Galileo's Middle Finger (17 page)

A few hours later, when I walked up to the room where the session Ryan had organized would be, I found a legalistic note on the door, saying that anyone entering automatically gave Andrea James the right to videotape them and use the recording for her own purposes. I backed up, went over to the conference organizers’ stand, and asked them to come deal with that. One of the organizers came and took the note down. I then walked in, and saw not only Andrea James, but indeed Lynn Conway herself, standing behind the video camera ready to tape. And
who was at her side but Juanita
, she whom Conway had used to try to ruin Bailey on the sex charge.

Andrea James began the session by explaining that the note on the door really just meant that they would videotape the panelists for their own purposes. Uh huh. I decided I would say nothing during the session, afraid that anything I said would be clipped and twisted in an edited recording. The whole scene was maddening.
Panelists repeatedly defended
James’s online abuse of Bailey’s children, never explaining to the audience what James had actually suggested in conjunction with those photos—that Bailey might have sodomized his own children. They instead focused on the most outrageous lines of Bailey’s book, without any context—perhaps lest they let any novice grasp the real issue, autogynephilia? They never mentioned that trans women who had agreed with Bailey had been silenced by harassment and threats—including by one of the panelists now being given a spot here at a legitimate academic conference. Of course they didn’t delve into the falsity of the charges against Bailey or my refutation of them. What could they say? My findings were all documented.

Then of course there were predictable claims about
my
position: A non-queer person could never understand the reality of queer people. My work could silence trans women in the academy, women who allegedly lacked the privilege I allegedly had. One identity card after another was thrown down—which only made sense in a “feminist” room where you win simply by having the most identity cards. I found myself thinking that Women’s Studies is about as sophisticated a game as Go Fish.

Most maddening, one of the panelists actually had a few
interesting critiques of my work
. For example, she took me to task for not adequately exploring the ways in which Bailey deployed the socially powerful term
science
even while putting forth sometimes oversimplified accounts of identity. She complained that, in my write-up of the Bailey history, I did not accord transgender people the kind of humanizing narrative attention I had accorded intersex people in my earlier work. I found myself going crazy with frustration that I could not, in this audience, engage or even acknowledge interesting criticism, because of the taping by James and Conway, because of all the stupid politicking being allowed to happen in the name of feminism. And what kind of feminism?

During all this, one young woman seated next to me remarked to her friend that this Dreger woman sure is terrible. I leaned over and whispered to her that
I am
that Dreger woman and that I did not recognize the person the panelists were describing. She turned away as though she had just met an armed skinhead wanted for murder. I just sighed.

At the end, there was a little time left for Q&A. I turned around to see the first person called upon: a tall trans woman, sitting near the back of the room.
Here we go,
I thought,
more piling on.
I braced myself for the next blow. Instead, the woman stood up and said this:

[I am]
Rosa Lee Klaneski
, [from] Trinity College. I cite Alice Dreger’s academically rigorous work all the time in my own work. She doesn’t know who I am, but I know who she is. And I am just wondering—and I’m a transgender person myself—what gives any transgender person the right to abrogate someone else’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech just because they hold an unpopular minority view? In my opinion [regarding] the person that you are arguing against [meaning Bailey], I completely agree with you. Bunk. Ridiculous science. And should be classified as such. I got that. What gives us the right to censor it just because we don’t like it?

Stunned, I turned back to see how the panel would respond. Predictably, they argued that the panel didn’t constitute censorship. How was this panel censoring people like Bailey or me? But I thought,
come on.
The note on the door, the Web pages, the video camera, and what so many sex researchers had said to me: that no one in sex research will touch male-to-female transsexualism with a ten-foot pole anymore. Which must have been just what Conway meant to do. And there was Conway, “mentoring” Ryan and taking it all in.

Then suddenly the session was out of time, and it seemed pretty much over. I went to the back of the room to Rosa Lee Klaneski, and shook her hand.

“You’re right,” I said, holding back tears, “I don’t know who you are, but I would like to know you. Can I buy you a drink in the bar downstairs?” She answered with a smile that I could certainly buy her a cranberry juice with soda water and lime. At that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Andrea James go up to my friend April Herndon, my former graduate student who had also worked on ISNA’s staff during my last year. James had clearly been doing her research; she seemed to know just who April was and to know of her relationships to me. I’d been so careful not to sit with April, lest she get in their sights, but my decoy had not worked. James seemed to be trying to corner her into saying something politically incorrect. The camera must have surely been pointed our way. I pulled on April’s sleeve and told her to just walk away. Otherwise we’d all be on YouTube by evening, positioned as oppressors to all trans women.

Rosa, April, and I left the conference room and started to walk down toward the hotel bar with a fourth woman whom we knew from intersex work and who had insisted on coming with us. But as we made our way, James suddenly came up to me.

“
Alice, honey
,” she said to me, towering over me, “I’m not done with you. In fact, I haven’t even started with you.” She said she was still going to prove Bailey had lied in his book. “I’m going to ruin your career.”

In a split second, Rosa stepped between us, and calmly spoke as if to me, though clearly actually speaking to James. “Alice,” she said, “the legal definition of assault does not require that a person touch you. You can call the police right now and report assault.”

At that, James hastily stepped away.

We went down to the hotel bar. It was the middle of the day, and yet after arranging nonalcoholic drinks for the other three, I ordered a gin and tonic for myself, and then another. As the sedative washed over my brain, Rosa told us about herself, mentioning that she had a degree in women’s studies but was tired of the bullshit of the field. She was finishing her master’s degree in public policy now, writing about her own experience of trying to change the sex on her driver’s license without being forced into medical procedures she didn’t want. She had some radical ideas about how to harness capitalism to push for transgender rights. Enough of the liberal feminist and queer rights rhetoric; it was time to use the existing economic system and work through for-profit institutions to make the world safe for trans people. In the meantime, while she finished her master’s, Rosa was working in the pawn industry in Connecticut. I got the sense that the guys in the business had had to accept her as a transgender woman because they had enough business smarts to know they needed her.

Rosa told me that she was also an up-and-coming poker player and was working on a nutritional supplement designed to help players concentrate better. She slipped me a sample packet of her product across the table, and I put it in my bag, wondering if I should pop it now. I wanted to be able to focus—to remember this. For there Rosa sat, rattling on, just so funny and calm and kind and independent-minded and smart and brave.

When it came time to leave, Rosa said a warm good-bye and added, “Seriously, you let me know if you need anything.” With her positive reputation in the pawn business, she had, you know,
good connections
with guys who know how to handle little problems. “You just let me know if you need anything. A sympathetic ear. A little
protection.
” She paused. “A slightly used big-screen TV?” Her mischievous smile made me wonder if she was serious.

 • • • 

A
T THE
U
NIVERSITY OF
M
ISSOURI
,
after talking for hours with Craig Palmer, I went on to talk to the other interviewees I’d arranged to meet, but I found it hard to concentrate. I kept doing a really weird math: What’s worse, having your work denounced by an act of Congress or trying to help prevent rape only to be accused of fomenting it? What’s more terrifying, being charged with having sex with a research subject or getting a lesson in how to check for bombs wired to your car? And who is the real feminist, the one who reflexively sides with people who’ve been historically downtrodden or the one who does so only after checking the facts?

And then a reactionary calculus question emerged: Is there anything too dangerous to study? Should there be any limits? What if, in order to prove how important truth seeking is, we made a point of studying the most dangerous ideas imaginable? What if we even really studied
race and IQ
?

Yeah, apparently I was now getting drunk on the idea of absolute intellectual freedom. I mean, I could see that no good and much harm could come out of certain scientific pursuits. (Oh, like studying race and IQ.) And yet, I kept thinking: What if we became unafraid of all questions? Unbridled in our support of the investigation of “dangerous” ideas? What if we came together in the ivory towers, barricaded the doors, and
looked at the skies
?

Never before that trip to Columbia had I felt a burning sense of being an academic. Never before had the profession felt to me holy in the way it was beginning to feel now. I found myself becoming bizarrely sentimental about donning my PhD robe and hood, those leftover symbols of the monasteries from which universities had emerged. Those monks had been about a supernatural truth. We must be all about earthly truth. And our pursuit of the truth
would be
our pursuit of justice, our defense of democracy. We would not allow the DeLays of the world to stop us. We would not put up with the American Psychological Association and the National Women’s Studies Association kowtowing to identity politics. The identity that mattered to us would be our identity as academics, as truth seekers.

And of course we would not naively believe that any of us could find the truth alone. We must honestly assess each other’s work. This, I had long taught my students in history-of-science classes, was the genius of science: the ideal of peer review.
The light of many minds. Not coincidentally, this was also the genius of modern democracy, I suddenly realized in Missouri—the Show Me State. The Enlightenment brought us both science and democracy. The Founding Fathers had understood the usefulness of the scientific review model. The three-branched system of government, with its checks and balances, the jury system, a Supreme Court with multiple justices approved by multiple representatives—these institutions were meant to do just what the review process of a good journal is meant to do: Weed out the bad, leaving the good.

But could we do it? Could we manage it in an era of moneyed interests—defense contractors and drug companies and oil monopolies (and Conways) financially manipulating the systems in ways we couldn’t even see? Could we do it in an era when the Internet allowed people like James to create “truth” through clever marketing strategies? Could we take back an academy that had allowed itself to become so beholden to external funding, identity politics, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and conniving legislators?

As we had talked in his office, Craig Palmer had said of his experiences: “From all this, I’ve learned more about the human species and how it can do things like lynch mobs and genocide and stuff. I’m not sure I’m glad to have that knowledge. One of my colleagues asked if the experience had lowered my view of the media. And I said no, it’s lowered my view of the species.”

Yet as I sat in the Columbia airport in the predawn dark of Halloween 2008, waiting for my early morning flight home, I felt strangely hopeful. I meditated on the actions of one woman long ago, a woman whose name I didn’t even know: the
woman who had been Craig Palmer’s dean
in Colorado when all hell broke loose. Craig had been in a nontenure line, utterly vulnerable. With all that bad publicity, all the trouble with the threats of violence, it would have been easy for his university administrators to cut their losses by cutting Craig loose. It was not as if they weren’t getting letters calling for him to resign or be fired. And what had his dean done?
She had defended his academic freedom.

They called for the passengers on our flight. I went through the metal detector and out the door that led to the tarmac where our plane waited. In the earliest light of the day, I looked up to see a great big plane right next to our little one, and I stopped in stunned surprise. It was Obama’s campaign plane,
Change We Can Believe In
.

“Can I take a picture for my son?” I asked the Secret Service agent standing there.

“If you hurry,” he said, taking my suitcase and smiling broadly.

In four more days,
I thought to myself,
the people will peer-review.
And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as
American academics
, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make people understand the difference between a self-serving personal narrative and an empirical study that had undergone rigorous peer review. Teach people why they all should want to be like academics saying “show me” at every step of the way.