Galileo's Middle Finger (12 page)

Nevertheless, if one read the book—something it seems few reporters on the controversy did—one would have quickly realized that it actually made perfect sense that the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) included
The Man Who Would Be Queen
as a finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/GenderQueer category. Although Conway’s site would claim that Bailey’s publicists had gotten the book nominated for that award,
Jim Marks
, then executive director of the LLF, later revealed that in fact the book “was added to the list [of nominees] by a member of the finalist committee and after the finalist committee had selected it, we went back to the publisher, who paid the nominating fee.” According to Marks, things turned ugly only when, immediately after the announcement of the finalists, Deirdre McCloskey contacted him to express her outrage.
McCloskey told Marks
the situation “would be like nominating
Mein Kampf
for a literary prize in Jewish studies. I think some apologies and explanations and embarrassment are in order.”
Marks wasn’t sure what to make of all this
:

While I was a little taken aback by the campaign of a university professor to relegate a book to a kind of Orwellian non-history, we might have considered taking administrative action and removing the book from the list if McCloskey’s view had been universally that of the transgender community. The LLF was in some senses an advocacy organization. Its stated mission was to advance LGBT rights through furthering LGBT literature. We would clearly have grounds for removing a book that was in fact hostile to the Foundation’s mission.

But
Marks found
that “McCloskey’s point of view, although widely shared, was not universally that of the transgender community. Among the torrent of e-mails we received, a minority came from transgender people who supported the book and urged us to keep it on the list.” Marks’s “main concern was maintaining the integrity of the nominating process.” He asked the finalist committee what to do; they revoted, and the vote came back in favor of keeping the book on the list.

A petition sprung up in protest, quickly reaching nearly fifteen hundred signatures. For her part, Conway encouraged her followers to go straight after the LLF committee members. She wrote on her site:

We thought you’d like to know who the gay men and lesbian feminists are who launched this attack on us. Following are the names, addresses, URL’s, and phone numbers of these people. We think that they should hear from you, so as to gain some comprehension of the scale of the pain they have inflicted on trans women throughout the world.

She added a note about lesbian feminist bookstores with a history “of welcoming only ‘womyn born womyn’”—a means of excluding trans women—and she “suggest[ed] that our investigators out there quietly gather evidence about any discriminatory policies employed by stores listed below, for
future publication on this site
.”

Meanwhile, under all this pressure, the LLF judges felt the need to vote one more time.
According to Marks
, on that round, one “member changed their vote and we withdrew the book from consideration.” For years afterward, Conway’s and James’s Web site continued to track Marks, eventually claiming he had been “ousted” over “mishandling of the Bailey matter,” something
Marks insisted was not true
.

The experiences of Kieltyka and Marks were hardly unique. Intimidation tactics flowed in every direction, with Andrea James showing a particular talent for this battle mode. She put up the page about Bailey sodomizing his kids and another page dedicated to making fun of his relationship with his girlfriend, suggesting
that Bailey was autogynephilic
. Soon anyone who said anything nice about the book became a featured evildoer at James’s site. A special circle of hell was reserved for Anne Lawrence, the transgender physician-researcher who dared to describe herself as autogynephilic and to promote Blanchard’s work. When in response to threatening e-mails from James, Lawrence refused to back off from support of Bailey and Blanchard, James mounted an extensive attack on Lawrence, making public an incident in which Lawrence had been accused of professional misconduct. James didn’t bother to tell visitors to her site that
Lawrence had been fully cleared
.

James even sent an e-mail message directly to all of Bailey’s departmental colleagues, while he was sitting chair, asking why they were allowing “someone suffering from what the DSM calls alcohol abuse and dependence” to lead the department. She told the Northwestern psychology faculty, “I’m sure some of you will continue to respond with self-righteous indignation or with fear of me and my message. For the rest of you, I hope this little rock tossed through your window
makes a real human connection.”
For her part, Conway called Joan Linsenmeier, whom she had found out was Bailey’s close friend at Northwestern. Linsenmeier later told me, “I don’t recall exactly what she said, but basically it was that some people with very negative feelings toward Mike knew where he lived, that this put him in danger, and that she thought I might encourage him to
consider moving
.”

Of course, most of what was going on remained completely invisible to the outside world. Most people didn’t read the book, they didn’t know the backstory, and Bailey and his colleagues didn’t generally make public the threats to which they were being subjected. (To do so would only have made them subject to more.) Instead, what people on the outside saw were tense news reports about formal charges being filed against Bailey: charges that he had been practicing psychology without a license, that he had been using transgender subjects in research without appropriate ethics oversight, that he had violated confidentiality rules, and that he had had sex with a transsexual research subject. Because Bailey had become worried enough about his job to retain a lawyer, and because the
lawyer told him to shut up
, the press could not even report what “he said” in response to what “she said.” Nothing makes you look guilty like “no comment.” As a result of all this, Bailey came across pretty clearly as an abuser, a trans-basher, and a sexual pervert. That was the Bailey I had pretty much expected to meet in Boystown.

 • • • 

A
S
I
CREATED
TIMELINES
out of what sources were telling me about the Bailey book controversy, I suddenly realized something jarring: Even amid the powerful disinformation and intimidation campaigns, there had actually been one reporter who
had
had the opportunity to learn and tell a story much closer to the truth near the start of it all. This was Robin Wilson at the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
As her “Dr. Sex” feature had revealed,
Wilson had personally witnessed
firsthand the warm relationships between Bailey and his trans women friends and book subjects out at the Circuit nightclub that evening in May 2003. She had herself reported that these women saw Bailey as “their savior.” She had spoken to Kieltyka, who—while upset over the label of autogynephile—had had a long and collaborative history with Bailey.

Nevertheless, starting just a few weeks after “Dr. Sex,” Wilson published in the
Chronicle
a series of
three terribly sober dispatches
about the complaints being filed against Bailey. Wilson wrote these scandal reports as if she had just come upon the scene with no previous insider knowledge and no insider connections to use to figure out the truth behind this “controversy.” When I realized the strange role Wilson had played, I tried asking her and her editor why they hadn’t used her before-and-after-scandal positioning to ask deep questions about why Bailey’s relationships appeared, at least in public accounts, to have suddenly changed with these women.
Wilson’s editor sent me back boilerplate
: “We stand by the accuracy, and fairness, of Robin’s reporting and are not inclined to revisit decisions Robin and her editors made here with regard to what to include or exclude from those stories in 2003.” But I was left obsessing about an
if:
If Wilson had used her special journalistic position as someone who was there just before the mushroom cloud, she might have seen—
right away
—what I saw when years later I charted the journey. What appeared to have happened between the generally happy times that were still evident at Circuit and the unhappy charges was that Conway had shown up at the scene of the alleged crimes, angry about Bailey’s promotion of Blanchard’s taxonomy.

Now, maybe Wilson would have concluded that Conway had just educated all these women into understanding they had been abused. But if she had taken this or any other theory of what had changed the scene so dramatically, and then
bothered to look into the actual charges,
as I was finally doing years later, she might have seen them fall apart one by one. And then she could have reported
that.
Was Wilson a good liberal simply afraid to look as though she was defending a straight, politically incorrect sex researcher against a group of supposedly downtrodden trans women? Had Conway and James scared the crap out of her, as they seemed to scare everybody else? Or was the explanation simpler? Was it just that trying to figure out what the hell was really going on would have taken too much time and other resources?

Well, such an unquestioning approach wasn’t good enough for me. The more I dug, the more I wanted to find out the truth about all of the charges made against Bailey. With the distance of several years, I had an advantage: Many sources that might have otherwise been covered up if someone like me had been doing an investigation were right out there in the open, including on Conway’s gigantic Web site. And I could ask people to talk to me—people who at the time of the controversy might have been too afraid. Not everybody agreed to talk to me on the record. From the start,
Conway refused, as did Juanita
, but ultimately the great majority of people I contacted responded. Bailey was willing to answer any question and open his records to me. Kieltyka was similarly forthcoming, although at first I was worried about even talking to her, given her record of filing complaints. I decided to use for her a system I then used for all oral interviews, to protect myself as well as my subjects: When we talked, I wrote down what I heard, but then gave back the source the notes to change however she or he wanted. Sources could add, delete, and append anything they wanted. Only what the person returned counted as on the record.

Boy, what I got on the record! The interviews for this project turned out to be almost as emotionally jarring as the interviews I had once done with intersex people, so passionate were my sources. Indeed, after almost eleven hours of interviews with Kieltyka, I felt about as sorry for her as I was coming to feel for Bailey. Not only did she feel used up and spit out by Bailey, but she felt the same about Conway and company. They had swept into Chicago after the book’s publication, encouraging her to file complaints against Bailey, only to later dump her. By the time I talked to her, she had come to a conspiracy theory in which Conway had actually been using
Bailey as a fall guy
in a much larger anti-LGBT scheme. I couldn’t really follow that complex worldview, but her specific answers to my straightforward factual questions helped fill gaps in the written record.

It became steadily clearer that what Bailey had done wrong was both sadder and much less scandalous than we had all been led to believe. What did Bailey do wrong? Well, in retrospect, it’s clear he should have let Kieltyka know that it would be almost impossible to ever convince him that she wasn’t autogynephilic. If her hope of changing his mind had been what had kept her collaborating with him, ultimately exposing her to criticism nationally—although I wasn’t convinced it was what kept her collaborating with him—then he should have let her know in no uncertain terms that he was very unlikely to ever change his mind about her identity. I also found myself wishing he had started working much earlier to protect Kieltyka’s identity, so that she could avoid people like Conway who might eventually go after her for
putting a human face on autogynephilia
.

That said, from everything I could find, it seemed pretty clear that no matter what Bailey said or did, Kieltyka would have kept presenting herself and the details of her sexual history all over the place, with her face and real name. She had outed herself long before his book. The more I thought about it, the more it appeared that not only was Bailey not guilty of outing her, but he also could have justifiably portrayed Kieltyka in his book using her
real
name while identifying her as autogynephilic if he had wished. There were enough highly detailed public self-representations by Kieltyka that he could have simply drawn from those. Was it personally obnoxious of Bailey to label his friend with a term she didn’t want? Certainly. But she had hardly been secretive about the details of her sexual history, and he had not hidden his belief that she was autogynephilic. Bailey’s position was like having a friend who was obviously a homosexual man—who openly dated and partnered with men—but who got upset if he heard someone refer to him as a gay man. I suppose one ought to try to observe anyone’s preference for self-labels, but doing so can feel like playing pointless games. I got why Bailey had very little patience for a situation in which all the identifiers are there but you’re not allowed to apply a category label that you (and many with the identity) don’t see as inaccurate or offensive.

In spite of the real backstory of generally warm collaboration and openness, Conway had made it look as though Bailey had dragged all these trans women into his book and outed them without their knowledge and consent. One of the ethics charges made formally to Northwestern
by three trans women
for whom Bailey had written recommendation letters involved the claim that Bailey had treated what he learned in the conversations leading up to those letters as research material for his book. This supposedly represented an intentional breach of confidentiality. Yet Bailey was able to show me that two of those three women were
not even in the book
. (None of the reporters relaying this charge did the math.) The third complainant? Juanita. Bailey denied that he used in his book what he had learned in the short interviews that went into Juanita’s recommendation letter. I had no way to verify the truth of his denial, but I
could
verify this: Juanita had told the Northwestern investigatory committee convened in response to her complaints that she had known Bailey was writing about her in his book and that she had
given him permission to do so
. Moreover, before Bailey ever submitted his book for publication, like Kieltyka, Juanita had chosen to repeatedly tell intimate details of her life history publicly, to the Northwestern reporter (remember: giving her real names and photos before and after transition). She’d done the same thing in the video filmed with her written consent for a human sexuality textbook. And she’d done the same thing in person in Bailey’s after-class presentations, where the audience ultimately added up to thousands. I was also able to confirm, from written documentation provided to me by Bailey, that Juanita had met with Bailey at a local coffee shop to help him write up her story for his book.