Galileo's Middle Finger (9 page)

The de-emphasis of sexuality among trans advocates also occurred because some of the sexologists and clinicians who had acted as
gatekeepers for sex reassignment
had for many years maintained the heterosexist idea that the transkids like Juanita were the only good candidates for sex reassignment. The transkids were naturally pretty femme and could be counted on to remain stably attracted to men, so they passed easily as straight women with no massive disruption of the heterosexual order. Meanwhile, many applicants for reassignment who showed any hint of
amour de soi en femme
—the would-be Chers—found they had to lie about their orientations and histories to get what they needed. Otherwise some clinicians were reluctant to let them get the hormones and surgeries they sought.
In 1969, one clinician
had indicated that a
single instance
of arousal by cross-dressing should eliminate a man from candidacy for sex-reassignment surgery.

Indeed, a few retrograde clinicians, like
Paul McHugh
, a psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, still actively use the idea that male-to-female transgender is really about perverted sexuality and mental illness to argue against access to sex-transitional hormones and surgeries. McHugh and his ilk ignore the fact that well-screened trans women are better off after transition, as if their well-being and happiness are utterly irrelevant. McHugh (whom
Bailey actually criticizes in his book
) has likened sex reassignment to doing
liposuction on anorexics
, apparently not noticing that, um, anorexia
kills people
while sex reassignment for adults
saves lives.
All this has contributed to the mainstream trans community’s feeling that it makes more sense to emphasize issues of gender identity rather than issues of sexuality. After all, under any reasonable understanding of human rights, one’s sex life ought to be one’s own business so long as one isn’t hurting anyone else.

It’s also worth mentioning, given how often cultural sex politics play out in universities, that academic feminists have always seemed a lot more supportive of trans
gender
than tran
ssexuality
—that is, when they’ve been supportive at all. The history of feminism and trans issues has been fraught with tension, especially since feminist Janice Raymond’s 1979 book,
The Transsexual Empire
, which accused trans women of actively undermining the work of “real” feminists by supposedly giving in to the heterosexist patriarchy by simply switching over from stereotypical male to stereotypical female. Raymond even claimed, “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact,
appropriating this body for themselves
.” Some feminist groups, like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, still shun transgender women, admitting only “womyn born womyn.” (So much for Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that women are not born, but made.)

Add to
that
the fact that, in many places, discrimination against trans people has been perfectly legal in housing, employment, even schooling. Then add the history of police refusing to investigate (or even participating in) gay-bashings and murders of trans people, not to mention emergency workers refusing to treat trans people with life-threatening injuries, and you get a group understandably vigilant about possible
violations of their rights
.

In short, there is always a lot at stake politically and socially when you’re talking about transgender. And yet, while some of Bailey’s best friends really were gay men and trans women, in his clueless privileged way, he didn’t worry about his work’s political implications for sexual minorities. He worried only about what’s
right
scientifically, and he decided that Blanchard’s taxonomy was right about the salience of sexual orientation to male-to-female transsexuality. Bailey gave quite sympathetic portrayals of all the trans women in his book, including Juanita and Cher, and he firmly concluded that the ultimate happiness of individual transgender people is what matters most, even if transitions leave families or communities unhappy. But Bailey made the mistake of thinking that openly accepting and promoting the truth about people’s identities would be understood as the same as accepting them and helping them, as he felt he was. Where identities as stigmatized as these are concerned, it just isn’t that simple. The shame and derision accorded trans women like Juanita and Cher doesn’t disappear just because a few scientists may be
personally
fine with the idea that men might become women primarily because of reasons of sexuality, not “trapped” gender identity. As I came to learn, Bailey thought sexuality was a plenty good reason for lots of actions. But the trans women who attacked Bailey for his book understood that the world would probably not agree.

And they weren’t interested in finding out. They wanted the whole business of Blanchard’s taxonomic division shot down. Transsexuality should appear only as the public could stomach it, as one simple story of gender, a tale of “true” females tragically born into male bodies, rescued and made whole by medical and surgical sex reassignment. And there should be absolutely no mention of autogynephilia or any other sexual desires that might make trans women look to the sexually sheltered like the perverts they were historically assumed to be.

To understand the vehemence of the backlash against Bailey’s book, you also have to understand one more thing. There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: Most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labeled. When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name. The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of
really
becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman. At least in fantasy, the typical autogynephile erotically desires a complete identity transformation—
to be a woman
, not to be a transsexual. So when the autogynephilic psychiatrist Richard/Alice Novic talks about her boyfriend stimulating her genitals, she
refers to her “clitoris
,” although anatomically what she has is a penis. The erotic fantasy is to really be a woman. Indeed, according to a vision of transsexualism common among those transitioning from lives as privileged straight men to trans women, sex reassignment procedures are restorative rather than transformative, because the medical interventions “fix” what some call the “birth defect” in their natal bodies. Some even reject the label of transgender or transsexual for this reason; to themselves they are simply women, outside now as they always were inside.

For Bailey or anyone else to call someone with
amour de soi en femme
an autogynephile or even a transgender woman—rather than simply a woman—is at some level to interfere with her core sexual desire. Such naming also risks questioning her core
self-identity
in a way that calling the average gay man homosexual simply can’t. One really must understand this if one is going to understand why some trans women came after Bailey so hard for naming and describing autogynephilia. When they felt that Bailey was fundamentally threatening their selves and their social identities as women—well, it’s
because he was
. That’s what talking openly about autogynephilia necessarily does.

In a nutshell—and this is really indisputable—it was Bailey’s dangerous dissemination of this part of Blanchard’s work that led a prominent transgender woman named Lynn Conway to begin what became a war against Bailey from her base at the University of Michigan, where she was on the computer engineering faculty. As Conway must have understood, Blanchard’s scientific work, always written in rather dry prose and published in hard-to-access specialist journals, could never pose the threat of Bailey’s
The Man Who Would Be Queen
, with its intriguing scope, engaging prose, sex-positive tone, and compelling personalized portrayals. Bailey’s book constituted a serious innovation. It could well bring Blanchard’s taxonomy—including news of autogynephilia—to the masses and change the public perception of women like Conway.

And so, within days of publication of
The Man Who Would Be Queen
, Lynn Conway sent an urgent e-mail to a trans woman ally named Andrea James:

I just got an alert about J. Michael Bailey’s new book. It’s just been published and of all places it’s co-published by the National Academies Press, which gives it the apparent stamp of authority as “science.” . . . As you may know, Bailey is the psychologist who promotes the “two-type” theory of transsexualism. . . . Anyways—not that there is much we can do about this—but we should probably read his book sometime and be prepared to shoot down as best we can his
weird characterizations of us all
.

You’re probably wondering how I got that e-mail. The answer is that Conway developed what became an enormous Web site hosted by the University of Michigan for the purpose of taking down Bailey and his ideas. There she proudly and steadily recorded her efforts against Bailey, Blanchard, et al. In fact, it was her own university Web site that largely enabled me to figure out what she had really done and how Bailey had essentially been set up in an effort to shut him up about autogynephilia.

 • • • 

W
HEN
B
AILEY’S BOOK
emerged in 2003, I didn’t pay much attention to the mushroom cloud expanding over Evanston, Illinois, where Bailey was tenured in Northwestern’s Psychology Department. At that time, I was still working on intersex at Michigan State. But people I knew were increasingly trying to get my attention focused on it. Paul Vasey kept telling me he couldn’t believe what transgender critics were doing to Bailey and even to his children and girlfriend, and Lynn Conway herself was calling me to help go after Bailey. In fact, as I found out via Paul, Conway had simply added me to her Web site’s list of outraged allies, apparently assuming I would agree with her.

But in 2003 I waved both Vasey and Conway off. To Paul, I said I didn’t have it in me to feel sorry for a member of the sexology establishment, given what the bastards had done to intersex children. To Conway I was more polite. She was a major donor to ISNA, and we didn’t have a lot of those. Still, I told her to take my name off her list of Bailey opponents—I hadn’t even read the book—and I advised her to just ignore Bailey. Paying attention to him, I told her, will just help sell his book.

Conway and company didn’t give up, however. The mounting pile of national press reports on the scandal made that clear. Whereas at first the complaint was that Bailey’s book portrayed a wrong and offensive vision of men who seek sex changes, soon the complaints became less about his supposedly offensive theory and more about his allegedly unethical actions. The emerging charges looked bad: that Bailey had failed to get ethics board approval for studies of transgender research subjects as required by federal regulation; that he had violated confidentiality; that he had been practicing psychology without a license; and that he had slept with a trans woman while she was his research subject. The wildfire nature of the conflagration made me no more inclined to get near it.

In early 2006—three years after Mike Bailey published his book, just after I quit ISNA, and a few months into my Northwestern position—I made plans to meet Paul in Chicago. We had decided to edit together a special journal issue on the evolution of sex, so we were meeting to hash out the details. But Paul also wanted to use the trip to introduce me to Bailey. Paul had been telling me about him off and on for years, mostly to tell me about the hell he’d been going through at the hands of the transgender activists. Paul said that the whole experience had terrorized Bailey, that he was a different man than before the controversy.

By that time, at Paul’s request, I had read
The Man Who Would Be Queen
. Paul had always insisted that it was a very good book about the range of feminine males. After a careful read, I had responded to Paul that it
was
certainly very original and engaging—and much more explicitly supportive of gay and transgender rights than I had expected—but that it had some truly obnoxious parts in it. Granted, they amounted to just a few lines, but they grated. For example, there was the bit where Bailey claimed he could “know” much about the childhood and sexual orientation of a man he had just met, merely because the
man was quite femme
; the line where Bailey called one entire group of trans women (those with
amour de soi en femme
)
not particularly good-looking
; and that passage where he suggested that the other group (the transkids) might be especially
well suited for sex work
because after transition they supposedly possess the perfect combo of traits and interests. There was also one place where Bailey wrote this: “When [the transkid Kim] came into my laboratory, my initial impression was reconfirmed. She was stunning. (Afterward my avowedly heterosexual male research assistant told me he would gladly have had sex with her, even knowing that
Kim still possessed a penis
.)” I got that in this passage Bailey was trying to convince people to get over their knee-jerk transphobia—but
honestly
, calculating a trans woman’s attractiveness using this particular metric seemed a bit much for a book by a scientist. Then there was the dreadful cover photo. I didn’t know if the nasty things people had been saying online and to reporters about Bailey were true. But I knew it
was
true that the book read as if written from a place of heterosexual white male privilege even though it was surprisingly saturated with genuine affection, sympathy, and unabashed support for femme boys, gay men, drag queens, and transgender women.

In advance of meeting in Chicago, with my tense approval, Paul set up dinner for the three of us in Boystown, just a few blocks from Bailey’s home. Over appetizers and then dinner, in spite of Paul’s attempts to get us to warm up, Bailey and I treated each other with cool suspicion. Yet it quickly became obvious to me that Bailey had great affection for Paul, and vice versa, and I just couldn’t figure out what to make of this. Paul was generally a good judge of people. Was Bailey like one of those characters in a novel who is nothing like his public reputation?