The Bailey Controversy

Dear Professor Roberts:

I imagine you are not longer open to persuasion on the Bailey/Dreger issue, having written yourself on it in no uncertain terms after reading Dr. Dreger's article and especially Mr. Carey's piece in the Times. People are like that, I know. They swallow a line hastily acquired — in this case the Bailey = Galileo, "transsexual activists" (e.g. Barres, Roughgarden, McCloskey, Conway, and other distinguished scientists) = The Inquisition — and then won't listen any more. It's one of the main supports for the culture of yelling we seem to have developed in the United States over the past couple of decades.

But in case you are more careful and thoughtful than your blog suggests, I attach a couple of attempts to persuade you that you've got the story wrong. Dreger is wrong, and what's more important in the long run a theory based on ignoring most of the scientific evidence, and appealing instead to the sort of prejudices about queers you praise in your piece, is wrong.

Dear Professor Roberts:

I do not want a "reply." The world doesn't need smart-aleck replies. I want you to read and think, and to consider with proper self-criticism what you have done, giving weight to your doubts as much as to your prejudices.

Dear Professor Roberts:

You are not listening, which I rather expected you would not. You are satisfied with debating points rather than trying to get to the scientific truth. Is this your modus operandi, or are you for some reason wedded off-stage to Bailey behaviorism, say, or transphobia? I really would like to know where your indignant certitude about things you know practically nothing about is coming from.

"The big issue" for you is free speech. In what way have I or anyone else in this debate abridged anyone's free speech? We aren't the government. It's just confused to identify published complaints by private citizens about someone — justified in this case, but let's for the moment set the issue of the merits aside — with censorship or some other governmental act in violation of "free speech." People complain about other people all the time. For example, I complain about Paris Hilton.

Your confusion fits smoothly with your strange assertion, swallowed from Dr. Dreger's self-dramatizing piece published at bizarre length in a distinguished journal run by the chief Baileyite, that we have "great power." That's how the Bailey-as-brave-victim line, adopted by Mr. Carey of the NY Times from an uncritical reading of Dr. Dreger's assault on me and others, got going.

Hmm. In what does our great power lie? Professor Bailey, like us, is a senior, tenured professor. We objected to his work and to his behavior, through our writings and through channels. What exactly is the exercise of "great power" there? Isn't this power called "the power of the pen," and isn't that exactly the "free speech" you believe you are so courageously defending? The National Academy of Science, which published Bailey's unscientific book, and which has been taken over it would appear by a clique of Gay Gene theorists (I suppose it is an indirect effect of Bush's administration, but I don't know), is powerful. That's the hand of a governmental advisory body, great power indeed, right? We are a couple of professors not in sexology who objected to the mistreatment of some of our poor and ignorant friends, and objected to Bailey's theories and especially to his lack of interest in investigating the bulk of the actual scientific evidence on the matter, namely, any serious sample of the lives of gender crossers. Where's the power?

And how about our right of free speech? We complained to the licensing board about Bailey practicing psychology without a license and you regard that action as requiring defense. (One reason the board did not act, by the way, is that the physician-created statute of limitation on malpractice had run out. It has a notably short fuse.) We complained about his abuse of scientific subjects (it's his claim, not ours, that they were scientific subjects), to the proper authorities. The proper authorities took what you call an "absurd" complaint most seriously, and Bailey resigned from the chairmanship of his department. You regard our actions not as the "free speech" you believe you are defending but as attempts to destroy Bailey.

May I suggest that you are not making sense? Criticizing people in open forums and through channels is precisely what Dr. Dreger, and now the reporter for the Times, and now you, have done. That's fine. I do not call Dreger's hysterical letters through channels against Andrea James, or her Bailey-group subsidized piece which you have so completely swallowed, an attempt to "destroy" James or me. I call her action self-dramatizing and illiberal, and I call her writings unscientific and nonsensical, politically slanted pseudo-history. I do not call your blog retailing Carey's article an attempt to destroy me or to suppress free speech. I call it a silly remark about a subject you have no experience of.

What sort of double standard are you applying to my speech but not to your own? My criticism and complaint is "an attempt to destroy." Dreger's, the reporter Carey's secondary, and now your tertiary criticism and complaint are then. . . what? I say both are free speech, the duty of serious citizens in a democracy. Go to it. Aux barricades for a free press. But stop making these unsupported claims about censorship and destroying Professor Bailey's life.

Speaking of "destroyed lives," by the way, what about our lives and the lives of the gender crossers we sought to protect? My children have not spoken to me since I transitioned, in 1995. I have two grandchildren I have not been allowed to meet. One important reason is the sex, sex, sex theory, known in the field to be of little scientific merit, which Bailey defends with shallow evidence but which is attractive to ignorant outsiders hostile to gender crossers. More widely, the sex, sex, sex theory is one potent reason for transphobia and for the numerous violent deaths of gender crossers. You may consult GenderPak on the issue, if you can rouse some scientific curiosity about the actual facts of the matter. Or you can read the hate mail I have received since Carey's piece.

Let me ask you what you would do in a similar case. I don't know what your scientific work has been, but let's be symmetrical. Suppose an economist had written a book with a exiguous selection of evidence saying that psychologists were liars and sexual perverts, and refused to risk his theory in a serious scientific test by interviewing a wide range of psychologists. Suppose he found, by searching in places where prostitutes gather, some psychologists working as prostitutes, and concluded that psychologists tended to be prostitutes. Suppose the psychologists he interviewed were very eager to get The Letter that would, they believed in their innocence, give them, say, very valuable rights to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and suppose the economist said he would write the letter if they would talk to him. Suppose he then in addition slept with one of the psychologists, and then used the "evidence" thus acquired to support his unscientific theories in a long book published with the government's imprimatur filled with anti-psychologist lore. First, kill all the psychologists.

What would you do about the economist's unscientific claims, let us say, on your blog? And would you also complain to the legitimate authorities about the economist's unprofessional and fraudulent behavior? When someone mugs you or a friend on the street, do you report it to the police? And would your just complaints against such a character be an attempt to ruin him? Or would it be fair comment in a free society and the exercise of the rights and duties of a citizen?

You may quote anything I write, in whole or in part. My pieces are posted on my webpage, deirdremccloskey.org. I expect, however, to be answered again with silly debating point. You have closed your mind on the issue, and are not open to evidence or to reason. It is a most unscientific stance. Shame on you. (That's called fair comment in a free society, dear, not an attempt to destroy you.)

Dear Professor Roberts:

Criticizing someone is "abridging free speech"? Good Lord, how do you think the Constitutional Convention went? Have you listened to a political campaign? Have you participated in any scientific dispute? I guess not.

If Bailey is chilled, perhaps he should get out of the cold room. If one doesn't like the heat of real scientific disagreement, get out of the kitchen. Free speech is how science advances. It ain't beanbag.

You want to think of yourself as defending the weak. It's a silly thought, which you have adopted completely uncritically from Mr. Carey's journalism. You've in fact allied yourself to the most powerful and queer-hating forces in the society. Congratulations.

The "great power" is on the other foot. Relative to the Hispanic women he abused, Bailey had the power. Relative to Lynn and me (you never mention the other distinguished scientists involved, incidentally) in sexology, Ken Zucker has the power (which he has duly exercised, and which again you do not mention: perhaps it has not registered that he allocated 52 pages of his journal on sexual behavior to what the author described as history of science. Would you be the slightest bit suspicious if an editor in your field used his journal, unrefereed, in this way to defend his own views? Relative to Sex Scientists like Bailey and Zucker, and the reactionary and queer-hating people that Bailey, and now you, have inspirited (look at the blogs, dear), Lynn and I, as notable queers, do not have the power. Relative to the authority of The New York Times and its "Science" worshipping and queer-hating editors (though Carey himself, I think, is gay, which of course doesn't mean he's not queer hating!), the "power" of our articles is merely, as I said, a feeble one. The feeble power of truth against prejudice and ignorance and cowardice.

You simply won't listen to the claims of the other side. You won't read. You won't consider. Nothing you say can be mistaken. Dreger got her facts exactly right, you assume. I have to conclude that you are immovable and uncritical. Bad qualities in a scientist, though in truth not all that rare in science and scholarship as they actually are.

I recommend that you get out more. Listen to a philosopher and anthropologist, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, who wrote a long time ago that what matters in science and scholarship is

our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions [in your case: sex, sex, sex is a true theory of queers; no Hispanic queer tells the truth; ordinary scientific disagreement abridges free speech], changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and no because they have listened, really listened, to their friends' [and enemies'] questions and objections

— Rorty, "Experiments in Philosophical Genre," Critical Inquiry 9 (March, 1983); 545-565, p. 562.

Words to live by. You've given no evidence that you have listened, really listened, to anyone except the tiny group of sex, sex, sex folk, believing uncritically their recently constructed image of Bailey as Galileo. You've not done the homework, and apparently have no shame that you haven't.

Have I got you pegged right: Get a theory, any old theory, of gender crossing or of the Bailey Controversy, and stick with it, regardless of the evidence or logic, eh? Don't open your mind. Don't read. Don't listen, really listen. I know a lot of economists like this, intellectually closed; my sister tells me they are pretty common in psychology, too.

Sartre wrote in 1944 (Anti-Semite and Jew: it's the only book of his I have fully understood, and one the few of his writings I agree with) about a personality type:

there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? . . . . What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation (Sartre 1944, p. 18).

Until you've read, really read, my autobiography, say, or done other serious homework, listening, really listening, you're not going to find the truth. You're going to be stuck with your first impressions and your apparently very deep prejudices. I say again (I expect it will have no more effect than it has had before): shame on you for the socially bad and scientifically indefensible thing you have done.

Dear Professor Roberts:

Having looked into it a bit I am very intrigued by your diet, and will buy the book and try it out.

You have a lot of nerve, however, to quote Bohr — "The common aim of all science" is "the gradual removal of prejudices"— and then without self-experimentation, without consulting people like me who have self-experimented, without examining any of the literature except the sort you like, to relay to the world your prejudices about gender crossers. A lot of nerve.

Dear Professor Roberts:

Yup. That should be obvious to you. That it's not, and that you sneer at the idea, is indicative. No one who has not actually tried to pass in the other gender has any idea what it is like not to pass, how dangerous and embarrassing it is. No one who has not tried the experiment can have any idea how important it is to have nose jobs and the like. It's exactly out of such non-self-experimentation, and the lack of real empathy it implies, that the God-wants-you-to-be-thus, Clarke Institute torturing comes.

I don't remember our discussion about Crossing.

You think Bailey's book will be a powerful force for toleration? I suppose you've actually looked at the evidence, right? You've consulting the blogs, and you've read the hate mail? And your conclusion is . . . what? That a wave of transphobic filth stimulated by your blog and Carey's article will lead, somehow, to the promised land? You have here a questionable social theory, but let's hope you're right.

Disagreement, as you should well know from your own self-experimentation, is not the same as "harassment." Nor is holding people to ethical standards in their scientific behavior. We didn't "do" anything to Bailey. We exercised our rights as free citizens and as ethical scientists. That you were "appalled" shows that you got fired up by Carey's article (just as he wished) and didn't bother to inquire — as you easily could have done (you keep making a point of our previous e-mail relationship) but most assuredly did not before shooting off your ill-considered blog — with the principals. You wanted the story to be Bailey = Galileo, and were not going to let such silly things as evidence stand in the way. You've stoutly defended it ever since, with no heed to the evidence.

I'm not impressed that you praise Holocaust deniers, or that you give standing to naive creationism. It just shows what is evident in your defense of Bailey, that you are willing to encourage the worst in our society in aid of a simpleton's version of "fairness." You would have been "fair" to Goebbels and the Inquisition, the Ku Klux Klan and the first Chinese emperor. Your position of "Let them have uncriticized speech to advocate idiotic and harmful proposals" depends on people like Lynn and me exercising our free speech to criticize such people. You would be the first person the Nazis you defend would come for. No, actually, on second thought, you would be the second, after me.

Dear Professor Roberts:

Let's make this a convergent series, by undertaking to answer in half the space as the last one. Your only — only — argument against our complaints about Bailey's behavior is to assert repeatedly, unadorned by evidence, that they were "absurd." Northwestern University did not think them absurd. They fired Bailey from the chairmanship; they investigated him for a year. The lawyer we consulted did not think them absurd; nor did the state licensing bureau. Alas, the statute of limitation had run out.

We did nothing to "silence" anyone. Get this: we are not the government. We argued with Bailey. We complained about his behavior. None of that constitutes "silencing," unless indeed poor, dear Bailey is too feeble for this world.

Dear Professor Roberts:

Anyone who is chilled by being challenged intellectually, I suppose you agree, doesn't belong in intellectual life.

Anyone who is chilled by being investigated for wrongdoing when he's done wrong is just a moral coward, as I reckon Bailey to be. You don't understand The Letter if you don't think the women were mugged. You've not walked in those shoes, or bothered to find out. You haven't read Bailey's book if you think the women were not "research subjects." He called them that, and bragged about it. After the book came out he said, oh, it was "only a trade book. Not science."

Dear Seth, we've grown so close,

OK, OK. You got your view of this, from Dreger, and are determined to stick with it. Fine. The next time you hear of a queer being murdered, think what you've done.
Love,
Deirdre

July 29, 2003
C. Bradley Moore, Vice President for Research
Office of the Vice President for Research
Northwestern University
Rebecca Crown Center, Room 2-223
633 Clark Street
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1108

Dear Dr. Moore:

We wish to make a formal, registered complaint against the practices of J. Michael Bailey in the "research" for his book The Man Who Would Be Queen. We would appreciate therefore official acknowledgment of receipt of this letter.

From what we can judge from a careful study of the book and from many discussions with some of the women involved, Professor Bailey has grossly violated the standards of science by conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of study. He has mined the observations for slanted evidence in support of a classification theory he wished to prove, ignoring contrary evidence.

The resulting "scientific" claims in the book are so defamatory of gender variant people that they threaten the lives of many hundreds of thousands of gender crossers (and many millions of gay men: we here focus on the smaller group). The book is in particular an attack on our own persons and lives. For instance Professor Bailey diagnoses one of us, McCloskey, without having met her, as "autogynephilic," and labels "autogynephilia" a "disorder," evoking the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The book is bad science. As it was put to the attendees at the July 19, 2003 conference in Bloomington, Indiana of the International Academy of Sex Research by John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute and one of the most respected sexologists in the world, "Michael, I would caution you against calling this book 'science' because I have read it, and I can tell you it is not science."

Strangely, Professor Bailey has recently claimed (on his website, not in the book) that he was writing merely a personal memoir of experience in the sexual underworld. The claim is in flat contradiction to the publicity for the book by the National Academy Press, as "cutting edge research" and the rhetoric of the book itself. Professor Bailey asserts in the title, throughout the book, and in the publicity for it that his book is "scientific." (We have evidence that he was personally involved in the publicity by the John Henry Press, an arm of the National Academy Press.)

We wonder what the explanation is for him abandoning the earlier claims that the book was based on "original research." Professor Bailey refers to his research on "homosexual transsexuals" on page 177, book, noting that the subjects were brought to him by "Cher" (Anjelica Kieltyka). He refers therefore to doing "research" involving precisely the women who have brought complaints to your office.

Professor Bailey does not mention that the women came to him for interviews as part of obtaining letters of approval for gender reassignment surgery. That is, he used his offer of GRS letters to gain access to the most intimate facts of their lives (often misreported in the book, by the way: Bailey has admitted for example to salting his prose with fictions). He has retailed the lives of private people without their foreknowledge or permission under cover of "research" and "science." He told none of the women that she was a research subject. Professor Bailey, surely, cannot have it both ways—claiming the high moral ground of science while at the same time exempted from scientific standards of care in the handling of people's lives. Jerry Springer Meets John Bancroft is not a formula for science.

It may not be clear to everyone that Professor Bailey went well beyond a merely clerical error in neglecting to provide his human subjects with forms to sign. He did not tell the women what he was about. And he has trifled with their lives. The women involved are a vulnerable population (Professor Bailey has refused in his "research" to speak to middle-class gender crossers like ourselves, evidently because our lives would not fit his theory; or perhaps because we would not have been so easy to frighten into detailed "confessions" of the life-pattern Professor Bailey wished to detect.) The women are of course appalled and depressed by how Professor Bailey has used them. We hope you realize, for example, and share our dismay, that Professor Bailey enticed the women into his classrooms under the pretense of listening open-mindedly to their views. From various reports we believe he prepared the students to view the women on the contrary with contempt and closed minds, and afterwards evoked from the students the clichéd responses of homophobia and transphobia. Some indeed are reported in the book.

We believe that the three women we know who have recently filed charges against Professor Bailey are telling the sober truth. We are both very well acquainted with Ms. Kieltyka, and have both spoken for many hours with the woman called "Juanita" in the book. One of us has spoken at length with the other young woman—who, though used as a research subject in the same way as "Juanita," was dropped from Professor Bailey's "sample," apparently because she fits poorly into his theory. We believe that the reports by the women (including the parts we have been told of that have not been made public) are honest and credible.

The women have come forward now at considerable risk to themselves. They live anyway in "stealth," which is to say that their identities as transsexual women are not generally known. They fear that the hundreds of Northwestern undergraduates before whom they were paraded in the on-going freak shows in Professor Bailey's classes might recognize them. Professor Bailey has frightened one of them recently by repeated attempts to get hold of her, though he has been told she does not wish to speak to him. She has moved and changed her phone number.

Professor Bailey is quoted as portraying us as activists with an ax to grind "censoring" his writings (Chicago Tribune, July 29; he does not seem to grasp the difference between state censorship on the one hand and scientific and political disagreement on the other). We wish to make clear that as astonishing as Professor Bailey's mistreatment of his human subjects has been, in any case his "science" is in our opinion nonsense. To these scientific criticisms—less relevant to your deliberations than his misuse of human subjects, we realize—he has offered no replies, neither to us nor to his professional colleagues in sexology.

Professor Bailey's book claims to be the latest science on transsexualism. It is not, and reveals in numberless ways his willful ignorance of the phenomenon. He is for example not a member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, the major professional association of scientists actively involved in the field. He has read little. He has ignored the range of transgendered experience—available for example a few blocks from his office in the person of Randi Ettner, the world's leading clinical psychologist specializing in the field (he does not appear to have read her book Gender Loving Care). The grossly stigmatizing design of the book's cover is typical of Professor Bailey's approach to "science."

The reputation of a great university has been put in jeopardy by Professor Bailey's use of its name and by his violations of its research safeguards. We are sure that Northwestern will treat our charges and those of the others more directly involved with the greatest care and consideration—care that Professor Bailey has so signally failed to exercise.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey
UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, and English,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Tinbergen Professor of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies,
Erasmus University of Rottterdam

Lynn Conway
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Emerita,
University of Michigan
Member, National Academy of Engineering

cc. Henry Bienen, President
Lawrence B. Dumas, Provost

Chicago Reader

Dear Editor:

Dennis Rodkin (Reader Dec 12) writes as an advocate for the anti-transsexual theories in Professor J. Michael Bailey's recent, widely attacked book. Mr. Rodkin wants your readers to believe that gender crossers are pathetic nut cases. He wants you to believe that Professor Bailey's views, by contrast, are "scientific."

The crucial point, which Rodkin omits, is that practically no one in the scientific community believes the "science" in Professor Bailey's Silly Theory (let me be as slanted as Rodkin is, OK?). At the July meeting in Bloomington, Indiana of the International Academy of Sex Research, John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute and one of the most respected sexologists in the world, stood up after Bailey's abbreviated talk and said sternly, "Michael, I would caution you against calling this book 'science' because I have read it, and I can tell you it is not science." Then he sat down, to stunned silence. Bailey resigned that afternoon from the secretaryship of the Academy.

Bailey portrays himself according to Rodkin as an "impartial social scientist," who looks at "aggregates," "lots of similar cases." According to Rodkin, Professor Bailey "has the goal of finding commonalities among groups of individuals."

You bet. Professor Bailey's "lots of similar cases" were a half dozen Hispanic drag queens and prostitutes he met in bars in Chicago. That's it. He threw out of the "sample" the one woman who was working as realtor rather than in the sex trades. Don't let facts get in the way of the ST (remember: Silly Theory) that such people are motivated by sex, sex, sex. The "commonalities" are derived from biased samples, ignoring most of the evidence, the evidence for instance of personal testimony or common sense or accurate accounting. The "aggregates" with which Bailey's Canadian guru works with are a few dozen people required to believe the ST to be allowed to change genders: that's how the Clarke Institute in Toronto works: vee have vays of making you believe. It's how Bailey works, too. (He is under investigation for having sex with his "sample," by the way, something Rodkin knew but did not report; The Chronicle of Higher Education reported it last Friday.) Bailey got the women in his "sample" to spill their guts by promising to write them a letter for their surgery. Vee have vays of making you testify.

I can tell you it is not science.

Rodkin has fallen for Bailey bigtime (despite the horrible picture of Bailey on the front page, worse even than mine: but love knows no reason). So he gets the core criticism of Bailey's methods wrong. I never said, as Rodkin claims, that "no one's more capable of understanding the phenomenon than the person who's been through it." Mr. Rodkin needs to check his tape. Lots of people, such as the overwhelming majority of gender scientists who reject the ST, understand the phenomenon. Randi Ettner, the Evanston psychologist and writer on the subject, for example, does. Read her excellent book, Gender Loving Care.

But Bailey and his little group of right-wing admirers claim that nothing can be learned from people who have been through it. Unless gender crossers agree with the ST, you see, they are liars or self-deluded. So much for their evidence. That's why Bailey feels no responsibility as a scholar to read anything or listen to anyone. He claims for example to have read my own book, Crossing: A Memoi r (1999; available on amazon.com cheap; great read). But you can tell right away from his brief description of it in his own book that he hasn't. He repeats the lie in the interview: "Deirdre says he [get it: "he"] was really a woman inside. What does that mean really? What does it mean to say you were a man but you `felt like a woman'?"

I said nothing of the kind. Yeah, I know: the ten-second take on gender crossers is that they are "women trapped in a man's body." But I'm telling you (and my book tells at greater length), that's not how I felt. (And no gender crosser I know tells me they felt the ten-second way; journalists impose it, Bailey adopts it; but it ain't science.) When I was a man I felt like one.

What it means to want to be something you are not is the commonest human experience, not "really" that difficult to understand. You were once a child, did not know "really" what it was like to be an adult, but wanted to be one. Got it? Not so difficult after all. Someone born in France doesn't "really" know what it's like to live in the United States, but immigrates. Someone who wants a better job doesn't "really" know what it's like to have an MBA, but goes to UIC to get one. And so forth.

Bailey defends himself from the charge of being homo- and transphobe by noting that his sex research has attracted unfavorable notice from some conservatives—who don't like any government-funded research into who gets horny from what. He doesn't mention (Rodkin does) that the right wing loves his opinions about homosexual men. And Bailey claims that he explicitly says in the book that he favors transsexuals. Uh-huh. It would be as though he spoke of heterosexual women thus: "They are driven by sex, sex, sex. But I favor them. They are inclined to enter prostitution. But I favor them. They need professional supervision. But I favor them. They are crazy fetishists. But I favor them." In the article Bailey's MO is well illustrated by the way he defends keeping gender crossing close to pedophilia in the manual of mental "disorders." Heh, "there's nothing immoral or harmful" about gender crossing at an advanced age, but there are "scientific reasons" for speaking of pedophilia in the same breath. Sure.

Mr. Rodkin's article is prurient without being honestly informative. A lot like Professor Bailey's book. The ST, which Rodkin swallows, is awfully silly. The genital surgery, for example, is in fact a minor matter for most gender crossers. If it is, how can love of one's own vagina motivate gender crossing? (And while we're at it, does that make born women into "autogynepheliacs"?) There's just a lot of such silliness in Bailey's book and Rodkin's article. The claim that getting the ST into the manual of mental "disorders" will "help" gender crossers in Canada by letting insurance pay for it, to give another instance, runs up against a pretty simple fact, which Rodkin and Bailey could have got right if they would actually listen: Dog Day Afternoon to the contrary notwithstanding, the genital surgery is cheap; in the US it costs less than a small automobile; in Thailand it costs less than most digital cameras. And on and on. Bailey is not a Respected Scientist Bravely Speaking Out. He literally doesn't know what he's talking about.

I among many other people have made numerous scientific points against the ST (see my article in Reason last month). Bailey doesn't have answers. So he goes on diagnosing me and others at a distance. He means it to defame: if Deirdre "shows all the signs" of "autogynephia," well, then her scientific arguments do not require an answer.

I'm going to sue Bailey for defamation if he calls me an "autogynephile" in print one more time. And the point here is that I'm going to win the case: the "diagnosis" is not accepted by most sex scientists; it's is a dead theory that Bailey in his sad way goes on espousing, and using to attack people who won't go along with the ST. The correct theory is that some people want to be who they are not, and become so, harmlessly: adult, American, UIC MBAs, women.

The ST is not science. It's defamation, pure and simple.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey
UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication University of Illinois at Chicago

Editor of Reason:

I do provide evidence, for instance the evidence of my own life, and indeed of the Chicago women and children Bailey so brutally exploited to write his book (some of whom I know well). My view of gender crossing is the standard scientific one—not Professor Bailey's or it seems Mr. Holsey's. The "alternative theory" Mr. Holsey asks for is available in the numerous competent books and articles on transgender, few of which, I'm afraid, Professor Bailey has read (Mr. Holsey thinks that gender dysphoria, which means in Greek "a gender hard to bear," is spelled "gender dysphasia," which would mean "a gender unspeakable"; the slip gives an idea of the level of Scientific competence in the Bailey circle; though, come to think of it, his neologism is not such a bad one). Providing new evidence is the responsibility of people who want to change science. Bailey has none.

I do tell just how Bailey's theories would be harmful to the transgender community. For example, I explained that Bailey's theory is that it's all (transgender and homosexuality) about sex, sex, sex. Not about love or identity. Is that notion harmful? Most people would say so. I explained that Bailey's theories are used right now, up at the Clarke Institute, and at Johns Hopkins, to Stop 'Em. Harmful? Let me tell you.

I have no objection to anyone who wants to "study the issue." I wish Bailey had. I wish he had, for example, gone up the street in Evanston to the clinical psychologist Randi Ettner, who actually knows all kinds of gender crossers. I wish Bailey had any evidence for his theory. Alas, he does not.

I did not accuse Bailey of being a Christian fundamentalist. As a devout Christian myself, actually, I saw no sign of religious depth in his book. I said, what is true, that the homophobes and transphobes and, yes, the Christian fundamentalists of a certain sort are delighted by his book, and are even now actively conspiring to use it (and similar unscientific "research") to reverse the freedoms flowering since the 1960s. I suggest your readers do a Google search on Michael Bailey and John Derbyshire and Paul McHugh and the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group and see what comes up.

If Bailey and his friends do not want people to be upset by their work they should do better scientific work: it is not I but the head of the Kinsey Institute who called Bailey's book "not science," an opinion then repeated by the president of the main scientific and therapeutic group dealing with transgenders. My one regret—I thank Mr. Holsey for giving me a chance to repair some of the damage—is my ill-advised witticism about homophobic yokels at the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I apologize. Of course not all members of the VFW are to be classed with Bailey's friends on the conservative right. It was unfair of me to associate defenders of our freedom with such bitter enemies of it.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey