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Available via license: CC BY-NC 2.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
ORIGINAL PAPER
The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen:
A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex
in the Internet Age
Alice D. Dreger
Published online: 23 April 2008
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract In 2003, psychology professor and sex researcher
J. Michael Bailey published a book entitled The Man Who
Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Trans-
sexualism. The book’s portrayal of male-to-female (MTF)
transsexualism, based on a theory developed by sexologist Ray
Blanchard, outraged some transgender activists. They believed
the book to be typical of much of the biomedical literature on
transsexuality—oppressive in both tone and claims, insulting
to their senses of self, and damaging to their public identities.
Some saw the book as especially dangerous because it claimed
to be based on rigorous science, was published by an imprint of
the National Academy of Sciences, and argued that MTF sex
changes are motivated primarily by erotic interests and not by
the problem of having the gender identity common to one sex
in the body of the other. Dissatisfied with the option of merely
criticizing the book, a small number of transwomen (particu-
larly Lynn Conway, Andrea James, and Deirdre McCloskey)
worked to try to ruin Bailey. Using published and unpublished
sources as well as original interviews, this essay traces the his-
tory of the backlash against Bailey and his book. It also pro-
vides a thorough exegesis of the book’s treatment of transsex-
uality and includes a comprehensive investigation of the merit
of the charges made against Bailey that he had behaved
unethically, immorally, and illegally in the production of his
book. The essay closes with an epilogue that explores what has
happened since 2003 to the central ideas and major players in
the controversy.
Keywords Transsexualism Transgenderism Gender
identity disorder Autogynephilia Identity politics
Institutional review board Human subjects research
Introduction
This is not a simple story. If it were, it would be considerably
shorter. The basic outline goes like this:
In the spring of 2003, J. Michael Bailey, a psychology
professor and sex researcher at Northwestern University, pub-
lished a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen: The
Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism with Joseph
Henry Press, a National Academy of Sciences imprint (Bailey,
2003). A popularization of certain areas of sexology research,
the book was quickly praised by some reviewers (e.g., Cantor,
2003; Kirkus Reviews, 2003;Osborne,2003) and denounced
by others (e.g., Beatty, 2003;McCloskey,2003a;Mundy,
2003). Although the book discussed a wide range of topics,
including male homosexuality and gender identity develop-
ment in intersex children, it was Bailey’s portrayal of male-
to-female (MTF) transsexuals that caused a firestorm. That
portrayal, based on Ray Blanchard’s taxonomy of MTF
transsexualism (elaborated below), drew ire from a number
of prominent transgender activists who found it profoundly
insulting to their senses of self and damaging to their public
identities. They argued that the book was obnoxious, wrong
and, most importantly, that it would seriously hurt trans-
women and their loved ones in its misrepresentation of their
experiences and identities (see Conway, 2003a).
As documented below, dissatisfied with the option of
merely criticizing the book, a small number of transgender
activists worked to try to ruin Bailey professionally and
personally. Largely under the leadership of three prominent
transwomen—Lynn Conway (a world-renowned computer
A. D. Dreger (&)
Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program, Feinberg School of
Medicine, Northwestern University, 750 N. Lake Shore Drive,
Suite 625, Chicago, IL 60611, USA
e-mail: a-dreger@northwestern.edu
123
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
DOI 10.1007/s10508-007-9301-1
scientist at the University of Michigan), Andrea James (a
Hollywood-based trans-consumer advocate and an entrepre-
neurial consultant on trans issues), and Deirdre McCloskey
(a Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English,
and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chi-
cago)—they organized charges of scientific misconduct
against Bailey, including charges that he lacked informed
consent from research subjects, that he failed to obtain Insti-
tutional Review Board (IRB) permission for human subjects
research, and that he had sexual relations with a transsexual
research subject. They successfully pushed for a top-level
investigation ofthesecharges at Northwestern University and
for numerous press reports about Bailey’s alleged misdeeds.
They successfully arranged a protest against the book’s
nomination for a Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) award
and tried to get Bailey’s colleagues (including his closest
departmental colleagues) to turn against him or at least dis-
tance themselves from him. They devoted elaborate Websites
to criticizing and mocking him and his book and anyone with
any positive relationship with him. One activist in particular,
namely Andrea James, also used the Web to publicly harass
Bailey’s children, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, and his friends.
In short, the controversy over Bailey’s book got about as
ugly as it could. So very intense have been feelings around the
Bailey controversy that several people were frightened to
speak to me when I sent them inquiries about it a good 3 years
after the book’s publication. A few people who heard I was
interested in writing a history of the controversy even tried to
talk me out of it. Most were concerned that I would suffer
personal harassment for researching and publicizing this his-
tory, and a few worried that no good would come of it because
it would only inflame tensions and further entrench the play-
ers. Although I expect that the first concern is legitimate given
what I’ve learned, I believe that this history has the potential to
calm and even quell some of the tensions that persist. This
history is worth tracking, too, in order for scholars, journalists,
politicians, funding agencies, university administrators, pub-
lishers, and others to appreciate what can happen in an
Internet-rich age of identity politics when a university-based
researcher takes a controversial public stand, especially if
that stand relates to sex, gender, or sexuality.
I also believe that a scholarly history of this controversy is
critically necessary to advancing both transgender rights and
sexology, two things about which I care deeply. As I have
researched the following history, I have run across many
people who labor under erroneous beliefs about what hap-
pened, and those misunderstandings need to be corrected
because they are adversely affecting many people’s lives and
actions. Perhaps most importantly, in this work I have
encountered a substantial number of transgendered persons
and scholars of sex (and some people who are both) who are
not entrenched in an ‘‘us versus them’’ mentality, but who
nonetheless have been repeatedly silenced, misrepresented, or
misheard by those who assume one must side with an ‘‘us’’ or a
‘‘them’’ since the backlash against The Man Who Would Be
Queen. That continued, vigorously policed, ‘‘us versus them’’
partisan behavior is hurting science as well as individual trans
people and it is time for it to stop. As I show here, the story of
the controversy over The Man Who Would Be Queen is sig-
nificantly more complicated than the on-the-street, ‘‘good
versus evil’’ cartoon versions of it, and that matters for many
people, individually and collectively.
This essay is divided into six sections: Part 1 explains my
background and methodology; Part 2 provides a history of
what went into the book ultimately entitled The Man Who
Would Be Queen; Part 3 puts forth what I believe to be the only
careful exegesis of the treatment of transsexualism in Bailey’s
book;Part4tracesthebacklashagainstthebookandthebook’s
author, including how the backlash began, who led it, how it
morphed, and the form it ultimately took; Part 5 examines the
merit of the charges made against Bailey that he had behaved
unethically, immorally, and illegally in the production of his
book; Part 6 constitutes an epilogue that sketches out what has
happened since the backlash to the key players and ideas in the
controversy.
Part 1: My Background and Methodology
By way of background, since it matters to the story I am about
to tell, let me explain that when Bailey’s book came out in
2003, I had not heard of him except to know vaguely of the
twin studies he had coauthored (Bailey & Pillard, 1991; Bai-
ley, Pillard, Neale, & Agyei, 1993), and I knew relatively little
about transsexuality. My work as an historian and patient
advocate focused on intersex (i.e., congenital anomalies of
sex chromosomes, gonads, and/or anatomic sex), particularly
on the clinical treatment of intersex in childhood. In addition
to being an Associate Professor of Science and Technology
Studies at Michigan State University, I was an intersex
activist. I became intimately involved in the intersex rights
movement starting in 1996 when Cheryl Chase, the founder
of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), read my
first publication on the history of intersex and asked me to
help change the then contemporary medical treatment sys-
tem for intersex children (Dreger, 2004). By 2003, when
Bailey’s book hit the Web and the stores, I had served as the
Chair and President of the Board of Directors of ISNA for
5 years. From then until I retired from ISNA in late 2005, I
served alternately as Chair of the Fundraising Committee,
Chair and President of the Board of Directors, and Director of
Medical Education. I think it is fair to say I am generally
considered one of the chief architects of the intersex patients’
rights movement. My two books and numerous articles on
the subject have consistently argued that the standard of care
needs to be changed because—among other problems, such
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 367
123
as its lack of evidence-base and violation of generally
accepted ethical principles—it is motivated by homophobia,
sexism, heterosexism, and, more generally, fear of gender-
blurring (see, e.g., Dreger, 1998; Dreger & Herndon, in press).
Thus, although I am heterosexual and not intersex, I’ve often
been considered (and consider myself) a queer rights activist
as well as an historian of sex and gender.
As bestI can recall, the first I heard of Bailey’s book was via
a phone call in 2003 from Lynn Conway, the person who—
except for Bailey himself—turns out to have played the most
important role in this story. I knew Conway because she was a
generous donor to ISNA and because she had been personally
supportive of Cheryl Chase, who had become my close friend
as well as my collaborator. In my capacity as a leader of ISNA,
I occasionally solicited donations from Conway and thanked
her for her donations. Shortly after the publication of The Man
Who Would Be Queen (hereafter TMWWBQ), Conway called
to tell me it was a terrible and dangerous book, a book that
called transwomen like her ‘‘perverts.’’ My recollection is that
I gave her this advice: ‘‘All publicity is good publicity. Ignore
Bailey and he’ll go away. Don’t feed his publicity machine.’’
I believe it was a few months later that my friend and
colleague Paul Vasey alsocalled to talkto me about the book. I
had met Vasey (a sex researcher at the University of Leth-
bridge) in February 2002 through a conference on sex and
gender co-organized by Joan Roughgarden at Stanford Uni-
versity. Vasey was calling to ask me whether I knew I was
listed as a supporter of Conway’s anti-Bailey campaign on her
University of Michigan Website (http://www.ai.eecs.umich.
edu/people/conway), and whether I knewwhat was happening
to Bailey and his family. I told him honestly this was all news
to me, and while I was disappointed that someone was
attacking Bailey’s children online, it seemed to me that Bailey
had stuck his hand into a buzzing hornet’s nest and he should
have expected to be stung. I then emailed Conway (p.e.c.
1
,
August 12, 2003) to tell her she should not list me as a sup-
porter of her campaign as I had not read the book and it was
embarrassing to have my colleagues think I had formed an
opinion about a book without reading it. She removed my
name and sent me a reply encouraging me to support her
campaign against the book (p.e.c., August 14, 2003). But by
that point the whole thing seemed ugly enough that I had no
interest in getting involved and being distracted from my work
on intersex rights. I did read the book sometime around late
2003 or early 2004, and—judging by my marginalia—I found
it generally lively and well written, unnecessarily snide or
even contemptuous in places, lacking in evidentiary support
(the book has ‘‘further reading’’ suggestions but no citations),
and full of claims and ideas that I knew very little about. I
marked it up copiously and put it down.
In November 2004, four years into trying to balance
motherhood with full-time university work and near-full-time
volunteer intersex activism, I gave up my tenured position
at Michigan State University so that I could devote more time
to my activism, writing, and speaking, and to my family’s
domestic life. In 2005, I accepted a part-time faculty appoint-
ment in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg
School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago,
and in February 2006, as Vasey was coming to Chicago to
work with me on a project proposal about sexual diversity, he
insisted it was time I meet Bailey. Bailey works on the
Evanston campus of Northwestern, and I work on the Chicago
campus, so we had no reason to meet through our ordinary
work. Being good friends with both Bailey and me, Vasey was
bothered that Bailey assumed me to be a senseless postmod-
ernist beholden to political correctness and that I assumed him
to be a homophobic, transphobic, sloppy scientist. What I
knew about Bailey I knew partly from reading his book but
mostly from hearing about him through the gender activist
grapevine: he was supposed to have abandoned his wife and
children, to have slept with a research subject, to have done
human subjects research with no oversight, to be against sex
reassignment surgery (SRS) for transgender people, and so on.
It was only my enormous respect for Vasey, whom I knew as
an openly gay man and a very good scientist, that made me
agree to meet the infamous Bailey.
Upon our meeting over dinner with Vasey in Chicago’s
Boys’ Town (the gay neighborhood near where Bailey lived)
in February 2006, I was surprised to find Bailey to be appar-
ently intelligent, open-minded, scientifically careful, and non-
homophobic. As I recall, about an hour into our conversation I
asked him point-blank whether it was true he had slept with a
research subject, and he answered in a legalistic and exas-
perated fashion, saying that, even if he had, that would not
have been a violation of IRB rules. Intrigued, in the next few
days, I looked up Bailey’s journal articles and his Website and
discovered, besides an impressive peer-reviewed publication
record, that Bailey appeared to have quite good relations with
the children and ex-wife he supposedly had abandoned. What
was the truth, I wondered?
In May 2006, knowing of my increasing curiosity in the
matter, Bailey emailed me to let me know that Andrea James
had been invited by Northwestern University’s Rainbow
Alliance to speak at the Evanston campus of our university
(p.e.c., May 9, 2006). At that point, I had not done any serious
investigation into the history of the controversy, so I asked
Bailey to tell me who James was exactly. He explained that
she was the person who was so angry about what he said in his
book that she had put up on her Website (http://www.tsroad
map.com) pictures of his children with their eyes blacked
out, asking whether his young daughter was ‘‘a cock-starved
exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of
it?’’ and saying that ‘‘there are two types of children in the
1
‘‘p.e.c.’’ stands for ‘‘personal email communication.’’
368 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
Bailey household,’’ namely those ‘‘who have been sodomized
by their father [and those] who have not’’ (James, 2003a). I
understood this was meant by James to be a parody of Bailey’s
alleged treatment of transsexuals in his book (James, 2003a),
but I was disgusted by this intimidation tactic, having myself
been subject to intimidation by right-wing activists who didn’t
like my pointing out how intersex challenges the assumptions
inherent in anti-‘‘same-sex’’ marriage legislation. I wrote to
Northwestern’s Rainbow Alliance to express my dismay that
someone of this sort would be invited to our university
(p.e.c., May 11, 2006). I told them that, given her unethical
tactics, I thought James was not the sort of person who was
good for a scholarly institution nor the sort who was good for
transgender rights. They did not respond. So, on May 13,
2006, I blogged about my dismay on my personal Website
(Dreger, 2006).
This blog led to a torrent of email from every camp
imaginable—indeed, many camps I had not imagined existed.
Manysex researchers and Bailey’s daughter wrote to thank me
for speaking out against James. Some transgender women
wrote to tell me that, no matter what James had done, Bailey’s
actions had been reprehensible and those were the actions to
which I should direct my criticisms. Most interestingly to me,
a surprisingly large number of transgender women wrote to
tell me that they had been harassed and threatened by James
for daring to speak anything other than the standard ‘‘I’m a
woman trapped in a man’s body’’ story. Many (though by no
means all) of those women found Bailey’s version of their
identities inaccurate, oversimplified, and/or just plain obnox-
ious (and, from my rather vague memory of the book, I was
inclined to agree), but they wanted me to know that they, too,
thought James was harmful. Almost universally those who
wrote to me—including sex researchers—asked that I not ever
quote them or mention them by name. They feared being
attacked by James, as Bailey and others had been.
When I posted my blog, I made a point of emailingJames to
tell her about it and to ask her to stop undermining progress in
transgender rights with her incontinent attacks (p.e.c.,May 16,
2006). She was none too pleased and sent me back a series of
hostile emails, including one referring to my 5-year-old son as
my ‘‘precious womb turd’’ (p.e.c., June 1, 2006). She also
came to my departmental office (I was not there) and then
emailed 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.
[…] We’ll chat in person soon’’ (p.e.c., May 27, 2006). At that
point, concerned for my son and office colleagues, I forwarded
the whole of the communications to my Dean, who put me in
touch with university counsel, who—given James’s threat-
ening tone and her history—recommended I alert campus
police. I told the police I was not aware of James ever having
been physically violent; she seems simply to harass and
intimidate.
Since then, James has been trying to undermine my repu-
tation as an intersex activist and scholar, which she explicitly
warned me by email shewould tryherbest to do (‘‘I’ll do what I
can to assist […] in discrediting you’’; Andrea James, p.e.c,
May 27, 2006). By early October 2006, I found myself featured
on the very first page of James’ massive attack and advice site
(http://www.tsroadmap.com). There my name was linked to
an erroneous account of my intersex activist history (Hinkle,
2006). As bizarre as this sounds, in trying to intimidate or
exact revenge on me for blogging about her tactics, James
has chosen specifically to focus her energies on undermining
the emerging medical terminology of ‘‘disorders of sex
development’’ as a replacement for the umbrella term ‘‘inter-
sex’’ and all terms based on the root ‘‘hermaphroditism.’’ (‘‘I
am […] going to do what I can to discredit your lame-ass
DSD model’’; James to Dreger, p.e.c., June 1, 2006.) Appar-
ently, James hopes she can get my fellow intersex activists
angry at me for helping to introduce the new terminology, a
terminology some find pathologizing and regressive (Dreger
& Herndon, in press). Intersex friends and allies tell me that,
out of anger at me personally, James does now seem to be
effectively sowing anger and dissention in the intersex world
as she has done in the transgender world. I consider this
development sad, but inadequate cause to be silenced.
I mention my own experience with James to help explain
why I decided to devote as much time and energy to this
scholarly history as I have. James’s expansive attempt to
intimidate (and presumably silence) me simply for question-
ing her once—along with the unsettling experience of hearing
bits of alternative histories from and so much fear among
sexologists and transgender women—left me with a strong
desire to know the truth about Bailey’s work and the contro-
versy surrounding it. It reminded me too much of the history of
modern intersex treatment—where claims about truth differed
so radically among activists and sexologists—to leave the
historical record unclear. So, early in the summer of 2006, I
decided to undertake this scholarly history and began col-
lecting available sources. I also began contacting people who I
thought could give me useful unpublished sources, oral his-
tories, and general advice about the project.
This article therefore draws on all of that material. Before I
interviewed sources orally, I let them know I would take notes
while we talked and that they could correct the notes however
they wished before I would use them. They were invited to
add, delete, or otherwise change whatever they wished in the
notes, regardless of what they had actually said; this ensured
they were represented accurately. (Oral-interview citations in
the reference list thus include both the date of the interview as
well as the date the corrected notes were returned.) If I inter-
viewed them by email, I let them know I would feel free to
quote from their responses unless they specifically indicated
otherwise. (In-text citations referring to emails are marked
‘‘p.e.c.’’ and provide the date the email was sent.)
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 369
123
As is the case for all histories, this is a partial history based
on available sources and including what this historian judges
relevant and important. Unlike some histories, it has the added
advantage of being extensively reviewed prior to publication.
Before this article was even submitted for peer review, I
solicited responses to drafts from 12 transgender activists and
sex researchers in disparate disciplines. (Several of the pre-
submission readers are both trans activists and sex research-
ers.) To the extent possible, I have sought input from all of the
major players in this story, although I confess that I did not
contact James for this project because, given our history, I did
not feel safe doing so nor did I think productive dialogue with
her was possible.
I did try contacting Lynn Conway through numerous
emails to let her know that I was working on this project and to
give her a chance to give me any input she wished. I also told
her in my emails that I hoped that the Editor of the journal that
eventually published my paper would give her and Bailey—
whom I believe to be the two most important characters in this
story—the opportunity to formally respond to my paper in the
same issue. When I decided to undertake this work, I felt sure
Conway would talk to me because she had spent so much
energy on Bailey and his book and because we had had a
cordial history. In addition to our positive fundraiser–donor
relationship through ISNA, we had over the years also tou-
ched base about parallel efforts at our universities (Michigan
State University and the University of Michigan) to ensure
that our institutions’ anti-discrimination policies adequately
protected transgender people. Several years ago, Conway
also very kindly at my request came to my home to provide
one-on-one peer support for a colleague of mine who was
considering sex reassignment. (I made them lunch and then
left them alone at my house to talk.) When she did not answer
my numerous emails about this project, I sent letters to her
office and home. Still I heard nothing, although I knew from
new posts at her Website that she was still interested in
Bailey’s doings. So I tried calling her at work, but her depart-
ment told me she is now a professor emerita and no longer
maintains a phone there. Consequently on August 16, 2006, I
called her at home, because I wanted to be sure she had a
chance to represent herself beyond the published record.
I finally reached Conway that way and we had a phone call
that lasted about a minute. She surprised me by being extre-
mely hostile at the outset. She also would not answer my
simple question about whether she was willing to speak to me
on the record. This confused me—why would she not just tell
me whether or not she wanted to speak on the record?—and I
said as much. She responded that it was very strange that I
would call her at home. I told her how many other ways I had
tried to reach her with no response before finally calling her
home. She then said that I was stalking her and added that she
would circulate this fact widely. Since it was at that point clear
she didn’t want to speak to me, and since I was afraid of being
accused of stalking, I said goodbye and gave up. (This account
is based on notes I made immediately following the call.) I
take this interaction to mean Conway does not wish to provide
input on this work. Fortunately, Conway’s extensive Website
and the oral histories I have conducted with others provide
substantial documentation about and insight into her role in
this history.
I also invited Deirdre McCloskey to talk with me on the
record about this history and told her I would be happy to
consider any material she wished (p.e.c., December 30, 2006).
McCloskey and I had met once, in 2001, when we both spoke
on a panel with California State University, Northridge FTM
philosopher Jacob Hale at the University of Illinois in Chi-
cago. (I recall that, at the lunch we had together, she auto-
graphed my copy of her autobiography.) As part of this pro-
ject, I sent her a list of specific questions regarding her role
based on what I had learned from other sources, and she sent
backvery brief answers on which I draw here (p.e.c.’s,January
22, 2007). McCloskey refused to tell me anything more sub-
stantial unless I first proved to her, by showing her what I was
writing, that I agreed with her positions (p.e.c.’s, December
31, 2006, and February 4, 2007). I explained that, as a scholar,
I do not make that kind of deal with potential sources. As in my
experience with Conway, I found myself confused as to why
McCloskey would not want to clearly self-represent to me her
critical role in what happened to Bailey following publication
of his book. I can only guess they want attention paid only to
Bailey and his actions, not to the history of the backlash
against him and his book. In any case, as with Conway, for my
account of McCloskey’s role I draw on the available sour-
ces—many of which happen to be posted on Conway’s site.
To maximize fairness and accuracy, I gaveMcCloskey a listof
the specific pages from Conway’s site that I was using to write
about her, and asked McCloskey to correct any misrepresen-
tations of her actions contained therein; she corrected none.
As this history shows, James, Conway, and McCloskey
played pivotal roles in the controversy surrounding TMW
WBQ, although their personal stories do not appear in the
book, except insofar as Bailey briefly discusses McCloskey’s
memoir in the ‘‘further reading’’ section (Bailey, 2003,p.
215). But two other women whose stories did appear in the
book also came to play important roles in the controversy.
These are Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka (known in the book as
‘‘Cher Mondavi’’) and the woman called ‘‘Juanita.’’ Before I
ever had a chance to contact her, Kieltyka called me at my
office in June 2006; she had read my blog about James as well
as some of my writing on bioethics, and she was calling in the
hopes I might help her continue her ongoing campaign against
Bailey. I listened to her extensive concerns and then, on a later
date, told her I had decided to work on this history and offered
her the opportunity to go on the record with her memories and
opinions. She chose to do so through a series of lengthy
telephone interviews (totaling about 11 hours) and numerous
370 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
emails. As with all subjects, I let Kieltyka change and approve
the written versions of our verbal interchanges so that they
contained exactly what she was willing to have on the record. I
reminded her frequently that all emails were on the record.
I have not spoken to the woman who is called ‘‘Juanita’’ in
this history as she was called in Bailey’s book. As we shall see,
‘‘Juanita’’ is the woman who accused Bailey of, among other
things, having had sexual relations with her when she was his
research subject (Bailey, 2005). Even though she has gone by
at least two pseudonyms (‘‘Juanita’’ and ‘‘Maria’’) in her many
public dealings with Bailey, in my research I quickly figured
out her real identity. Indeed, it was impossible not to figure
out who she is, because Juanita has chosen before and since
TMWWBQ to be so very public with her autobiography and
her physical image. She even let Kieltyka take a semi-nude,
erotic photograph of her, with her face veiled (Kieltyka,
2003a), a photograph Conway herself then reproduced and
specifically identified as being of the ‘‘Juanita’’ of TMWWBQ
(Conway, 2003b). (Conway says on her site she reproduced
this photo of Juanita to counter what she sees as Bailey’s
negative representations, by ‘‘show[ing] the inner grace and
beauty of a young transsexual woman’’ [Conway, 2003b]. I’m
not sure how it represents the subject’s inner qualities, but it
certainly doesn’t leave much about her outer qualities to the
imagination.)
Conway’s ‘‘Transsexual Women’s Successes’’ site pro-
vides five photographs of Juanita (this time with her face
showing in plain view and her clothes on) along with a detailed
autobiography of Juanita, including an oblique reference to her
encounters with Bailey (Maria, 2004). Although the photo-
graphs and autobiography are reproduced under the name
‘‘Maria’’ on Conway’s ‘‘Successes’’ page, ‘‘Maria’s’’ autobi-
ography obviously matches the already-published biography
of Juanita in Bailey’s book. ‘‘Maria’s’’ face as shown in plain
view on Conway’s site also obviously matches the face found
in a feature story on Kieltyka and Juanita that was published
with their consent in 1999 in the Daily Northwestern,thestu-
dent newspaper of Northwestern University, an article to
which no fewer than four sources (including Kieltyka) referred
me. For that feature story, Kieltyka and Juanita gave the stu-
dent reporter permission to use their photos as well as their real
first and last names—pre-gender-transition as well as post
(Gibson, 1999). The match between the representations in the
Daily Northwestern article (February 1999), in Bailey’s book
(April 2003), and on Conway’s page (April 2004) is the reason
it became obvious to me who Juanita really is, although below I
also document additional public real-name presentations by
Juanita.
I also document that Juanita consented to all of those public
representations. If Juanita has wanted to hide her real identity,
she hasn’t tried very hard. Nevertheless, I’ve decided here not
to give Juanita’s real name because she hasn’t chosen to
publicly connect the dots as I have easily done (and as anyone
else researching this history would quickly do). For this his-
tory, I did try to contact Juanita through the email address
provided in her autobiographyon Conway’s site (I received no
response to my email [p.e.c., December 16, 2006], not even an
‘‘undeliverable’’ postmaster response), and through Kieltyka
(who told me she checked with Juanita and that Juanita didn’t
want to talk to me [Kieltyka to Dreger, p.e.c., September 20,
2006]). I also tried to find her through public address lists, but
her real name turns out to be common in the Chicago area,
where I assume she still lives, and it seemed inappropriate to
write to all women with her name seeking the one person for
whom I was looking, particularly given that Juanita did not
write back to the email and apparently told Kieltyka she didn’t
want to talk with me.
In terms of other important sources, as I elaborate below,
one journalist repeatedly refused to explain to me her odd part
in this history. No sexologist refused my requests for inter-
views. I am gratefulto themorethan100 peoplewho answered
my requests for information and help, particularly Charlotte
Anjelica Kieltyka and J. Michael Bailey who each provided
me enormous amounts of information and documentation,
and tolerated impressively my sometimes uncomfortable
questions.
Part 2: The History of the Book that Became TMWWBQ
Chicago-based therapist Randi Ettner might be surprised to
learn that she was the impetus for the book that became
TMWWBQ. After Michael Bailey attended a reading by Ettner
of her book Confessions of a Gender Defender (Ettner, 1996)
at a local Barnes & Noble bookstore in June 1997, he was so
frustrated by what he saw as gross inaccuracies in Ettner’s
account of transsexualism that he decided he would write a
book of his own (Bailey, 2006b; Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c.,
August 22, 2006). By October 1997, he had begun writing
notes for that book under the working title Sexual Difference.
The draft dedication turned out to be, in retrospect, as ironic as
they come: ‘‘For my children. May they learn life’s hardest
lessons from books’’ (Bailey’s personal files; Bailey to Dre-
ger, p.e.c., August 22, 2006).
From the start, Bailey intended this book to be very dif-
ferent from anything he had published before. Whereas most
of his previous work consisted of peer-reviewed articles for
scientific journals, this book would be a popularization—
based on certain sexological findings of his lab and others, but
replete with vivid stories of people the author had met, stories
provided to put a human face on those findings. Along with
accessible, abbreviated accounts of key scientific studies, the
book would also feature the author’s hunches, speculations,
and personal opinions.It would include suggestions for further
reading, but no other documentation (Bailey, 2006b). Thus,
TMWWBQ was never envisioned as a work of science in any
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 371
123
traditional sense; instead, Bailey viewed the book as his
chance to expose to the masses what he saw as the often
politically incorrect truth about ‘‘feminine males’’: boys
diagnosable with ‘‘gender identity disorder’’ (GID); surgically
feminized, genetic male children; male homosexuals; drag
queens; heterosexual male crossdressers; and MTF trans-
sexuals. Bailey also saw the book as an opportunity to make
some money; when he was ready to sell the book, he engaged
an agent, Skip Barker, who negotiated in November 2000 a
contract and an advance from Joseph Henry Press (p.e.c.,
Bailey to Dreger, October 2, 2006). Joseph Henry Press is
‘‘an imprint of the National Academies Press […] created
with the goal of making books on science, technology, and
health more widely available to professionals and the pub-
lic’’ (Bailey, 2003, copyright page).
Bailey had originally considered also writing about ‘‘mas-
culine females’’ (e.g., tomboys) in his book, but soon decided
thatthatwould have to wait for a secondvolume(Bailey,2003,
p. xii). But it was his long-term interest in masculine females
that had led Bailey to meet one of the transwomen who would
become a major character in TMWWBQ and in the controversy
that followed: Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka. Kieltyka, who
lived in the Chicago area, called Bailey after seeing him in a
1993 Dateline NBC television segment on tomboys (Copaken,
1993). Kieltyka sought out Bailey to suggest that he might be
interested in ‘‘the other kind of ‘tomboy’—those transsexual
womennamed‘Tom’thatwereborna ‘boy’….‘Tomboys’like
me’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a).Sheexplainedto Bailey that,unlikethe
media stereotype of transsexual women, she was attracted to
women, and that women like her ‘‘were NOT inconsistentwith
masculine lesbianism’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a). In their subsequent
conversations, she also explained she had been a rather boyish
boy and had worked as a car mechanic as well as being an
artist.
Sometime in 1994, Bailey and Kieltyka met for the first
time, at Bailey’s office. At their very first meeting, Kieltyka
brought along ‘‘show and tell’’ items (Kieltyka, 2006c). These
included realistic prosthetic vulvas complete with pubic hair.
Kieltyka explained to Bailey how, before she had SRS, she
used to tuck and glue her penis into her body (made easier by
having been born with only one testicle) and glue on one of
these vulvas to achieve the appearance of female genitalia.
Kieltyka also explained how she had constructed realistic-
looking prosthetic breasts and how, before her sex change, she
wore these with female masks and wigs to achieve a feminine
appearance she had found both erotic and transformative.
Kieltyka told me that she saw ‘‘the cross-dressing with the
mask [as] a kind of transitional thing—the fetish objects—the
breasts and the plastic vagina—an important part of a ‘dress
rehearsal’ [.…] WITHOUT IT—without this fetish transfor-
mativephase—Iwould never have seen myself as a woman—
never realize[d] that I was a transsexual woman.’’ She went
on: ‘‘I needed to see myself, like an artist following a creative
path, realizing only after you created it; the realization [of
being a transsexual] came after the creation’’ (Kieltyka,
2006b).
Accordingto Bailey, Kieltyka came acrossas an intelligent,
warm, creative, outgoing woman with a good sense of humor
and a strong interest in telling people about herself. (This is all
consistent with my experiencein my extensiveinterviewswith
Kieltyka.) Kieltyka immediately and repeatedly told Bailey
vivid details about her life, and she encouraged Bailey to
accompany her to the local bars frequented by pre- and post-op
transsexual women and drag queens where Kieltyka was
familiar with many of the regulars (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c.,
October 2, 2006). In his book, Bailey thanks Anjelica Kieltyka
for ‘‘introduc[ing] me to the Chicago transsexual community
and [teaching] me a great deal by being honest and open’’
(Bailey, 2003,p.xii).
Not long after their meeting, Kieltyka saw in Bailey a
possible aideto the advocacy workshe was doingwithpre-and
post-op transsexuals in the Chicago area. Kieltyka had been
working with sympathetic clinicians at Cook County Hospital
and elsewhere to get local transsexual women prescription
feminizing hormones (as an alternative to black-market hor-
mones) and to try to convince the hospital to restart its SRS
program. She had also been referring and accompanying
transsexual women to a support group at Good Samaritan
Hospital run by Wanda Sadoughi, a psychologist who also
sometimesprovidedletters to pre-opwomen in support of their
requests for SRS (Kieltyka, 2006a). Why did these women
need letters from people such as Sadoughi? Surgeons who
followed the fourth version of the Standards of Care as laid
out in 1990 by the Harry Benjamin International Gender
Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) required two ‘‘favorable
recommendation[s] for surgical (genital and breast) sex reas-
signment,’’includingatleastonefroma‘‘doctorallevelclinical
behavioralscientist’’ (Walkeret al.,1990,Sect. 4.7.5).Version
Five of the Standards of Care, adopted in 1998, called for ‘‘a
comprehensive evaluation by [two] qualified mental health
professional[s]’’ (Levine et al., 1998, p. 28). Thus, during the
time in question here, respected surgeons performing SRS
typically required patients to produce evidence from two
qualified psychological professionals that the applicant fit
HBIGDA’s eligibility and readiness criteria for SRS.
Sometime around 1996, Kieltyka asked Bailey whether he
would help out some of her friends and prote
´
ge
´
s by providing
them with letters in support of their requests for SRS. Bailey
was amenable to Kieltyka’s request. His understanding was
that, so long as he made clear in his letters what his profes-
sional status was, there would be no problem reporting simply
what he observed in terms of a pre-op transsexual woman’s
gender identity presentation, her apparent understanding of
the surgery, and her likelihood of adjusting well after SRS.
Nowhere in his letters did Bailey say that he was these
women’s therapist or that he counted under the HBIGDA
372 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
Standards of Care as a ‘‘qualified mental health professional’’;
in each, he simply stated his university position, said how
many times he had talked with the subject, and included
his c.v. (Bailey, 2006b; for examples, see Conway, 2004d).
Whether or not a surgeon accepted his letter as an adequate
recommendation would be up to the surgeon, just as it was up
to the surgeon more generally which parts of the HBIGDA
Standards of Care he or she would follow.
Bailey’s letters were typically less than one page long and
were based on a small number of interviews (usually two or
three) conducted over a span of 6 months or more (Bailey,
p.e.c.’s, October 2 and 3, 2006). Kieltyka often attended these
interviews because she saw herself as an advocate for the
transsexual women seeking letters (Kieltyka, 2006a). Bailey
provided somewhere between five and ten of these letters,
including one for Juanita (Bailey, p.e.c., October 3, 2006), and
he neither sought nor received remuneration for these letters
(Bailey, 2006b); like Kieltyka, he saw the work as a sort of
voluntary public service to local transsexuals who were
already living as women and who could generally not easily
afford months or years of the psychological therapy that typ-
ically preceded the production of a psychologist’s letter
regarding SRS. Bailey recalls, ‘‘I was definitely sympathetic’’
to the transwomen who asked him for letters of recommen-
dation: ‘‘I had little doubt that they would be happy after SRS,
and I sympathized with all they’d been through. I wrote the
letters as a favor to them, the transsexual community, and to
Anjelica [Kieltyka]’’ (Bailey, 2006b).
Kieltyka also arranged with Bailey opportunities to present
to students in his Human Sexuality class herself, her history,
and her understanding of transsexuality. She says her ‘‘lec-
tures were an opportunity to do ‘outreach’; to educate AND
entertain’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a). As in the case of other guest
speakers, these presentations took place after the regular class
session and were optional but heavily attended; between 1994
and 2003, a total of several thousand Northwestern University
students saw Kieltyka’s annual appearances (Bailey, 2006b;
Kieltyka, 2006b). In these presentations, held in a large
auditorium to accommodate the class size, Kieltyka showed
and explained a series of still images using overhead projec-
tion. She began with two pictures, first one ‘‘of an ‘erratic’
rock formation—sticking out in the middle of an incongruent
landscape/environment,’’ and then one of herself as ‘‘a beau-
tiful, attractive woman in the middle of an all guy and Catholic
high school 30th reunion.’’ She saw herself in the second
picture as being very much like the erratic boulder of the first,
and she posed the question, ‘‘How did she get there? … How
did I get here?’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a).
To Bailey’s students, Kieltyka also presented a short video
compilation she had made. The compilation included ‘‘before
and after’’ shots of herself—for example, clips of her former
self (Chuck) playing the hammered dulcimer with a local Irish
folk group, and of her post-SRS self (Charlotte Anjelica)
sitting in a recording studio. In the recording studio segments,
Kieltyka is seen surrounded by television monitors and
recording equipment. She is wearing a white bikini, drinking a
cocktail, and explaining her history (Kieltyka, 1999).
No doubt to the surprise of Bailey’s students that video
compilation actually begins with a pornographic segment
Kieltyka had made for herself pre-SRS. In it, as Donna
Summer sings ‘‘Love to Love You Baby’’ in the background,
Chuck appears as a nude woman through use of prosthetics,
including false breasts, a glued-on vulva (with his penis glued
up inside his body), a female mask, and a platinum blondewig.
The woman whom Chuck appears as masturbates through
simulated finger-clitoral stimulation and through the use of a
dildo attached to the floor; she straddles the dildo and thrusts
up and down so that it looks as if the dildo is going in and out of
her vagina. (It was actually going in and out of Chuck’s anus.)
Kieltyka overlaid an audio clip from a porn video in this
segment to provide the sound of a woman reaching orgasm.
Immediately after this segment, the compilation cuts to a post-
op scene of Anjelica standing topless in a bikini bottom and
moccasins, looking radiant and being dramatically bathed in a
rushing waterfall. She brushes back her long dark hair with her
hand and motions to two nearby women unknown to her to
also take off their tops. They decline (Kieltyka, 1999, 2006e).
Kieltyka explained to me that she used this video in Bai-
ley’s class to show an important part of her profound
transformation from man to woman. In producing the video,
I was freeing that woman that was trapped inside my
body. Just as Michelangelo would free the image from
the block of marble, or Pygmalia, the carving became
the woman that he desired. I became the woman I
desired, but it wasn’t a sexual desire, because when I
knew and stepped out of the trans state, the ritual state, I
knew that was me behind the mask. I could not use that
video to masturbate to, because I knew it was me. I could
not become aroused if I wasn’t wearing a mask. I had to
become the other. (Kieltyka, 2006c).
She also said about the video:
Itwasakindofa simulation,almostlikeapilotlearningto
fly a commercial airline[r] first goes through a simulator
untilitbecomesalmostsecond[-]natureorinstinctive—a
simulator that was also a ‘‘stimulator’’….and the higher
thestimulation[,]thegreaterthe positivefeedback[….]it
was all religious; technical; psychological; artistic; sex-
ual….even pornographic. (Kieltyka, 2006b;ellipsesin
original unless in brackets)
In other words, Kieltyka believes that the stimulation she
felt in producing the video-simulation allowed her to under-
stand she was a woman inside. To Kieltyka’s mind, the video
also demonstrates that the prosthetics and women’s lingerie
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 373
123
she used to crossdress prior to her SRS are very much like
fetishes in Native American cultures; she specifically likens
them to the eagle feathers and animal furs used in certain
Native American ceremonies. She is thinking of those Native
Americans who ‘‘had animal fetishes that the individual[,] in
their trans state or their ritual state, would don […] and they
would become those animals that had special powers within
them. The person was transformed into or transubstantiation
took place, using the fetish elements, they became those
entities’’ (Kieltyka, 2006c). She explains that this is why, in
the post-op waterfall scene that immediately follows the pre-
op pornographic scene, she looked somewhat Native Ameri-
can, with long, dark hair and moccasins: ‘‘it was symbolic of a
baptism, a kind of native American nature child, born again,
emerging from the water like a Venus’’ (Kieltyka, 2006b;see
also Kieltyka, 2006e).
Kieltyka has also explained how women’s ‘‘foundation
garments’’ (bras, girdles, etc.) were truly foundational to her
self, because they helped her understand who she truly is:
I saw [the foundation garments] as the foundation to a
woman’s sexuality, and that was where I ultimately saw
the vagina and breasts as powerful fetish elements[.…]
If I could create or recreate those powerful fetish objects
for myself—within myself[—]I would become the
woman in appearance, most certainly, but also to corre-
late with my own identity that was buried and repre-
ssed for so many years—inside. It was substantive[.]
(Kieltyka, 2006c).
Thus, as she explained to Bailey and his students, Kieltyka
saw herself as undergoingnot just a sex change, but a profound
transformation which achieved an integration of material,
emotional, and spiritual realities.
For his part, Bailey saw Kieltyka’s story as constituting an
open-and-shut case of autogynephilia. ‘‘Autogynephilia,’’ a
term coined by sex researcher Ray Blanchard in 1989, refers to
the phenomenon of a person (in Blanchard’s formulation, a
natal male) being sexually aroused by the thought of himself
as a woman (Blanchard, 1989; see also Blanchard, 2005).
Now Head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto (formerly known as
the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry) and Professor of Psychiatry
at the University of Toronto, Blanchard has posited that
autogynephilia constitutes an ‘‘erotic target location error’’ in
which a male winds up with himself as the object of his het-
erosexual desire (Freund & Blanchard, 1993). Though she has
often talked about her lesbianism, i.e., sexual attraction to
women, Kieltyka also sometimes had sexual relations with
men, and has described herself as being bisexual (Bailey,
2003,p.159;Gibson,1999). This in itself did not make her
story inconsistent with Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia;
Blanchard (2005) noted that autogynephiles might present
with a sexual history of heterosexuality (attraction to women),
bisexuality, or even asexuality. And with her elaborate and
highly creative history of erotic crossdressing, Bailey saw
Kieltyka as a perfect example of autogynephilia. Indeed, the
more he learned of Kieltyka and of autogynephilia, the more it
made perfect sense to Bailey that many of Kieltyka’s earliest
sexual arousal experiences occurred when crossdressing and/
or imagining herself as a woman (Allyn & Bacon, 2004;
Bailey, 2003, p. 152; Kieltyka, 2006c).
In his work on transsexualism, Blanchard argued that there
are actually two types of MTF transsexuals, with autogyne-
philes being one type and ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’ being
the other. In contrast to those identified as autogynephiles,
homosexual transsexuals are understood to typically appear
very effeminate from early childhood on (Blanchard, 2005). In
Bailey’s words, ‘‘From soon after birth, the homosexual male-
to-female transsexual behaves and feels like a girl’’ (Bailey,
2003, p. 146). People with this form of transsexualism are, by
definition, sexually attracted to other males, though notably
their attraction is generally to heterosexual men. Blanchard
termed them ‘‘homosexual’’ in keeping with Magnus Hirsch-
feld’s taxonomic approach (Blanchard, 2005,p.443),andhe
argued that MTF homosexual transsexuals who opt to undergo
sex reassignment do so, in part, because being a woman makes
more sense than trying to live as a very effeminate man
attracted to heterosexual men. Blanchard’s theory is, therefore,
one that sees erotic desire as a central component of MTF
transsexualism and indeed an impetus to sex reassignment. In
Bailey’s take on Blanchard’s theory, whether one is talking of
‘‘homosexual’’ or ‘‘non-homosexual’’ (i.e., ‘‘autogynephilic’’)
transsexuals, MTF transsexualism is fundamentally about
sexuality—or more specifically, eroticism. Kieltyka’s class
presentations, including her video compilation and pre-op
crossdressing ‘‘props,’’ did little to persuade Bailey otherwise.
The fact that she used the term ‘‘fetish’’ to talk about her
‘‘props’’ would only have added to his sense that her behavior
represented classic fetishistic crossdressing—autogynephilia.
When she presented to Bailey’s Human Sexuality students,
Kieltyka usually brought along friends who were also post-
operative transwomen, some of whom had, through Kieltyka,
sought out and obtained SRS-support letters from Bailey.
AccordingtoKieltyka,thesewomen(includingJuanita)joined
her in part out of gratitude to Bailey for his earlier help. But
Bailey did not seek a quid pro quo; that is, he never asked
a woman who came to him seeking an SRS letter to pres-
ent to his class or to do anything else in exchange (Bailey,
2006b; Kieltyka, 2006a). Indeed, all of the co-presenters were
arranged by Kieltyka, and all presented to his students after
their surgical transitions had been accomplished. Bailey paid
them for their presentations the same way he compensated
his other post-class speakers, out of designated university
accounts. Although it makes sense that the transwomen who
got SRS-support letters from Bailey might have been grateful
to Bailey for his help, none of them was so grateful that she
374 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
declined the money he would offerforpresenting. And, as with
allof hisafter-classspeakers, he letthempresentwhatever they
wanted; he did notrequirethem or any other after-classspeaker
to say anything in particular. Most of them simply spoke
plainly about what they saw as the relevant facts of their
experiences and their bodies, and thenthey answered students’
questions (Bailey, 2006b). None of Kieltyka’s co-presenters
gave the sort of elaborate, multimedia presentation Kieltyka
did,andnonedidwhatKieltykachosetodotwice:stripdownto
completenudityattheend of her presentation,asa sortofgrand
finale (Bailey, 2006b; Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., October 3,
2006). According to Kieltyka, she stripped ‘‘to show that even
40[-]something-year[-]old transsexual women that were les-
bianand ‘butch’ in the head but ‘fem[me]’ in the bodycould be
‘show girls’—attractive and sexy’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a).
To Bailey’s mind, the transsexual women Kieltyka brought
for SRS-support letters and as co-presenters turned out to be
perfect examples of Blanchard’s ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’
(Bailey, 2005). They passed easily as women, they were
attracted to heterosexual men, and they had been identified by
themselvesand others as femininesince early childhood.They
did not have the history of erotic crossdressing Bailey saw in
Kieltyka, though they did report histories of numerous and
often casual sexual relationships with heterosexual men. This
again was in keeping with Blanchard’s findings. Thus, the
patterns Bailey saw in Kieltyka and her associates supported
Blanchard’s theory of the two types of MTF transsexuals and
(importantly) flew in the face of the accounts of people such as
Ettner who saw transsexualism as representing a single phe-
nomenon, one that had nothing to do with eroticism and
everything to do with gender identity (Bailey, 2006b; Bailey
to Dreger, p.e.c., August 22, 2006).
According to Ettner and many other gender therapists and
theorists, the central problem pretty much any trans person
faces is having a gender identity that doesn’t match body type
(Ettner, 1996, 1999). The primary reason for seeking SRS is to
correct a mismatch between the transsexual’s body and her
gender identity, not to achieve any erotic goal. Mildred L.
Brown, a therapist popular with many trans activists (including
Conway and James), sums it up this way: ‘‘Transsexualism is
not about sex, sexual behavior, or sexual orientation—it’s
about gender or, more specifically, gender identity’’ (Brown &
Rounsley, 1996, p. 20). To this way of thinking, trans people
suffer from a sort of trick of nature, whereby they have the brain
of one gender in the body typical of the other. Thus, the trans
person has a sort of neurological intersex condition, typically
understood to be inborn. Blanchard and Bailey would likely
agree that homosexual transsexuals appear to be somewhat
neurologically intersex, given their male anatomies and their
histories of effeminacy and attraction to heterosexual males
(Bailey, 2003, p. 159), but both would reject such a claim
from a person they view as autogynephilic (which in their
view would be all non-homosexual MTF people). And more
importantly, both see eroticism and not some innate gender
identity as the salient point. Both believe that eroticism is
important in the explanation of and motivation for MTF
transsexualism.
Although Kieltyka never saw herself as an autogynephile,
judging by actions as well as copies of emails provided to me,
the fact that Bailey saw her that way did not interfere signifi-
cantly with their friendly relationship. Kieltyka told me
recentlythatsheandhertranssexualfriends‘‘tookit forgranted
that Bailey saw us the way we saw ourselves’’ (Kieltyka,
2006a), i.e., not as ‘‘autogynephilic’’ and ‘‘homosexual’’ in
Blanchard’s sense. Yet Kieltyka also distinctly remembers
that Bailey considered her an autogynephile virtually from
Day One: ‘‘I was aware that Bailey saw me as an example of
autogynephilia, he thought so the very first day we met in his
office’’ (Kieltyka, 2006b) when she showed him her pre-op
crossdressing props. Certainly by late 1998, Kieltyka knew
for sure that Bailey subscribed to Blanchard’s theory and saw
her as an autogynephile, because by that time she knew he was
writing about her in a forthcoming book. After double-
checking the facts of her story with her by phone, he showed
her the draft section about her and let her fact-check it and
comment on it (Bailey, 2006a; p.e.c.’s Bailey to Dreger,
August 22, 2006 and November 21, 2006). Although she did
not dispute the basic details about her life, she was upset that
he was using her as an example of autogynephilia (Bailey to
Blanchard, p.e.c., December 2, 1998; Bailey, 2005). So
Bailey told her that he would change her name in the book
(Bailey, 2005; Kieltyka, 2006c).
Relations between Kieltyka and Bailey remained relatively
cordial after she saw the manuscript; this is supported by
records of friendly toned emails and by the fact that Kieltyka
kept willingly presenting to Bailey’s class and otherwise
associating with him. The friendly association kept up even
after Bailey publicly labeled Kieltyka an autogynephile in no
uncertain terms in early 1999 in an interview for the article that
appeared in the Daily Northwestern
on February 24, 1999. As
mentioned in Part 1, that article featured the stories of Kieltyka
and her friend Juanita. The author, Maegan Gibson, one of
Bailey’s former Human Sexuality students, enjoyed the ben-
efit of the full cooperation of Kieltyka and Juanita, and thus
she was able to report key features of their histories and
romantic lives. With their permission, Gibson’s article also
reported Kieltyka’s and Juanita’s real pre- and post-transition
first and last names and reproduced before and after transition
photos—that is, photos of their faces from the time when they
were legally and socially men along with present-day photos
from their lives as women. When Gibson interviewed Bailey
for the article, he explained to her that he was writing a book
and that he saw Kieltyka as an example of autogynephilia and
Juanita as an example of homosexual transsexualism. And
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 375
123
Gibson (1999) reported just that, as well as Kieltyka’s clear
objection to Bailey’s classification of her.
Bailey did not formally interview Kieltyka for the book,
though, as mentioned above, he did run a draft past her and she
helped him fact-check and augment it (Bailey to Dreger,
p.e.c., August 22, 2006). At no point did Bailey feel he needed
to formally interview Kieltyka, given how much he already
knew from her many class-related presentations and her
extensive conversations and ‘‘show and tells’’ with him. As
time went on, what he believed he knew about her was only
confirmed over and over again in what she told him ‘‘in class,
in my office, in restaurants, everywhere’’ (Bailey to Dreger,
p.e.c., August 22, 2006). It was further confirmed by her
published interview with Gibson in 1999 and her substantial
participation in 2002 in a video made to accompany a human
sexuality textbook. In that video, in which through Bailey’s
introduction Kieltyka participated voluntarily and for which
she signed a full release to the publisher, she appears with her
face unobscured, identifies herself as Charlotte Anjelica, tells
her pre- and post-op story, and shows the prosthetic vulvas and
female masks she used when she was Chuck (Allyn & Bacon,
2004).
For the book project, Bailey did rather informallyinterview
two of the supposedly homosexual transsexual women he had
met through Kieltyka, those identified in the book as Juanita
and Alma. He let them know he was writing a book, and they
met with him and talked with him about their experiences.
Some of what he wanted to write about them he already knew
simply from meeting them socially through Kieltyka, but he
used the follow-up conversations to confirm details (Bailey to
Dreger, p.e.c., November 21, 2006). Kieltyka (2006a)has
contended that Bailey also drew on what he could have only
learned from the SRS letter interviews. Bailey disagrees: ‘‘I
never used the information that I got in those limited inter-
views for the book’’ (Bailey, 2006a).(Thisisdiscussedin
detail in Part 5.)
Some may well wonder why Kieltyka developed and
maintained such a friendly association with Bailey when he
persistently subscribed to a theory about her identity that
conflicted with her own understanding. And why did it take so
many years for her to get so upset about his characterization of
her that she would turn on him? This is discussed more fully in
Parts 4 and 5 below. For now, let me just say in summary that
Kieltyka has explained to me that she valued her relationship
with Bailey, and, though she knew he consistently labeled her
autogynephilic, she thought that over time she could educate
Bailey about her own theory of transsexualism and change his
mind with regard to his understanding of it and her. Indeed,
when Kieltyka had first learned that Bailey was writing a book
on the subject, she was glad she would be included and
excitedly imagined that it would be something of a collabo-
ration in which he would explore Kieltyka’s ideas, including
her analogy between the role of sexual fetishes in transsexual
transformation and the role of animal-part fetishes for simi-
larly profound spiritual transformation in Native American
rituals. (Kieltyka did not understand how this analogy would
be seen as an offensive cultural appropriation to many Native
Americans, including many Two Spirits.) She thought if she
worked with Bailey long enough, she could get Bailey to
understand (and write about) how gender identity, sexual
orientation, and sexual identity could all be understood as
distinct components of transsexual identity, and how fetish-
istic crossdressing could function as a stage of discovery and
empowerment on the way to full transition (Kieltyka, 2006c,
2006d).
So, when Kieltyka saw the book draft in November 1998,
she discovered—and was upset to discover—that Bailey was
using her in the book as an illustration of autogynephilia. She
recalls, ‘‘I felt trapped. But then he said this is a first draft, we
can use any information to support your theory if you have
support for your theory. If you can change my mind, that’s all
part of our relationship[….] What I saw was a misunder-
standing or a misinterpretation, [and] I wanted the opportunity
to change his mind’’ (Kieltyka, 2006b). Surely Bailey did see
Blanchard’s theory as a theory, but it seems to have held (and
to hold) in his mind the sort of weight that the theory of
universal gravitation does. That is because of what Bailey sees
as the substantial scientific and clinical evidence for Blan-
chard’s theory. It would take quite a lot of scientific counter-
evidence—far more than Kieltyka could muster—to displace
it. Indeed, the more Kieltyka told and showed Bailey, the more
she seemed anecdotally to confirm Blanchard’s theory (Bailey
to Dreger, p.e.c., August 22, 2006; Bailey, 2005). Kieltyka’s
yearly presentations, the transwomen she introduced Bailey to
at Northwestern and at local bars, the interviews with Gib-
son—all these seemed to Bailey only to reconfirm what he felt
he already knew from the scientific literature—that all trans-
sexual women fit easily into one or the other of Blanchard’s
two types (Bailey, 2005). Kieltyka and her friends seemed like
obvious examples of the two types, and, as he worked on his
book, he saw them as just that: perfect illustrations to use in the
book.
As do a lot of researchers, as Bailey went through his daily
personal and professional life, he was making mental note of
otherpeoplehe met whodidordidn’tmatchvarioustheorieshe
had come across in his work—including people who could put
a human face on the other sexual varieties and sexological
concepts he wanted to talk, teach, and write about. Other
characters that made it into his book include: Edwin, a very
effeminate gay man who worked at the cosmetics counter of a
department store near where Bailey lived; Leslie Ryan, a
mother who came to Bailey with her questions and concerns
about her son Danny who often behaved very girlishly;
Ben, ‘‘the leader of the ‘gay guys panel’ who [like Kieltyka]
spoke to [Bailey’s] human sexuality class’’ (Bailey, 2003,
p. 63); and Stephanie Braverman, a middle-aged heterosexual
376 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
crossdresser who (like Kieltyka) after encountering a media
report on Bailey’s work contacted him ‘‘to ‘educate’’’ him
(Bailey, 2003,p.160).
And, as a sex researcherwith an activeprogram, Bailey was
doing scientific studies, the results of some of which would
make it into his book. For example, he and his collaborators
werelooking at the occupationsandavocationsof gaymen,the
speech patterns of gay and heterosexual men and women, and
the relative prevalence of feminine traits in gay men, drag
queens, and MTF transsexuals (see, e.g., Barlow, 1996).These
scientific studies were conducted with the approval of North-
western’s Social Sciences IRB, the committee charged with
overseeing this type of human subjects research. (Which kinds
of research require IRB approval is discussed in depth in
Part 5.)
In the fall of 2002, Bailey submitted the final version of his
manuscript to Joseph Henry Press, and in spring of 2003, the
book came out in print and on the Website of the press (Bailey,
p.e.c., October 5, 2006). The back cover of the print version
included the following advance blurb from Harvard Univer-
sity psychology professor Steven Pinker:
With a mixture of science, humanity, and fine writing, J.
Michael Bailey illuminates the mysteries of sexual
orientation and identity in the best book yet written on
the subject. [TMWWBQ] may upset the guardians of
political correctness on both the left and the right, but it
will be welcomed by intellectually curious people of all
sexes and sexual orientations.
Meanwhile, psychology professor David M. Buss of the
University of Texas opined: ‘‘Refreshingly candid, remark-
ablyfreeofideology,thisbookisdestinedto become a modern
classic in the field. But readers should be prepared to have
some cherished assumptions about human nature shattered.’’
Anne Lawrence, physician, sexologist, and self-identified
autogynephilic transsexual woman, remarked simply, ‘‘This
is a wonderful book on an important subject.’’ Needlessto say,
not everyone would agree. Nevertheless, as his book went to
press, Bailey saw no hint that several of the transwomen with
whom he had such good relations would, within just a few
months, decide to turn against him.
Part 3: What TMWWBQ Actually Said
If one is to understand the history of the controversy sur-
rounding J. Michael Bailey’s book, one must know what the
book itself said, even though (as I will show) some of the
reactions to TMWWBQ were based on incorrect assumptions
about the book rather than its actual content. The analytic
synopsis presented in this section reviews the contents of
TMWWBQ relevant to this history—i.e., chiefly the portions
on GID and transsexualism—while simultaneously making
special note of which parts (real and imagined) drew particular
ire. Let me be clear that the following synopsis is not intended
as a substitute for an actual reading of TMWWBQ.In
researching this history,I was dismayed to discover how many
people—including professional scholars—were ready to give
me detailed opinions about the book while admitting they
hadn’t bothered to read it. I think it is fair to say, and I hope
here to show, that TMWWBQ is an odd book in many ways,
one that frequently doesn’t do what you expect of it. Indeed, an
examination of Bailey’s collected works suggests this is
generally true of his productions—they often don’t match one
of the standard, expected viewpoints—and I think this helps to
explain a lot of the criticism he encounters from both pro-
gressives and conservatives who tend to adhere to clear-cut
dichotomies of ‘‘facts’’ and opinions.
It is worth noting that a fair number of people were angered
by Bailey’s book before they ever even opened it. This was
because of the cover, which features a black and white photo of
the bare legs of a hairy, muscular man (shown from behind,
from the knees down) standing, in a feminine pose, in pretty
pumps. The book’s title is superimposed on this picture. When
I talked with him about the backlash against the book, Paul
Vasey recalled being with Joan Roughgarden, a prominent
transgender scientist, in February 2003 when she saw for the
first time the book’s cover, reproduced on a flier. Vasey
remembers that, upon seeing the flier, Roughgarden immedi-
ately denounced the book and declared it a threat to the LBGT
community (Vasey, p.e.c., July 3, 2006). Roughgarden could
not have actually known what the book said, because it wasn’t
yet published (Vasey to Dreger, p.e.c.,February 27, 2007). Just
after the book was issued, in her blog, Becky Allison, M.D., a
prominent transwoman, asked rhetorically, ‘‘Did I mention the
cover art? A pair of big hairy legs in high heels. Are we having
fun yet?’’ (Allison, 2003). On her Website, Andrea James
remembered, ‘‘I winced the moment I saw Bailey’s con-
descending title and cover art’’ (James, 2003a). Time after
time, those I talked to about the book reported that the cover
photo and title had immediately offended them or others. Even
some of those generally friendly to the book found the cover a
detriment. Bailey showed me an email from a stranger, a self-
identified feminine gay man, who in a thoughtful email mes-
sage in May 2003 said he ‘‘was put off by the title and cover,
thinking it unlikely to be a serious study. […]Thecoverand
title do not do your fine work justice, in fact they work against
you’’ (p.e.c. to Bailey, May 13, 2003). Even Blanchard told me,
‘‘I didn’t like the cover. Mike sent me the two choices [before
publication] that I believe he got from the publisher. My
recommendation was to go with the one he didn’t take’’
(Blanchard, 2006), namely a cover featuring three very similar
faces, with one looking masculine, one feminine, and one
androgynous.
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 377
123
Even though TMWWBQ is about a lot more than MTF
transsexualism, and even though Bailey insists the cover and
title were meant to allude to a whole range of people who
might fit under the umbrella of ‘‘feminine males,’’ most critics
(and indeed most readers) seem to have understood the cover
and title to constitute a pejorative comment on transsexual
women. Indeed, TMWWBQ’s title and cover explicitly con-
trasted with those books on transgenderism which adhered
to the ‘‘woman trapped in a man’s body’’ narrative of trans-
gender identity, or what I will call hereafter the ‘‘feminine
essence’’ narrative. The feminine essence narrative is summed
up by Bailey this way:
Since I can remember, I have always felt as if I were a
member of the other sex. I have felt like a freak with this
body and detest my penis. I must get sex reassignment
surgery (a ‘‘sex change operation’’) in order to match my
external body with my internal mind. (Bailey, 2003,p.
143)
In keeping with their themes, books that favor the feminine
essence narrative have tended to feature on their covers
attractive head-to-toes photos of transwomen dressed rela-
tively conservatively. Consider, for example, the front cover
of Deirdre McCloskey’s Crossing: A Memoir, which shows a
photo of the author dressed in dark suit (matching skirt and
jacket) and pearls, seatedwithher legs crossed the way women
often cross their legs, leaning back and laughing with both
hands clasped to her upper chest (McCloskey, 1999). Even
Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the
Rest of Us, which presents a somewhat radical account of a
trans life, has as its cover illustration a photo of the author
dressed in a long dress with long sleeves, her hands laid flat,
wrists crossed, just above her breasts, rather like a butterfly
(Bornstein, 1994). Contrast the subject of Bailey’s book’s title
(The Man…) and cover illustration (a hairy, muscular man).
Bailey’s point seemed clear: the man who would be queen was
really just a guy in size-thirteen pumps.
Those who, on the basis of his book’s cover and title,
suspected Bailey of rejecting the feminine essence narrative
and who did bother to venture into the actual content of
the book quickly found their suspicions confirmed. In the
Preface, Bailey bluntly insists that eroticism, not gender
identity, is the salient point in MTF transsexualism: ‘‘One
cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsex-
uals’ sexuality. Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives’’
(Bailey, 2003, p. xii). He then provides a thumbnail fore-
shadowing of Blanchard’s taxonomy of homosexual and
autogynephilic MTF transsexualism: ‘‘Those who love men
become women to attract them. Those who love women
become the women they love’’ (p. xii).Convinced he’s dealing
with a fundamentally sexual phenomenon, Bailey shows no
patience for the idea of women trapped in men’s bodies; he
out-and-out denies the feminine essence narrative told by
many transwomen and pushed by therapists such as Ettner
and Brown:
Supposedly, male-to-female transsexuals are motivated
solely by thedeep-seated feeling that theyhave women’s
souls. Furthermore, the fact that some transsexuals are
sexually attracted to men and others to women allegedly
means that sex has nothing to do with it. However, in this
case the exception proves the rule. Heterosexual men
who want to be women are not naturally feminine; there
is no sense in which theyhave women’ssouls. Whatthey
do have is fascinating, but even they have rarely dis-
cussed it openly. (p. xii)
His book, he insisted, would be different. He would blast past
the feminine essence narrative to the core truth of transsexu-
alism: ‘‘[W]riters have been either too shallow or too
squeamish to give transsexual sexuality the attention it
deserves. No longer’’ (p. xii). So where MTF transsexualism
was concerned, Bailey would happily play Galileo to Blan-
chard’s Copernicus, spreading, supporting, and fiercely
defending a truth too often denied and suppressed because of
self-serving identity politics.
Given Bailey’s lightning-quick summary of Blanchard’s
theory in the Preface, and given that Blanchard’s taxonomy
is not really spelled out clearly until page 146, the reader
unfamiliar with the concepts of ‘‘autogynephilia’’ and
‘‘homosexual transsexualism’’—and plenty familiar with the
female essence narrative—may well find TMWWBQ acon-
fusing book on the first pass. At least this reader did. After all,
the first third of the book seems to carefully document what
amounts to a feminine essence story. Part 1 (Chaps. 1–3),
entitled ‘‘The Boy Who Would Be Princess,’’ tracks a boy
Bailey calls Danny Ryan, an anatomically typical, pre-
pubescent male diagnosable with GID.
In Bailey’s account, Danny seems to have had fairly fem-
inine behaviors and interests from the very start (Chap. 1).
Again in keeping with the standard feminine essence narra-
tive, Bailey speaks unfavorably of psychological theories that
would point to the Ryans’ parenting as the source of Danny’s
femininity, hinting instead that, given how early and consis-
tently it showed up, Danny’s femininity is probably inborn. To
further make the case for biological etiology of gendered
behavior and interests, in his general discussion of Danny,
Bailey uses outcomes studies of sex-reassigned children to
suggest that the tendency towards what we ultimately call
gender is at least in many cases set before birth (Chap. 3). In
short, Bailey seems to see the tendency towards masculine or
feminine behaviors and interests as largely innate—and thus
‘‘gender identity disorder’’ (or at least early-onset mismatches
between sex and gendered behavior) as largely innate.
But in a sign of his turn away from the standard feminine
essence story of transgenderism—that holds that girlish male
378 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
children are really girls—Bailey sees as very important the
fact that Danny’s uncle is gay and, like Danny, was feminine
from an early age (pp. 12–13). Thus, Bailey strongly suggests
that being a feminine boy and becoming a gay man are
correlated, and that they share a common biological etiology.
Indeed, Bailey refers to data showing that nearly all boys like
Danny diagnosable with GID turn out not to be transsexual
women, but to be gay men (pp. 17–20). Given the outcomes
data on boys treated for GID, and given the self-reports of
gay men with regard to their childhoods, Bailey speculates
that Danny will end up a non-transsexual gay man (pp. 17,
34). This, of course, is part of what infuriated certain trans
critics who adhere to the feminine essence story of MTF
transsexualism—especially those who are attractedto women;
they wanted to claim personal histories just like Danny’s, yet
here was Bailey saying, in fact, that the vast majority of boys
likeDannywouldjustend up asfairlyrun-of-the-millfeminine
gay men.
Still, at this point, the reader relatively new to the topic may
wonder why Bailey would deny the feminine essence expla-
nation to men who, as adults, do choose to change sex. Could
they not have been, as they often claim, Dannys as children?
After all, Bailey acknowledges that a very small number of
boys with GID wind up to be transsexual women (pp. 19–20).
Furthermore, he notes that outcome studies of boys treated for
GID may be disproportionately missing those who did end up
transsexual, ‘‘So maybe transsexualism is a more common
outcome than some people believe’’ (p. 32). Why, then, would
Bailey be reluctant to accept the claim of many transsexual
women who say they have ‘‘always felt as if I were a member
of the other sex’’ (p. 143)?
Interestingly, a close reading of Bailey’s book reveals the
author’s persistent skepticism about many scientists’ and
clinicians’ conception of gender identity, and an especially
strong skepticism about the idea of an innate gender identity:
‘‘‘Gender identity’ [in the psychological literature] refers to
the subjective internal feeling that one is male or female’’ (p.
22). But, Bailey insists, ‘‘most of us rarely, if ever, think about
our gender identities’’ (p. 22). Most of us don’t go through our
days with an articulated sense of being male or female, the
way the psychological literature (including the DSM)would
lead us to believe. While he acknowledges that we all—as
children and adults—seem to have gendered interests and
gendered behaviors, Bailey is doubtful that young children
have ‘‘subjective internal feeling[s] that one is male or
female’’ (p. 22). He asks, ‘‘how would a girl even know if she
had the same inner experience as a typical boy?’’ (p. 50).
Ultimately, Bailey concludes that ‘‘scientists have not fully
appreciated how complicated a trait gender identity likely is,
or how little we know about it. One expert told me, bluntly:
‘‘Gender identity is defined as ‘the inner sense of oneself as
male or female.’ What the hell does that mean?’’ (p. 50). It
makes more sense to him that children naturally exhibit
‘‘feminine’’ and ‘‘masculine’’ behaviors and interests, and that
those are then categorized as feminine and masculine in such a
way that children get the idea that they count as girlish or
boyish.
So his doubt about the commonly held concept of a core
gender identity is one reason Bailey remains dubious about
claims by transsexuals that they change sex because they have
always had a core gender identity that conflicted with their
anatomical sex. He does, following Blanchard, acknowledge
that ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’ may be born with something
like a neurological intersex—a kind of inborn feminized brain
in a masculine body, so that from an early age they naturally
exhibit feminine interests and behaviors: ‘‘From soon after
birth, the homosexual male-to-female transsexual behaves
and feels like a girl’’ (p. 146). Thus, Bailey distinguishes
homosexual transsexuals from ‘‘autogynephiles’’ when he
singles out the latter kind of MTF transsexual as ‘‘not naturally
feminine’’ and in ‘‘no sense[…] hav[ing] women’s souls’’ (p.
xii). But still, he just doesn’t think it is a gender identity
problem that ultimately motivates people to change sex, even
in the case of extremely feminine homosexual transsexuals:
‘‘Homosexual transsexuals are in their own way just as sex-
ually motivated [to seek SRS] as autogynephiles’’ (p. 180).
‘‘Princess Danny,’’ then, is used by Bailey not as an
example of transsexualism—and certainly not as an example
of the feminine essence origins of transgenderism—but rather
to show that some boys are really quite feminine, that this is
probably caused by something that happens before birth, and
that these boys will mostly likely wind up gay. Indeed, in his
final story about Danny, presented in the book’s Epilogue,
Bailey portrays Danny as gay and very much ‘‘not a girl in
boy’s clothing’’ (p. 214) and when I asked Bailey whether he
knows about Danny’s identity today, he informed me, with
little surprise in his voice, that Danny is now, in fact, out as a
young gay man (personal communication, November 5,
2006). Thus, to Bailey, the story of Danny enables a dis-
cussion of how gendered behavior and gendered interests are
often linked to sexual orientation—how it is that being gay
often goes with being feminine in interests and behaviors.
This explains why it is that, although many trans critics saw
the story of Danny (Part 1 of the book) as comprising an
integral part of Bailey’s story of transsexualism, Bailey
insists he doesn’t really discuss transsexualism in depth
until Part 3 of the book. The way he indexed the book
confirms this; the index entries on transsexualism are almost
entirely limited to the pages of Part 3.
So Bailey was rejecting the dominant (feminine essence)
narrative of MTF transgenderism, and simultaneously reject-
ing the two dominant narratives of sex and gender identities,
namely biological determinism and social constructivism. Or
at least he was rejecting the standard versions of these theories.
Biological determinists have tended to be fairly dualist (reject-
ing of gradations) with regard to gender; they assume two sexes
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 379
123
means two genders. Meanwhile, social constructivists have
tended to talk about spectra of gender identities, believing that
cultural variation leads to variations in gender identities. Given
these two dominant narratives about sex and gender, a number
of critics assumed that, if Bailey was rejecting the feminine
essence narrative of transsexualism, he must be collapsing
gender identity and sex—that is, he must be a biological
determinist who assumes that, if you’re born genetically male,
your gender identity will clearly be masculine (in spite of
whatever you ultimately claim). You might put on pretty
pumps, but you’re not kidding anyone. Although Bailey leans
heavily towards a biological understanding of the origins of
gendered behaviors, gendered interests, and sexual orientation,
his account is not about two simple gender identities that map
to two simple sexes. In fact his book is largely dedicated to—
even arguably all about—the
under-appreciated complication[…] that gender identity
is probably not a binary, black-and-white characteristic.
Scientists continue to measure gender identity as ‘‘male’’
or ‘‘female,’’ despite the fact that there are undoubtedly
gradations in inner experience between the girl who
loves pink frilly dresses and cannot imagine becoming a
boy and the extremely masculine boy who shudders to
think of becoming a girl. (p. 50)
Bailey sees particularly in feminine gay men, many of whom
were feminine boys, plenty of evidence that gender is not a
one-or-the-other proposition.
In TMWWBQ as elsewhere, Bailey rejects social influence
explanations of gendered behaviors and sexual orientations—
i.e., he rejects the idea that upbringing can cause certain boys
to act like girls or to turn out gay. For example, he says,
‘‘There is no reason to believe that we could alter Danny’s
future sexual orientation even if we tried’’ (p. 20). Later he
adds, ‘‘Essentialists believe that sexual orientation is an
essential part of human nature. I am an essentialist’’ (p. 126).
But Bailey does see a role for culture in our experiences of
identity. He recognizes that boys and men who are homo-
sexual or otherwise gender atypical can be made extremely
miserable if they are prohibited from expressing their
homosexuality and femininity (pp. 25–28). He acknowl-
edges that, ‘‘In our world very feminine boys must contend
with peers who despise sissies, fathers who get squeamish
seeing them pick up a doll[….] For the most part, people do
not just keep their attitudes to themselves but convey them to
the boys’’ (p. 33).
With this comes an acknowledgment that more boys like
Danny might become transsexual given a different cultural
milieu:
Imagine that we could create a world in which very
feminine boyswere not persecuted by other children and
their parents allowed them to play however they wan-
ted[….] As much as I would like to arrange such a world,
I think it might well come with the cost of more trans-
sexual adults. Maybe it would be worth it, though. It is
conceivable to me that transsexuals who avoided the
trauma and shame of social ostracism and parental
criticism would be happier and better adjusted than the
gay men whose masculinity came at the expense of
shame and disappointment. […] I can imagine that this
world would be more humane than ours. (p. 33)
Similarly,Chapter7,‘‘IsHomosexuality aRecentInvention?’’,
rejects the idea that sexual orientation is simply socially con-
structed, but in his examples Bailey also makes clear that he
understands that cultural setting strongly influences how one
will live out one’s orientation. So he claims, ‘‘Transgender
homosexuality is probably the most common form of homo-
sexuality found across cultures’’ (p. 134). He defines this as
‘‘occur[ing] when one man takes on a feminine role, often
dressing as a woman and taking a woman’s name, and [having]
sex with masculine men’’ (p. 134). He sees this basic phe-
nomenon—ultra-feminine homosexual males—as showing
up in part because certain cultures tolerate it, but also because
of biological variation that exists consistently throughout the
human population: ‘‘The cross-cultural regularity of homo-
sexual transsexuals and drag queens is highly suggestive of
some fundamental biological influence that transcends cul-
ture’’ (p. 136). Culture constrains and/or amplifies what arises
naturally.
Thus, while two common misperceptions are that Bailey
rejects any idea of innate transsexuality and that he rejects any
idea of culture mattering, in fact he’s placing what is called
MTF transsexuality (the desire to change sex from male to
female [p. 144]) on a spectrum of biologically induced male
sexual variation, a spectrum that in our culture includes the
people who are ultimately identified as feminine gay men,
transvestites, drag queens, and transsexuals. Who lives out
which role depends on the interaction of each individual’s
biology, experience, and cultural milieu. This might again, to
the novice, sound like a theory most trans people would
welcome. But, in fact, it again involves a rejection of the
standard feminine essence narrative; that is, it rejects the idea
that some people are born ‘‘true transsexuals,’’ profoundly
different from all other people in having the true gender
identity of one sex in the body of the other. It also means
crossdressers (whom Bailey claims are also erotically moti-
vated) are not that different from the non-homosexual trans-
sexuals—‘‘They are all autogynephiles’’ (p. 164)—an idea
really irritating to many transwomen who do not see them-
selves as autogynephiles andwhosometimesseethemselvesas
‘‘true transsexuals’’ distinguishable from (and much more
normal than) crossdressers. So, the fact that he speculates that
380 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
autogynephilic transsexuals, like homosexual MTF transsex-
uals, are essentially born, not made (pp. 169–170), would
placate few transwomen who reject the idea that eroticism
motivated their SRS or that they are in league with fetishistic
crossdressers.
Although he is generally pessimistic about social pro-
gress—‘‘Who can really hope to change society?’’ (p. 28)—
Bailey also actively argues (progressively, I think) that there’s
nothing really wrong with being a feminine male or a gay man,
or, as he thinks is often the case, both. He sees as simple
truths—simple truths well supported by scientific research—
that gay men are more likely than straight men to enter certain
feminine-identified professions and have feminine-identified
interests (pp. 63–69), that gay men are more likely than
straight men to remember acting or being identified as femi-
nine as children (pp. 62–63), and that gay men are more likely
than straight men to walk, stand, and sit more like women (pp.
73–76). He admits ‘‘that not all gay men are alike, and not all
straight men are alike, and some gay men are very much like
straight men (except, by definition, in their sexual orienta-
tion)’’ but he adds that this ‘‘does not invalidate the fact that
there are some large differences between typical gay men and
typical straight men’’ (p. 64). In Bailey’s view, critics who
wrongly call him homophobic for noting these ‘‘stereotypes’’
are themselves just femiphobic—homophobic by virtue of
being afraid and intolerant of femininity in men, which he
suggests he is not (p. 59).
But Bailey’s tone with regard to transsexuals seems to be
notably less tolerant—or at least significantly more uneven. It
is not true, as some critics claim, that he denies transwomen
their female identities by using the male pronoun to refer to
post-transition women; in fact he consistently uses the same
convention used by others like Deirdre McCloskey in her
autobiography: ‘‘he’’ for pre-transition, ‘‘she’’ for post. Indeed,
Bailey uses ‘‘she’’ as soon as a social gender transition happens,
even if a woman has not had SRS (see, e.g., Bailey, 2003,
pp. 149, 155). Nor, as noted above, does he deny the claim
that transsexualism might be inborn; autogynephilic trans-
sexualism like homosexual transsexualism ‘‘smells innate’’
to him (p. 170).
But there seems to be plenty else in the book to offend many
transwomen and their allies. First, there is the running theme
started in the Preface of the feminine essence narrative being a
sometimes-willful lie told to cover up a sexual fetish, namely
autogynephilia, and the associated theme that virtually all
‘‘non-homosexual transsexuals’’ are autogynephilic, no matter
what they claim about themselves and their histories. Bailey
says that autogynephilic transsexuals ‘‘sometimes misrepre-
sent themselves as members of the other [type of transsexual…
T]hey are often silent about their true motivation and instead
tellstoriesaboutthemselvesthataremisleadingand,inimportant
respects, false’’ (p. 146; cf. p. 173). To further emphasize how
deceptive he thinks most non-homosexual (i.e., autogynephilic)
transsexuals are, he praises ‘‘Honest and open autogynephilic
transsexuals [who] reveal a much different pattern’’ of gendered
history than homosexual transsexuals (p. 147). He quotes
transwoman Maxine Petersen, ‘‘the ace gender clinician at
the Clarke,’’ as saying ‘‘Most gender patients lie’’ about the
erotic components of their feelings and desires so that they can
obtain thesexchangestheyreasonablyfear they willotherwise
be denied (p. 172). (Bailey implicitly admits this fear is well-
founded: ‘‘some psychiatrists refuse to recommend for sex
reassignment any man who has had even one incident of erotic
cross-dressing’’ [p. 174].) One gets the clear sense from the
book that all transsexual narratives are deeply suspect—or just
plain false—unless they fit Blanchard’s theory and Bailey’s
reading.
Bailey also speaks of transsexuality as being something for
which a boy may be ‘‘at risk’’ suggesting it is a relatively bad
outcome (see, e.g., pp. 30–31). His logic spins out this way:
‘‘[S]ex change surgery is major and permanent, and can have
serious side effects. Why put boys at risk for this when they
can become gay men happy to be men?’’ (p. 31). He also points
to the possibility that autogynephilic transsexuals ‘‘might
dedicate their lives to changing their sex to the point of
apparent obsession, losing families, friends, and jobs in the
process’’ (p. 144). The implication: best that these ‘‘risks’’ be
minimized if possible. I think it is safe to say that few trans
adults see their identities as a risk to be avoided, any more that
most natal women see their identities this way, even though
being a natal woman (like being a transwoman) invariably
comes with biological and social challenges.
In parts of the book, Bailey talks more bluntly about
transsexuality as if it is a disease, or at least a disorder: ‘‘I
suspect that both autogynephilic and homosexual gender
dysphoria result from early and irreversible developmental
processes in the brain. If so, learning more about the origins of
transsexualism will not get us much closer to curing it’’ (p.
207; emphasis added). He particularly singles out the non-
homosexual transsexuals as having a paraphilia, namely
autogynephilia:
Paraphilias comprise a set of unusual sexual prefer-
ences that include autogynephilia, masochism, sadism,
exhibitionism[…], frotteurism (rubbing oneself against
strangers[…]), necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophilia.
Because some of these preferences (especially pedo-
philia) are harmful, I hesitated to link them to
autogynephilia, which is not harmful. But there are
two reasons to think that these sexual preferences have
some causes in common. First, all paraphilias occur
exclusively (or nearly exclusively) in men. Second,
paraphilias tend to go together. [… A]lthough most
autogynephiles are not sexual sadists, they are more
likely to be sadists compared with men who are not
autogynephilic. (pp. 171–172)
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 381
123
In this way, Bailey’s portrayals of transsexuals often do not
strike the average reader as flattering, even when he may
intend them to be such or to be merely descriptive. He argues
that ‘‘True acceptance of the transgendered requires that we
truly understand who they are’’ (p. 176), but who he says they
truly are seems unlikely to lead to general acceptance.
For instance, how many already-transphobic people would
be inclined to be more accepting upon hearing from Bai-
ley about the high rate of sex work, promiscuity, and petty
theft among ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’? Bailey generalizes,
‘‘Most homosexual transsexuals have also learned how to live
on the streets. At one time or another many of them have
resorted to shoplifting or prostitution or both. This reflects
their willingness to forgo conventional routes, especially
those that cost extra time or money’’ (p. 184). He says of
Juanita, ‘‘her ability to enjoy emotionally meaningless sex
appears male-typical. In this sense, homosexual transsexuals
might be especially well suited to prostitution’’ (p. 185). Even
when he lists other occupations among transsexual women,
the list is limited to fairly low-status professions: they work as
‘‘waitresses, hairdressers, receptionists, strippers, and prosti-
tutes, as well as in many other occupations’’ (p. 142).
Bailey’s portrayal of autogynephiles (by his schema, all
MTFs except classic homosexual transsexuals) also seems
unlikely to cause an outpouring of admiration or acceptance
from the rest of the population, especially as he speaks of them
(using physician, sex researcher, and transwoman Anne
Lawrence’s phrase) as ‘‘men trapped in men’s bodies’’ (Chap.
9). He himself admits that autogynephilia is so ‘‘bizarre to
most people’’ and ‘‘differs so much from ordinary experience
that it cannot be understood simply’’ (p. 166). After all,
‘‘Autogynephiles are men who have created their image of
attractive women in their own bodies, an image that coexists
with their original, male selves. The female self is a man-
made creation’’ (p. 168).
TMWWBQ includes two vivid portraits of supposed auto-
gynephiles, and it is really not surprising that the two portraits
are not the sort many transwomen want to publicly identify
with. They both seem sexually strange, and perhaps pathetic.
The first is of ‘‘Stephanie Braverman,’’ a ‘‘50-ish married
man’’ crossdresser (p. 160), who ‘‘insists [to Bailey] that the
primary benefit of cross-dressing these days is relaxation’’ (p.
161), a claim Bailey doesn’t believe for a second. Given
Braverman’s history of masturbating while cross-dressed, and
given her confessed fantasy that Bailey ‘‘would treat her ‘like
a lady’—take her out to a nice restaurant and then out danc-
ing’’ (p. 165), Bailey considers her a rather classic auto-
gynephile.
The second supposed autogynephile represented in the
book is included ‘‘less because she is representative than
because she openly and floridly exemplifies the essential
features of […] autogynephilia’’ (p. 156). This is Bailey’s
account of Anjelica Kieltyka, identified in the book’s account
of her as Cher Mondavi, ne
´
Chuck Mondavi. In TMWWBQ,
details from Kieltyka’s history allow Bailey to paint a portrait
of the autogynephile as a young man and child—boyish, apt to
experience occasional unexpressed wishes to be a girl, and
prone to masturbating while crossdressed or while fantasizing
about being a woman. Because it illustrates the phenomenon
of autogynephilia, Bailey goes into particular detail about ‘‘a
period in Chuck’s life marked by a devotion to cross-dressing
that was both obsessive and highly creative’’ (p. 153). This
was the period that included the use of prosthetic breasts,
vulvas, wigs, and female masks, and the period that involved
the production of the pornographic video Kieltyka showed to
Bailey and his many students. Bailey notes that Chuck also
constructed a ‘‘robot man’’ that could fulfill the fantasy
of penetration. ‘‘Robot man’’ had a body, a penis made
of a dildo, and even an arm that Chuck could manipulate
to make it feel as if it was stroking his back. Chuck
attached a mirror to his bedroom ceiling, and could view
the image of the robot man on top of Chuck, dressed as a
woman, ‘‘penis’’ in Chuck’s anus. (p. 154)
Bailey goes on to tell of ‘‘Cher’’ being ‘‘born in 1991,’’ a
year before she got her SRS (p. 155). He relays Cher’s insis-
tence ‘‘that once Chuck became Cher, the sexual focus was no
longer a self-image, but other people’’ (p. 156). But he doesn’t
think this claim exempts her from the category of autogyne-
philic transsexual. (Notably Kieltyka has never saidBailey got
any of the details of her life story wrong in the book; her
objections have been directed at his labeling of her as auto-
gynephilic andhis exclusion of her own understanding of what
her history tells about her identity and about transsexuality.)
Bailey’s remarks on the appearance of transwomen such as
Cher are often germane to his discussion, but they too
undoubtedly rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Take, for
example, this: ‘‘There is no way to say this as sensitively as I
would prefer, so I will just go ahead. Most homosexual
transsexuals are much better looking than most autogyne-
philic transsexuals’’ (p. 180). Bailey confirms this opinion
when he describes his own sexual response (only) to homo-
sexual transsexuals: ‘‘It is difficult to avoid viewing Kim from
two perspectives: as a researcher but also as a single, hetero-
sexual man’’ (p. 141). Later we read that, ‘‘When [Kim] came
to my laboratory, my initial impression was reconfirmed. She
was stunning. (Afterwards my avowedly heterosexual male
research assistant told me he would gladly have had sex with
her, even knowing that Kim still possessed a penis.)’’ (p. 182).
His explanation of the appearance differential between
homosexual and autogynephilic transsexuals points partly to
homosexual transsexuals being born more feminine and more
likely to transition early (i.e., before advanced masculini-
zation), and partly to the sexual orientations that allegedly
distinguish them: while homosexual transsexuals want to
be able, post-transition, to attract heterosexual men, ‘‘The
382 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
autogynephile’s main romantic target is herself’’ (p. 183).
Thus, the homosexual transsexual who will have trouble
passing is less likely to decide to transition than the auto-
gynephilic transsexual who is willing to struggle even post-
SRS with passing, since the former needs to pass for sexual
gratification while the latter does not.
In keeping with his focus on the erotic motivations for SRS,
Bailey’s portrayal of individual homosexual transsexual
women—including women identified as Terese, Alma, Maria,
Kim, and Juanita—focuses on their sexual interests and
activities. He sees ‘‘in important respects’’ the ‘‘story of all
homosexual male-to-female transsexuals’’ in Terese’s story:
‘‘Her early, extreme, and effortless femininity, her unambig-
uous preference for heterosexual men as sex partners, her
(however brief) attempt to live as a gay man, and her difficulty
in securing the right kind of guy prior to surgery, are almost
universal among this type of transsexual’’ (p. 151). In contrast
to his intimation about many autogynephiles, including
Braverman,Bailey expresses virtually no skepticism aboutthe
stories of homosexual transsexuals, because they tell him
stories consistent with his understanding of them. They con-
firm his presumption that they have male-typical high sex
drives, high enough that they follow those sex drives even
when it may not be in their apparent best interests. So he tells
the story of Juanita who, finding herself bored and undersexed,
separates from her husband and apparently idyllic life in the
suburbs: ‘‘she missed the excitement of living in the city, and
of dating new partners. She had also begun to work again as an
escort—she had done this before meeting her husband’’ (p.
210). Bailey takes the opportunity of this story to add, ‘‘Nearly
all the homosexual transsexuals I know work as escorts after
they have their surgery. I used to think that somehow, they had
no other choice. […]I have come to believe that these trans-
sexuals are less constrained by their secret pasts than by their
own desires[...] including the desire for sex with different
attractive men’’ (p. 210).
One might assume from this sort of passage that Bailey
negatively judges homosexual transsexuals, but in fact he
doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with their choice
of sex work, their high sex drives, or their identities. Similarly,
though he labels autogynephilia a paraphilia, he is clear that it
is ‘‘not harmful’’ in the way some other paraphilias are (p.
171). And while his portrayal of Braverman seems to have a
certain tone of exasperation, his portrayal of Kieltyka is
overlaid with his appreciation of her talents as an artist and her
struggles as an unconventional person:
I think about what an unusual life she has led, and what
an unusual person she is. How difficult it must have been
for her to figure out her sexuality and what she wanted to
do with it. I think about all the barriers she broke, and all
the meanness that she must still contend with. Despite
this, she is still out there giving her friends advice and
comfort, and trying to find love. And I think that in her
own way, Cher is a star. (p. 212)
In this way, Bailey’s portrayals of transwomen seem quite
mixed in tone.
But there is one very interesting and important way in
which Bailey is consistent in his consideration of transwomen:
If one reads TMWWBQ without presupposition, it’s clear that
Bailey measures long-term ‘‘success’’ for transwomen spe-
cifically in terms of whether or not they are happy.Heleaves
no doubt that individual transwomen’s happiness is what
researchers and clinicians (and presumably the rest of us)
should care about: ‘‘Surely the most relevant data [on SRS] are
transsexuals’ own feelings before and after transitioning. Are
they glad they did it? By now, hundreds of transsexuals have
been followed after changing sex, and the results are clear.
Successful outcomes are much more common than unsuc-
cessful outcomes’’ (p. 207). The way Bailey tells the stories of
individual women only confirms this. For example, he relays
that ‘‘Terese has blossomed since her surgery. […] Depressed
and in self-imposed isolation when I first saw her, she is flir-
tatious, energetic, and socially busy now’’ (p. 150). The story
of Cher (Kieltyka) comes out basically the same way: ‘‘for the
most part Cher has been happier than Chuck was. She is more
outgoing and feels that she lives a real life now, instead of a
fantasy life. Despite her negative experiences with her family,
many other people have accepted her’’ (p. 155).
Similarly, when he talks about how a different cultural
milieu might lead more Dannys to become women, Bailey
names as a ‘‘more humane [world] than ours’’ that which
leaves more people ‘‘happier and better adjusted’’ (p. 33).
When he talks about treatment options for boys with GID who
come to Toronto psychologist Ken Zucker’s clinic, he ima-
gines a randomized control trial that would ‘‘see if those
Zucker treats are less likely to become transsexual. Or see if
the boys Zucker treats are happier in some other way’’ (p. 34).
Thus, while he acknowledges that being transsexual might
interfere with happiness—given the costs and risks of transi-
tion—he also entertains the possibility that outcome studies
will show SRS (and thus fully realized transsexualism) pro-
vides the greatest chance at happiness for some people.
Happiness for the individual transwoman is the goal, even if it
means her family suffers from her transition: ‘‘I do not think
that this real suffering [on the part of family members] should
be used to discourage transsexuals from sex reassignment’’ (p.
209).
Bailey’s rejection of the feminine essence narrative has led a
number of readers (and non-readers) to incorrectly assume that
he has also rejected SRS. In particular, many I talked to
assumed that, like psychiatrist Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins
University, Bailey thinks that having autogynephilia (consid-
ered a sexual disorder) should eliminate one from SRS
candidacy. But, in fact, for autogynephilic as for homosexual
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 383
123
transsexuals, Bailey believes that, if the subjects will be hap-
pier with SRS, they should seek and obtain it. Indeed, he takes
McHugh to task for forcing transsexuals to continue suffering
by denying them SRS. ‘‘Given our present state of knowledge,
saying that we should focus on removing transsexuals’ desire
to change sex is equivalent to saying that it is better that they
should suffer permanently from gender dysphoria than that
they obtain sex reassignment surgery’’ (p. 207).
As I believe I have shown here, this book isn’t simply pro-
or anti-gay or pro- or anti-trans. It isn’t simply socially con-
structivist or biologically determinist. It’s significantly more
complicated than it at first appears, and much more compli-
cated than its cover and title would lead one to believe. Most
importantly for this discussion, TMWWBQ is not the book
many people assumed it to be—particularly after the phe-
nomenal backlash it received—nor is it the book many still
claim it to be. But it is the book—real and imagined—that
served as a flashpoint for the criticism and retaliation detailed
in the next section of this history.
Part 4: The Backlash
It is clear from the historical record that many people reacted
negatively to TMWWBQ before (or whether) they had even
readit and, in her initial email about the book to AndreaJames,
Lynn Conway revealed that to have been the case with her,
too. Conway—who would essentially become the architect-
in-chief of the backlash—first sounded the alarm about
TMWWBQ to James on April 10, 2003:
I just got an alert about J. Michael Bailey’s new book.
It’s just been published and of all places it’s co-pub-
lished 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 [….] Any-
ways—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 char-
acterizations of us all. (Conway, 2004a)
Why were people such as Conway so sure Bailey’s book
spelled trouble? Surely, the cover and the title had something
to do with it, as did their longstanding rejection of Blanchard’s
theory. The fact that the book was a popularization directed at
the masses—and not an obscure journal article—and that it
had the imprimatur of the National Academy of Sciences
reasonably added to the sense that it could have a substantial
impact on how people would think about MTF transsexuals. In
that initial email alert to James, Conway guessed, ‘‘Sadly, his
book will probably become popular with people who ‘want to
understand us’, and will seem sort of ‘empathetic’ towards us,
but if it is at all like his past writings, it will treat us all as rather
pathetic objects of study—and of course he calls us all
‘transsexual men [sic]’’’ (Conway, 2004a).
In addition to all these concerns, I think it must also be
the case that the extraordinarily strong reaction to TMWWBQ
had something to do with trans activists’ knowledge of the
long history of oppression against trans people—a history that
has included criminalization, involuntary committal to mental
institutions (as McCloskey learned firsthand [McCloskey,
1999]), denial of basic rights, active discrimination in housing
and employment (as Conway learned firsthand [Hiltzik,
2000]), relentless harassment, mockery, and, not so infre-
quently, brutal assault and murder. And not just the murder of
trans people themselves, but of their loved ones, too; the
boyfriend of Andrea James’s close professional collaborator,
Calpernia Addams, was murdered when his fellow soldiers
found out his girlfriend was transsexual (France, 2000). My
own experience suggests that there isn’t a single trans person
who, when asked, can’t immediately recall instances of
being concerned for her or his personal safety, job, lover, or
family. Add to this the sense among many trans people that
they have had their identities unnecessarily medicalized and
pathologized, and the sense among many trans activists that
they have been denied sympathy from and alliance with other
queer rights leaders and feminists. (It’s not uncommon to
hear trans critics of Bailey’s book liken it to Janice Ray-
mond’s The Transsexual Empire, a book which accused
transsexuals of undermining women’s rights and actively
harming women with their supposed naive adherence to
sexist ideas about what it means to be a woman [Raymond,
1979].) Given all this, it is not too surprising that people such
as Conway would have been—as her early emails suggest—
on high alert for possible new threats.
Yet, even with an understanding of this backdrop, it can be
hard to fathom how the backlash against Bailey’s book could
have reached the proportions it did. Several people have
remarked to me that the controversy over TMWWBQ ulti-
mately amounted to ‘‘a tempest in a teapot,’’ but if that is the
case, the teapot Bailey’s detractors constructed grew to the
size of a battleship.
There is a remarkable graphic on Andrea James’s ‘‘tsroad-
map’’ Website that evidences this. Let me say, before I
describe this graphic, that I don’t think this computer-gener-
ated image shows what James thinks it shows. She apparently
thinks it proves the horrific scope of Bailey’s supposedly anti-
trans claims and eugenical desires as revealed through the
intensive ‘‘investigation’’ into Bailey that James and Conway
co-led. I think the image reveals the depth and breadth the
backlash against Bailey’s book took on. Entitled ‘‘J. Michael
Bailey Connections,’’ the graphic in question purports to be ‘‘a
diagram explaining the connections of all of the people in the
Bailey–Blanchard–Lawrence investigation’’—Bailey, Blan-
chard, and physician-researcher Anne Lawrence having been
384 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
lumped together, by this point, by Conway and James as a
single, uniformly dangerous beast for their active support of
Blanchard’s taxonomy. In the diagram, a stark black back-
ground dramatically offsets an elaborate blossom of colored
bubbles, each showing some institution or field of inquiry that
James apparently believes to be associated (mostly nefari-
ously) with Bailey and his alleged anti-LBGT scheme. The
bubbles are color-coded, and a key to the coding is helpfully
provided: cyan is used to indicate theories and fields; purple is
for universities (no doubt as a tribute to Northwestern Uni-
versity, whose school color is purple and who is the worst of all
offenders, judging by the size of its bubble); gold is for gov-
ernment entities; and red is for ‘‘sexology trade group[s].’’ The
last category includes the International Academy of Sex
Research (IASR), the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex-
uality (SSSS), and the HBIGDA, a group now known as the
World Professional Association for Transgender Health
(WPATH). Names of individuals appear superimposed on
their institutions’ bubbles, and the names of all individuals and
organizations are awarded font size commensurate with their
importance in James’s scheme. Thus, Bailey’s and Kieltyka’s
names appear in a larger font, while, for example, the names
of Eli Coleman and Walter Bockting (sex researchers at the
University of Minnesota) appear in a smaller font (James,
n.d.-a).
The central contention of this diagram is that ‘‘Bailey’s
theories and work as a pop psychologist are heavily informed
by a combination of eugenics and sexology, put to work
shaping public perception and policy of our community’’
(James, n.d.-a). The picture is thus presumably meant to
capture how overwhelming and socially credentialed the
forces against transwomen’s rights seemed to be—how much
the cards were stacked in Bailey’s favor. Groups seemingly
indicted by association with Bailey include the Kinsey Insti-
tute, the ‘‘National Academies of Science [sic],’’ and the
‘‘National Institute [sic] of Health.’’ The fields of abnormal
psychology, criminology, and evolutionary psychology are
also called to task, as are a number of prominent sexologists,
including, confusingly, several who have publicly criticized
Bailey’s book. The chart even features a few far-flung scholars
who have told me they have no idea how they ended up in this
picture. (I have explained to them the reasoning where I have
understood it.) Looking at this graphic, I can see why in
2005—after 2 years of seemingly endless personal attacks,
extreme accusations, and investigations—some of Bailey’s
sexology friends took to wearing t-shirts reproducing the
graphic, as a sort of sympathetic joke. And I admit that, when
Bailey showed me one of the t-shirts, seeingthe graphic for the
first time I assumed it to be a satire made up by an ally to cheer
him up. I had no idea the graphic was real—that it was made by
James herself and was meant to be serious.
The basic story of the florid explosion that is depicted by
James and that I’m going to try to unpack goes like this:
Starting in April 2003, Conway and James spearheaded what
they saw as a counterattack on Bailey’s book. (I say ‘‘what
they saw as a counterattack,’’ because, although he understood
his book would offend some people, Bailey never considered
his book an attack [Bailey, 2006a].) Conway, James, and a
group of allies used the power of the Internet and the press to
try to undermine Bailey’s professional reputation, undo any
positive praise his book received, and make Bailey as per-
sonally miserable as possible. As they felt he had attacked
them in the spaces of their public and intimate lives, they
would try to do the same to him. Fairly early in the process,
Anjelica Kieltyka (identified as ‘‘Cher’’ in TMWWBQ) joined
forces with Conway and James. James—and Conway to a
lesser extent—tended to take an ‘‘if you’re not with us, you’re
against us’’ approach to their work. Thus, anyone who seemed
to be on Bailey’s side or refused to fully turn risked being
labeled as part of the problem. This meant that even those who
did not want to get involved often found it impossible not to
be.
As I’ve learned from many hours of conversations with
Anjelica Kieltyka, within a few months of the start of the
backlash, the relationship between Kieltyka and the leaders of
the ‘‘investigation’’ (including, by then, Conway, James, and
Deirdre McCloskey) became strained. Kieltyka seems to have
grown tired of Conway’s and James’s implicit message that
she was to blame for a lot of Bailey’s ‘‘abuse’’ of transwomen
in Chicago because she had introduced him to those women
and encouraged their interactions. As time wore on, Kieltyka
also became personally adept at doing her own Internet
searches. As a result of all this, Kieltyka increasingly became
convinced thatthe real problem was much larger than Bailey’s
treatment of transsexuals—and thus, much larger than any-
thing she might have enabled (Kieltyka, 2006a, 2006b;see
also p.e.c. from Kieltyka to approximately 150 people, subject
line ‘‘What’s Wrong With This Picture—Scowcroft—Ze-
der—Conway???’’, September 2, 2005). Using clues she
picked up from Bailey’s other work—including an article he
co-authored explaining how parental selection against off-
spring carrying a (theoretic) ‘‘gay gene’’ would not be
inherently unethical (Greenberg & Bailey, 2001)—Kieltyka
became convinced that Bailey was part of a much larger, right-
wing, international effortto alienate and even‘‘screen gays out
of existence’’ using emerging biotechnologies, including
gesture-recognition software and genetic engineering. She
recalls, ‘‘I began to see that there was collusion,’’ and that,
while Bailey’s treatment of transsexuals was very important,
‘‘the gay issue was more important’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a).
James’s graphic from October 2003 thus appears to make
reference both to the ‘‘if you’re not clearly with us, you’re
against us’’ general mentality of the perceived counterattack
as well as Kieltyka’s emerging conspiracy theory about Bailey
and an international, anti-gay, biotech program. Conway,
James, and McCloskey apparently remained relatively cool
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 385
123
to Kieltyka’s expansive theory; ‘‘they were surprisingly
unimpressed’’ according to Kieltyka, and ‘‘it puzzled me but it
did not discourage me’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a). She pressed on,
although, to Kieltyka’s dismay, Conway continued to resist
pursuing and publicizing it. Eventually, this led Kieltyka to
investigate Conway herself, and to become convinced Con-
way might actually be part and parcel of the international anti-
gay program through her computer work; Kieltyka intimates
Conway has developed technologies—including gesture-
recognition software—that would support and thus profit from
it (Kieltyka, 2006a; see also e-mail from Kieltyka to approx-
imately 150 people, subject line ‘‘What’s Wrong With This
Picture—Scowcroft—Zeder—Conway???’’, September 2,
2005). Indeed, she believes there is ‘‘some possibility that
Bailey was using this technology’’ in his ‘‘gaydar’’ research
work ‘‘developed for Bailey by Conway and [Conway’s for-
mer student Charles] Cohen’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a). What she
found ‘‘finally made [her] think that [Conway] had a major
conflict of interest and she was misdirecting this whole ad hoc
trans investigation’’ into Bailey and his book (Kieltyka,
2006a). Kieltyka told me that nowadays she believes Bailey
was just the ‘‘fall guy’’ in the scheme, a scheme in which
Conway ranks much higher (Kieltyka, 2006a). The fact that
Conway now refuses to speak to Kieltyka—and indeed
recently accused Kieltyka of stalking her—only solidifies
Kieltyka’s sense that Conway is part of something she doesn’t
want Kieltyka and others to know about (Kieltyka, 2006a).
But Kieltyka has pursued her inquiry, in spite of fear. She even
called Cohen, Conway’s former student and collaborator, to
ask him about the gesture-recognition software; when Con-
way found out about this, she accused Kieltyka of trying to
‘‘out’’ her to her former student (Kieltyka, 2006a). (It’s hard to
imagine how Conway thinks she isn’t ‘‘out,’’ given that her
university-based Website prominently features her cross-sex
biography.) All this might sound crazy, petty, or amusing to
some, but such a reading would minimize the actual damage
done to people in the whole TMWWBQ affair.
So how did the backlash start? Within a couple of days of
her first alert to James on April 10, 2003 (quoted above),
Conway read the book, and found herself as appalled as she
had expected (Conway, 2004a). She immediately understood
the text as especially dangerous because it was fully cloaked in
the social power of science and academia. Thus, within just a
few more days, Conway called to arms as many allies as she
could, insisting
this book is the equivalent for the entire transgender
community of a Ku Klux Clan [sic] smearing of the
entire black community by painting their entire lives and
identities as nothing more than the obsessive pursuit of
bizarre sex. Imagine what would have happened if the
Academy had published a book such as this about
African Americans. Their gates would be stormed and
the institution would fall. So how can they get away with
doing this to us? They can’t, unless we let them get away
with it! (April 18, 2003, p.e.c. of Lynn Conway to Chris-
tine Burns, Joan Roughgarden, Sarah Weston, Emily
Hobbie, Gwendolyn Ann Smith, Donna Rose, Susan
Stryker, Jenny Boylan, Jamison Green, Stephen Whit-
tle, and Shannon Minter; available at Conway, 2004a)
Conway officially opened an ‘‘investigation’’ into Bailey and
his book and, along with Andrea James, started devoting a
substantial amount of energy and Web presence to doing what
they could to undermine Bailey and TMWWBQ. (I put ‘‘inves-
tigation’’ in quotation marks throughout this essay because, as I
show, it quickly moved from an inquiry to something much
more proactive.) A number of prominent trans scholars and
activists immediately agreed with Conway that Bailey’s book
was serious trouble, and Conway rapidly posted many of their
negative reactions (or links to them) on her University of
Michigan site. Becky Allison, M.D., Joan Roughgarden, Ph.D.,
Ben Barres, M.D., Ph.D., Christine Beatty, and Christine Burns
all provided expressions of disgust and dismay (see Conway,
2003a). Through fortunate timing, Roughgarden was able to
attend a lecture by Bailey at her own university, Stanford, on
April 23, 2003, and write a scathing review of it for the school
newspaper (Roughgarden,2003).The backlash against the book
had thus begun in force.
Notably, not everyone in the LBGT world found TMW-
WBQ to be the moral and political equivalent of the pro-Ku
Klux Klan film-fantasy ‘‘Birth of a Nation.’’ After all, one of
the blurbs on the book jacket came from Simon LeVay, a
prominent gay scientist, and another from Anne Lawrence, a
transwoman and physician (who subscribes to Blanchard’s
taxonomy and identifies herself as an autogynephilic woman).
AreviewerforLavender Magazine called the book ‘‘a highly
readable and well-researched book. […] Detailed, but never
dry. A fascinating book’’ (Boatner, 2003)andawriterfor
Out
Magazine declared the book ‘‘recommended reading for
anyone interested in the study of gender identity and sexual
orientation’’ (Osborne, 2003). In a review published by the
Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, and
Bisexual Issues—a division of the American Psychological
Association—James Cantor, an openly gay sex researcher
who works with Blanchard, opined that ‘‘Bailey sympatheti-
cally portrays these peoples’ experiences[….] Bailey’s
respect for the people he describes serves as a role model for
others who still struggle to accept and appreciate homosexu-
ality and transsexuality in society’’ (Cantor, 2003; see also
Velasquez, 2004).
Certainly not all LBGT reviewers praised the book; per-
haps revealing the continued fractured politics between the
‘‘G’’ and the ‘‘T’’ communities, trans reviewers were much
more likely than gay reviewers to criticize the book. Jamison
Green (a transman) and Deirdre McCloskey (a transwoman)
386 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
both panned it (Green, 2003;McCloskey,2003a). Neverthe-
less, while the condemnation from Conway and those who
joined her would come to suggest a unilateral denouncement
of the book by all parties on the LBGT front, the reviews
suggest otherwise. Positive reviews by queer people seem
only to have made Conway and James angrier. Indeed, James
was annoyed enough that she sought out writers of positive
reviews and asked them to explain themselves, publishing
their responses on her Website (see, e.g., James, 2003b).
Now, it’s clear throughout the record of the backlash
against TMWWBQ that what Conway, James, McCloskey,
Burns, and other involved transwomen leaders detested and
rejected most about Bailey’s book was the idea of autogy-
nephilia. After all, in Bailey’s presentation of Blanchard’s
scheme, women such as they might be labeled autogyne-
philic—individuals with paraphilias whose cross-sex identi-
fication was not about gender but eroticism. Yet, I think it is
worth noting that historically not all of these transwomen
leaders had always rejected every shred of what might
reasonably be classified as autogynephilia the way they
would come to do post-TMWWBQ. McCloskey strongly
denies that ‘‘autogynephilia’’ applies to her (and indeed
recently informed my Provost she would sue me and my
university if I dared to diagnose her with it [McCloskey to
Dreger, two p.e.c.’s, copies to Lawrence Dumas, February 4,
2007]). But Bailey has pointed out that she does discuss in her
autobiography a pre-transition arousability to the idea of
becoming or being the other sex (Bailey, 2003, pp. 217–218;
see also Rodkin, 2003), an admission that is hard to imagine
her offering post-TMWWBQ. McCloskey is speaking here of
Donald, her pre-transition self, in the third person:
When in 1994 he ran across A Life in High Heels,an
autobiography by Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy War-
hol’s group,the parts he read andreread andwas 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 kind of crossdressing 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.
(McCloskey, 1999, pp. 18–19; for McCloskey’s res-
ponse to Bailey’s reading of this, see Rodkin, 2003 and
McCloskey, 2003b)
Anne Lawrence also recalls that, before the blow-up over
TMWWBQ, one of the other transwomen who would become
part of Conway’s expanded ‘‘investigation’’ team admitted to
Lawrence that the way she finally achieved orgasm after SRS
was to fantasize about forced feminization (Lawrence to
Dreger, p.e.c., Nov. 28, 2006; see also Lawrence, 1998). And
still a third member of the ‘‘investigation’’ team apparently for
years had accepted the label of autogynephilia for herself and
others. This was none other than Andrea James.
The evidence for this is unmistakable. In 1998, James had
written to Anne Lawrence to congratulate her on her latest
paper on autogynephilia and to talk about her own first- and
second-hand experiences with autogynephilia. And it wasn’t
for lack of understanding the theory of autogynephilia that
James wrote so favorably of it in 1998. I quote from that
message at some length here, because I think it is important to
see how radically James’s attitude changed towards Blan-
chard, Lawrence, and autogynephilia from 1998 to the time in
2003 when she teamed up with Conway to devote enormous
resources to discrediting Bailey, Blanchard, and Lawrence,
and anyone else who spoke favorably of autogynephilia as an
explanation.
In the email in question, dated November 9, 1998, James
wrote to Lawrence with the subject line ‘‘Excellent paper!’’ to
say:
I just read your autogynephilia paper [‘‘Men trapped in
men’s bodies: An introduction to the concept of autogy-
nephilia’’ (Lawrence, 1998)] and found it to be excellent,
as expected. I’m sure you’ve gotten quite an array of
responses, since TSs [i.e., transsexuals] are extremely
reluctant to be categorized and defined by others. A defi-
nition 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 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 patterns of thought and
behavior. I don’t buy into all of Freud, either, but that
certainly doesn’t invalidate his many brilliant insights.
James went on to tell Lawrence that, ‘‘Now that I have
received a lot of letters from TSs, I have found that your paper
backs up my own experiences.’’ She gave some specific
examples from MTFs she had known before moving 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]. Now, if you think you’ve
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 387
123
caught a lot of shit about autogynephilia, just imagine
what would happen if I used ‘‘TS’’ and ‘‘self-loathing’’
in the same sentence! Nonetheless, I see my own trans-
sexual feelings paralleled in the words of people with
other body dysphorias. (Andrea James to Anne Law-
rence, p.e.c., November 9, 1998; emphasis added)
James signed the message to Lawrence ‘‘Take care, Andrea.’’
How radically James’s attitudes towards Blanchard, Law-
rence, and autogynephilia had shifted from the time of this
1998 communication to the time in 2003 when Conway called
James to her side to vigorously deny Bailey’s claim that
women suchasthemareautogynephilic.My pointhereis notto
argue whether James, Conway, or anyone else is ‘‘autogyne-
philic,’’ but rather to note that the backlash against TMWWBQ
became something of a purge where autogynephilia was con-
cerned. Sharp ‘‘us versus them’’ division lines were drawn by
Conway, James,McCloskey,andtheir compatriots,seemingly
negating any possibility of productive dialogue about the
claims made in the book with regard to possible erotic com-
ponents of transsexuality.
In keeping with Conway’s simplistic ‘‘good versus evil’’
account of the book and backlash—wherein all true trans-
women are non- and anti-autogynephilic (i.e., good) and all
pro-autogynephilia researchers are anti-trans (i.e., evil)—
Conway’s master ‘‘Timeline of the unfolding events in the
Bailey investigation’’ asserts that,as soonas Anjelica Kieltyka
received and read a copy of Bailey’s book, on May 3, 2003,
Kieltyka ‘‘realize[d] he’[d] defamed and outed her’’ (Conway,
2006a). It is certainly true that, where ‘‘Cher’s’’ identity was
concerned,Bailey lefta trail ofclues quite easyfora close-knit,
Internet-savvy community of transwomen to uncover. (I dis-
cuss this further in Part 5.) But Kieltyka’s reaction to the book
andto the immediate flare-upwasmoresanguine than Conway
represents. Conway’s account has Kieltyka on May 3, 2003,
totally distraughtoverBailey’s behavior as soon as she sawthe
book:
Anjelica was shattered. She now realized that Prof.
Bailey had intended all along to publish that old version
of her story and to use her as his centerpiece ‘‘poster
child for autogynephilia’’. He had merely been humor-
ing her for the past 3 years with ‘‘intellectual discus-
sions’’, keeping her thinking that he was open to new
ideas and open to making revisions in her story.
The very next day, according to Conway,
Anjelica frantically began web searches to learn about
the controversy now swirling around the book. She
quickly learned that she was being defamed in the
transgender community as the ‘‘poster child for auto-
gynephilia’’, and that Prof. Bailey’s caricature of her in
the book was being used to defame other transwomen as
being ‘‘autogynephiles like Cher’’. During her frantic
searches, Anjelica came acrossAndreaJames’ and Lynn
Conway’s websites. She quickly realized that these sites
were the key ones that were coordinating the trans
community’s responses to the Bailey book controversy.
She immediately e-mailed Andrea and Lynn, pleading
for their help in clearing her name. (Conway, 2004b)
Thus, it would appear from Conway’s account as though
Kieltyka immediately turned away from Bailey to look to
Conway and James as her possible saviors. But Kieltyka’s
memory and the historical record suggest otherwise. Cer-
tainly, Kieltyka now feels Bailey ‘‘did a bait and switch’’ on
her by telling her for years after she saw his first draft that he
remained open to her counterarguments, when, in fact, he
never seriously doubted Blanchard’s theory or her status as
an autogynephile (Kieltyka, 2006f). Kieltyka has told me,
‘‘He respected me like the colonist respects the native—he
used me. There’s no two ways about it’’ (Kieltyka, 2006d).
But Kieltyka didn’t contact Conway and James because she
immediately hated Bailey for what she read in his book and
was looking to jump to their side. Rather, she remembers:
AJ [Andrea James] and the rest of them wanted to lynch
me, as they did Joan Linsenmeier [a colleague who
helped Bailey with the manuscript] and anyone else
connected with the book. They were about to hang me. I
was told this by people that had frequented the Internet,
and that’s why they gave me the link to contact Andrea
James and Lynn Conway, because I was going to be
hanged by them. (Kieltyka, 2006f)
Soit’struethatKieltyka wastryingto saveherself, but notat
that point by simply rejecting Bailey and teaming up with
Conway and James. In fact, in what could only be called a
friendly email from Kieltyka to Bailey dated May 16, 2003—
nearly two weeks after Kieltyka first read the published book
and contacted Conway—Kieltyka spoke warily to Bailey of
the likes of Conway. In the email, headed by the joking subject
line ‘‘Cher’s Guide to Auto…Repair,’’ Kieltyka wrote to
Bailey:
Dear Mike, Thanks for the Cantor Review [i.e., Cantor,
2003]….I followed up on the links to your difficulties
with some hysterical women [an apparent reference to
Conway and James] […] when you wrote…. ‘‘I under-
stand that Roughgarden is slated to review my book for
Nature Medicine, and I am certain that this review will
be as fair and accurate as her review of my Stanford
talk’’….I really appreciated the sarcasm…….just wear a
bike [i.e., athletic] support to your next book signing or
lecture….you can borrow mine, I don’t use it nor need it
anymore…. Your friend, in spite of spite, Anjelica, aka
Cher (Kieltyka to Bailey, p.e.c., May 16, 2003; ellipses
in original unless in brackets)
388 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
Kieltyka added a postscript saying she was enclosing ‘‘two
recent pictures of me in maskon mode’’—i.e., she supplied
Bailey two more photos of herself crossdressed pre-transi-
tion—and she added, ‘‘see maskon.com for some missing
trans links.’’ Nearly a month later, Kieltyka wrote to Bailey’s
Northwestern psychology colleague Joan Linsenmeier (who
was starting to get caught in the backlash) to say ‘‘We have
both been caught between larger egos with agendas and
motivations and axes to grind, (and swing)…. And yet, I have
been able to keep my head, while all about are losing theirs and
blaming it on Bailey, you, and me’’ (Kieltyka to Linsenmeier,
p.e.c., June 13, 2006; ellipses in original). This hardly sounds
like a woman who, right after reading the book in early May,
considered herself simply wronged by Bailey and looking to
fall into the arms of fellow transwomen who would join her in
roundly denouncing Bailey and autogynephilia.
Nor did the women identified as ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’
in Bailey’s book immediately react with disgust and dismay
over the book. Indeed, regarding this, Conway’s timeline—an
enormous, fully hotlinked spreadsheet that makes James’s
‘‘Connections to J. Michael Bailey’’ graphic look like a quick
afterthought—leaves out entirely what I would consider one
historically key event in May 2003. Shortly after the book came
out, the Chronicle of Higher Education apparently decided to
have its staff writer, Robin Wilson, compose a feature story on
Bailey and his book (Wilson, 2003a). For the story, Wilson
traveled to Evanston and Chicago, and on May 22, 2003, Bailey
took Wilson out to the Circuit nightclub, along with Kieltyka
and several of the women who appeared as ‘‘homosexual
transsexuals’’ in Bailey’s book, including Juanita.
No question Kieltyka comes across in Wilson’s article as
unhappy with Bailey’s book: ‘‘Ms. Kieltyka says the professor
twisted her story to suit his theory. ‘I was a male with a sexual-
identity disorder,’ not someone who is living out a sexual
fantasy, she says’’ (Wilson, 2003a). But the other transwomen
who went out to help promote Bailey and his book appeared
downright supportive, judging both by Bailey’s recollection
and Wilson’s account (Bailey, 2006a;Wilson,2003a). Indeed,
Wilson opined ‘‘they count Mr. Bailey as their savior.’’ She
goes on:
As a psychologist, he has written letters they needed to
get sex-reassignment surgery, and he has paid attention
to them in ways most people don’t. ‘‘Not too many
people talk about this, but he’s bringing it into the light,’’
says Veronica, a 31-year-old transsexual woman from
Ecuador who just got married and doesn’t want her last
name used. (Wilson, 2003a)
But if these women were, compared to Conway’s rather
selective account, relatively slow to turn against Bailey, turn
four of them did. Just about two months after the gathering at
the Circuit, about one month after Wilson’s gossipy ‘‘Dr. Sex’’
feature story on Bailey, Wilson would write a sober news
article for the Chronicle entitled ‘‘Transsexual ‘Subjects’
Complain about Professor’s Research Methods’’ (Wilson,
2003b).Five months later, thiswould be followed upby another
sober dispatch, ‘‘Northwestern U. Psychologist Accused of
Having Sex with Research Subject,’’ that ‘‘subject’’ being
Juanita (Wilson, 2003c).
So, given that Kieltyka did not immediately turn against
Bailey once she saw the book (though there’s no question she
was frustrated and disappointed with being called autogyne-
philic), given that the other transwomen were helping Bailey
promote the book even after its publication, given that Wilson
reported they saw himas ‘‘their savior’’ evenat that point,what
happened to turn these women’s warm feelings for Bailey into
charges of scientific misconduct? Given the evidence, the
answer is unequivocal: Lynn Conway’s and Deirdre McClos-
key’s intervention.
According to Conway’s timeline, in early June 2003,
Conway began taking ‘‘field trips’’ (Conway 2003b) to Chi-
cago ‘‘to meet and begin interviewing Bailey’s research
subjects’’ (Conway, 2006a). Kieltyka remembers these visits
vividly, and recalls that, early in the process, McCloskey and
Conway informed Kieltyka and her friends that, if they had not
given informed consent to Bailey to research and write about
them, it didn’t matter whether Kieltyka and friends wanted to
file charges against him; McCloskey and Conway would do so
(Kieltyka, 2006c). As it turns out, Kieltyka, Juanita, and two
other women did decide to file complaints with Northwestern
University. (That didn’t stop McCloskey and Conway from
also doing so.) The sophisticated writing style and language of
the formal charges compared to that of Kieltyka’s other
writings and Juanita’s autobiography as it appears on Con-
way’s site suggests that Kieltyka, Juanita, and the two other
complainants had help writing their letters to Northwestern.
So I asked McCloskey what her role was in preparing the
formal complaints made by the four women who claimed they
were Bailey’s research subjects, and she replied ‘‘I helped
write the letter some. I knew one of the women’’ (McCloskey
to Dreger, p.e.c., January 22, 2007). She declined to elaborate
(p.e.c., February 4, 2007).
Anjelica Kieltyka took the lead on the filings. On July 3,
2003, she submitted a letter to C. Bradley Moore, Vice Presi-
dent for Research of Northwestern, stating ‘‘I was a participant
in a research study without being informed of that status. […]I
was unaware that I [or the women Kieltyka introduced to
Bailey] were subjects of a research study, and I did not rec-
eive, nor was I asked to sign, an informed consent docu-
ment’’ (Kieltyka to Moore, July 3, 2003; available at Kieltyka,
2003b). On July 14, 2003, a woman identified on Conway’s
site as ‘‘Victoria’’ also filed a formal complaint that ‘‘I have
been a participant in a research study conducted by Dr. Bailey
without my knowledge and without my approval’’ (available
at Conway, 2003c), although her story did not appear in
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 389
123
TMWWBQ. On July 23, Juanita filed a similar complaint
(available at Conway, 2003d) and also filed a ‘‘sealed’’ com-
plaint claiming that ‘‘On March 22, 1998, Northwestern
University Professor J. Michael Bailey had sexual relations
with me. I was one of his research subjects at that time’’
(available at Conway, 2003e). On July 29, McCloskey and
Conway filed their own complaint, charging Bailey with
‘‘grossly violat[ing] the standards of science by conducting
intimate research observations on human subjects without
telling them that they were objects of study’’ (McCloskey &
Conway, 2003). And on July 30 came a complaint from a
transwoman who felt she had been similarly ‘‘researched’’ by
Bailey and that Bailey had ignored evidence from her history
that not all transwomen fit Blanchard’s scheme (available at
Conway, 2003f).
Northwestern University first appointed a Provost-level
inquiry committee to examine the charges against Bailey.
Then, in November 2003, the university announced that the
inquiry committee had found cause to continue the investi-
gation, and so a Provost-level investigation committee was
formed (C. Bradley Moore to Alice Dreger, p.e.c., August 1,
2006). Bailey bitterly remembers that the first he heard of
Northwestern’s decision to move to a full investigation was
from a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He adds, ‘‘Obviously
Northwestern told the complainants […] and it was on the web
probably before I knew about it. […] I think Northwestern
didn’t know what kind of people they were dealing with’’
(Bailey, 2006b).
Why did Kieltyka, Juanita, and the two other transwomen
familiar with Bailey but not mentioned in the book decide to
charge Bailey after years of good relations with him? Moti-
vation is one of the most difficult things to document in
historical scholarship, but I think it is fair to speculate that a
number of factors may have been in play here. First, Conway,
McCloskey, and perhaps also James seem to have convinced
Kieltyka that she had—however unintentionally—hurt trans-
women by helping Bailey ‘‘recruit’’ transwomen as ‘‘sub-
jects’’ for his book (Kieltyka, 2006b). A letter from Kieltyka,
Conway, James, and Calpernia Addams to the faculty of Bai-
ley’s department in January 2004, speaks to the degree to
which they saw themselves as the protectors of other, more
vulnerable transwomen:
We are socially assimilated trans women who are men-
tors to many young transsexuals in transition. Unable to
bear children of our own, the girls we mentor become
likechildrentous.Theseyoungwomendependonusfor
guidance during the difficult period of transition and then
on during their adventures afterwards—dating, careers,
marriages, and sometimes the adoption of their own
children. As a result, we have large extended families
and are blessed by these relationships. Through our ex-
tended families we know first-hand how Bailey’s junk
science is hurting young trans women. […] You may
have wondered why hundreds of successful, assimilated
trans women like us, women from all across the country,
are being so persistent in investigating Mr. Bailey and in
uncovering and reporting his misdeeds. Now you have
your answer: We are hundreds of loving moms whose
children he is tormenting! (Kieltyka, Conway, James,
and Addams, to the Faculty members of the Department
of Psychology, Northwestern University, January 7,
2004)
I don’t think there can be any doubt Kieltyka saw herself in
that caring, protective role, and in charging Bailey, she must
have wanted to get out of the position of being represented as
the opposite—a sort of merciless pimp who turned over vul-
nerable transwomen to Bailey in exchange for chances to
perform before his classes (Kieltyka, 2006a).
It also seems fairly clear that Kieltyka (if not the others) must
have feared what might happen if she didn’t cooperate with
Conway and the other ‘‘investigators.’’ After all, Kieltyka dis-
tinctly remembers initially contactingthem specifically because
they were ‘‘about to hang’’ her (Kieltyka, 2006f).
Recall too that, even before Conway’s ‘‘field trips,’’ Kiel-
tyka had already been upset with Bailey’s portrayal of her as
the poster-child for autogynephilia; the fact that many other
transwomen read ‘‘Cher’s’’ story so negatively no doubt
fueled Kieltyka’s sense of hurt. Indeed, Bailey’s continued use
of Kieltyka as an example of autogynephilia—for example, at
a lecture at UCLA on June 2, 2003 (see Conway, 2004b)—
certainly added to her growing anger. Kieltyka now seems to
hold nothing but contempt for Bailey and is convinced he was
intentionally duping her all along; this again suggests she
came to agree with Bailey’s other detractors’ assessment that
Bailey had made a fool of her. Kieltyka recalls Juanita feeling
similarly wounded because Bailey wrote about Juanita’s
wedding with a snickering tone and included in the book ‘‘his
opinion she got a divorce because she was too used to having
sex with men and prostitution is well suited for her and the
others’’ (Kieltyka, 2006f).
My conversations with Kieltyka also suggest that she and
the other women who charged Bailey found a certain relief—
perhaps even pleasure—in going from the powerless position
of represented subject to the powerful position of active
accuser. Through her Website, Conway in particular gave
them a place to reconstruct themselves and their histories with
Bailey. Thus, instead of appearing as Bailey’s collaborators in
their annual presentations to his Human Sexuality class, they
came to call themselves his victims. Juanita’s complaint of
July 23, 2003 declared it ‘‘most disturbing and humiliating to
find out that we were all misled by Dr. Bailey and misused […]
as part of his ‘Freak Show’ Demonstration of ‘Homosexual’
390 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
and ‘Autogynophilic’ [sic] Transsexuals’’ (see Conway,
2003d). (An odd claim, given that Juanita knew perfectly well
that in 1999 Bailey had identified her as a ‘‘homosexual
transsexual’’ in the newspaper article with which she fully
cooperated [Gibson, 1999].)
Finally, although Kieltyka told me that the only money she
received from Conway was to reimburse her for phone calls
made as part of their collaboration, Kieltyka speculated to me
that, in Juanita’s case, monetary reward for her aid to Con-
way’s ‘‘investigation’’—including her sexual relations charge
against Bailey—may have been substantially higher. Kieltyka
adds‘‘[Juanita] denied it, so I had no proof’’ (Kieltyka, 2006d).
I asked McCloskey whether she knew if Conway financially
compensated Juanita for making formal accusations against
Bailey (p.e.c., January 22, 2007). McCloskey responded,
‘‘What an absurdity. Juanita is well-to-do’’ (p.e.c., January 22,
2007). It is certainly true that for at least several years before
TMWWBQ’s publication, Juanita had been wealthy; in the
2002 human sexuality textbook video, she says that ‘‘when I
was a she-male [and] I prostituted myself […]Ienjoyedit[…]
eas[il]y making about a hundred thousand [dollars] a year’’ (in
Allyn & Bacon, 2004).
Regardless of why they turned so dramatically, Kieltyka
and her new allies ended up going after Bailey with virtually
everything they could muster. Kieltyka used her artistic
talents to provide Conway with a clever series of political
cartoons on the theme of ‘‘The Sinking of ‘The Queen’’’ (see
Conway, 2003g). And in July 2003, Kieltyka showed up at
the meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research
(IASR) in Bloomington, Indiana, where Bailey had decided
to speak on the controversy over his book. Kieltyka tells me
she went on ‘‘orders from’’ Conway ‘‘to confront Bailey’’
(Kieltyka, 2006a). Prohibited from entering, she remained
outside to talk to anyone who would listen, handing out a
flyer explaining in damning tones ‘‘How the sex research
community will be hurt by J. Michael Bailey.’’ The hand-out
elaborated briefly on how Bailey was guilty of ‘‘academic
dishonesty,’’ ‘‘(still more) bad science,’’ ‘‘unethical behavior,’’
and‘‘personalmisconduct.’’ The flyercalledonthesexresearch
community to
censure J. Michael Bailey for his recent acts of junk
science and groundless defamation. Do not invite him to
speak at your institutions. Disinvite him if he is invited.
Review his manuscripts and grant proposals with great
caution and skepticism. J. Michael Bailey has brought
further embarrassment to a research community that is
still feeling the aftershocks of John Money’s John/Joan
scandal.
‘‘For more on this scandal,’’ the reader was advised to visit
‘‘tsroadmap.com/bailey’’, Andrea James’s Internet expose
´
.(Copy
of flier obtained from Bailey’s personal files.)
Kieltyka’s campaign seems to have caused some strain at
the IASR meeting, but not to have resulted in much more than
that institutionally within IASR. John Bancroft—then-
Director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender,
and Reproduction—did stand up to admonish Bailey after his
talk, saying ‘‘Michael, I have read your book and I do not think
it is science’’ (John Bancroft, p.e.c., July 22, 2006). When I
asked him about his remark—a shot heard round the world of
the controversy—Bancroft explained that ‘‘my response
might have been more measured’’ if Bailey had ‘‘allowed
adequate time for discussion by the group’’ (John Bancroft,
p.e.c., July 23, 2006). Bancroft elaborated:
My dislike of Michael’s bookwasthatit promoted a very
derogatory explanation of transgender identity which
most TG people would find extremely hurtful and
humiliating—hence the reaction of the TG community
was not surprising. Whether based on science or not we
have a responsibility to present scientific ideas, particu-
larly in the public arena, in ways which are not blatantly
hurtful. But in addition to that, Michael did not support
his analysis in a scientific manner—hence my comment.
(John Bancroft, p.e.c., July 23, 2006; editedFebruary 27,
2007)
As it turned out, someone at the IASR meeting sent Conway a
detailed report of Bancroft’s ‘‘not science’’ remark, and almost
immediately her Website started prominently featuring Ban-
croft’s denouncement of Bailey. On the page about Bancroft’s
remark, Conway likened it to ‘‘a similar moment back in 1954
when Joseph Welch faced Senator Joseph McCarthy and threw
down the gauntlet with the statement: ‘Have you no sense of
decency, sir, at long last?’’’ (Conway, 2003h).
But if Conway thought her publication of Bancroft’s remark
would result in his becoming an active ally, she was mistaken.
Bancroft told me ‘‘If I had known my remark would be made
public, I wouldn’t have said it. We like to think of the Academy
meetings as opportunities for sex researchers to openly discuss
their ideas and criticisms with each other, and not the outside
world.’’ Nevertheless, Bancroft maintains his concern for truly
vulnerable trans people: ‘‘The Lynn Conways of the trans-
gender world are the exception. They fight back, often in a self-
defeating fashion. In this case, they went over the top and lost
credibility in the process. But the majority in that world are less
resilient and more vulnerable, and they get hurt’’ (John Ban-
croft, p.e.c., July 23, 2006; edited February 27, 2007).
Several people I spoke to about the IASR meeting told me
that Bancroft’s remarks did not reflect anything like a con-
sensus of the people in IASR (e.g., Pepper Schwartz to Dreger,
p.e.c., February 3, 2007; Wallen, 2006). Indeed, several
recalled that researcher Pepper Schwartz immediately res-
ponded to Bancroft’s remark with ‘‘a small speech about civ-
ilized discourse, collegial norms, and critical analysis rather
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 391
123
than name calling’’ (Schwartz to Dreger, p.e.c., February 3,
2007). Schwartz recalls she ‘‘said I was particularly troubled
that this particular performance was more like the inquisition
thana professionalmeetingand I wantednoneof it’’ (Schwartz
to Dreger, p.e.c., February 3, 2007).
Although she worked to get other organizations to act
against Bailey, Conway also had not much success trying to
use her influence with the National Academies to have
Bailey’s book removed from the Web, investigated, and
denounced. But Conway and her allies enjoyed more success
with the HBIGDA. On July 14, 2003, Conway, McCloskey,
Ben Barres and Joan Roughgarden of Stanford University, and
Barbara Nash of the University of Utah wrote collectively to
HBIGDA about ‘‘Bailey’s shockingly defamatory book.’’
They outlined ‘‘the investigations now underway’’ and ‘‘urge
[d HBIGDA] to begin your own investigation into Prof. Bai-
ley’s motives, methods, and activities’’ (available at Conway,
2003i). Walter J. Meyer, HBIGDA’s President, and Bean
Robinson, HBIGDA’s Executive Director, responded in
writing ‘‘on behalf of [HBIGDA’s] Officers and Board of
Directors’’ on October 20, 2003 to note that, while Bailey was
not a member of HBIGDA (and therefore was not for them to
regulate), they found ‘‘it appropriate that an investigation into
these allegations is being conducted by Northwestern Uni-
versity.’’ Meyer and Robinson went on to say
It is felt by many of our members that this poorly ref-
erenced book does not reflect the social and scientific
literature that exists on transsexual people and could
damage that essential trust. We hope that the Office for
the Protection of Research Subjects at Northwestern will
consider the ethical issues that are involved and we will
also be sending them a copy of this letter so that they are
aware of our concerns. We are also preparing a separate
letter to Northwestern University to express our concerns
directly. (Meyer and Robinson to Conway, McCloskey,
Barres, Nash, and Roughgarden, October 20, 2003;
available at Conway, 2003j)
What exactly the ‘‘separate letter to Northwestern’’ said, I
have not been able to determine; I have asked Meyer and
Robinson for a copy of the letter and have been told no one at
HBIGDA can find it (Tara L. Tieso to Dreger, p.e.c., Sep-
tember 12, 2006). Whatever it said, through this action,
HBIGDA was seen both by Bailey’s allies and detractors as
siding with Conway and her allies.
In utter disgust, Ray Blanchard resigned from HBIGDA on
November 4, 2003. His letter stated as the reason ‘‘the
appalling decision of the HBIGDA Officers and Board of
Directors to attempt to intervene in Northwestern University’s
investigation into the allegations made by certain members of
the transsexual community against Prof. J. Michael Bailey.’’
Blanchard decried ‘‘such an intervention, undertaken without
any effort by the HBIGDA to conduct their own systematic
inquiry or to learn all the relevant facts of the matter,’’ a move
he felt ‘‘could only be prejudicial to Northwestern’s investi-
gation.’’ Blanchard argued, ‘‘The HBIGDA would have been
better advised to allow the Northwestern authorities, who are
actually taking the trouble to investigate the allegations, to
reach an impartial decision.’’ He expressed:
deep regret that I tender my resignation[…] I have long
supported the goals of the HBIGDA. I have been
involved in the clinical care of transsexual persons for
24 years. During the years 1983 to 1991, I conducted
eight research studies on the therapeutic impact of
hormonal and surgical treatment of transsexuals. […]
I published an additional article on the desirability of
insurance coverage for sex reassignment surgery as
recently as 2000. (Blanchard to Walter J. Meyer III and
Bean Robinson, November 4, 2003)
As one might expect, Conway quickly announced Blan-
chard’s resignation in victorious tones: ‘‘Blanchard resigns in
a huff from HBIGDA!’’ (Conway, 2003k).
Meanwhile, Conway remained particularly relentless in
her drive to get Northwestern to take serious action against
Bailey. On May 10, 2004, a full year after the book’s publi-
cation, she filed a new 49-page complaint with Northwestern.
According to Conway’s Website,
the new complaint contain[ed] hard evidence implicat-
ing Mr. Bailey in, among other things, (i) deliberate
failures to examine counter-evidence to the theory he
was studying, (ii) open defamation of those who put
forward counter-evidence to that theory, (iii) the making
of ‘‘remote clinical diagnoses’’ of mental illnesses in
persons he has not ever even met, (iv) libel, (v) flagrant
abuses of the power of his office and (vi) the deliberate
suppression of complaints by colleagues about such
conduct. (Conway, 2004c)
And Conway et al.’s formal complaints were not limited to
Northwestern University. In the spring of 2004, Conway,
James, and McCloskey filed a series of complaints with the
Illinois Department of Professional Regulation stating that, in
providing letters in support of several transwomen’s SRS
requests, Bailey had been practicing psychology without a
license. The three also made the same complaint to North-
western (see Conway, 2004d).
The charges of misconduct against Bailey are worth con-
sidering at length, and so I do that in the next part of this article,
remaining here focused on the history of the backlash itself.
But I will note here what I can of the outcomes of the formal
complaints. It appears that the Illinois Department of Profes-
sional Regulation did not do anything with the complaint that
Bailey was practicing clinical psychology without a license,
presumably because he never took money for the SRS letters
he wrote, nordid he offer or represent a therapeutic relationship
392 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
(Clinical Psychologist Licensing Act, 225 ILCS 15/1 et. Seq.).
Northwestern University appears to have quickly rejected
Juanita’s charge of improper sexual relations, saying it ‘‘did not
merit further investigation’’ (see Conway, 2003e); why they
likely reached this conclusion is spelled out in the next section.
Northwestern concluded the remainder of its investigation
in December 2004 and ‘‘The investigation committee then
made its recommendations to the Provost for an appropriate
response’’ (C. Bradley Moore to Alice Dreger, p.e.c., August
1, 2006). Much to the dismay of Kieltyka, Conway, the press,
and me (among others), the university has consistently refused
to say what the investigation committee found or what specific
actions they recommended. Northwestern’s provost Law-
rence Dumas will state only ‘‘‘that he had ‘taken action that I
believe is appropriate in this situation’’’ (quoted in Wilson,
2004). Bailey has also refused to say what the outcome of the
investigation was, although he is willing to say that, if the
investigation committee did its job correctly, then he was
cleared (Bailey, 2005). It seems likely that if he agreed with
the committee’s findings, he would release the results.
When, for this history, I contacted C. Bradley Moore,
Northwestern’s Vice President for Research, to ask about the
investigation, I received mostly the party line:
In his response to the investigative review, Provost
Dumas noted that, ‘‘Northwestern has established a
protocol to help ensure that Professor Bailey’s research
activities involving human subjects are conducted in
accordance with the expectations of the University, the
regulations and guidelines established by the federal
government and with generally accepted research stan-
dards.’’ As with all employees and faculty members of
Northwestern University, any other internal personnel
actions are confidential. (C. Bradley Moore to Alice
Dreger, p.e.c., August 1, 2006; italics in original)
But interestingly, Moore did add in his response to me this
telling line:
Even though the allegations of scientific misconduct
made against Professor J. Michael Bailey do not fall
under the federal definition of scientific misconduct,
Northwestern utilized the procedures outlined in our
[‘‘]Policy on Integrity in Research and Procedures for
Reviewing Alleged Misconduct[’’] to review the alle-
gations. (C. Bradley Moore to Alice Dreger, p.e.c.,
August 1, 2006; italics added)
Thus, it would appear from Moore’s statement to me that
Northwestern found that Bailey did not trespass ‘‘the federal
definition of scientific misconduct.’’
Any other clues as to how the Northwestern investigation
turned out? The only notable change in Bailey’s status at
Northwestern is that he stepped down as department chair in
October 2004. Conway has called this a ‘‘quiet victory’’
(Conway, 2006a). But about this shift, Bailey and a North-
western spokesperson have said ‘‘the change had nothing to do
with the investigation’’ (Wilson, 2004; see also Bailey, 2006a;
Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., July 22, 2006). Indeed, the timing of it
is odd; one wonders why Bailey would have stepped down as a
result of the investigation in October 2004, if the investigation
wasn’t completed until December 2004. Meanwhile, Bailey
has maintained his title of full professor, has retained tenure,
and keeps teaching and conducting human subjects research;
he has taken no unscheduled leaves. All of this suggests that if
Northwestern found Bailey had done something wrong, it
wasn’t enough to change his terms of employment.
Nevertheless, throughout the various investigations—
including Northwestern’s own—the press reports generally
made Bailey look quite bad as they recorded charge after
charge of misconduct (see, e.g., Barlow, 2003;Becker,2003;
Wilson 2003b, 2003c, 2004). From fairly early on, at the
advice of a lawyer he retained to defend himself, Bailey
refused to answer reporters’ inquiries, and many may have
read that refusal to respond as evidence of guilt. (I recall that I
certainly did, watching casually from the sidelines in 2003 and
2004.) Oddly, it seems at least from this vantage point that
virtually all of the reporters working on this story from 2003
forward did not do much to independently investigate the
claims being made against Bailey, even when they had the
opportunity; for the most part, they merely reiterated the
charges. Perhaps that is because they did not know how to go
about conducting an independent inquiry without Bailey’s
cooperation. But even given that possibility, one particular
example of strangely shallow—even critically incomplete—
reporting standsout, namely that done by Robin Wilsonfor the
Chronicle of HigherEducation. This is significant because the
Chronicle of Higher Education is an essential source of aca-
demic news; it is the newspaper of record in the eyes of many
university administrators and faculty, and thus Wilson’s
reporting undoubtedly helped to harm Bailey’s professional
reputation.
Remember that on June 20, 2003, Wilson published in the
Chronicle of Higher Education her ‘‘Dr. Sex’’ feature on
Bailey and his book—a gossipy, in-person accounting that
included the story of her excursion to the Circuit nightclub on
May 22, 2003, with Bailey, Kieltyka, Juanita, and several of
the other transwomen whose stories appeared in TMWWBQ
(Wilson, 2003a). According to that June 2003 feature by
Wilson, Kieltyka was openly disenchanted with Bailey’s
account of her as an autogynephile, but by Wilson’s and
Bailey’s accounts, the night out in May had been friendly
(Bailey, 2006a;Wilson,2003a). Even Kieltyka did not con-
tradict this account when I asked her (Kieltyka, 2006c). The
transwomen who accompanied Wilson and Bailey to the club
in May 2003 understood they were helping Bailey promote the
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 393
123
recently published book by meeting with Wilson—and why
not, since, according to Wilson, ‘‘they count[ed] Mr. Bailey as
their savior’’ (Wilson, 2003a).
Flash forward to July 25, 2003, a month after Wilson’s ‘‘Dr.
Sex’’ feature, just two months after the Circuit excursion. Now
the Chronicle prints Wilson’s sober third-person report,
‘‘Transsexual ‘Subjects’ Complain about Professor’s Research
Methods’’ (Wilson, 2003b). Wilson posted a similarly grave
third-person dispatch on December 19, 2003, ‘‘Northwestern
U. Psychologist Accused of Having Sex with Research Sub-
ject’’ (Wilson, 2003c). Curiously, these two news items give
absolutely no hint that Wilson herself had met at least two of the
women charging Bailey, i.e., Kieltyka and Juanita. There is no
mention of the fact that, in late May 2003, after the book’s
publication, Wilson had joined Bailey, Kieltyka, Juanita, and
others for that good time at Circuit, and that at the time there
had been no clue that these women would ever file such serious
and formal charges against Bailey. Now, it is certainly possi-
ble—as Kieltyka has told me—that it wasn’t until after
Conway and McCloskey talked to Kieltyka and Juanita in early
June that they realized they had been ‘‘abused’’ by Bailey
(Kieltyka, 2006c). But why, one has to wonder, didn’t Wilson
ask in July what was going on to have caused such a radical shift
in relations? Why did Wilson not use her serendipitous insider
knowledge—something any reporter would surely have been
delighted to have on such a good story—to raise questions
about why these women went so rapidly from being Bailey’s
friends to claiming a long history of abuse at his hands?
Even stranger, Wilson’s (2003b) July article reported that
Kieltyka ‘‘agreed to let the Chronicle print her real name,’’ as
if this were new and terribly important when, in fact, the
Chronicle had printed Kieltyka’s real name a full month
before (Wilson, 2003a). Why was Wilson acting as if in July
she and the Chronicle were completely new to this story?
Genuinely baffled, I asked Wilson as much,and she repeatedly
refused to go on the record with her reasoning for reporting in
this way (Wilson to Dreger, p.e.c.’s, July 27, 2006 and Feb-
ruary 7, 2007). I therefore asked her editor to explain (p.e.c.’s
August 15, 2006 and September 5, 2006). After looking into
the matter, the Chronicle’s editor Bill Horne would only say
‘‘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’’ (Bill Horne to Dreger, p.e.c., August 15,
2006). I simply cannot figure out what happened at the
Chronicle. What I do know is that many academics (including
reviewers of grant applications and manuscripts, and recipi-
ents of letters of recommendation for Bailey’s students) would
likely have drawn a negative opinion of Bailey from Wilson’s
July and December news reports.
Amazingly, somehow in the midst of all this controversy,
Bailey managed to be vilified by both the right- and left-wing
presses. Although the book received a warm review in the
ultra-conservative National Review (Derbyshire, 2003), the
equally conservative Washington Times reported both the
Northwestern investigation into Bailey as well as the disgust
among certain House Republicans that Bailey’s sexual arousal
studies received federal funding (McCain, 2003). Almost
simultaneously,the ultra-liberal Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC) claimed in their Intelligence Report that ‘‘many of
those who praised’’ TMWWBQ ‘‘belong to a private cyber-
discussion group of a neo-eugenics outfit, the Human Biodi-
versity Institute (HBI)’’ (Beirich & Moser, 2003). When I
asked Kieltyka how the SPLC got involved in all this, she
explained that she had learned of the SPLC’s interest in hate
crimes against transgendered people, and that she had fed
them information about Bailey’s role in what she increasingly
understood to be a vast anti-gay collusion (Kieltyka, 2006c).
Bailey indeed does belong to the HBI ‘‘private cyber-dis-
cussion group’’—the sort of online discussion group usually
referred to by the less thrilling name ‘‘listserv’’—and Bailey
acknowledges that some of the most active members of the
HBI list could legitimately be called right-wing (Bailey,
2006a); this would include the list’s founder, Steve Sailer. But
Bailey denies being part of a well—or, for that matter,
loosely—organized group that believes homosexuality is ‘‘a
‘disease’ that could eventually be eradicated’’ (Beirich &
Moser, 2003). When in our interviews I mentioned the SPLC
article to Bailey, his tendency was to look either bewildered or
amused, even after I explained to him that Kieltyka saw the
2001 article he published with lawyer Aaron Greenberg,
‘‘Parental Selection of Children’s Sexual Orientation,’’ as
clear evidence of his push for an anti-gay eugenics.
In that article, Bailey and Greenberg argued that ‘‘even
assuming, as we do, that homosexuality is entirely acceptable
morally, allowing parents, by means morally unproblematic in
themselves, to select for heterosexuality would be morally
acceptable.’’ They believe ‘‘this is because allowing parents to
select their children’s sexual orientation would further par-
ents’ freedom to raise the sortof children they wishto raise and
because selection for heterosexuality may benefit parents and
children and is unlikely to cause significant harm’’ (Greenberg
&Bailey,2001, p. 423). Bailey told me this article doesn’t
make him anti-gay or eugenical. He is not trying to ‘‘improve’’
the human stock through the elimination of theoretical ‘‘gay
genes’’ and, as for the question of the article’s attitude towards
gay people, the paper clearly states:
[H]omosexuality, like heterosexuality, is ethically neu-
tral. Because homosexuality causes no direct harm to
others (other than those who take offense at it on irrational
and/or inhumane grounds) and because homosexual
behavior is crucial to the ability of homosexual people to
enjoy their lives (as heterosexual behavior is to hetero-
sexuals), homosexuality should not be morally condem-
ned or proscribed. (Greenberg & Bailey, 2001,p.424)
394 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
Bailey has insisted that, in this paper,he and Greenberg simply
argued one thing: that parental rights could reasonably be
understood to include genetic selection against—or for—a
theoretic ‘‘gay gene’’ in the same way that parental rights are
reasonably understood to include the right to raise children in
parents’ religions. A close reading of the paper certainly seems
to bear out Bailey’s claims about it.
Although it is clear Kieltyka believes the ‘‘collusion and
possible conspiracy’’ is absolutely key to understanding the
backlash against Bailey’s book and Conway’s role in it, it is
difficult for me to sum up what Kieltyka sees as the evidence
for a vast network of cooperation among supposedly anti-gay
researchers, pundits, engineers, and politicians. I have found
her theory confusing enough that at least three times I offered
to put Kieltyka’sown account of it up on my personal Website,
so that she would feel her theory has been accurately repre-
sented (Dreger to Kieltyka, p.e.c.’s September 3, 2006 and
September 22, 2006; Dreger to Kieltyka, letter, September 6,
2006). She has not taken me up on the offer. I do know she is
sure the scheme reflects the ‘‘God, guns, and (anti) gay’’
agenda of right-wing Republicans, and that it intimately
involves members of and testifiers to the President’s Council
on Bioethics, as well as members of and contractors to NASA
and the Defense Department (Kieltyka, 2006a, 2006c, 2006d;
p.e.c. from Kieltyka to approximately 150 people, subject line
‘‘What’s Wrong With This Picture—Scowcroft—Zeder—
Conway???’’, September 2, 2005). I believe I should also
report—since Kieltyka mentioned it repeatedly—that her
conviction that she had accidentally stumbled onto something
really big was bolstered when she appeared on the KKK-
related ‘‘New Nation News’’ Internet ‘‘shit list’’ (Kieltyka,
2006a, 2006d), and, most frighteningly, when she woke up
one day to find a dead cat laid out on her doorstep, a cat who
looked very much like her own dear pet (Kieltyka, 2006a,
2006b, 2006d). (She alerted the local police to a possible hate
crime [Kieltyka, 2006a].) I should also note that, although
Kieltyka insisted to me that Bailey is just the ‘‘fall guy’’ in the
much higher-stake scheme she hoped I would point my
attentions to—a scheme where Conway ranks significantly
higher up than Bailey (Kieltyka, 2006a)—she is still really
angry with Bailey for having used her story as an example of
autogynephilia.
As mentioned earlier, Conway seems to have remained
coolto Kieltyka’s wide-ranging findings that pointed to Bailey
as being a collaborator in a massive anti-gay agenda shared by
right-wing Republicans. But apparently James did not,
because her 2003 graphic of ‘‘J. Michael Bailey connections’’
suggests that, at least in October 2003, James bought into
Kieltyka’s grand unifying theory—or at least that she thought
it a useful new form of rhetoric to use against Bailey (James,
n.d.-a). But, in general, James took a more direct—though not
less expansive—approach than Kieltyka. Thus, in an effort to
undermine TMWWBQ, James tried to discount, denigrate, or
discredit anyone who was seen as supportive of the book. So
her Website includes an appraisal of Simon LeVay—who
works on the biological origins of sexual orientation and
who blurbed Bailey’s book—calling him ‘‘a dilettante’’ and
explicitly likening him to ‘‘the race scientists who influenced
Nazism by emphasizing biological differences of ethnic
minorities’’ (James, n.d.-b). James seems to have been unable
to find anything usefully objectionable about co-blurber Ste-
ven Pinker; her page on him consists mostly of a cartoon of
‘‘Pinker and the Brain plotting their takeover of the intellectual
world’’ and scattered ‘‘notes to address later’’ (James, n.d.-c).
James also sought to force anyone who might be on the
fence toside withher or facetheconsequences. Forexample, in
April 2003, when she discovered endorsements of TMWWBQ
on Anne Lawrence’s Website, James sent Lawrence an email
tellingLawrence, ‘‘Idonotdenyyourlegitimacyasa womanor
ascribe motivations to you in order to make my own behavior
and desires seem more acceptable, yet if you and Bailey feel
entitled to do so to me, I will be forced to travel this low road as
well and respond in kind.’’ She ended with a menacing tone: ‘‘I
believe youfind yourself at another crossroads as a community
leader. You have a choice to make. […]Istronglysuggestyou
stake out the places where your opinion differs from Bailey’s,
oryouwillfindyouhavesquanderedevenmoreofthegoodwill
and respect you used to have in abundance’’ (p.e.c., April 15,
2003). Once it became clear Lawrence was going to stick with
thetheory she found most correct, Jamesmountedan extensive
attack on Lawrence’s professional reputation, publicizing an
incident where Lawrence was charged with professional mis-
conduct. The fact that Lawrence was ultimately fully cleared
appears nowhere on James’s ‘‘expose
´
’’ of the events (Law-
rence, 2006a). Had Lawrence supported the feminine essence
narrative over Blanchard’s taxonomy, one could easily imag-
ineConway,James,andthelikecirclingwagons toprotecttheir
fellow transwoman. Lawrence’s supposed sin of professional
misconduct is clearly not the issue; her allegiance to Blan-
chard’s theory is. (By contrast, nowhere on James’s extensive
site in her favorable use of the work of pro-feminine-essence
therapistMildred BrowndoesJamesmentionthat‘‘Brownpaid
off a former client to drop a $2.5 million lawsuit that alleged
a personally damaging and ruinous sexual affair’’ [Rendon,
1999].)
James and her allies reacted powerfully when a new site
claiming to represent self-identified homosexual transsexuals
sprang up. The ‘‘Transkids.us’’ site was organized by intersex
activist Kiira Triea, whom I knew coincidentally through my
intersex advocacy work in 1998–1999 and with whom I
reconnected after my blog on James. When we reconnected,
Triea told me that, following the publication of TMWWBQ and
the enormous backlash against it, she set up the Transkids site
as a way for transwomen she was helping out in Baltimore to
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 395
123
voice their stories and analyses—stories and analyses that
largely supported Blanchard’s taxonomy and thus Bailey’s
book. Triea and her friends prefer the term ‘‘transkids’’ to
‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’ ‘‘because their problems started so
young’’ (Triea, 2006). In fact, Triea bonded with the transkids
because she could relate to that aspect of their histories; Triea
was born intersex and raised male, and at 14 wound up in the
famous gender identity clinic led by John Money at Johns
Hopkins University. Diagnosed by Money’s team as (in
Triea’s words) a ‘‘failed male,’’ she was put through a sex
reassignment Triea experienced as brutalizing (Triea, 1999).
Although Triea and the transkids knew the extent of the
anger against Bailey, they never imagined that so much of it
would be directed toward them for daring to defend Blanchard
and Bailey. She recalls:
We had been working on the transkids.us site for several
months and when it was done we announced it in various
places. The very next morning, one of the transkids
called on the phone in a panic, really scared, because
overnight news of our website had caused such outrage
on the Internet. Andrea James was saying ‘‘if you have
any information aboutany of these peoplegive it to me.’’
I looked at two of the forums, the worst ones, and the
outpouring of hatred and violence was just unbelievable.
It was frightening because I had never seenanything like
that. They were saying things like we needed to be
‘‘infiltrated and taken out’’ or ‘‘vectored and destroyed,’’
all this military stuff! (Triea, 2006)
Triea told me, ‘‘We talked about taking the website down,
because we didn’t want anyone to get hurt’’ (Triea, 2006). But
in the end, they left it up and continued to post new material
occasionally. The fact that the transkids have occasionally
criticized some of Bailey’s book (see, e.g., Velasquez, 2004)
did not seem to mollify James. James’ site still calls for readers
to send in any ‘‘email, attachment or photo from’’ the transk-
ids.us writers ‘‘for analysis by our investigators. We need to
vector and expose this kind of online fakery before someone
takes them seriously’’ (James, n.d.-d).
For her part, Deirdre McCloskey, too, led sections of the
counterattack. We see this most clearly in thecase of theLLF’s
collisionwiththe Baileycontroversy.On February 2,2004, the
LLF announced the finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards,
and included among the five books in the ‘‘Transgender/
GenderQueer’’ category was TMWWBQ. Conway’s site on
‘‘the Bailey Investigation’’ tends to assume that all positive
publicity for the book was the production of the publishers’ or
Bailey’s agents, and the LLF case is no different. According to
Conway’s master ‘‘Timeline,’’ Bailey’s publicists managed to
get the book nominatedfor a Lambda award(Conway, 2006a).
But Jim Marks, then Executive Director of the LLF, cor-
rected the record when I spoke with him. ‘‘The book was not
originally nominated by the publisher,’’ according to Marks.
‘‘It was added to the list 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’’ (Jim Marks,
p.e.c., July 22, 2006). Bailey remembers with annoyance that
his publisher let him know about it only to tell him they
assumed he didn’t want the book nominated. Presumably, by
then, the publisher was weary of being attacked over the book.
Bailey recalls, ‘‘My editor was always supportive, although I
didn’t deal with him much after [the book] came out. The
publicist was also very positive. But the people higher up
definitely seemed torn between supporting me and appeasing
the people who were giving them trouble’’ (Bailey, 2006b).
Bailey responded that of course he wanted the book nomi-
nated, so the fee was paid, and the nomination became official.
Immediately after the nominations were announced,
Deirdre McCloskey contacted Jim Marks to let him know she
was outraged. Marks remembers, ‘‘I first realized that we had a
problem on our hands when I got a vehement phone call from
Deirdre McCloskey, Professor of Economics and English at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. McCloskey insisted that
we immediately remove the book from the list of finalists’’
(Jim Marks, p.e.c., July 22, 2006). In an email sent on the day
after the announcement, McCloskey told Marks the nomina-
tion ‘‘would be like nominating Mein Kampf for a literary
prize in Jewish studies. I think some apologies and explana-
tions and embarrassment are in order’’ (McCloskey to Marks,
p.e.c., February 3, 2004; available at Conway, 2005a). Marks
wasn’t sure exactly what to make of this at first:
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 consideredtaking
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
advocacyorganization. Its stated mission wasto advance
LGBT rights through furthering LGBT literature. We
would clearlyhavegrounds for removing a bookthatwas
in fact hostile to the Foundation’s mission. (Jim Marks,
p.e.c., July 22, 2006)
But Marks soon learned that ‘‘McCloskey’s point of view,
although widely shared, was not universally that of the trans-
gender community. Among the torrent of e-mails we received,
a minority came from transgender people who supported the
bookand urged us to keep it on the list’’ (Jim Marks,p.e.c., July
22, 2006). Marks recalled to me,
I had no expertise in this area (which is one reason we
were blind-sided by the controversy). My main concern
was maintaining the integrity of the nominating process;
I didn’t feel like I could ask a finalist committee to take
396 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
the time and effort to select finalists and then simply
overturn their decision without legitimate grounds. I
informed the finalist committee of the controversy and
asked them what to do. They re-voted and said, keep the
book on the list. We did and sent the book out to the
transgender panel of judges. (Jim Marks, p.e.c., July 22,
2006)
Following this decision to keep the book in the running, the
pressure McCloskey, Conway, and others brought to bear on
the LLF to remove Bailey’s book from the running became
intense. A worldwide online petition was started by Christine
Burns, a leading trans advocate in the U.K., insisting ‘‘that the
book […] be withdrawn forthwith from the list of nominees
at our collective request.’’ It quickly reached nearly 1,500
signatures (see http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.
cgi?bailey).
In the style of the rest of her ‘‘investigation,’’ in the LLF-
nomination affair, Conway also encouraged her followers
to take to task anyone who could be seen as helping Bailey.
Thus, she listed on her site ‘‘Members of the Lambda Literary
Foundation committee who selected Bailey’s book,’’ with this
heading:
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 transwomen throughout
the world. […] Note: There is some evidence that the
owners and employees of several of the book stores listed
below have specific lesbian-feminist policies of wel-
coming only ‘‘womyn born womyn’’ (thus excluding
transwomen) as customers in their stores. We suggest
that our investigators out there quietly gather evidence
about any discriminatory policies employed by stores
listed below, for future publication on this site. (Conway,
2005a)
In a little over a month after McCloskey’s first call to Marks,
the pressure did result in what McCloskey, Conway, and their
allies sought. By early March, according to Marks, a judge
within the LLF ‘‘raised concerns, we went back to the finalists
committee one more time, a member changed their vote and
we withdrew the book from consideration’’ (Jim Marks, p.e.c.,
July 22, 2006). Only one vote had flipped, but it was enough to
have the book removed.
In their public comments, those on the Finalist Committee
disagreed about whether this action was tantamount to cen-
sorship. Kris Kleindienst is quoted in an LLF announcement
as saying, ‘‘Removing the book from the list is not censorship.
The book is widely available, has been widely reviewed and is
not about to be denied to the public. What we are doing is
behaving in a responsible manner to make sure the list of
finalists is compatible with the Foundation’s mission.’’ But
Victoria Brownworth, along with other members of the
committee, disagreed, saying ‘‘if we take the book off the list
we are indeed censoring it. It doesn’t matter what our reasons
are’’ (Jim Marks to ‘‘distribution list,’’ p.e.c., March 12, 2004,
reproduced at Conway, 2005a).
Jim Marks’s challenging experience with the controversy
and his new critics did not end there. As was typical in the
whole TMWWBQ-related affair, Conway’s and James’s site
continued to track their perceived-enemy’s actions. In 2005, in
a link highlighted on Conway’s site, James victoriously
announced on her Transsexual Road Map site that Marks had
been ‘‘ousted as Executive Director’’ of the LLF, claiming that
the cause was ‘‘the mishandling of the Bailey matter, com-
bined with late publication deliveries and financial woes’’
(James, n.d.-e). Marks says this is simply not true: ‘‘I did not
resign […] because of financial difficulties. The 12 month
period from June 2004–May 2005 was the most successful
year, financially and organizationally, that the Foundation had
ever had.’’ Instead what happened was that the LLF board
decided to reorganize the Foundation in a way that Marks ‘‘did
not think […] was a viable business model and [he] resigned
rather than try to implement it’’. He adds, ‘‘As far as I know,
the controversy over [TMWWBQ] played no part in the deci-
sion of the board to reorganize the Foundation. When I
resigned, it was over 15 months in the past and of no imme-
diate relevance to the Foundation’’ (Jim Marks, p.e.c., July 22,
2006). James’s and Conway’s sites continue to say otherwise.
All of this was no doubt taking its toll, most especially on
Michael Bailey. And I don’t think there can be any doubt that,
via their work with the press, their orchestrating of charges of
scientific misconduct against him, and their encouraging of
vocal objections at any public talks Bailey might give, Con-
way and James in particular were trying to make Bailey as
miserable as they could. In my interviews with him, Bailey
resisted admitting to misery, but conversations with his family
and friends suggest the multi-year assault on so many fronts
did wear on him. Because they believed he had rhetorically
assaulted them, his enemies would seem to deny him any safe
haven, however personal. At one point, Conway even decided
to contact Bailey’s close personal friend and departmental
colleague, Joan Linsenmeier, to suggest that Linsenmeier tell
Bailey he needed to be concerned for his personal safety.
Linsenmeier told me about Conway’s call:
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. […] while she definitely scared me, this was
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 397
123
something I chose not to share with Mike at the time.
(Joan Linsenmeier, p.e.c., August 17, 2006)
This sort of direct appeal to Bailey’s colleagues would con-
tinue unabated for years. In September 2003, while Bailey was
Chair oftheDepartment of Psychologyat Northwestern, James
wrote to all of Bailey’s departmental colleagues, feigning
concern for him:
Northwestern’s Psychology Department tacitly allows
someone suffering from what the DSM calls alcohol
abuse and dependence to run the department. As psy-
chologists and friends, you must know that if Bailey
continues his downward spiral, it’s largely because you
and your colleagues didn’t step in. […] I’m sure some of
you will continue to respond with self-righteous indig-
nation 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. (Andrea James to the
faculty of the Northwestern University Psychology
Department, p.e.c., September 15, 2003)
Similarly, in January 2004, members of Bailey’s department
all received the previously mentioned letter from Kieltyka,
Conway, James, and Calpernia Addams. The ostensible cause
of the letter was to alert them to the SPLC report:
With this letter we wish to inform you that the Intelli-
gence Report identifies J. Michael Bailey, the Chairman
of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern, as a
central figure in an elite reactionary group of academics,
pundits and journalists now especially active in an
insidiously noxious ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘scholarly’’ pursuit
ofinstitutionalizedbigotryanddefamationoftranssexual
women[. …] We urge you to suspend disbelief. Read
those SPLC Intelligence Report articles for yourselves.
Then contemplate the role that some psychologists,
including your Department Chairman, are playing in
fostering hate and violence against young transsexual
women. (Letter from Anjelica Kieltyka, Lynn Conway,
Andrea James, Calpernia Addams to faculty members of
the Department of Psychology, Northwestern Univer-
sity, January 7, 2004)
As late as 2005, Conway was still using this approach, choosing
to write to Alice Eagly, who had replaced Bailey as chair of the
department. Conway insisted that, because of Bailey, ‘‘the deep
stain on Northwestern Psychology remains.’’ But she offered a
solution:
the internal culture of the Department could perhaps be
improved over time if signals were quietly sent that it
now at least tolerates open discussion of alternatives to
Mr. Bailey’s views […] It might also be important to
reflect upon what is being taught about transsexualism
to Northwestern’s undergraduates in the large ‘‘sex
courses’’ given by your Department’s faculty members.
(Letter from Lynn Conway to Alice Eagly, January 26,
2005)
Unlike Conway, James considered even Bailey’s family
and non-professional friends fair game in her own branch of
the ‘‘investigation.’’ So, in 2005, James obtained pictures of
Bailey’s girlfriend from 2003 and mounted a special page
mocking her. It included a visual feature that morphed Bai-
ley’s girlfriend’s face into Bailey’s face from his high school
yearbook picture—presumably implying Bailey is autogy-
nephilic, though the exact meaning is unclear. Bailey’s now-
ex-girlfriend has asked James to take down the page to no
avail; it is still the first page you get when you Internet-search
that woman’s name (Bailey to Dreger, personal communica-
tion, September 19, 2006).
InMay 2003,Jamescreated a specialportion of hersite to go
after Bailey’s children.In her own words, this special page was
‘‘a very coarse and mean-spirited screed, designed to reflect
what I consider [Bailey’s] own motivations to be. […] A taste
of his own medicine.’’ For this project, James took from Bai-
ley’s homepage photos of his son Drew and daughter Kate
when they were in junior high and primary school, respec-
tively. She then superimposed black bands over their eyes,
presumably to mimic the dehumanizing pictures of trans
people in the medical literature. Under the picture of Drew,
using mostly a line from Bailey’s book about transwomen, she
added the caption, ‘‘There are also kids like ‘Drew’ who work
as waiters, hairdressers, receptionists, strippers, and prosti-
tutes, as well as in many otheroccupations.’’ Meanwhile James
labeled Kate’s picture this way: ‘‘‘Kate’: a cock-starved exhi-
bitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it?
We’ll find out in 12 easy questions!’’ In an update on this page,
James delighted ‘‘that professionals are reading this page and
acting with disgust.’’ Indeed, the negative reactions she was
getting made her decide to ratchet up her satirical analogizing
of Bailey’s book to his children. She now imagined ‘‘a clas-
sificationsystemto categorize Bailey’s children.Therearetwo
types of children in the Bailey household: Type 1, who have
been sodomized by their father, or Type 2, who have not’’
(James, 2003a).
James did eventually take enough flak over her mockery of
Bailey’s children that she withdrew the special page about
them. She claims on her site that she issued via Drew Bailey a
sincere apology to him, his sister, and his mother (James, n.d.-
f), but Drew Bailey says she did nothing of the sort, even after
he contacted her to defend himself and his sister: ‘‘there was
nothing in her response that could have been reasonably
interpreted as a sincere apology’’ (Drew Bailey, 2006). In our
conversation, Drew, now 22 years old, added, ‘‘Something
[else] that really bothered me involved her characterization of
our family dynamic. She saidthat my father had abandoned us,
398 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
that we were his ‘ex family.’ That really hurt because it is
completely untrue’’ (Drew Bailey, 2006). I asked Michael
Bailey if it is possible that Andrea James was referring to the
terms of his divorce in speaking of his alleged ‘‘abandon-
ment.’’ Bailey replied that the divorce had been friendly.
When I asked if he had any evidence of that, he thought a
moment, and remembered that he and his then-wife Deb had
used the same divorce lawyer (Bailey, 2006a).
As it turns out, the Bailey clan remains quite close-knit in
spite of the parents being divorced. Thus, James’ character-
ization of Bailey ‘‘abandoning’’ his family could only be
called a misrepresentation at best. The Baileys are inclined to
call it a vicious lie. By all accounts, the Baileys celebrate
holidays together, are in constant close contact, and even
vacation together. When I interviewed Deb Bailey in Evans-
ton the day after she returned from a Maine vacation with her
partner, her children, her ex-husband, and other close friends,
she told me ‘‘It’s eleven years since we’ve been divorced and
he still rideshis bike [over], stops by, all the time to see the kids
[…] and to see me.’’ She confirmed for me that she and her ex-
husband had shared the same divorce lawyer, and indeed
remembered somewhat sentimentally how they enjoyed each
other’s company the day of the court divorce proceedings. She
also remembered that, in 2003, when the stress of the book
backlash was getting particularly intense, Michael Bailey
came to her house to talk for hours about it with her. Deb
summed it up this way: ‘‘Mike and I have an unusual rela-
tionship in that we care for each other a lot. Married was not a
good thing, but friends is a fabulous thing, and I have only the
utmost respect for him’’ (Deb Bailey, 2006).
While Bailey’s family and friends privately rallied around
him, throughout the controversy over TMWWBQ, Bailey’s
colleaguesdid not do much to visibly side with one party or the
other. This may have been because—as John Bancroft sug-
gested above, and Anne Lawrence seconds below—it became
difficult, if not impossible, to put forth any kind of judicious
critique of the book given the highly charged terms of the
debate. One sexologist who did seem to take the side of
Conway is Eli Coleman of the University of Minnesota. In
response to the outrage coming from Conway and her allies,
Coleman expressed his concerns about Bailey’s book and
promised in an email he copied to Conway, ‘‘we will do all we
can do to respond to this situation’’ (available at Conway,
2003i). Then, at the 2003 Ghent meeting of HBIGDA, Cole-
man criticized Bailey’s book as an ‘‘unfortunate setback.’’ At
his 2005 lecture to the International Foundation for Gender
Education, Coleman again ‘‘said pretty much what I said in
Gent—that it was an unfortunate setback in feelings of trust
between the transgender community and sex researchers.’’ He
also specifically ‘‘said thanks to Lynn Conway that the con-
cerns of the transgender community had been brought forth
and articulated’’ (Coleman to Dreger, p.e.c., August 4, 2006).
According to Conway, it is ‘‘courtesyof Dr. Coleman’’ that her
site shows a slide from Coleman’s IFGE lecture—namely a
reproduction of TMWWBQ’s cover with the words ‘‘Unfor-
tunate Setbacks’’ added above it (Conway, 2005b). When I
asked him if he gave Conway the image, Coleman told me ‘‘I
have no idea where she got the slide’’ (Coleman to Dreger,
p.e.c., February 6, 2007).
A number of Bailey’s colleagues who might have been
inclined to explicitly defend him suggested to me in conver-
sation that they feared being both ineffectual and attacked;
certainly his colleague Joan Linsenmeier found herself set
uponbybothConway andJames as a consequenceof herpublic
positive association with Bailey (see, e.g., James, 2003c). One
sexologist suggested to me that some colleagues who might
haveotherwisedefendedBailey publiclymighthavestayed out
of the conversation because, in 2003 and 2004, as charge after
chargeofscientificmisconduct piledup,colleagues mighthave
believed ‘‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’’ But things have
clearly shifted since then; Bailey is now quicker to call on
colleagues to help, and they are quicker to respond. When the
queer-community-oriented Chicago Free Press ran an anti-
Bailey editorial in August, 2006 in response to a new tip from
Kieltyka (‘‘Bad Science,’’ 2006), Bailey asked his colleagues
to write letters to the editor, and at least 18 immediately did
(Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 23, 2007).
Meanwhile, although strife within the trans (especially the
transwomen) activist and support circles certainlypredatedthe
publication of TMWWBQ, the controversy over the book
seems to have substantially exacerbated it. A number of the
transwomenwho wroteto me aftermy original blogon Andrea
James volunteered that they had been harassed, intimidated,
and sometimes electronically erased for speaking autobio-
graphically of autogynephilia or positively of Blanchard,
Bailey, or Lawrence. (All of these correspondents asked to
remain anonymous for fear of further attack.) The heat around
Bailey’s book appears to have entrenched for many people the
‘‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us, and you’ll be treated
as such’’ mentality. Even transman/trans-advocate Jamison
Green, who has publicly criticized TMWWBQ and Bailey
(Green, 2003), has said,
I have been disappointed by some of the vitriolic attacks
that Bailey received from trans people at the height of
the controversy. I strongly feel that scholarly (and cre-
ative) work should be reviewed on its merits and that
resorting to personal attacks on creators of published
work is uncalled for at best and demeaning to the critic at
worst. Such tactics actually undermine productive crit-
ical dialog[.] (Jamison Green, p.e.c., August 20, 2006)
And indeed the divisive shockwaves from the controversy
over TMWWBQ are still reverberating within trans circles in
ways that don’t seem productive or civil much of the time.
Whether that will change remains to be seen, and will prob-
ably depend much on whether leaders and followers within
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 399
123
trans advocacy and activism can find a way to move forward
while the ‘‘if you’re not fully with us, you’re against us’’
mentality remains. For his part, Green told me ‘‘I sincerely
hopethat one day intelligent peoplewill be able to consistently
exhibit civil behavior toward each other in all aspects of social
interaction’’ (Jamison Green, p.e.c., August 20, 2006).
Part 5: The Merit of the Charges Made Against Bailey
I think it is fair to say, given the historical evidence noted
above, that the firestorm against The Man Who Would Be
Queen was initially motivated by a few powerful transsexual
women’s strong public rejection of Blanchard’s theory of
MTF transsexualism. But as we have also seen above, that
firestorm quickly came to be fueled by allegations that J.
Michael Bailey had behaved in all sorts of unethical, illegal,
and immoral ways in the production of his book. This move on
the part of Bailey’s detractors—from questioning the message
to questioning the messenger—effectively directed public
attention away from the book itself and Blanchard’s theory
towards TMWWBQ’s author. What then of the merit of the
charges that Bailey behaved unethically, illegally, and even
immorallyinproducingTMWWBQ?
In providing this history, it would be convenient to be able
to simply report the merit of the charges made against Bailey
as determined by some reliable investigatory body. But I am
unable to do so. Besides the rather odd and brief inquiry made
by the SPLC and those ‘‘investigations’’ of Bailey made by
Conway, James, and their cohort—‘‘investigations’’ which, as
noted above and below, appear factually and ethically flawed
in key respects—apparently the only formal, institutional
investigation made of Bailey was that conducted by the Pro-
vost’s office of Northwestern University. No other group—
including the National Academies, various professional
organizations like HBIGDA and IASR, and the Illinois
Department of Professional Regulation—seems to have found
reason to proceed with any deep inquiry into Bailey’s work, in
spite of many calls to do so from Conway, James, Kieltyka,
McCloskey, and others. And, as noted in the last section,
neither Northwestern nor Bailey has publicly revealed the
results of the university’s lengthy investigation, except insofar
as: (1) Northwestern’s Vice President for Research has said
that ‘‘the allegations of scientific misconduct made against
Professor J. Michael Bailey do not fall under the federal
definition of scientific misconduct’’; and (2) Northwestern’s
Provost has said that the university ‘‘has established a protocol
to help ensure that Professor Bailey’s research activities
involving human subjects are conducted in accordance
with the expectations of the University, the regulations and
guidelines established by the federal government and with
generally accepted research standards’’ (C. Bradley Moore to
Alice Dreger, p.e.c., August 1, 2006). It seems that if Bailey
were completely happy with the outcome of the investigation,
he would release the results, but the apparent lack of change in
Bailey’s university status following the December 2004
conclusion of the investigation suggests the university found
nothing too damning. Still, I think it unscholarly to rely on
such ambiguous evidence to deduce anything meaningful
about Bailey’s conduct. Consequently, I consider here the
allegations of misconduct made against Bailey with regard to
the production of his book, and examine what the sources tell
us about the merit of those charges.
Of the myriad charges organized and broadcast against
Bailey by Conway, James, and McCloskey, arguably the two
most serious have been (1) that Bailey conducted human
subjects research that required NorthwesternUniversity’s IRB
approval and oversight without seeking or obtaining that
approval and oversight, and (2) that he had sex with the
woman called Juanita in the book at a time when she was his
research subject. These two charges turn out to be interrelated,
so I’ll deal with them first, one right after the other.
Did Bailey conduct IRB-qualified human subjects research
without IRB oversight? According to reproductions posted on
Lynn Conway’s ‘‘Bailey investigation’’ Website, in their 2003
complaints about Bailey made to Northwestern, Anjelica
Kieltyka, Juanita, and two other transsexual women whose
stories did not appear in TMWWBQ all claimed that they were
‘‘participant[s] in a research study without being informed of
that status’’ (Kieltyka to C. Bradley Moore, July 3, 2003,
available at Kieltyka, 2003b; see also Conway, 2003c, 2003d,
2003f). Kieltyka’s complaint of July 3, 2003, went further,
stating that she expected Bailey to be ‘‘found […] in violation
of University and federal policies’’ because, she implied, he
had been conducting IRB-qualified human subjects research
on her and her friends without IRB approval and oversight
(Kieltyka to C. Bradley Moore, July 3, 2003, available at
Kieltyka, 2003b). Indeed, by his own admission, Bailey did
not seek or obtain approval from Northwestern’s IRB to talk
with Kieltyka, Juanita, and other transsexual women about
their lives for purposes of his writing about them (Bailey,
2005). But did Bailey need IRB approval and oversight in this
case?
Answering this question requires both general consider-
ation of the IRB regulations and specific consideration of
Bailey’s relations with the people whose stories he recounted
in his book. First the general: In the U.S., universities that
receive federal funding are required to maintain oversight
boards to ensure that qualified human subjects research is
conducted in an ethical manner. To quote from Northwest-
ern’s Office for the Protection of Research Subjects:
The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is designated by
Northwestern University (NU) to review, to approve the
initiation of, and to conduct periodic review of research
involving human subjects or materials obtained from
400 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
human subjects. Federal law and/or NU policy mandates
prior written and dated IRB approval of such research
regardless of the funding source. (Office for the Pro-
tection of Research Subjects, n.d.)
As Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education noted
in her July 25, 2003 news report of the first two charges made
against Bailey, ‘‘According to federal regulations, a human
subject is someone from whom a researcher obtains data
through ‘interaction,’ which includes ‘communication or
interpersonal contact between investigator and subject’’’
(Wilson, 2003b).
There’s no question Bailey obtained information about
their lives from observing and talking with Kieltyka, Juanita,
and the other transsexual women who did and did not appear in
TMWWBQ. In thatsense, they would seem to count as ‘‘human
subjects,’’ presuming the information he gathered from them
could be called ‘‘data.’’
But, as Wilson and many other writers on the Bailey con-
troversyhavefailedtonote,thekindofresearchthat issubjectto
IRB oversight is significantly more limited than the regulatory
definition of ‘‘human subject’’ implies. What is critical to
understand here is that, in the federal regulations regarding
human subjects research, research is defined very specifically
as ‘‘a systematic investigation, including research develop-
ment, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute
to generalizable knowledge’’ (United States Department of
Health and Human Services, 2005, Sect. 46.102, def. ‘‘b’’). In
other words, onlyresearchthat istrulyscientific innature—that
whichissystematicandgeneralizable—ismeant tobeoverseen
by IRBs. Thus, a person might fit the U.S. federal definition of
‘‘human subject’’ in being a person from whom a researcher
gains knowledge through interpersonal interaction, but if the
way that the researcher gains the knowledge is not systematic
and the knowledge she or he intends to gain is unlikely to be
generalizable in the scientific sense, the research does not fall
under the purview of the researcher’s IRB.
It is worth noting here, for purposes of illustration of what
does and doesn’t count as IRB-qualified work, that I consulted
with the Northwestern IRB to confirm that the interviews I
have conducted for this particular project do not fall under the
purview of Northwestern’s IRB. Although I have intentionally
obtained data through interpersonal interaction, the interview
work I have conducted for this historical project has been
neither scientifically systematic nor generalizable. That is, I
have not asked each subject a list of standardized questions—
indeed, I typically enjoyed highly interactive conversations
during interviews; I have not interviewed all of my subjects in
the same way; I have negotiated with some of them to what
extent I would protect their identities. This is a scholarly study,
but not a systematic one in the scientific sense. Nor will the
knowledge produced from this scholarly history be
generalizable in the scientific sense. No one will be able to use
this work to reasonably make any broad claims about trans-
sexual women, sex researchers, or any other group.
When I put my methodology to the Northwestern IRB, the
IRB agreed with me that my work on this project is not IRB-
qualified (Eileen Yates to Dreger, p.e.c., July 31, 2006), i.e.,
that, although I have obtained data from living persons via
interactions with them, what I am doing here is neither sys-
tematic nor generalizable in the scientific sense. Had the IRB
disagreed with me on this point—which, knowing the regu-
lations, they did not—I would have pointed them specifically
to the 2003 clarification by the U.S. Office for Human
Research Protection (OHRP) that ‘‘oral history interviewing
projects in general do not involve the type of research defined
by [Department of Health and Human Services] regulations
and are therefore excluded from IRB oversight’’ (Ritchie &
Shopes, 2003). The Oral History Association sought this
clarification in response to what many scholars have come to
call ‘‘mission creep’’ on the part of IRBs, i.e., the move on the
part of many IRBs to claim regulatory rights to work that was
never intended by the federal government to count as human
subjects research (Center for Advanced Study, 2005; see also
American Association of University Professors, 2006). The
Oral History Association and the American Historical Asso-
ciation have gotten fed up enough with IRB mission creep that
they recommend historians like me not even consult with their
IRBs when planning to take oral histories; theyadvise scholars
instead to simply inform their Chairs and Deans of the 2003
clarification (Ritchie & Shopes, 2003). I went against their
recommendation in this case and actively sought confirmation
of exception from my own IRB partly out of project-relevant
curiosity as to how the Northwestern IRB views these kinds of
interviews, and partly out of fear of being charged with IRB
violation in retaliation for producing this history.
In terms of how this all applies to the claim that Bailey was
violating IRB regulations, one could argue that the 2003
clarification of the OHRP about oral histories came after he
wrote TMWWBQ—that the clarification postdates his work.
That is true, but the clarification about taking and relaying
individual stories was not a new ruling. It was simply a clari-
fication that oral histories were never meant to be overseen by
IRBs. Moreover, I’m not sure we can even reasonably use the
term ‘‘oral histories’’ to describe what Bailey did with Kiel-
tyka, Juanita, and the other people whose stories were relayed
in the book—that is, I’m not sure it counted as any kind of
serious scholarship (which real oral-history taking is). The
information aboutindividuals thatBailey gathered forthebook
from Kieltyka, Juanita, Braverman, and others he obtained
haphazardly—without any developed plan of research—from
their occasional presentations to his classes, from their joint
social outings, and from one-on-one discussions that occurred
on an irregular basis. Bailey did conduct a few fill-in-the-blank
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 401
123
discussions with Kieltyka, Juanita, and others (Bailey to Dre-
ger, p.e.c., August 22, 2006)—discussions during which, as I
show below, they knew he was writing about them in his book,
and with which they cooperated. But these fill-in-the-blank
discussions canagain hardly be calledsystematic orproductive
of generalizable knowledge. When I pressed him to consult or
perhaps even turn over to me the notes he took from these
conversations, Bailey admitted he had no organized notes that
he had bothered to keep. Obviously, he never really thought of
these discussions as research—systematic work meant to be
productive of generalizable knowledge—any more than he
ever imagined that the women who seemed eager to tell their
stories and have him write about them might later charge him
with abuse.Otherwise, he surelywould haveprotected himself
and his work by being significantly more organized. By com-
parison, for the systematic and generalizable psychological
and sociological studies of transsexual women and others to
which he occasionally refers in the book (e.g., Barlow, 1996),
Bailey and his lab did seek and obtain IRB approval from
Northwestern.
Historically speaking, the confusion over whether Bailey
violated human subjects research regulations is somewhat
understandable, both because many people are unfamiliar
with the regulations and because of TMWWBQ’s style. In the
book, the way in which Bailey refers offhandedly and irreg-
ularly to his methodology could lead someto believe that all of
the information he relays therein is the result of scientific
study. The total lack of citation and documentation makes it
very difficult to determine to what extent Bailey’s claims are
based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence. It is true that
TMWWBQ’s jacket boasts that it is ‘‘based on his original
research’’ and ‘‘grounded firmly in the scientific method.’’
And indeed, in some places, Bailey does refer to some of his
own actual scientific research. For example, at the opening of
the chapter called ‘‘In Search of Womanhood and Men,’’
Bailey speaks of ‘‘my own recent research [that] has focused
on the homosexual type’’ of transsexual (Bailey, 2003,p.177).
A couple of pages later, he similarly remarks that ‘‘In our
study, we found that drag queens ranked between gay men
and transsexuals on a number of traits related to femininity’’
(pp. 179–180). But, compared to the organized (and IRB-
approved) studies to which he is referring in these two sen-
tences, one would be hard-pressed to call what Bailey did to
obtain and present the stories of Kieltyka, Juanita, and the
other individuals about whom he wrote ‘‘science’’—or even
‘‘ re s e ar c h’’ i n any scholarly sense. Indeed, both Conway and
McCloskey have complained about just that—that what he
was doing with these women’s stories wasn’t science—and I
think they are absolutely right (McCloskey & Conway, 2003).
Clearly, what Bailey did in terms of learning and relaying
the stories of Kieltyka, Juanita, and other transsexual women
was neither systematic nor generalizable. Never did Bailey
organize a series of specific questions to ask these women,
questions that might have been used, for example, to scien-
tifically test Blanchard’s taxonomy. Never did he seek a
statistically representative sample of transsexual women in
deciding whose stories to tell; again, his critics have com-
plained about just this (see, e.g., Sauer, 2003). He simply
picked people who came with good stories—people such as
Kieltyka and Juanita—to put human faces on Blanchard’s
theory. He had no interest in scientifically investigating
Blanchard’s theory; at this point, he already believed it to be
true because of what he had learned from the scientific liter-
ature, from colleagues, and from his prior experiences. Using
stories in this way is not science—it doesn’t even rise to the
level of bad science, because it doesn’t even pretend to test or
develop a theory—and I think it is clear it does not rise to
the level of IRB-qualified research by the U.S. federal
definition.
Although TMWWBQ occasionally seems to brag about its
scientific rigor—especially on its jacket—in the text Bailey
frequently acts more like a science journalist than a scientist.
He mixes up references to scientific studies he led and stories
of individuals he met along the way—stories, remember, not
just of transsexual women and crossdressing men, but also of
the men on the annual ‘‘gay guys’’ panel of his human sexu-
ality class, of ‘‘Princess Danny,’’ and of Edwin, the effeminate
man at the cosmetics counter of Bailey’s local department
store. Bailey didn’t get IRB approval to gather or write about
any of these stories, because they were all anecdotes and not
scientific studies. Given that he consistently obtained IRB
approval for work he did that was IRB-qualified, there can be
no doubt Bailey knew perfectly well the difference between
the anecdotes he used to liven up his book and real systematic
and generalizable science. If his readers do not know it, that
has certainly been to his and his argument’s advantage, but it
does not mean he violated federal policy.
Given all this, we have to conclude that, in his inter-
action with the people whose personal stories appear in
TMWWBQ—of whom apparently only two (Kieltyka and
Juanita) have complained to Northwestern University—J.
Michael Bailey did not conduct IRB-qualified human sub-
jects research without IRB oversight.
What about the second seemingly damning claim, the
sexual relations allegation? Did J. Michael Bailey have sexual
relations with a woman who was his research subject at the
time?
Although the answer to this question turns out to be rela-
tively simple, this story bears careful unpacking. In a notarized
affidavit reproduced on Conway’s site, dated July 21, 2003,
Juanita claimed:
On March 22, 1998, Northwestern University Professor
J. Michael Bailey had sexual relations with the under-
signedtranssexualresearchsubject.Iamcomingforward
after I learned he divulged his research findings about
402 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
me in The Man Who Would Be Queen. (Available at
Conway, 2003e)
Let’s take the second sentence first: Juanita claimed she was
coming forward after she learned Bailey ‘‘divulged his
research findings’’ about her. This presumably was meant to
explain why she had waited a full 5 years to make an issue of
the alleged sexual relations: because she was so disturbed in
July 2003 by learning that Bailey had written about her in the
book, she decided to charge him with improper sexual rela-
tions that allegedly occurred one night in March 1998.
The facts say otherwise. Learning that he divulged his
‘‘research findings’’ about her in the book could not have been
the impetus for Juanita’s deciding in July, 2003, to charge him
with improper sexual relations 5 years earlier. In fact, Juanita
knew for many years what Bailey was generally writing about
her in his book manuscript—indeed, she gave him permission
to write about her—and she likely knew for months before the
affidavit specifically what he had said about her in the pub-
lished book.
First, what is the evidence that Juanita gave Bailey per-
mission to write about her—and thus that she knew (for years)
that he was writing about her in a book manuscript? Kiel-
tyka—a witness extremely hostile to Bailey nowadays—told
me in our interviews that the Northwestern investigatory
committee convened in response to their complaints asked
both her and Juanita ‘‘did you know Bailey was writing a book
and did you give him permission?’’ According to Kieltyka,
‘‘Juanita said yes to both, she knew and she gave him per-
mission’’ (Kieltyka, 2006f). In fact, this giving of permission
is confirmed by Juanita’s own ‘‘sealed’’ letter (now repro-
duced on Conway’s site) to Northwestern alleging the sexual
affair. There Juanita says:
after infrequent ‘‘social’’ meetings with Anjelica and I,
Dr. Bailey informed us that he was writing a book about
transexuals and would like to include both of our ‘‘sto-
ries.’’ Believing it to be similar to Dr. Randi Ettner’s
book, Confessions of a Gender Defender,AnjelicaandI
gave our verbal consent once Dr. Bailey assured us he
would show us what he was writing about us. (Available
at Conway, 2003e)
In her ‘‘sealed’’ letter, Juanita goes on to say that what Bailey
wrote about her ‘‘in an early draft was not objectionable, but
absolutely nothing like the spurious and insulting description
he wrote about my life that did become part of that most
hurtful book of his’’ (from Conway, 2003e;emphasisadded).
Kieltyka tells me Juanita was specifically referring to her hurt
feelings about what Bailey said about Juanita’s wedding and
divorce (Kieltyka, 2006c), material that did not appear in the
early draft Juanita saw before publication, since Juanita’s
wedding and divorce post-dated the early draft.
Actually, given how little of Bailey’s draft changed from
what Juanita saw to what he ultimately published—given that
the only substantive changes were about her wedding and
divorce—the vast majority of what Bailey wrote about her
could not have come as a painful surprise. And most assuredly,
she could not have been fundamentally unaware that he was
writing about her in his book, as the second sentence of her
affidavit suggests. Additionally, and in critical contradiction
to the way her complaints to Northwestern read (see Conway,
2003e), Juanita must have known for years that he was writing
about her as an example of ‘‘homosexual transsexualism.’’
Not only was that claim consistently in early drafts—that,
after all, was the whole point of Bailey’s writing about her—
but in February 1999, in the Daily Northwestern article, stu-
dent reporter Maegan Gibson reported that in Bailey’s book
manuscript (the relevant sections of which Gibson also saw),
‘‘He classifies [Juanita] as a homosexual transsexual and
Anjelica [Kieltyka] as an autogynephilic transsexual’’ (Gib-
son, 1999, p. 5). Surely Juanita would have read this feature
story about herself; she had been enthusiastic enough about
the feature to provide Gibson with her own before-and-after-
reassignment photographic portraits, her real before-and-
after-reassignment names, and her life story—and so surely in
February 1999, from Gibson’s article she would have learned,
if she really didn’t already know it, that Bailey was classifying
her as a homosexual transsexual.
Remember also, as noted in Part 4, that on May 22, 2003,
several weeks after the book had come out, Juanita joined
Bailey, Kieltyka, and others for the social excursion to the
Circuit nightclub with Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of
Higher Education. In other words, fully 2 months before her
affidavit, a document which, in its rhetoric, positions her as
newly aggrieved by virtue of just discovering Bailey had
written about her, Juanita actively helped Bailey promote his
published book by going out and talking with Wilson about
what Bailey wrote about her in the book.
To quote one last time the second sentence of Juanita’s July
21, 2003, affidavit: ‘‘I am coming forward [to charge him with
improper sexual relations of 5 years earlier] after I learned
[Bailey] divulged his research findings about me in The Man
Who Would Be Queen’’ (emphasis added). Given how many
historical documents (including Juanita’s own letter to
Northwestern) contradict its premise, this second sentence of
Juanita’s affidavit seems to explain considerably less than the
fact that said affidavit was witnessed by none other than
Andrea James and Lynn Conway, and the fact that the letter
presented to Northwestern along with the affidavit credited
‘‘Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, who have acted on
our behalf to make Dr. Bailey accountable for his actions.’’ I
think the historical progression here is clear. Juanita knew for
years that Bailey was writing about her in his book; she gave
him permission and indeed actively helped him; she even
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 403
123
helped him promote the book after it came out. And then
Conway, James, and McCloskey showed up in June and July
2003 to play what appears to have been a significant role in
convincing and helping Juanita to charge Bailey with several
forms of misconduct—significant enough roles for Kieltyka
also to have bothered specifically naming Conway and
McCloskey as key witnesses to Juanita’s claims in Kieltyka’s
own July 2003 affidavit about the matter (Kieltyka affidavit,
July 23, 2003; available at Conway, 2003e). For the record, I
asked McCloskey, ‘‘What exactly was your role in preparing
the formal, written charges made by the woman known as
Juanita that Bailey had had sexual relations with her when she
was his research subject?’’ She answered only ‘‘Not much’’
(p.e.c., January 22, 2007). She declined my request to elabo-
rate (p.e.c., February 4, 2007).
Even if Juanita was not in July 2003 the shocked and dis-
illusioned party that the second sentence of her affidavit
suggests, what of the core claim as reported in the first sen-
tence of the affidavit: ‘‘On March 22, 1998, Northwestern
University Professor J. Michael Bailey had sexual relations
with the undersigned transsexual research subject.’’ In her July
23, 2003 letter to Northwestern University’s C. Bradley
Moore, charging Bailey with having had sex with her, Juanita
recounted more precisely the alleged circumstances:
Dr. Bailey met Anjelica Kieltyka and myself earlier
that same evening [March 22, 1998] into morning at
‘‘Shelter’’, one of the night clubs frequented by female
transexuals. The date is well remembered because it was
‘‘Shelter’s’’ final night before closing for good. I arrived
at the club with Ms. Kieltyka, but left with Dr. Bailey.
Ms. Kieltyka can confirm this. Dr. Bailey then drove me
back to my place, where the sexual relations occurred.
[…] I have told no one about the sexual relations other
then [sic] you, Dr. Moore,my best friend and confidante,
Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka, and Professors’ [sic] Lynn
Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, who have acted on our
behalf to make Dr. Bailey accountable for his actions.
They will provide sworn affidavits supporting my
claims. (available at Conway, 2003e)
Juanita is thus quite specific: She and Bailey had sexual
relations on the night of March 22, 1998. What of Bailey’s
response to this claim?
In his online self-defense piece, ‘‘Academic McCarthy-
ism,’’ published in October 2005, Bailey countered with this:
‘‘her ‘complaint’ is not true. The alleged event never hap-
pened. If I ever needed to do so, I could prove this, but there is
no reason why I should’’ (Bailey, 2005). Bailey’s reasoning
for why he should not have to prove he didn’t have sex with
Juanita was twofold: first, he ‘‘insist[ed] that Juanita was not a
research subject’’ when she claimed they had sex; second,
‘‘there is nothing intrinsically wrong or forbidden about hav-
ing sex with a research subject[….] Some of my colleagues
have had sex with their research subjects, because it is not
unusual to ask one’s romantic partner to be a subject’’ (Bailey,
2005).
Temporarily putting aside the question of that twofold
defense (Juanita wasn’t a research subject and there’s nothing
intrinsically wrong about having sex with a research subject), I
told Bailey I thought the reason he should prove he didn’t have
the sexual relations Juanita claimed is because many people
found the claim to be the nail in the supposed coffin of his
professional reputation. I pressed Bailey to answer two
questions for me: Did he in fact have sex with Juanita? And if
not, why had he for several years—until his 2005 ‘‘Academic
McCarthyism’’ self-defense—refused to publicly answer her
charge?
He explained simply the delay in denying the charge:
About the time Juanita’s sexual relations allegation appeared,
Bailey’s lawyer had advised him to stop publicly answering
any questions about the controversy. Indeed, the record con-
firms that the sexual relations allegation is not the only thing to
which Bailey refused to respond starting in the summer of
2003; he did not defend himself publicly on any of the charges
made against him until ‘‘Academic McCarthyism’’ in Octo-
ber, 2005 (Bailey, 2005). Bailey also explained to me that he
understood that there was no way to answer Juanita’s claim
without at some level legitimizing her claim; he believed
(correctly I think) that acting as if what she claimed mattered
by protesting repeatedly against it would only backfire and
work against him in the court of public opinion (Bailey to
Dreger, p.e.c., July 18, 2006). Could he really, in 2003, say ‘‘I
did not have sex with that woman’’ and hope to have his public
reputation thus exonerated?
Nevertheless, given that he had come around in 2005 to
denying Juanita’s claim, I pressed him on what his denial
(‘‘The alleged event never happened’’ [Bailey, 2005]) really
meant: Was he using a Clintonian definition of sex, or evading
the central question in some other way? Did they have sexual
relations on some other day, or perhaps have some kind of
non-intercourse physical contact that a reasonable person
could define as ‘‘having had sexual relations’’? No, he said, he
had never engaged in anything with Juanita that could rea-
sonably be called sexual relations. He did admit to me that he
had flirted with Juanita once or twice when they were out
socializing, but he insisted that was the limit; he had never had
or even attempted any sexual relations with Juanita (p.e.c.’s,
July 19, 2006). I then pressed him for the proof that it never
happened—the proof he alludes to in ‘‘Academic McCar-
thyism’’ (Bailey, 2005). And he produced it (p.e.c., July 20,
2006). When I read it, it struck me ironically as about the least
sexy proof one could provide.
Bailey explained to me that, when Juanita made the sexual-
relations charge to Northwestern in 2003, in order to defend
himself, knowing it never happened, he immediately looked
up his computer records to see whether he could prove his
404 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
claim. He quickly discovered that, on March 22, 1998, his ex-
wife Deb Bailey had been out of town on her spring break and
he was, by their annual arrangement, staying at her house
taking care of their children, who were then aged 11 and 13.
He provided me what he had offered Northwestern: records of
back-and-forth conversations between him and Deb Bailey
that week, covering all the mundanities of taking care of house
and children (provided in p.e.c., Bailey to Dreger, July 20,
2006). In these, Deb Bailey reminded Michael Bailey to feed
the fish, the hamster, and the cat, to clean out the litter box, to
bring in the newspaper and the mail, to take the kids to their
after-school activities, and so on. These documents evince at
least that on March 22, 1998, Michael Bailey was single-
parenting his two children (and their many pets) in Evanston. I
asked him if he might have left the children in Evanston,
perhaps with a sitter, and gone out with Kieltyka and Juanita to
the Shelter nightclub into the small hours of the morning, but
he was adamant that he would never have left his children to
go out to bars while his ex-wife was across the country and it
was his turn to parent (p.e.c.’s, July 19, 2006).
For confirmation, I put Michael Bailey’s claims to Deb
Bailey, and she checked her records and confirmed that on
March 22, 1998, Michael Bailey was single-parenting in
Evanston while she was away. She also (with some embar-
rassment) confirmed the elaborate household instructions she
gave him for that period, independently providing me a copy
of some of the same correspondence Michael Bailey had
provided me. When I asked her if she thought it possible that
Michael Bailey would have gone out to a Chicago bar when he
was supposed to be taking care of their children in Evanston
while she was away, Deb Bailey said she found it unfathom-
able given his record as a devoted and attentive father. She
made it politely clear that she has no illusions that Michael
Bailey is a saint, but she also finds it impossible to believe that
he would have been out with Juanita on the night she claimed,
especially given that there were plenty of other weeks of the
year in which he could have done just that (Deb Bailey, 2006;
Deb Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c. January 7, 2007).
If Michael Bailey is telling the truth—that he and Juanita
never had sex—why does Juanita’s account so clearly say
otherwise? I asked Kieltyka to tell me what she knew about the
alleged relations and the charge, since she supposedly had
been with Bailey and Juanita on the night in question and she
had been present for at least some of the sessions in which
Conway and McCloskey apparently helped to arrange the
charge (Conway, 2003e; McCloskey to Dreger, p.e.c., January
22, 2007). According to Kieltyka,
[Juanita] told me the day after Bailey drove her home
from the Shelter nightclub that Bailey had tried to do
something …. That they had ‘‘messed around’’—She
was being slightly evasive and uneasy so I left it alone.
[Five years later, in the summer of 2003] when Lynn
Conway [was] over at my house, Juanita was there, and
that’s when she told the two of us that Bailey in fact had
had sex with her. This was the first time thatI found out it
wasn’t that he had ‘‘tried something’’—it was that he
had tried to have sex with her. But that he couldn’t get it
up. (Kieltyka, 2006c; ellipses in original)
This came as surprising and important news to me—that what
Juanita had apparently meant in her affidavit and her sealed
letter to Northwestern by ‘‘sexual relations’’ was ‘‘he had tried
to have sex with her but that he couldn’t get it up.’’ The story
about what even happened seemed to keep changing. So I
pressed Kieltyka further:
Dreger: Why did she say [in the affidavit and the letter] they
had sex, if he couldn’t get it up?
Kieltyka: What are you—his lawyer? What’s your defini-
tion of sex?
Dreger: The fact that he tried? That’s the definition of
having had sex?
Kieltyka: What did Clinton have?
Dreger: Clinton got it up. […] So you’re saying she said he
tried but he didn’t get it up?
Kieltyka: Right.
Dreger: And she told that to Conway and McCloskey.
Kieltyka: Right.
Dreger: And then [in the formal charge] to Northwestern
she said that they had had sex.
Kieltyka: I’m not sure what the letter says….I think it says
‘‘sexual relations’’—just like El Presidente Clinton. […]It
all is a matter of a definition of what sexual relations is.
Because there was fingering, that she was giving him a hand
job, I don’t recall exactly. Anyway […] from the moment
that Andrea James and Conway wanted to use the sex with a
research subject as a way of getting Bailey, I wasn’t
enthusiastic[.] (Kieltyka, 2006c; ellipses in original unless
bracketed)
Nevertheless, the national press was enthusiastic about this
part of the Bailey controversy. Conway handed over the
socially and professionally damning charge of ‘‘sexual rela-
tions with a transsexual research subject’’ to any reporter who
would take it. And, while Bailey’s accuser’s identity remained
protected almost as if she were a rape victim, while his accuser
apparently remained privately inconsistent about what even
happened, while Bailey felt unable to defend himself publicly
because of his lawyer’s gag order and the realities of post-
Lewinsky sexual politics, many reporters broadcast the charge
along with Bailey’s refusal to respond (e.g., Barlow 2003;
Wilson 2003c) to the serious detriment of Bailey’s personal
and professional reputation. By the time I came to this work in
2006, when I asked people what they knew about what Bailey
had supposedly done wrong, the majority told me that he had
had sex with a research subject.
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 405
123
Yet, given the facts, we must conclude that Bailey was right
when, in 2005, he made the rather dull (and thus generally
ignored) legalistic point that, all other questions aside, Juanita
was simply not his research subject in March 1998, at least not
in any meaningful sense of research. Even if Bailey had started
thinking by March 1998 that he might eventually write some-
thing about her (which documents suggest was not the case
until the summer of 1998 when she agreed to meet him over
coffee to talk about her story for the book), I don’t think this
made her a ‘‘research subject.’’ I don’t think we can call
everyone from whom a scholar may learn a story she or he
eventually may recount a ‘‘research subject.’’ Otherwise, given
how often we scholars write about conversations we’ve had
and observations of people we’ve met along the way, we’re
going to have to count nearly everyone we know and meet as an
actual or potential research subject. (And in that case I confess
I’ve repeatedly had sex with a research subject, namely my
husband, about whom I’ve written quite often, and generally
without first asking his permission—for instance, right now.)
I have come to conclude Bailey was also right when, in
2005, he made the point that no one—not even his friends and
defenders—wanted to hear, i.e., that there’s nothing neces-
sarily wrong about sex with a research subject. Although I had
the initial knee-jerk reaction shared by many—‘‘sex with a
research subject is verboten’’—I’ve come to realize people’s
revulsion to sex-with-a-research-subject represents a more
general (and irrational) revulsion to non-standard sexual
relations. If a researcher abused a position of power to coerce a
research subject into sex, that would be wrong, but sexual
coercion is wrong regardless of the relationship, and it is
certainly not the case that all researchers hold all subjects in
disempowered (and thus potentially coercive) positions.
Indeed, it is easy to imagine a situation wherethe reverse could
be true, i.e., where a subject would hold real power over the
researcher rather than the other way around. I have heard the
claim that sexual relations will necessarily interfere with data
collection because of the problem of dual relationships, but
again, this isn’t necessarily the case with all research. It’s hard
to imagine, for example, how data collection would be com-
promised if a researcher studying the effects of a particular
drug on cholesterol levels had sex with one of the subjects
whose cholesterol levels she was tracking.
In the specific case of Bailey and Juanita, I believe we have
to conclude that, even if one does believe that sex with a
research subject is always unethical (which seems seriously
wrongheaded), and even if one believes Bailey and Juanita
had sex on March 22, 1998 (which seems unlikely), the salient
point here is that Juanita was not Bailey’s research subject in
March 1998, when she claims they had sex. In other words,
even if any sexual relations occurred between Bailey and
Juanita on March 22, 1998, they were not improper rela-
tions by any reading of ethics-of-sex-with-research-subjects,
because Juanita was not Bailey’s research subject in March
1998, when she claims the relations happened.
Even after this conclusion, the curious may still wish I
could tell them for sure whether the alleged sexual relations
happened. I must leave it to readers to make what they will of
what I have uncovered regarding the nature and timing of
Juanita’s story (or stories), and to also decide what to make of
the roles of Conway, James, and McCloskey in the formal
production and broadcasting of the injurious claim. From the
vantage point of this inquirer, it certainly looks as if the alle-
gation—particularly the choice of the conveniently vague
phrasing ‘‘sexual relations’’ combined with otherwise highly
specific details about the when, the where, and the who of the
supposed event—amounted to a trumped-up attempt on the
part of a small circle of Bailey’s transwomen critics to damage
his professional reputation. To some extent, it worked, in large
part because it cleverly took advantage of the sex-negative
attitude that pervades American culture, including the par-
ticular cultural phobias that surround transwomen such as
Juanita. As Bailey remarked to me, ‘‘it was deeply ironic that
Conway et al. were trying to sensationalize sex with trans-
sexuals,’’ but it seemed they would do even that to try to get
back at Bailey for the claims he made in his book (Bailey to
Dreger, p.e.c., July 19, 2006).
When Kieltyka told me she ‘‘wasn’t enthusiastic’’ about the
sexual relations charge, it was to emphasize that what she
found truly unethical was what she called Bailey’s ‘‘bait and
switch’’ tactics:
he was using friendship as a context for what he wanted,
there was a duplicity, there was a deception. It was a
misuse of our friendship and relationship. […] And not
only that, […] saying that he was writing a book, and us
agreeing [to that] on one set of values and terms, and for
him to switch it, and to present it to us, and for us to
understand we were misused, it was too late for us to do
anything about it because he intended all along from the
get-go to use that information. (Kieltyka, 2006c)
On another occasion, Kieltyka put the same sort of complaint
to me this way:‘‘It now seems Bailey ingratiated himself to me
and the transwomen I brought to him: Entering our favor in
order to take advantage of us……gaining our friendship and
confidence—playing a conjob on us……using and abusing
our vulnerability’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a;ellipsesinoriginal).
What then of this claim of unethical behavior? Did Bailey
abuse the trust he established with the transsexual women
about whom he wrote in TMWWBQ, essentially tricking them
into revealing otherwise private information about them-
selves, so that he could use them as ‘‘poster children’’ for
Blanchard’s taxonomy in his book?
The first thing one has to understand in considering this
questionis thatthetwowomenwho complained about Bailey’s
406 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
account of them in TMWWBQ, namely Kieltyka and Juanita,
could not seriously be said to be deeply private and ‘‘living in
stealth’’asMcCloskey andConwayinsistedintheir complaints
to Northwestern’s Vice President for Research (McCloskey &
Conway, 2003). At the risk of beating a dead horse, let me note
again that, by the time TMWWBQ was published, Kieltyka and
Juanita had presented themselves, their life histories, and their
takes on transsexualism to a total of thousands of students at
Northwestern University. Kieltyka had even concluded twice
by stripping naked (she says to make the point that transsexual
women can be extremely attractive even in the nude [Kieltyka,
2006a]). Juanita was apparently also not shy about appearing
nude; after all, from at least June, 2003, to December, 2004,
Conway’s site featured the semi-nude erotic photo of Juanita
taken by Kieltyka (Kieltyka, 2003a). Remember also that, in
1998, Kieltyka and Juanita had given Maegan Gibson their
true, pre- and post-reassignment first and last names, their pre-
and post-reassignment photos, and their life histories to
broadcast in the Daily Northwestern (Gibson, 1999). Before
this, Kieltyka had revealed parts of her transsexual story to
a local paper, Berwyn Life, and on a local cable channel
(Kieltyka, 2006a). Then in 2002, in response to a request from
Bailey, Kieltyka and Juanita again teamed up to talk openly
about themselves, their bodies, and their sex lives for a video
made to accompany a human sexuality textbook. In that video
recording, besides both of them again allowing a publisher to
use their true first names and unobscured faces, Kieltyka
showed off her pre-transition, crossdressing,erotic-play props,
and Juanita talked about making a living as a sex worker both
pre-op (as a ‘‘she-male’’) and post-op. In the video work, each
of these women also openly recounted significant portions of
what Bailey’s book would say about them a year later (edited
version at Allyn & Bacon, 2004; uncut interview footage
provided from Bailey’s personal files). Then, shortly after
meeting Conway in the summer of 2003, Juanita let Conway
put up five close-up photos of her along with her story—again
matching much of what Bailey said about her in the book—on
Conway’s Transsexual Women’s Successes page (Maria,
2004).
In short, Kieltyka and Juanita were not ‘‘stealth’’ shrinking
violets whose stories were sneakily gathered and then first
broadcast in 2003 by Bailey. Given how many times Kieltyka
and Juanita willingly revealed themselves again and again,
Bailey concludes ‘‘I believe the claim is absolutely false—the
claim that they didn’t want anyof this public’’ (Bailey, 2006a).
Trying to explain away the repeated classroom presentations
(for which, remember, Kieltyka and Juanita were paid),
McCloskey and Conway claimed to Northwestern that
‘‘Professor Bailey enticed the women into his classrooms
under the pretense of listening open-mindedly to their views’’
(McCloskey & Conway, 2003). But even if Bailey really had
been faking open-mindedness throughout their relationships,
he surely wasn’t forcing Kieltyka and Juanita to talk about
their lives and show themselves off again and again. To sug-
gest, as McCloskey and Conway do, that these women had no
agency in their work with Bailey, no ability to decline him, is
to treat them as children. They were not.
Might there be some other sort of way in which Bailey
abused the trust of the transsexual women about whom he
eventually wrote in TMWWBQ? Kieltyka told me that Bailey
had violated both trust and confidentiality by using what the
transwomen she brought to him had told him in the interviews
he conducted for purposes of writing letters in support of their
SRS requests (Kieltyka, 2006c). Out of the four women who
filed charges with Northwestern claiming Bailey used them as
research subjects without their knowledge and approval, three
had obtained letters from Bailey supporting their requests for
SRS (Conway, 2003c, 2003d, 2003f). (Kieltyka was the fourth
complainant; she was post-transition when she met Bailey.)
The three women in question all claim in their complaints that
Bailey used whathe learned during their SRS-letter interviews
for his ‘‘research.’’ What about this?
Bailey denies it. He points out that two of the women in
question are not even mentioned in TMWWBQ; thus, it is
unclear how they think he used their SRS-letter interviews for
his so-called ‘‘research’’. As for the third woman, namely
Juanita, Bailey says he did not use her SRS-letter interviews
for the book; he says he used what he learned from her outside
the context of those interviews (Bailey, 2006a, 2006c). It is
impossible to confirm whether this is the case. But what we do
know is that, according to Kieltyka, Juanita acknowledged to
the Northwestern investigation committee that Juanita knew
Bailey was writing about her and that she had given her per-
mission for him to do so (Kieltyka, 2006f), and that, according
to Juanita, both Kieltyka and Juanita knew Bailey was writing
about them and gave them permission to do so (see ‘‘confi-
dential addendum to item 2, submitted in sealed envelope,’’ at
Conway, 2003e). It is also clear that Bailey had plenty of
contact with Juanita outside the SRS interviews—in her class
presentations, in a book-related coffee appointment in August
1998, in their social outings, and in her participation in the
2002 video. Maybe he did use in the book what Juanita told
him during the SRS interviews, but it doesn’t look as if he
would have needed that material as a source. She seemed
perfectly willing to be open about herself with him and others
on many other occasions.
What then about Kieltyka’s claim that Bailey pulled a ‘‘bait
and switch’’ by leading her and her friends to believe he would
write about them favorably only to turn around and—to her
mind pejoratively—label them either autogynephilic or
homosexual transsexuals? Being used by Bailey as someone
who ‘‘openly and floridly exemplifies the essential features of
[…] autogynephilia’’ (Bailey, 2003, p. 156) is clearly the
source of much pain for Kieltyka, understandably so since she
was taken to task by some transwomen for ‘‘allowing’’ Bailey
to ‘‘use’’ her as an example of a theory they find wrong,
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 407
123
harmful, and even disgusting. Kieltyka told me several times
that she believes Bailey’s portrayal of her as an ‘‘autogyne-
phile’’ constitutes ‘‘subreption,’’ i.e., a misrepresentation of
her identity so absolutely gross as to constitute a virtual theft of
her true identity (Kieltyka, 2006a, 2006b). It was Bailey’s
identification of her in this way, she suggested, that led to the
change of her reputation in trans circles, from a devoted friend
and advocate of transwomen to a source of potential or actual
harm to those same women.
As I have already shown, Kieltyka and Juanita knew many
years in advance of 2003 that Bailey was writing about their
lives in a manuscript and also that he classified Kieltyka as an
autogynephilic transsexual and Juanita as a homosexual
transsexual. Kieltyka even admitted to me that ‘‘these terms
‘homosexual’ transsexual and ‘nonhomosexual’ transsexual
[…]Baileyused[them]ontheSRSletters’’forJuanitaandthe
other women, though, according to Kieltyka, ‘‘none of us
noticed, let alone understood the implications of those clas-
sifications’’ (Kieltyka, 2006a). But at least Kieltyka had to
have noticed and understood the implications by the time of
Gibson’s 1999 article, because there Gibson wrote, ‘‘Bailey
believes Anjelica is an autogynephile, but Anjelica adamantly
disagrees with the way he categorizes her. While she does
believe autogynephiles exist, she doesn’t consider herself
one’’ (Gibson, 1999,p.5).
Indeed, evidence shows that Kieltyka noticed and was
bothered by her labeling as autogynephilic even sooner, in late
1998. In an email message Bailey wrote to Blanchard in early
December 1998, Bailey told his colleague, ‘‘I showed the
[relevant manuscript] section to Anjelica (the autogynephilic
transsexual who is most in the book), and she is upset. Not that
the facts were wrong, but she doesn’t like my interpretation
and the intimation that she is not a woman trapped in a man’s
body. I talk to her tomorrow; not looking forward’’ (Bailey to
Blanchard, p.e.c., December 2, 1998). In fact, both Bailey and
Kieltyka recall Kieltyka’s being upset during that conversa-
tion—not about Bailey writing about intimate details of her
life, but about his labeling her masculine and autogynephilic
(Bailey, 2005;Kieltyka,2006b). Then just a couple of months
later, Gibson aired Bailey’s classification of Kieltyka (Gibson,
1999). That couldn’t have made Kieltyka any happier, and it
surely couldn’t have caused Kieltyka to think Bailey was
budging on his claim about her identity.
Why, then, did Kieltyka keep associating with Bailey, year
after year, even though he seemed to keep labeling her auto-
gynephilic, a diagnosis of which she knew and to which she
objected? I put this to Kieltyka—why did she keep going to his
classes, socializing with him, introducing him to other trans-
women, helping in response to his request regarding the
human sexuality textbook video, and so forth, if she was upset
with his labeling her an autogynephile?
Kieltyka had two parts to her explanation. First, to put it
simply, she valued her relationship with Bailey and didn’t
want to abandon it. She explained the same was true for many
of the other transwomen she introduced him to: ‘‘all those
years, all these women that volunteered to lecture [for pay in
his classes] did it because they were still friends with me and
also because they respected Mike Bailey and trusted him,
[they trusted] that Bailey saw them the way they saw them-
selves’’ (Kieltyka, 2006b). Kieltyka in particular believed
Bailey saw her as an intellectual and professional collaborator.
In fact, as noted in Part 2, for some time she believed she
would be something like a co-author on the book he was
writing (Kieltyka, 2006b). She came to see ‘‘Bailey as a
mentor or almost like the relationship between a grad student
and a professor, or even like a daughter and a father’’ (Kiel-
tyka, 2006b). She recalls ‘‘I was getting validation [from
Bailey] as a researcher, as a field operator, as someone who
had large contacts within the community. I felt I was working
as a consultant and a collaborator’’ (Kieltyka, 2006b).
Apparently, it didn’t seem worth giving all that up over what
she saw as his misdiagnosis of her.
The second reason Kieltyka says she kept working with
Bailey, even after she knew he had labeled her an autogyne-
phile in his manuscript and in Gibson’s article, was this: After
she expressed her distress over his diagnosis of her, he told her
he remained open to any evidence she could present that he
was wrong. And she believed that, if she stuck with the rela-
tionship, she could convince him he was wrong about her. She
recalled to me that after she saw his manuscript where he wrote
about her as an autogynephile, ‘‘he said this is a first draft, we
can use any information to support your theory if you have
support for your theory. If you can change my mind, that’s all
part of our relationship[….] What I saw was a misunder-
standing or a misinterpretation, [and] I wanted the opportunity
to change his mind’’ (Kieltyka, 2006b). Kieltyka tells me she
eventually came to believe that the opportunity to change
Bailey’s mind came in the form of a sexual arousability study
Bailey’s lab was conducting, and so she helped recruit trans-
women subjects for that study. The study sought to explore
whether sexualarousal is category-specific in females as it is in
males. Bailey and his colleagues specifically wanted to know
whether homosexual and heterosexual natal men, homosexual
and heterosexual natal women, and MTF transsexuals dem-
onstrated genital arousal to male sexual stimuli (i.e., erotic
images of men), to female sexual stimuli, or to both.
Kieltyka told me she was convinced that the study would
show Bailey what she believed to be true: that transsexual
women such as herself (i.e., those primarily attracted to
women) would show genital arousal to
other women. In other
words, she believed the study would show Bailey that women
like her are gynephilic, and not autogynephilic (Kieltyka,
2006a, 2006b). And indeed she believes the results did dem-
onstrate just that, because the women like her showed clear
category-specific genital arousal patterns to the female stimuli
(Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004).
408 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
I asked Bailey about Kieltyka’s interpretation of this study,
and he explained that the study was never designed to be a
critical test of Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia, because
the study included no clear assessment of whether ‘‘nonho-
mosexual’’ transsexual women are or are not erotically
aroused by the idea of being or becoming women; to his mind,
the study simply showed that nonhomosexual transsexual
women are aroused by erotic pictures of women—not why
they are, nor whether other women are the primary source of
their arousal, nor what is the motivation for their transitions.
More importantly, Bailey said Kieltyka never gave him any
sense that her recruitment of transwomen to the study was
motivated by her desire to disprove Blanchard. His under-
standing was that she was simply interested (as he was) in
having his lab study the arousability of transwomen like her
(Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 17, 2007).
All in all, given the substantial historical record of their
collegial associations, it makes sense that Kieltyka got a lot out
of her relationship with Bailey and that consequently she
wanted to try to make it work in spite of their continuing
disagreement over her identity. It also makes sense that she
would try to talk him out of labeling her an autogynephile, and
that she would choose to believe that, as she says he claimed,
he remained open to contrary evidence—although it is also
clear he would have required truly extraordinary evidence to
seriously doubt Blanchard’s theory and the peer-reviewed
scientific evidence for it, especially when virtually everything
Kieltyka and her friends told him about themselves seemed to
him only to back up Blanchard’s theory.
One has to suspect that, had the intervention of Conway and
her fellow ‘‘investigators’’ never happened, Kieltyka and
Bailey might well have continued to have a relatively conge-
nial relationship even while Bailey continued to label Kieltyka
an autogynephile, against her sense of self. I say this because of
the friendly emails that continued after Kieltyka had seen a
copy of Bailey’s book. For example, recall that on May 16,
2003, several weeks after she received the book and just after
the backlash had started, Kieltyka jokingly offered to lend
Bailey her old athletic support for his next book signing or
lecture, and signed the email ‘‘Your friend, in spite of spite’’
(Kieltyka to Bailey, p.e.c., May 16, 2003). But the intervention
of Conway and company did indeed happen, and once it did,
Kieltyka painfully came to see how, via Bailey’s portrayal of
her as an autogynephile and the ensuing backlash against
TMWWBQ, her personal identity was fast being reconstructed
by people like Conway and James. She was being actively
transformed from a well-liked local trans advocate to a national
pariah in the realm of trans rights. And so she came to believe
she had been used and abused by Bailey; and she came to
believe he had been pulling a con job on her and her friends all
along. For his part, he was stunned and then angry at how, after
years of a friendly relationship in which he often helped her and
her friends, she turned so viciously on him (Bailey, 2006a).
So, to return to the question posed at the outset of this
discussion: Did Bailey abuse the trust he established with the
transsexual women about whom he ultimately wrote in
TMWWBQ, essentially tricking them into revealing otherwise
private information about themselves, so that he could use
them as ‘‘poster children’’ for Blanchard’s taxonomy in his
book? A total of two women—Kieltyka and Juanita—have
complained personally of this sort of treatment. I think it is
clear that, in fact, both opted to reveal intimate details about
themselves publicly again and again, and both of them knew,
or surely should have known, that Bailey was very likely if not
certain to write about them as examples of Blanchard’s tax-
onomic types. It is also clear Kieltyka repeatedly objected to
the characterization of her as an autogynephile, and it seems
likely that, through his words and actions, Bailey let Kieltyka
wishfully believe she might change his mind about that when,
in fact, there was little chance of her doing so. If Bailey falsely
put forth an image of being likely to be swayed by Kieltyka’s
critiques as a way of drawing more intimate information from
Kieltyka and her friends about their sexualities and their lives,
that would be wrong. But I can’t find any evidence that this is
how he came to know the intimate details of Kieltyka’s life
or the lives of her friends; rather, he seems to have obtained
those because Kieltyka, Juanita, and indeed several other
transwomen in their circle were generally forthright and
unashamed about themselves in their presentations and their
conversations with Bailey.
A subsidiary question to consider in the context of this dis-
cussion is this: Did Bailey write about Juanita and Kieltyka
without their permission, as they claimed in their complaints,
and if so, was that wrong? As noted above, it appears that, at
least early on, both Juanita and Kieltyka gave Bailey permission
to write about them—gave permission explicitly (according to
what Kieltyka said about their testimonies to Northwestern and
what Juanita said in her ‘‘sealed’’ letter to Northwestern) and
implicitly (judging by the fact they helped Bailey by answering
questions when he told them he was writing about them in the
manuscript). Notably, although he did obtain their permission,
according to commonly accepted ethical standards, Bailey was
not required to obtain or even seek Juanita’s and Kieltyka’s
permission to write about them; it is not uncommon for scholars
to relay stories without asking permission of subjects, particu-
larly when their identities are protected. Now, was it obnoxious
of Bailey to write of Juanita and ‘‘Cher’’ as examples of
Blanchard’s two types without obtaining their permission to do
that specifically? One can see why the subjects themselves
might feel that way. But I think one must also appreciate that
scholarship (like journalism) would come to a screeching halt if
scholars were only ever able to write about people exactly
according to how they wish to be portrayed.
I said above that it is not uncommon for scholars and
journalists to relay stories without ever asking permission of
subjects, particularly when their identities are protected.But
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 409
123
one of Kieltyka’s complaints is just that—that Bailey failed to
adequately protect her identity, leaving her personally open to
criticism and profound misunderstanding. What about this?
Did Bailey fail to adequately protect his subjects’ true
identities?
No person aside from Kieltyka has alleged that his or
her identity was inadequately protected in TMWWBQ,soI
focus here on Kieltyka. In his self-defense piece ‘‘Academic
McCarthyism,’’ Bailey claims ‘‘It was [Kieltyka] who com-
promised her own anonymity, in her [May 4, 2003] email to
Conway,’’ an email Conway quickly put up on her Website
(Bailey, 2005). But after I listened to Kieltyka’s version of the
story, I told Bailey that Kieltyka said that by the time she
contacted Conway in early May 2003, Conway already knew
she was Cher. Kieltyka told me, ‘‘They were about to hang me.
I was told this by people that had frequented the Internet, and
that’s why they gave me the link to contact Andrea James and
Lynn Conway, because I was going to be hanged by them’’
(Kieltyka, 2006f).
How did James and Conway figure out who Cher was? In
the preface to TMWWBQ, Bailey thanks Anjelica Kieltyka for
‘‘introduc[ing him] to the Chicago transsexual community’’
(Bailey, 2003, p. xii), and then much later says that ‘‘most
of the homosexual transsexuals I have met, I met through
Cher’’ (Bailey, 2003, p. 177). Even given this mirroring of
acknowledgements, I think it is safe to say the average reader,
unfamiliar with the trans scene, would have been unlikely to
figure out from Bailey’s book that ‘‘Cher’’ was Kieltyka,
especially given that in the preface he separately thanks
Kieltyka and Cher as if they were two different people (pp.
xii–xiii). But Conway and her co-‘‘investigators’’ were not
average readers. Kieltyka notes that Bailey revealed that Cher
plays the hammered dulcimer in an Irish folk group (Kieltyka,
2006c; see Bailey 2003, p. 155). A number of people in
Kieltyka’s local communities, including presumably neigh-
bors and various associates in Chicago transwomen circles,
knew about Kieltyka’s transsexuality as well as her musical
life. Given the hammered dulcimer reference as well as the
extent to which Bailey’s description of Cher matches Kiel-
tyka’s personality and personal life—about which she had
been very public—it would not have been too hard for Con-
way to ask around and find out who this ‘‘Cher’’ was (Kieltyka,
2006c). It is also possible—even likely—that Conway or a
member of her cohort was Web-savvy enough to find archives
of the portion of Bailey’s Northwestern site where in 1998 he
had put up the part of the manuscript where he described
Kieltyka, identifying her at that time by her real name. (Bailey
states he had put this material up for his human sexuality
students to read. It never occurred to him that it could or would
later be found by others [Bailey, 2006a].)
When I asked Bailey about whether he thought he had
failed to protect Kieltyka’s identity, and whether he regretted
that, he explained,
I had originally asked her to help me pick a pseudonym
for her, and she asked me to use her real name. I still
remember her saying: ‘‘I am not ashamed of anything
I’ve ever done.’’ I admired that. It was only after she read
the initial draft, and especially my interpretation of her
behavior as autogynephilic, that she changed her mind
on this. (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 17, 2007)
He continued, ‘‘Because Anjelica Kieltyka had so publicly
given her story to so many people (including not only my class
but to transgender groups in Chicago), I felt no legal or ethical
obligation to mask her. I changed her name because I liked her
at that time and because she requested it.’’ According to
Bailey, ‘‘She only requested that I change her name, and not
that I mask her’’ by changing other details that might identify
her (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 17, 2007).
It is entirely possible, given her personality and especially
her persistent interest in being public about herself, that
Kieltyka might have decided to out herself as the woman who
was Cher sometime after the book came out if Conway’s
‘‘investigation’’ had never begun. But Kieltyka never had the
option of deciding that, since Conway and James quickly
flushed her out. I do not believe Bailey intentionally outed
Kieltyka as Cher, so I don’t think we can call his behavior in
this case unethical in any simple fashion, though he might
have thought more carefully about changing more of her
personal identifying information, especially given that he
knew she didn’t want to be called an autogynephile. Iunder-
stand why Kieltyka is so angry that she came to be seen, based
on Bailey’s portrayal of her and the backlash-reading of that
portrayal, to be a cause of harm to the very women for whom
she saw herself as an advocate. It must have been—and still
must be—truly painful to feel that her core identity has been
misrepresented over and over again.
Four final charges made against Bailey must be considered
before we close this inquiry into the merit of the claims that
Bailey behaved unethically, illegally, or immorally in the
production of his book. I believe all four can be dispensed with
rather quickly.
First, did Bailey fabricate the ending to the ‘‘Danny’’ story
to show that Danny (and most boys like him) would end up gay
instead of transsexual (Bailey, 2003, pp. 213–214)? Conway
claims this on her site and bases the claim solely on a report
from Kieltyka that Bailey admitted this to Kieltyka (Conway,
2003l
). When I asked Bailey about the matter, he responded:
‘‘I changed things [in the ending story about Danny] to prevent
identification. In fact I’m not sure that, if Danny read the book,
that he would say ‘oh, that’s me.’ But the essential story at the
end of the book is true. To tell you more about what that means
would compromise the anonymity that I’m trying to main-
tain’’ (Bailey, 2006a). He added, ‘‘Lynn Conway says that, by
the way, [solely] on the basis of what Anjelica told her, and I’d
like to know if Lynn Conway thinks everything Anjelica says
410 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
is true’’ (Bailey, 2006a). In fact, I can find no evidence that
Bailey fabricated anything meaningful in Danny’s story or in
the story of anyone else in the book. It is worth noting again
that even Kieltyka has never disputed any of the facts Bailey
related about her and her life; she disputes only his
interpretations.
Second, was Bailey illegally practicing clinical psychology
without a license when he provided letters in support of a few
local transwomen’s requests for SRS? This may not really be a
point germane to an inquiry into the production of TMWWBQ
since Bailey says he did not use the SRS interviews as the basis
for the stories in his book, but let’s assume for the moment that
he did, and answer the question anyway. After all, Conway,
James, and McCloskey each filed formal complaints with the
Illinois Department of Professional Regulation and North-
western University accusing Bailey of illegally practicing
psychology without a license by providing the SRS-support
letters (Conway, 2004d).
A quickcheck of the laws of the state of Illinois reveals that,
in fact, Bailey was not practicing illegally, because he never
asked for or received money (or anything else) in exchange for
producing the SRS-support letters, and the relevant Illinois
state regulations indicate that if a person does not seek or
obtain ‘‘remuneration’’ for services offered or rendered, that
person is not required to have a license, even if the person
otherwise appears to be offering what counts as ‘‘clinical
psychological services’’ (225 ILCS 15/1 [from Chap. 111,
para 5351]). Bailey also never offered or represented a ther-
apeutic relationship with any of the women in question.
Presumably this is why the Illinois Department of Professional
Regulation never seems to have bothered pursuing the charges
made against Bailey.
As a side point, let me just note the irony in Conway’s,
James’s, and McCloskey’s trying to use Bailey’s SRS-support
letters against him. It certainly appears from this vantage that,
in answering Kieltyka’s call for help for her marginalized
transwomen friends by providing letters in support of their
requests for SRS—free of chargeand without any requirement
of a lengthy and costly ‘‘therapeutic’’ relationship—Bailey
was helping to reduce the barriers to transition for a small
number of transwomen, the very barriers about which people
such as Conway, James, and McCloskey have complained
(see, e.g., Conway, 2006b;James,n.d.-g; McCloskey 1999,
pp. 71–72). One can imagine, in a different situation—say,
one in which the psychology professor in question didn’t
believe in Blanchard’s taxonomy—the likes of Conway,
McCloskey, and James holding up Bailey as a model for his
support of these women’s pursuit of SRS.
Third, was Bailey undermining the rights of sexual
minorities, including transsexual women, by producing the
book he did? As I’ve noted, this claim has been made again
and again by Conway, McCloskey, Kieltyka, and others,
including to the press, on the Web, and in letters and emails to
Bailey’s colleagues in the Northwestern Psychology Depart-
ment. But it isn’t clear that Bailey’s book does undermine the
rights of sexual minorities, any more than it is clear that it
supports them. Yes, he points to the relative femininity of
many gay men, and that reiterates a classic stereotype, but he
also makes clear he believes there’s nothing wrong with being
a relatively feminine man or a gay man. Yes, he labels some
transwomen as having a paraphilia—namely autogynephil-
ia—but he also clearly says it is not harmful and that the only
real consideration with regard to SRS decision-making is the
happiness of individual transwomen. If it makes them happier
(and he says it does), then they should be able to get it. As I
think I showed clearly in Part 3 of this essay, Bailey’s book is
complicated and often atypical in its claims, and this is
probably why different readers have read TMWWBQ quite
differently. Public critiques as well as correspondence Bailey
has received (like correspondence I myself have received)
suggest that some queer people find his book part of the prob-
lem of social oppression of queer people, while others see in it
personal liberation through his finally giving voice to politi-
cally incorrect truths about their queer identities.
Notably, because it is often scientifically and politically
atypicalinitsclaims,Bailey’sworkseemsparticularly inclined
to create critics and allies on all sides; so, for example, we’ve
seen howhe wascriticized andpraised in boththeleft-wingand
right-wing media. And we find the anti-gay National Associ-
ation for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)
trying, largely through highly selective quotation, to use Bai-
ley’s words on homosexuality to defend their homophobic
policies (see, e.g., Byrd, 2006) even while Bailey has been
reasonably positioned to debate against NARTH representa-
tives on a Catholic radio program and in academic conferences
on homosexuality. So I think it is a serious intellectual chal-
lenge tomakethe claimthat Bailey issimply anti-queer or even
anti-trans in his book. I see no evidence the bookis, as Kieltyka
has suggested, part of a widespread, undercover agenda to
eliminate queer people through eugenics and other biotech-
nological means. And, after my exegesis of TMWWBQ as
presented in Part 3, I find it impossible to analogize the book to
Mein Kampf, as McCloskey has done (McCloskey to Marks,
p.e.c., February 3, 2004, available at Conway, 2005a).
Finally, did Bailey ignore critical data against Blanchard’s
theory, so thathe was essentially engaged in the suppression of
legitimate data in his book? Bailey’s response to this is a
resounding no—that he did not, during the production of his
book, see legitimate evidence of transwomen whose lives
and histories flew in the face of Blanchard’s taxonomy and
what he saw as the substantial scientific evidence for it (Bailey,
2006a). Of course, McCloskey, Conway, and others have
claimed otherwise. I think this one ends up as a problem that
has stumped philosophers of science for ages, namely the
problem of how scientists (or scholars more generally) are to
discern what data count as legitimate and relevant. Given the
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 411
123
evidence for Blanchard’s theory and the lack of peer-reviewed
evidence or argumentation refuting it, Bailey is about as con-
vinced of the theory as he is of the theory of evolution by
natural selection—though, when I jokingly asked him, he did
say he thinks Blanchard’s theory is more likely to eventually
fall than Darwin’s (p.e.c., January 3, 2007). Bailey considers
claims made against Blanchard’s theory extraordinary, and
extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Thus, what
seems to some trans critics obvious proof against Blanchard
strikes Bailey as very weak indeed (Bailey, 2006a). No matter
how many transwomen bombard Bailey with claims of being a
‘‘third type’’ unexplained by Blanchard’s theory, I don’t think
Bailey can be called unethical for sticking stubbornly to a
theory he believes to be, all in all, well-evidenced not only in
his own experience but in the scientific literature (e.g., Blan-
chard 1989, 1993; Smith, van Goozen, Kuiper, & Cohen-
Kettenis, 2005).
So in conclusion, what did Bailey do wrong legally, ethi-
cally, and morally? It seems J. Michael Bailey should have
been more proactive in protecting the identity of Anjelica
Kieltyka. It also seems he should perhaps have worked harder
to be as clear as humanly possible with Kieltyka just how
unlikely she was to ever convince him that Blanchard’s theory
was wrong, so that she was not at risk of continuing to relate
with him under an umbrella of wishful thinking.
That’s it? After months of investigation evinced by the
foregoing, I must conclude: that’s it.
How could there possibly have been so much smoke and so
little fire? One answer is that, if you look as closely as I have
done here, there were in fact far fewer accusers of Bailey than
all the noise in the press and on the Internet would have you
believe. And of the accusations made, almost none appear to
have been legitimate. But all of the noise of the accusations did
what I suspect Conway, James, and McCloskey hoped: It dis-
tracted attention from the book’s message—that Blanchard’s
theory of MTF transsexualism was right—by apparently kill-
ing the messenger. Indeed, much as Bailey would prefer not to
admit it, in their leadership of the backlash against TMWWBQ,
Lynn Conway, Andrea James, and Deirdre McCloskey came
remarkably close to effectively destroying J. Michael Bailey’s
reputation and life.
Part 6: Epilogue
So what happened to the text at the center of all this? I asked
Stephen Mautner, a representative of the publisher, Joseph
Henry Press, how many copies of TMWWBQ were ultimately
sold. Mautner first sought Bailey’s permission to answer my
question—sales figures are ordinarily privileged informa-
tion—and then, given the go-ahead, Mautner revealed that as
of August 2006, the book had sold about 4200 copies. That
would be considered a moderate number for an academic book
and a low number for a trade book, which TMWWBQ was
intended to be. But, Mautner continued, ‘‘The big story is the
activity online,’’ where Joseph Henry’s books were until
recently available to anyone to read for free. ‘‘Since publica-
tion, there have been about 900,000 visits to the electronic
version of [TMWWBQ]. We are not able to tell you how many
of those were repeat visits, but by any measure, that’s a LOT of
online reading’’ (Stephen Mautner to Michael Bailey, copy to
Alice Dreger, p.e.c., August 11, 2006; capitalization in
original).
Given that the book probably turned out to have at least
a quarter-million readers (and possibly many more), did
TMWWBQ ultimately have the negative effect on transwomen
that so many of Bailey’s trans critics feared at the outset? I
think that is hard to demonstrate. In their January, 2004 letter to
the faculty of Northwestern University’s Department of Psy-
chology, denouncing Bailey ‘‘as a central figure in an elite
reactionary group [… in] pursuit of institutionalized bigotry
and defamation of transsexual women,’’ Anjelica Kieltyka,
Lynn Conway, Andrea James, and Calpernia Addams claimed
of knowing ‘‘how Bailey’s junk science is hurting young trans
women.’’ They said they were aware ‘‘of cases where it is
destroying [young transwomen’s] relationships with families
and friends, limiting or even ruining their chances for employ-
ment, and causing deep emotional angst.’’ They named one
specificinstance:‘‘Onewomanwrotetousdescribinghowher
mother came running into her bedroom after reading Bailey’s
book, and threw the book at her shouting, ‘Now I know what
you are!’’’ (letter from Kieltyka, Conway,James, and Addams,
to the faculty members of the Department of Psychology,
Northwestern University, January 7, 2004).
Nevertheless, I have found it impossible to locate
any independent confirmation that TMWWBQ has been
responsible for these kinds of negative effects—employment
discrimination, ruining of relationships, and ‘‘deep emotional
angst’’—although it seems reasonable to presume that those
who read it may have come away believing Blanchard’s tax-
onomy more than the feminine essence narrative, and that that
will have caused certain transwomen real angst. Bailey has
certainly received copious correspondence from transwomen
claiming to be a ‘‘third type’’ not addressed in Blanchard’s
theorizing or Bailey’s book—just as Bailey has received
substantial correspondence from transwomen who thank him
for explaining Blanchard’s theory and thus helping them to
make sense of their lives as ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’ and
‘‘autogynephilic transsexuals’’ (J. Michael Bailey, personal
files; compare http://www.transkids.us.). When I wondered to
Anne Lawrence whether it might be true that TMWWBQ
has
led to transwomen suffering things such as employment dis-
crimination, ostracism, deep angst, or even—as Kieltyka,
Conway, James, and Addams implied in their January, 2004
letter to Bailey’s closest colleagues—violent hate crimes,
Lawrence responded: ‘‘At the risk of stating the obvious, the
412 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
reason that Conway, James, McCloskey, [Becky] Allison,
[Christine] Burns, et al. are so angry is not because they are so
sure that Bailey is wrong. It is because they worry that he
might be at least partly right and this realization is potentially
fatal for their hard-earned sense-of-self’’ (p.e.c., December 11,
2006; italics added). In that vein, Lawrence agrees with the
claim about angst, but thinks it is not an unjust angst thrust
upon particularly vulnerable young transwomen. Bailey is
more blunt in his assessment: he says that if there has been an
injury from his book—a book he sees as positive in its honesty
and in its acceptance of transwomen’s realities—it has been a
narcissistic injury suffered by a small number of autogyne-
philic transsexuals who wish we would all deny the truth
(Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., February 27, 2007).
SeveralpeoplehaveclaimedTMWWBQ and the ensuing
controversy have had substantial negative effects on sex
researchers’ relationships with transwomen, because sup-
posedly they have made the two groups deeply suspicious of
each other. In his review of the book, University of Minnesota
sex researcher Walter Bockting argued that the controversy
constituted ‘‘yet another blow to the delicate relationship
between clinicians, scholars, and the transgender commu-
nity,’’ a real problem for the professionals (like him) in
question, since clinicians and researchers ‘‘cannot do this
work without the cooperation and support of the transgender
community’’ (Bockting, 2005). Recall that, similarly, Bock-
ting’s University of Minnesota colleague Eli Coleman has
publicly argued that TMWWBQ equated to ‘‘an unfortunate
setback in feelings of trust between the transgender commu-
nity and sex researchers’’ (Eli Coleman, p.e.c., August 4,
2006). Meanwhile, trans advocate Jamison Green reported to
me that ‘‘A few sex researchers that I know have expressed
dismay over the controversy, [but] mostlyto say that they were
sorry that Bailey treated both his subjects and the topic in such
a cavalier manner’’ (Jamison Green, p.e.c., August 20, 2006).
Nevertheless, a number of sex researchers with whom I
talked made the argument that, while Bailey’s book perhaps
rubbed some people the wrong way—and perhaps rubbed
them the wrong way more than it needed to do to make its
points—it was the over-the-top response from Conway and
her colleagues that really put a chill on sex researchers’
interest in trans issues. Steven Pinker of Harvard University
opined to me, ‘‘The intimidation directed at Bailey will ensure
that graduate students, post-docs, and other young researchers
will not touch this topic with a ten-foot pole, starving the field
of new talent. Only tenured professors who have decided to
change fields—a tiny number—would take it on’’ (p.e.c., June
27, 2006). Blanchard had a similar take:
The population of people who were actively doing
research on transgender was already pretty small[….] If
anything, [the attack on Bailey] has had a discouraging
effect about getting into the area of study. It’s not hard
for a student to see, if they have a choice of topics, ‘‘Why
should I pick one where the subjects are likely to get
litigious or make a fuss, or suspect everything I do?’’
(Blanchard, 2006)
Blanchard was striking a common chord here; many sex
researchers told me—without wishing to be named—that trans
activists such as James have behaved so crazily, the entire
population they ‘‘represent’’ has been marked by researchers as
being too unstable and dangerous to bother with.
Beyond the research realm, what about the effect
TMWWBQ has had on clinicians and their trans clients? Again,
most people I talked with seem to think its effects have been
small or negligible. Although, as we have seen, Bockting
(2005) thought the book would harm clinician–client rela-
tionships, Jamison Green has speculated that it has had little
effect: ‘‘I’ve not seen [the book] cited in any important articles
or books, other than to comment on the controversy it gener-
ated[….] Most of the clinicians that I’ve spoken to don’t seem
to be aware of the book or the controversy’’ (p.e.c., August 20,
2006). It certainly does seem to be the case that Bailey’s book
and Blanchard’s theory continue to be largely ignored in the
popularized gender psychology literature, literature that gen-
erally accepts and promotes the feminine essence narrative as
the one and only true story of MTF transsexualism.
What about the book’s and controversy’s effects on trans
advocacy? Several people have argued for a generally positive
outcome there. So Simon LeVay suggested to me,
It may be that [the criticisms and attacks] have raised the
visibility of transgendered people to some extent. For
example, I like the fact that Ben Barres of Stanford has
become quite vocal in the area of sexuality and gender,
even though I don’t agree with everything he says. I
think Mike’s book sparked that to some extent. (p.e.c.,
August 2, 2006)
Jamison Green similarly argues that ‘‘I think the Conway-led
response had a positive effect on the community at large. I
believe people felt empowered by it, because it modeled a
powerful self-regard and courage to stand up for what one
believes in, which is something that trans people need to see
and internalize’’ (p.e.c., August 20, 2006). But others believe
that the nastiness that ensued from the controversy shut down
productive discussion of the etiology and meaning of MTF
transsexualism among transwomen and indeed among sex
researchers to some extent. When I asked Anne Lawrence
about the effects of the book and the controversy, she told me
that
extreme reactions led to a hardening of positions. It
became difficult for anyone to stake out a middle ground
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 413
123
concerning the book [and its claims]. It became hard to
say, ‘‘Well, some things could have been expressed
more sensitively or with more qualification, but there is
still great value in the book.’’ And because the attacks on
Bailey have been so unfair, those of us who find value in
the book and who like and respect Bailey are not
inclined to talk about what we might wish he had done
differently. It’s almost impossible now to stand in the
middle. (Lawrence, 2006a)
As Lawrence was hinting here, a few people have sug-
gested that Bailey might have avoided at least some of the fray
if he had onlybeen more politic in some of his wording. LeVay
told me that, when he saw the manuscript of the book, he
encouraged Bailey to be careful that his terminology not cause
him to ‘‘be read as blurring or denying the real differences that
exist between gay and transgendered people, especially in the
area of self-identification.’’ He went on, ‘‘I don’t think that
Mike made any significant changes as a result of that comment
of mine, which was perhaps unfortunate because [it] did in fact
spark some (unnecessary) hostile reactions’’ (p.e.c., August 2,
2006). But I suspect Bailey was right when he told me that he
was going to encounter resistance to his support of Blan-
chard’s taxonomy regardless of how he phrased it. Blanchard
is sure: ‘‘If Mike’s book had been written by someone who
[had] self-censored every paragraph, Conway et al. would not
have liked the message any better. They would not have liked
the bottom line message’’ (Blanchard, 2006).
For his part, Bailey says he doesn’t care primarily about
whether the book had a negative or positive effect; he cares
that he told what he saw as the truth, and that he continued to
speak what he saw as the truth in the face of vitriolic personal
assaults. He clearly puts the value of truth-seeking and truth-
telling over the value of the complicated relationships among
sex researchers, gender clinicians, and trans people—com-
plicated (even tangled) relationships he sees as having
perpetuated the universalizing of the feminine essence nar-
rative at the exclusion of reality. He argues that speaking the
truth will help trans people more in the long run, even if it hurts
in the short run:
It is almost always better (in terms of having a positive
effect) to know and speak the truth than it is to believe
and speak something that is untrue, even if the former
upsets people more than the latter. Furthermore, I have
profound skepticism regarding claims that X should not
be studied or said because it is dangerous, harmful, or
hurtful to do so. (p.e.c., January 29, 2007)
So was Bailey speaking the truth—not just the truth as he
knew it, but the truth? It is beyond the scope of this history to
examine the evidence for and against Blanchard’s typology of
MTF transsexualism. I will say here that the literature around
Blanchard’s theory looks ripe for a thorough queer theory-
based, science studies critique that would consider the possi-
ble inconsistencies, blind spots, and culture-heavy assump-
tions in that literature. A numberof reasonable questions could
(and should) be raised: What do we make of the varied ways
that autogynephilia has been conceived, including by Blan-
chard himself (Blanchard, 2005)? What of the choice of terms
used, and how might those terms constrict conceptions of the
phenomena and harm (or help) the individuals in question?
Could ‘‘autogynephilia’’ exist in at least some natal women,
and if so, might autogynephilia in MTFs not be understoodas a
sign of a core female genderidentity? Patternsof demographic
differences between ‘‘homosexual transsexuals’’ and ‘‘auto-
gynephilic transsexuals’’ are taken as evidence for Blan-
chard’s theory (see, e.g., Smith et al., 2005), but to what extent
might those apparent demographic differences be a product
not of inherent differences in those people but in the way
androphilic MTFs versus non-androphilic MTFs are treated in
our culture?
Pending a thorough critical analysis of Blanchard’s theory,
let me say for this historical record, reports of its death have
been premature. Blanchard’s explanatory typology certainly
has not been roundly rejected by virtually all sexologists, as
the sites of people such as Conway and James suggest.
Although fewer sexologists are as familiar with it as Blan-
chard and Bailey would like, there are indeed researchers
considering its explanatory power and evidentiary basis—and
some have found evidence to support it. For example, a group
in the Netherlands found that
Homosexual transsexuals were […] younger when
applying for sex reassignment, reported a stronger cross-
gender identity in childhood, had a more convincing
cross-gender appearance [….] Moreover, a lower per-
centage of the homosexual transsexuals reported being
(or having been) married and sexually aroused while
cross-dressing.
These researchers concluded, ‘‘A distinction between sub-
types of transsexuals on the basis of sexual orientation seems
theoretically and clinically meaningful’’ (Smith et al., 2005;
see also Chivers & Bailey, 2000). And while Blanchard’s
work on MTF transsexualism has been portrayed by his critics
as if it was merely theoretical with no real empirical basis, the
truth is that Blanchard himself has also sought and published
empirical data for his typology and his theory of autogyne-
philia (see, e.g., Blanchard, 1992). For instance, he has dem-
onstrated a high prevalence of sexual arousal to cross-gender
fantasy among non-homosexual MTF transsexuals (Blan-
chard, 1989)aswellasshowingthat‘‘nonhomosexualmen
most aroused sexually by the thought of having a woman’s
body are also those most interested in acquiring a woman’s
body through some permanent, physical transformation’’ (Blan-
chard, 1993).
414 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
What of the supposed evidence against Blanchard’s the-
ory? Many transwomen have complained that, in their work,
Blanchard and Bailey have ignored their life narratives, nar-
ratives that these women say fly in the face of the simple two-
type model of MTF transsexualism that sees eroticism as a
fundamental motivation for MTF sex reassignment. But what
many of these critics have failed to realize is that Bailey and
Blanchard aren’t interested in whether people’s narratives fit
Blanchard’s theory; they are interested in whether people do.
And Bailey and Blanchard see plenty of evidence that, self-
representation to the contrary, transwomen’s histories—
including their gendered and erotic histories—and the data
drawn from them in lab-based and clinical studies support
rather than weaken Blanchard’s typology.
There have been multiple attempts to shut down meaningful
public discussion of Blanchard’s theory, even beyond the
controversy that surrounded TMWWBQ. So the Wikipedia
entries on ‘‘homosexual transsexual,’’ ‘‘autogynephilia,’’ and
‘‘Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory’’ seem to be perma-
nent sites of dispute, with editors constantly replacing, spin-
ning, deleting, and augmenting each other’s contributions. But
there remain resilient pockets not only of sexologists who
subscribe to Blanchard’s theoretical work, but also of trans-
women who subscribe to it and identify themselves as ‘‘homo-
sexual transsexuals’’ and ‘‘autogynephilic transsexuals’’
(though not always without questioning Blanchard’s choice of
terminology). For example, as noted in Part 4, the ‘‘Transkids’’
Website records the autobiographies and critiques of trans-
women who see themselves as fitting the ‘‘homosexual
transsexual’’ model (http://www.transkids.us). For a time,
during the height of the Bailey controversy, there was also an
active listserv of self-identified autogynephilic transwomen,
and even today, after the TMWWBQ blow-up, a small number
of transwomen such as Willow Arune and Anne Lawrence
continue to be open about their self-identification as autogy-
nephilic transwomen (Arune, 2004;Lawrence,2007; see also
the ‘‘narratives about autogynephilia’’ at Lawrence, 1999a,
1999b).
Indeed, even people highly critical of Bailey sometimes
acknowledge the existence of autogynephilia, though they
discount its importance in trans identity and deny Blanchard’s
two-type taxonomy. Thus, Bockting told me, ‘‘Autogyne-
philia is not an uncommon phenomenon among my clients,
and a phenomenon that is relevant and part of their identity
development. However, I do not see it as an identity in and of
itself’’ (p.e.c., August 30, 2006). Others acknowledge the
phenomenon of erotic crossdressing but refuse to categorize it
as ‘‘autogynephilia’’; so transwoman Becky Allison, M.D.,
asks rhetorically in her critique of Bailey’s book, ‘‘am I sug-
gesting that eroticism while crossdressing played no part in
my history, or in the histories of my many non-autogynephilic
friends? I am not. It did play a part. A small part. Call it a phase
if you will’’ (Allison, 2003). So I think it is fair to say that the
role of eroticism—including erotic crossdressing—in trans-
sexualism remains a lively point of discussion, as does
Blanchard’s two-part typology.
The controversy over Bailey’s book has allowed his critics
to lump together the work of Bailey, Blanchard, and Anne
Lawrence as a monolithic, containable, anti-trans-rights the-
oretic entity known as ‘‘the Blanchard, Bailey, Lawrence
theory’’ (see, e.g., James, n.d.-h). But this strikes me as a
blatant mischaracterization at several levels. First, in a move I
think could only be labeled pro-trans-rights, Blanchard, Bai-
ley, and Lawrence have each actively argued that the chief
determinant of whether transwomen should have access to
SRS is whether or not individual transwomen are better off
(Bailey, 2003;Blanchard,2000; Lawrence, 2003). Blanchard
and Lawrence have done the work to show that they generally
are better off (Blanchard, 1985, 2000; Blanchard, Clemmen-
sen, & Steiner, 1983; Blanchard, Legault, & Lindsay, 1987;
Blanchard & Sheridan, 1990; Blanchard & Steiner, 1983;
Blanchard, Steiner, & Clemmensen, 1985
; Blanchard, Stei-
ner, Clemmensen, & Dickey, 1989;Lawrence,2003). This is
the work that Bailey alludes to in his book when he writes
about why Paul McHugh is wrong to deny transwomen access
to reassignment (Bailey, 2003, p. 207). Second, referring to
the theory as the ‘‘Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence’’ theory
conveniently denies that there are plenty of other profes-
sional sexologists who take seriously Blanchard’s typology of
homosexual and nonhomosexual MTF transsexuals (see, e.g.,
Cohen-Kettenis & Gooren, 1999;Green,2000;Kelly,2005;
LeVay & Valente, 2006; Schroder & Carroll, 1999;Smith
et al., 2005; van Goozen, Slabbekoorn, Gooren, Sanders, &
Cohen-Kettenis, 2002). Third, the ‘‘Blanchard–Bailey–Law-
rence’’ construction fails to give Blanchard the substantial
priority he is due.
Finally, it seems to me that there are actually subtle but key
differences in the way that Blanchard and Bailey have con-
ceived of and Lawrence is now conceiving of autogynephilia.
Lawrence is developing a conceptualization of autogynephilia
as a real sexual orientation, akin to the way being homosexual
or heterosexual is a sexual orientation. Like Blanchard and
Bailey, she sees autogynephilia as a paraphilia, but she seems
to be more interested than Blanchard and Baileyin elaborating
what it means to take seriously autogynephilia as a sexual
orientation. So she has been theorizing the roles of the erotic-
based, attraction-based, and attachment-based elements of
autogynephilia, and considering how the balance of these
elements might change as an autogynephilic transsexual
develops her identity as woman. When she speaks of auto-
gynephilia, Lawrence speaks much more of ‘‘becoming what
we love’’ than ‘‘becoming what we lust after’’. All this, she
suggests, helps to explain why some transwomen who admit
to erotic crossdressing pre-transition say that they essentially
give up or lose what looks like autogynephilia after transition,
especially after the reduction of libido that happens with
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 415
123
the intentional shift from male-typical to female-typical
hormones. Thus, what some transwomen label as ‘‘an auto-
gynephilic stage’’ in personal development is understood by
Lawrence as representing a period when the erotic component
of autogynephilia is more prominent (and undeniable) than it
becomes later in the lives of most autogynephilic transsexuals.
Consequently, in spite of being lumped into what gets labeled
by its critics the ‘‘Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence’’ theoretical
construct, Lawrence seems to be developing a vision of
autogynephilia that is more complex and potentially more
explanatorily powerful (and possibly even more palatable)
than what has thus far been put forward (Lawrence, 2004,
2006b, 2007).
But will Blanchard’s theory ever make it into the main-
stream of trans politics and discourse? To do so, it would have
to overcome the widespread political rejection of a model that
sees transsexuality as a pathology. After all, Blanchard, Bai-
ley, and Lawrence have all argued that autogynephilia is a
paraphilia—a psychosexual disorder. Granted, they argue
autogynephilia is a non-harmful paraphilia, and one which
absolutely should not eliminate a transwoman from consid-
eration for sex reassignment. But as long as they talk of any
kind of transsexuality as a paraphilia, I think it is unlikely
Blanchard’s theory will find anything like general acceptance
among politically conscious trans people who, understand-
ably, are sick and tired of being treated as if they suffer from a
pathology.
Putting aside for a moment the whole problem of the sci-
entific truth about MTF transsexuality, I’m not sure that the
simplistic feminine essence narrative is necessarily any better
for transwomen than Blanchard’s typology. In doing research
for this project, I have been disturbed to see the extent to which
transwomen, in order to speak and be heard, seem to feel
obliged to completely deny the role of eroticism in their
decisions to undergo sex reassignment—and not just by trans
activists like Conway and James, but also by gender therapists
like Randi Ettner and Mildred Brown, and by the press. His-
torically, this de-eroticization of transsexuals’ life narratives
has been promoted not only by certain transwomen like
Christine Jorgensen but also, importantly, by the medical
professionals who have acted as gatekeepers to sex reassign-
ment (Meyerowitz, 2002). After all, in the past, some influ-
ential clinicians claimed that confession of a single instance of
sexual arousal associated with crossdressing should eliminate
a patient from consideration of a diagnosis of transsexualism
and thus also from consideration of sex reassignment (see,
e.g., Baker, 1969). Although the de-eroticized feminine ess-
ence narrative may function socially and clinically like a sort
of get-out-of-male-free card, this pushing of sex into the closet
where transsexuality is concerned at some level robs trans-
women of their erotic possibilities and realities, and in that
sense Ettner and Brown are surely doing their clients and
readers no favors. I personally hope that as trans activists seek
to work for greater acceptance of trans people, they also do not
insist upon a complete and universal de-eroticization of trans
people’s life histories.
Importantly, as Lawrence has pointed out, there exists an
almost invisible group of people for whom the universalizing
of the feminine essence narrative may (ironically) act as a
barrier to beneficial sex changes. These are male-bodied
people who experience severe, sometimes incapacitating
distress about or alienation from their male bodies but who do
not feel in themselves a ‘‘feminine essence’’ others seem to be
describing. If a ‘‘feminine essence’’ feeling is said to be the
necessary motivation for a sex change, these people may not
seek and get sex changes from which they would truly benefit
(Lawrence to Dreger, p.e.c., March 23, 2007). This constitutes
another reason why the feminine essence narrative—espe-
cially at the exclusion of all other possibilities—may harm
some trans people even as it seems to help others.
Ironically, as some science studies scholars have sug-
gested, it is gender clinicians and sexologists themselves who
have set the scene for trans women denying anything other
thanfeminineessence autobiographies by demanding singular
sorts of Western heteronormative stories out of MTFs seeking
SRS (Stone, 1991; see also Meyerowitz, 2002). Clinicians like
Robert Stoller maintained a dichotomy of ‘‘true transsexuals’’
(i.e., androphilic would-be MTFs who came with what looked
like feminine essence narratives) versus ‘‘transvestites’’
(including non-androphilic would-be MTFs who confessed to
erotic cross-dressing), insisting only the former sort be
allowed SRS (Stoller, 1971). Although Blanchard and most of
his followers have abandoned this language of ‘‘true’’ versus
untrue transsexuals, and have insisted (and even shown) that
SRS can benefit ‘‘autogynephilic’’ transsexuals as much as
‘‘homosexual’’ transsexuals, the legacy of their more prohib-
itive predecessors hangs over the clinical and political
representations of MTF transsexuality.
Finally, what of the individuals who played major parts in
the history of the controversy over TMWWBQ?AsIwrite,
Deirdre McCloskey maintains an active and prominent aca-
demic career, enjoying an international reputation as an
interdisciplinary scholar. Lynn Conway, now retired from the
University of Michigan, continues to use her university
Website to broadcast her ongoing ‘‘investigation’’ of Bailey
and to provide inspiring stories of successful transwomen like
herself. Andrea James keeps up her ownWebsite as a source of
consumer advice to transwomen, as a marketing platform for
herself, and as a font of intimidation to those who would dare
to openly disagree with her. James was featured on the front
cover of The Advocate’s June 2006 Pride Special; inside she
was quoted as saying, ‘‘I consider myself agnostic but guided
by a set of unwavering moral principles’’ (James, 2006
). I do
not know what has happened to the woman known as Juanita.
As for Anjelica Kieltyka, my sense is that she feels chewed
up and spat out several times over. It is clear she now feels she
416 Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421
123
was being used by Bailey all along, and I take from what she
told me that she also feels abused by Conway and her ‘‘co-
investigators.’’ During our interviews, she remembered sev-
eral times that the last thing Michael Bailey ever said to her
was to warn her of Conway and James, ‘‘Don’t let them use
you’’ (Kieltyka, 2006c, 2006d). Of all the people in this story,
Kieltyka is the one I worry about. She struck me—both in her
biography and in our conversations—as a genuinely kind-
hearted person who truly tried to help her fellow transwomen
along the way, only to find herself ejected from that com-
munity. She told me, ‘‘The problem is that Conway [came] in
and befriended all of my friends and turned a number of them
into discrediting me’’ (Kieltyka, 2006f). She can’t even seem
to attend the regular trans gatherings she used to without
risking being misunderstood and rejected. Just as I told her
of Conway’s bizarre threat to tell people I was stalking her,
Kieltyka recalled to me, with some anger,
the recent incident at the Be-All [a trans gathering]
where [Conway] accused me of stalking her. I was at the
bar over there and she was among my friends and I […]
heard that she was going around saying that I was
stalking her. […] Anyway, it was a nonevent that Pro-
fessor Conway tried to turn into a ‘‘staged event’’—an
opportunity to discredit me. (Kieltyka, 2006a)
A woman who once enjoyed an active life among the trans-
women circles of Chicago, a woman who once valued her
regular association with academics (including Bailey and his
colleagues) at Northwestern University, Kieltyka has now
become largely isolated through what she feels has been one
misrepresentation of her after another.
Meanwhile, on the sex research side, Blanchard says he
hasn’t been much affected personally by the controversy,
because ‘‘there were no opportunities for those people to
attack me the way they had attacked Mike.’’ Blanchard had
already lost interest in doing work in transsexuality before
TMWWBQ, and, not surprisingly, the controversy has not
rekindled his interest. He did tell me he found the backlash
discouraging. I guess to some extent I’m used to aca-
demic controversies, and however vicious those get,
people have a common understanding of where you
draw the line about disputing a theory or an idea. In this
particular battle, people were not playing by the familiar
academic rules. James put up pictures of Mike’s
children, people moved to have books removed from
consideration for awards. This was totally out of the
rules of discourse. (Blanchard, 2006)
When I asked Lawrence about how she had been affected by
the backlash personally—a backlash that ended up repainting
her as a sworn enemy of trans rights—Lawrence said:
It feels like a great loss to be so alienated from my own
community. I have worked very hard on behalf of my
community. For over 10 years now, I have tried to pro-
vide accurate information for MTF transsexuals on my
website. And I worked so hard to try to liberalize the
[HBIGDA] Standards of Care! [Sex researcher and
FTM] Aaron Devor and I must have put in close to a
hundred hours, trying to make Version Six [of the Stan-
dards of Care] better for transpeople and reduce barriers
to care. I conducted the research that demonstrated,
among other things, that nonhomosexual transsexuals
can have outcomes from sex reassignment surgery that
are every bit as good as those of homosexual transsexu-
als. I used to be respected, even admired, within my
community. Now many people see me as the anti-Christ.
I rarely attend transgender conventions anymore. (Law-
rence, 2006a)
And Bailey? Undaunted, he plugs ahead, working on more
sexual-orientation studies—studies likely to keep angering
people on both the right and the left who wish his work fell
simply into one of the politicized scientific boxes on which
they insist. He is relieved that, with the dust of the backlash
settling and the full history emerging, his colleagues seem
increasingly inclined to rally to his side and to the sides of
similarly beleaguered sex researchers (see, e.g., De Vries
et al., 2007).
As I was nearing the end of my research into this history, I
asked Bailey whether he regrets publishing his book. Not a bit,
he replied. Regrets the backlash? At this, he surprised me by
answering, ‘‘I have decided that I’m glad for everything, even
Lynn Conway’s behavior.’’ The backlash, he explained to me,
made him realize what fine family, friends, and colleagues he
has, to stand by him for all the right reasons. On top of that, he
notes, the backlash also did exactly what I had warned Con-
way back in 2003 it would: it gave his book far more publicity
than it otherwise would have had. And finally, Bailey
explained, the whole experience ‘‘has taught me, albeit the
hard way, the value of truth.’’ He went on, ‘‘I think that before,
sometimes, I used to hesitate to say true things out of concern
that the truth would cause someone pain. But Conway et al.
took away any remaining inhibitions I had against telling the
truth’’ (p.e.c., January 30, 2007).
Acknowledgments My thanks go to the more than 100 people who
answered inquiries on this project, Yorgos Strangas for excellent
research assistance, the Editor for patient editorial assistance, and the
following people for comments on drafts of this article: Marcus Arana
(Holy Old Man Bull), William B. Kelley, Lisa Lees, Kathryn Mont-
gomery, James L. Nelson, Maxine Petersen, Julie F. Simpson, Aron
Sousa, John Sylla, Kiira Triea, Paul Vasey, 13 readers who asked that I
not name them, and three anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Claire
Hoipkemier and Kepler Domurat-Sousa for assistance with proofing.
Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421 417
123
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