The Man In One Black Patent-Leather High-Heeled Shoe
Question: What's wrong with a man in a black patent-leather miniskirt and matching black patent-leather fuck-me pumps?
Answer: Nothing whatsoever -- providing he's got the legs for it.
Trans-gender girl Deirdre McCloskey, a Reason contributing editor who teaches at the U of Illinois, Chicago, shines a spotlight on the meteorite crater-sized holes in the apparently intellectually crooked author Michael Bailey's "science" about gay men (oops, forgot to study lesbians) and transsexuals -- which says that gay men really want to be girls, or girlish, and men who want a sex change are just gay or crazy or sex-mad, not people with a genuine gender-identity issue:
Bailey writes charmingly and has the knack of suggesting that heís reporting from the front lines of Science, inserting a lot of personal "guesses" and "hunches" into the prose as though he were an actual Scientist with a lifetime of serious consideration of alternative hypotheses and tons of data behind him. You can imagine Bailey with a pipe and a lab coat advertising laxatives on TV. But in his case we have what the physicist Richard Feynman used to call "cargo-cult science": The book has the style of an informal talk with a Serious Scientist who is getting down and personal with you about his science. The stuff looks a little like science, the way the "airports" the highlanders of New Guinea constructed out of coconuts and palm fronds to get the American cargo planes to come back after the war looked a little like airports. Itís even in the title of his book, that Science. But sadly, itís scientific nonsense.Harsh words? Judge for yourself. Throughout the book, Bailey makes a big deal of his academic position. (His bosses at Northwestern seem to agree: they recently promoted this alleged violator of their own human-subjects procedures to chairman of the Psychology Department.) All the way through the book he calls his findings "science." His main evidence for the femininity of gay men (aside from that study of how queers say the two s sounds in science) is a Scientific study of personal ads in some gay newspapers. His other piece of "research" -- and the only research this Researcher did on gender crossers -- consisted of, first, long talks with one gender crosser in Chicago (named "Cher" in the book; I know her well; sheís one of the people who have filed legal complaints against Bailey) and, second, short talks with a half dozen young Hispanic gender-crossing prostitutes whom Cher brought to Bailey under the impression he wanted to help them. Itís a sample of convenience of, say, size seven. (One was Cher herself, the only case of alleged "autogynephilia" Bailey has studied; the rest were the other type, of the two types allowed.)
The sample was collected by what looks like a violation of federal law. Northwesternís Office for Human Research is investigating. No one was offered a human subjects form to sign, no one was told she was under study, and no one was told her story would appear in a book. The subjects were enticed by the offer of a document crucial for their gender change. (Gender surgeons require a letter from a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist saying that the patient is in her right mind, if not his right body.) Their lives were used in the book with brutal disregard for their feelings to titillate readers. Bailey even "studies" one of their weddings, to which he was invited as a guest.
Thatís the legal problem Bailey and his university now face, but the scientific problem they face is worse. The entire sample, representing the worldís hundreds of thousands of gender crossers, just happens to live in Chicago. Six-sevenths of the sample are first-generation Hispanic Americans, most working as prostitutes and professional drag queens. (Bailey dropped from his sample women who were not in sex trades.) Thatís not a very good sample. If most of Baileyís data come from young Hispanic sex workers in Chicago, then he has not put his theory (namely, that gender crossing is about sex, sex, sex, because gender crossers are men, men, men) in much jeopardy.
Randi Ettner, a clinical psychologist who has written the best book on gender problems, Gender Loving Care, and who has seen hundreds of every conceivable kind, has an office in Evanston, a few blocks from Baileyís. Not interested, says Bailey in effect: Leave me alone with my two-category VFW theory and my half-dozen pretty girls off the streets of Boysí Town. He didnít want to talk with gender crossers like, say, me -- exhibiting no "autogynephilia," working not as a prostitute but as a professor of economics (now, now: no jokes).
McCloskey asks the essential question at the end: Why do the transgendered need to be ìcuredî if theyíre happy?
Why shouldnít a free person be able to express her notions of gender? (Gender expression -- your right as a woman to wear pants, say -- is the next frontier of this evolving revolution: see www.gpac.org, the Web site for GenderPAC, devoted to freedom whatever your chromosomes or genitals.) And if changing oneís genitals is considered a violation of Godís law, why arenít nose jobs or cancer cures also abominations?Ask the libertarian question: Why not ? No fair just declaring without sensible argument that itís contrary to natural law. Or saying peevishly, "I canít understand such a desire." Neither can I understand why some people let themselves pay first-year depreciation on automobiles or why other people write books in which they exploit for gain little boys interested in dolls and Hispanic women off the street desperate for a letter to allow gender surgery. But Iím not proposing to put these two disorders into the next DSM to prevent people from engaging in such behavior.
Actually read this book- got a signed copy at BookExpo in LA last June. Even as an undergraduate with one research methods class under my belt, I could tell his methods were less than scientifically sound. From what I recall (I've since given the book away), there's no quantitative definition of what "feminine" behavior in boys is; it's just assumed that we can all see it and know that it's dangerous. Umm, riight. The book is not worth a read.
Kate at November 15, 2003 10:38 PM