter praising Blanchard’s work and readily admitting her own autogynephilia? None other than Andrea James.

 • • • 

O
K, THIS WAS
FASCINATING
.
A prior admission to autogynephilia from James and what seemed to amount to the same from McCloskey—plus something very much like an ongoing tacit admission from Conway?—lying behind the attempts to bury Bailey. All that spoke to motivation on the part of Conway et al. Of course, it didn’t make them guilty of anything, really (except maybe self-deception). And it certainly didn’t exonerate Bailey.