Thanks for posting this, Julia, and for exposing Bailey's grotesque biases as well as unbelievably shoddy "research" techniques. (Interested readers ought definitely to click through to read Julia's refutation as well as Joan Roughgarden's thorough and dismantling review.)

The NYT article doesn't exactly claim to be about the validity of the research (or lack of) or to be an inquest into the ethics of the original work. It's goal is to address those who chose to resort to ad hominems in the extreme, seeking to ruin an academics career without engaging in dialogue. Sure, many did make an attempt. For instance, the book's many academic opponents criticised it effectively without trying first to ruin someone's career. The NYT article states its purpose and follows suite.

Dio- what "ad hominems" are you referring to?

Ethics charges were filed by his research subjects, who were not informed they were the subject of research. As even Dreger had to reluctantly concede, the university found against Bailey, even if it hushed up the specific results of the inquiry.

Many, many people chose to exercise their free speech rights to disagree with what Bailey and Blanchard have said, and Bailey chose to try and spin other's peoples exercise of their free speech rights to criticize him as somehow being an attack on his free speech rights.

One critic put quotations from Bailey's book under pictures of his kids to illustrate how disgusting they (the quotes) were. She has since taken them down and apologized. To date, Bailey has yet to apologize for writing the quotes in the first place (which he himself characterized as "dirty" and "obscene" when applied to people he actually gave a damn about).

So if you don't mind my asking, what, specifically, are you referring to?

And incidentally, Dreger's article contains several easily debunked false claims: e.g. that Andrea James attacks any transwoman who won't say they are or were "a woman trapped in a man's body." Simple use of the search engine on Andrea's website shows that she believes gender is a social construction and the only places she uses the above phrase is to mock it. She also quote-mined an email from Andrea to Anne Lawrence to make it look like Andrea had earlier claimed to be "autogynephillic" when the entire email in context shows Andrea meant something quite different. If you're a professional social science researcher writing an article for an allegedly peer reviewed publication, your claims should not be debunkable by a layperson using google. The rest of Dreger's article consists largely of unverifiable innuendo.

It is not the job of activists to do things in a fair and impartial way. They are responding to the personal threat represented by distorted, and biased ideas of their reality stated by "experts", to the community at large, and, more importantly, to people who hold power.
I'm glad to hear that the scientific community is also responding appropriately, with peer review.
The activists will remain active, which is their particular role.

Thanks so much for posting this here, Julia. The one thing that I'd add - for trans allies & feminists alike - is that the book is also horrifically sexist. Bailey's general "standard" for trans women is whether or not they're attractive to him. Imagine if women who were not trans were held up to a similar "standard."

I agree with a lot of what Serano is saying - I think it's an insightful analysis to the Bailey affair. I think it's more effective than a lot of the critiques that have been published.

I wanted to take issue with three things in Serano's article/the post.

1) ETHICS Charges - Journal.
I think it is disturbing that someone would file charges regarding Dreger submitting her article to Archives of Sexual Behavior. Archives is the number 1 sex journal in terms of impact factor - of course she is going to submit it there. All of the major sex researchers are on the editorial board, not just Bailey and Zucker.

Every single journal has editors who have some form of bias for or against a topic or interpretation, whether it's a feminist journal like Psychology of Women Quarterly, an animal behavior journa, etc. Personal and professional bias is inescapable in science (and both a positive and negative force). The best you can do is recruit scientists with multiple viewpoints, which Archives did.

I have no doubt that Zucker being the lead editor helped Dreger. They certainly would NOT put Bailey as an action editor, so his influence in the process was probably minimal/non-existent. It strikes me that they handled it well - creating a position paper target article and then allowing numerous commentaries. That's not uncommon (and, for some journals, the only way they do things - like Behavioral Brain Sciences). This certainly is not the first time that Archives has used this strategy (published a controversial target article and then recruited numerous viewpoints to common).

2) Is the Problem with the Model or the Construction of Paraphilia?

I agree with Serano that Bailey is overly dismissive of the personal stories and accounts - he is definitely inflammatory in a number of places in the book.

Thinking from a sociocultural perspective, however, it is interesting to me that the sociologists have focused most of their attention on the biases of Bailey (which he certainly has).

But it strikes me one of the main problems with Bailey's thesis is the social construction of paraphilias. One of the main reasons there is a negative reaction to the Bailey/Blanchard model is that paraphilias are heavily stigmatized. If Bailey published this book in a culture where it was completely acceptable to explore and develop paraphilias and they were seen as positive things, then this "backlash" would be far less strong. In a culture where rights and medical options depend on transsexuality being viewed as a non-paraphilia, of course there is going to be a backlash. I'm surprised that more people don't see the problem as "paraphilias are stigmatized and this forces a gender-identity into the dominant framing" and almost exclusively focus their reaction to trying to tear down the paraphilia model.

I do think Blanchard/Bailey's model has the power to explain some trannsexual women's experiences. I agree with Bailey that we can't use personal narratives as the only or necessarily most informative source of information. I agree with Sernano, however, that the problem emerges when the dichotomy advanced by Bailey has become so rigid.

In my opinion, we simply don't know how applicable the model is - only that it effectively captures the experiences of some transexual women. I think that is where Bailey (rightly) gets himself in trouble - by making a strong claim that all transsexual women fit that model. Nothing in science is ever that clean cut.

3) BIASES OF THE CRITICS
I definitely agree with Serano that the framing of the Dreger article is problematic - she had an agenda and gathered evidence selectively to support it.

I do think it is important to note that the critics also have strong personal biases as well that color their views of the evidence. Serano speaks positively of Roughgarden, but I actually thought Roughgarden's response to Bailey was one of the weakest of all the retorts, and Roughgarden clearly has a personal stake in questioning the character of Bailey and the model he supports that goes beyond the realm of science.

Jessica - Just wanted to note that there is a typo in the feministing post. The editor's last name is "ZUCKER" not "ZUKER"

Jane- Activists' role is not to respond in a way which is totally out of proportion with the totally valid assertions of poor wittle scientists which have been misrepresented by "experts."

Activists are responding to an article which is obviously wrong even to a lay-person and was put forward by a man with severe ethics issues and an obvious sexual fetishization of transwomen.

You, in fact, are confused because you have not quite grasped yet that scientists are capable of being wrong and often skew and distort results in an effort to excuse oppression.

Super-scary olde-tyme example which relates:

There were, for some time, a group of male scientists who would tour with Hottentot women from Africa in order to give "scientific" lectures on the state of the Hottentot's ideal, shapely ass. This "research" consisted largely of repeated rape of the Hottentot woman in question, with the excuse that her ass was so perfectly designed to arouse male sexual drives that no dudely dude would ever be able to help himself.

I guess you see where I'm going with this. Accusations that transwomen are especially well-suited for prostitution and/or are actually gay guys in a vast conspiracy to attract some of that awesome straight cock are nothing other than one man's invention of multiple excuses for his creepy fetishization of transwomen.

He totally thinks that there is some essential feature of a transwoman which is just FORCING poor little innocent him to take advantage of the ladies, just as other scientists have assumed that African women were somehow forcing them to be rapists.

I have no doubt that Zucker being the lead editor helped Dreger. They certainly would NOT put Bailey as an action editor, so his influence in the process was probably minimal/non-existent. It strikes me that they handled it well - creating a position paper target article and then allowing numerous commentaries.

There are several other Clarke Institute personnel on the board besides Zucker, including the Managing Editor, along with others who have written in defense of Bailey in the past, such as Anne Lawrence and Khytam Dawood. The article contains numerous factual inaccuracies in addition to those noted above which could have easily been corrected by someone spending five minutes on Google:

On pp 21-22 Dreger intentionally mischaracterizes an odd looking diagram Adrea James created, claiming Andrea is trying to illustrate an imagined massive conspiracy against transpeople, when the chart just shows how many of the people involved are connected institutionally with each other, including those on both sides. (If she just wanted to say it was an odd and overly elaborate way to make a point, I'd agree with her, but Dreger didn't have to lie about it.)

She repeatedly mischaracterizes all of Bailey's critics as holding some kind of "feminine essence narrative" regarding transsexualism, when actually looking through what the critics say will find few if any holding this position (with the notable exception of the relatively late-coming "HBS" people, who remain a small minority).

Then there's the parts that are just inneundo, such as on pp 27-28 where she speculates that Andrea James and Lynn Conway somehow manipulated the women who filed complaints against Bailey. The only "evidence" she cites to back up this charge is further speculation from Angelica Kieltyka, whom she subsequently characterizes as disturbed and prone to paranoid conspiracy theories. (Tho apparently Bailey worked with her for years and never realized she was so disturbed until she began to disagree with him publically)

So you've got several people who are lionized by Bailey as the only people who truly understand transsexualism (so much so that more than once in the book he implies that the large majority of experts in the field are incompetent for not agreeing with them) missing several easily checked errors and passing through poorly defended speculation in a peer reviewed science journal article. I myself would say that they did not handle this well.

Is the Problem with the Model or the Construction of Paraphilia?

One problem is that they've never given a consistent definition to this "paraphilia." The measurement scales on Blanchard's one published study of autogynephilia and transsexual typology are here:

http://www.genderpsychology.org/autogynephilia/male_gender_dysphoria/autogynephilic_fetishism.html

On the "Core Autogynephilia Scale," note that seven out of eight questions ask if one has ever been aroused "while" doing something, whereas only one asks if one has ever been aroused "by" something. If you take any good sized collection of female erotica (I used Nancy Friday's "Women on Top" but I imagine there are plenty of others that would work just as well) and go through it rating the fantasies on the scale, quite a few will end up scoring at least five (Blanchard's claimed average for what he calls "nonhomosexual transsexuals" i.e. autogynephilics) off of just that single fantasy (while the questions ask if one has "ever" been aroused while yada yada). If this is a phenomena which is not clinically distinguishable from "normal" sexuality, what's the point of making up a fancy new name for it and labelling it a paraphilia? Are all women paraphilics?

Also, it's worth noting (I know, I'm kind of a broken record with all this, but it's still relevant) that pretty much all of the small number of transwomen who chose to apply the autogynephilia label to themselves ended up redefining it. Most of the self-proclaimed autogynephilics on the now-defunct "autogynephiliasupport" yahoo group said they were autogynephilic and then turned around and said they didn't believe autogynephilia was a paraphilia, and gave it their own definition, usually something along the lines of "enjoying one's sexuality as a woman" which is a pretty far cry from what Blanchard and Bailey are talking about. (And that's not even getting into the issues of Blanchard's conflating transvestites with transsexuals or doing research on his own captive population who were beholden to him for his monopolistic control over government-subsidized transition services, giving them a strong incentive to say whetever they thought he wanted to hear)

Bailey apologist Anne Lawrence even recently published an article in "Perspectives in Biology and Medicine" where she tries to redefine AG away from being about sexuality to being about "romantic love."

BIASES OF THE CRITICS

Forget for a second the biases on both sides. If this is supposed to be science, it needs to be supported by valid, reliable data. More than twenty years after Blanchard started doing his research, the data just isn't there.

I'm going to have to take issue with two of your points, UCLA.

First, you point out (in #3) that Roughgarden and many other critics have a personal stake in Bailey's work, and are therefore biased, and unqualified to criticize it. I'm tired of this argument. All people have biases, every last one. Saying that a transsexual woman shouldn't be trusted to critique a theory of transsexuality is like saying a woman shouldn't be trusted to critique theories on gender.

Second, I see a logical fallacy in your critique of paraphalia. You're right on in your assertion that most people view paraphalias as a bad thing. However, that doesn't impact their scientific value. This has come up before in these debates (can some one give me the name of the fallacy?). If I understand you, you're basically saying that people want to believe that they don't have a paraphilia due to the stigma attached, therefore, their arguments against Bailey's theories must be false. No. People don't want to be labelled as having a paraphilia, but the strength of their arguments is independent of this.

Also:

Trans-people are happier after they transition. They don't tend to change their minds later. Transition is, all in all, a very good thing for those who transition, and it doesn't hurt anybody else in any quantifiable way, any moreso than gay marriage actually damages the institution for poor defenseless straight people. The vast fucking majority of them are never in sex work. This is all fairly easy to prove.

Given all this, I'm just not sure why transwomen's motivations should matter so much to this scientist or anybody else, any more than the existence of a "gay gene" should matter to a world that is totally unaffected by gay marriage unless they're in one.

If you chose to be trans for some "weird" reason like attracting straight men, I don't particularly care. Just go for it and feel better. Good luck with the new box. If you "chose" to be gay, then I'm happy you had the freedom to make the choice and I hope you enjoy the copious same-gender sexytime.

I guess I just fail to see why we owe Zucker, Bailey, and his whacky crew any respect whatsoever.

Bailey is simply out there lying about our community. He's making up fantasies and exploiting us in ways that damage our community.

Zucker, oh my God, the last "reputable" reparative therapist. I've run into at least two of his victims who he "cured" of transsexuality who after wasting a decade of their lives went on to transition, facing a far harder time than they would have had they been treated reputably in their early teens.

These people are doing very real harm.

hi everyone, thanks for all the comments!

I first wanted to quickly touch on Dio’s comment, and then address UCLAbodyimage’s comments.

First Dio, I think it is extremely relevant that the NYTimes was completely *unconcerned* with Bailey’s portrayal of trans women, yet *concerned* about the possibility that “powerful transsexual women� tried to “ruin� the reputation of a non-trans scientist. As boo and Jane pointed out, you have to take into consideration who has institutional power over who. If a scientist wrote a book about how women are intellectually inferior to men, and if NY Times completely ignored the story, but then published a story about how some feminists tried to “ruin� that scientists’ reputation, it would be highly problematic. It would be ignoring sexism but reporting on “reverse sexism.�

And that gets to the heart of why they published the article. A story about angry, irrational and dangerous transsexuals attacking someone (which is the plot of Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, and many other movies) is infinitely more sexy than that of a psychologist who misuses his scientific credentials and institutionalized power to marginalize transsexuals (even though the latter happens all of the time).

Next, to UCLAbodyimage. First thanks for pointing out my misspelling of “Zucker.� I must have missed the “c� key, so I apologize for that...anyway, here are my responses to the points you raised:

1) ETHICS Charges - Journal.

I reported on what the ethics charges were, but I didn’t share my personal thoughts about them. I agree with you that 1) all reviewers are biased against something, and 2) that academia is an incestuous world and everybody not only has strong opinions, but they often know each other personally.

Personally, I’d have to say that I’m not surprised that Dreger submitted it to ASB, but I am surprised that Ken Zucker considered publishing it. The reasons why I would *not* have accepted Dreger’s article if I were him are:
1) Bailey is on the editorial board, which would give the appearance of bias even if there wasn’t any, 2) Dreger obviously had an axe to grind with Andrea James, which again would raise the suspicion of bias even if there weren’t any, and 3) her article is not a sexology article at all – it’s (supposedly) a scholarly history. If I were Zucker, I would have suggested that she submit it to a history or science history journal.

2) Is the Problem with the Model or the Construction of Paraphilia?

My answer is yes to both. I agree with you that “paraphilias� are unnecessarily stigmatized in our society. But I also don’t believe in the concept of paraphilia’s either. I highly recommend reading Charles Moser’s critiques of the very category “paraphilia.� It is an inconsistent, arbitrary and problematic grouping to begin with.

Next, I think the model is problematic to. First off, there is this conflation between “autogynephilia� as a cause of gender dysphoria/transsexuality and “autogynephilia� as a type of fantasy one has. I don’t believe that the latter is a cause of the former. In fact, *nobody*, neither Bailey nor Blanchard nor Lawrence, has ever provided evidence to support the idea that such fantasies are a cause (rather than merely correlating with) transsexuality. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of trans people who 1) wanted to be female long before they experienced sex embodiment fantasies (what Blanchard would call “autogynephilic� fantasies), and trans men and heterosexual trans women (i.e., exclusively attracted to men) who also have those fantasies.

I am currently working on two psychology papers that together make a strong case that such fantasies are a coping mechanism for dealing with trans feelings in trans feminine people who are socialized male. Some of the ideas are already roughly sketched in my book Whipping Girl (especially in chpts 14, 17, and 7) if you’re interested. You can also listen to my Psychatric Sexualization of MTF Transgenderism podcast, which outlines some (but not all) of my ideas:
http://www.juliaserano.com/TSetiology.html#PsychSexMTF

3) BIASES OF THE CRITICS

I agree with you on this. I am biased on this issue. My bias stems from the fact that my personal experience (and those of other trans people I know) contradicts the theories of trans women that have been put forward by Bailey and Blanchard and others. I will be the first to admit that my position is socially constructed or socially situated. My main issue is that folks like Bailey and Dreger pretend that they’re “objective� academics who have some kind of unadulterated view of trans people’s realities.

I remember first reading Bailey’s book – the part where he glowingly recounts how insightful Blanchard’s theory is. And I remember being dumfounded, because Blanchard’s theory (that trans women are either gay men who transition to pick up straight men, or fetisheists who get off on some bizarre sex fantasy) is so obviously rooted in stereotypes that already exist in the culture. That’s why I think it resonates with some researchers despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence regarding causation (i.e., that such fantasies cause gender dysphoria).

Finally, I posted a link to Joan Rougharden’s piece because it highlights how sexist and sexualizing the book is (especially to trans women of color). Given the fact that I was writing a Feministing post, I thought that this audience of largely non-trans women would easily get why trans women are so angry about the book.

If I were posting to a psychology blog, I would probably not link to Rougharden’s review, because she doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of the theory. Instead, I would recommend Madeline Wyndzen’s critiques and my own (mentioned above). Unfortunately, I don’t think that there is yet one comprehensive psychological critique of the model, which is why I’m working on that this year...

In Response to EastsideKates Response to my Comments.

I think you took some of what I was saying and painted a much more extreme characterization - one that doesn't match my views. I realize it's easier to defeat those extreme strawmen, so let me reiterate and develop in more detail what I was saying.

EASTSIDEKATE: "First, you point out (in #3) that Roughgarden and many other critics have a personal stake in Bailey's work, and are therefore biased, and unqualified to criticize it."

I definitely don't believe that (and didn't say that).

I do believe that because some of the critics have a personal stake in the outcome of the debate, that they are more willing and endorse anti-Bailey viewpoints not because of the science but because of their biases and use inflammatory arguments that are just as bad as Baileys. I think Joan Roughgarden is a perfect example of that. This does not mean that all critics are motivated by this or that I believe Bailey is right.

"Saying that a transsexual woman shouldn't be trusted to critique a theory of transsexuality is like saying a woman shouldn't be trusted to critique theories on gender."

I agree with you - and I didn't say that should trannsexual shouldn't be critiquing the theory.
The viewpoints of trannsexual women are EXTREMELY important in this discussion.

As I noted, I thought Julie Serano's critique was particularly effective.

My third section was largely in response to an earlier post celebrating Roughgarden's post, which I thought was particularly biased and unhelpful in the debate.

EASTSIDEKATE: "If I understand you, you're basically saying that people want to believe that they don't have a paraphilia due to the stigma attached"

Yes - I am saying that that is ONE of the reasons there has been such a negative reaction. Others include the inflammatory language, the dismissal of trannsexual narratives, etc.

But I do think it is worth challenging the view of paraphilias - because I DO believe that some transwomen transition for reasons relating to sexual arousal. I don't think there is anything wrong with that at all - the problem is that society has such a negative view of that narrative.

What I was noting is that it is surprising to me that more of the critiques don't focus on the rampantly negative view of paraphilias (which basically is pathalogizing sexual interests that are not mainstream) and how that feeds into people's perceptions of what the dominant narrative should be.

Response to Julies comments on my Comments.

I appreciate your thoughts on my comments - I think they are convincing.

I do agree with you that Dreger would have been better off going to a history of science/philosophy of science journal. I'm glad archives is taking all of the critiques so seriously and publishing this unprecented number of commentaries. The last time this happened that I can remember was the strong reaction people had to an article published by Spitzer et al. in the journal, which focused on whether coversion therapy (i.e. "reparative therapy") is "effective" for some gay men and women.

Paraphilias - Your counterexplanation for why sexual fantasies is correlated with transitioning is really interesting - I don't think that explanation is on the minds of many psychologists. But should be.

JULIE: "My main issue is that folks like Bailey and Dreger pretend that they’re “objective� academics who have some kind of unadulterated view of trans people’s realities.... And I remember being dumfounded, because Blanchard’s theory (that trans women are either gay men who transition to pick up straight men, or fetisheists who get off on some bizarre sex fantasy) is so obviously rooted in stereotypes that already exist in the culture. That’s why I think it resonates with some researchers despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence regarding causation (i.e., that such fantasies cause gender dysphoria)."

I do think those are possible biases that were operating in the heads of Bailey and Blanchard and why the ideas might take root.

I think there is another set of biases as well operating here - Disciplinary biases.

Over the past 5 years, Bailey has devoted a great deal of his career to studying sexual arousal and the link between sexual/genital arousal and attractions. Given that backdrop, it makes sense that he would try to extend that perspective into as many domains as possible. This biases him to look for arousal related explanations for a behavior/identity.

This arousal-based perspective is a different set of biases than the ones I think sociologists hold, which would tend to really focus on the narratives and beliefs and experiences of the transsexual women themselves.

I do wish that Bailey hadn't been so over the top with some of his framings because I do think both models - the "sociology-themed" and "arousal-themed" could be useful. We might never know how useful the arousal model is because of how politically charged the issue is now.

UCLA, I guess we're mostly in agreement on why things stand the way they do. And, FWIW, while I don't believe in paraphilia, I share your dismay with stigmatizing sexual interests that aren't mainstream. I guess I just think you're missing one of the main points Bailey's critics are making. On the one hand, there has been a sort of professional critique of his methodologies. On the other hand, there has been a nasty, vicious argument about Bailey et al.'s motivations and perspectives. IMO, both of these are called for. While the fact that so many transsexual women recoil at the stereotypes Bailey presents does not impact the validity of the work in question, it is an important consideration in my mind.

Here's an analogy using (sigh) racial identity: Let's say a sociologist wants to have casual conversations with a handful of people in order to publish a book supporting her comprehensive theory on how and why African-Americans adopt a "black identity". While the validity of the science would remain the same in both cases, the tenor and scope of criticism surrounding the work would be very, very different depending on whether she selected her study subject from, say, the faculty club at Morehouse, or say, a crack house-- and in my mind the difference in reception would be very justifiable.

Bailey just happened to write a book that traffics in the worst and most offensive stereotypes of transsexual women. While that in and of itself doesn't make it bad science, it goes a long way in explaining why "personal biases" are popping up everywhere. Given Bailey's anxiousness to embrace his notority, his willingness to tout his conclusions and his complete dismissal of any criticism of his science, it's really hard to divorce the issue of whether or not Bailey's science is valid from the issue of whether or not Bailey is a bigot.

This does pose a dilemma for people trying to have a debate purely on the merits of Bailey's work. However, I don't think we'd be having this debate at all if it didn't trade in stereotypes-- as Julia points out, those stereotypes are likely the primary reason this work has any traction at all.

Ugh, what a quagmire of bad science and vicious activism this whole Man Who Would be Queen debacle is. Bailey's book is crap science. He cites "studies" that are just his students handing out questionnaires to their circle of friends. He has very little evidence to go by and he tries to make up for it with "common sense" (call me common bias!) At some point, he asks his ten year old son to tell him "why are all ballet dancers poofters?" and his son confirms his suspicion that "dancing is gay." Duh, dad. And they pay you to study sex? Ten year old kids know that etc etc.

On the very other hand, and sort of like UCLAbodyimage (who sounds a lot more academic than I'm comfortable with in discussions of gender identity) I'm very suspicious of people who attack Bailey on the basis that he compares transsexuals to common whores and faggots. What's wrong with whores and faggots? The majority of visible transwomen around the world (as in, not just the English-speaking world) are in sex work at least for a while (see South America, South and Eastern Europe and South-East Asia). The problem is not that "Society" thinks transwomen are whores, the problem is that "Society" thinks whores should burn in hell. There are many reasons for that and the "shemale whores give us all a bad name" brigade can share in on the responsibility. Not to mention, a good deal of those modest-to-God transwomen are clients to those very girls, especially before they decide to transition themslves.

And there is a strong push for homosexuals to accept that they are somehow emasculated for taking it up the butt or whatever it is those filthy pervs get up to. Of course some would yield to it. Vide the condition in Iran with homosexuals being forced to transition to avoid persecution and so on.

As about autogynephilia, or, well, getting off by wearing garters or whatever, why can't we hear a reasonable and simple explanation, that will make sense to any who hear it? What about "puberty hit and I went batshit?" What are you going to do with your fantasies of being a beautiful princess on a pure white unicorn when you wake up each morning and you have to do handstands to pee? You'll go crazy, that's what. 'S not microcoding.

But I blame the medicalisation of transsexuality (again, perpetrated in the Western World.) Somewhere down the line, someone figured having a fetish must preclude a diagnosis of "true" gender dysphoria, just to keep things tidy. It's not like a patient can have all sorts of conditions any more- they must be pure this or pure that, as if human beings have a single motivation throughout their lives for whatever they do. And they call themselves "psychologists." Psychologists my foot. More "anthropos" and less "psyche" is what we need methinks.

"The majority of visible transwomen around the world (as in, not just the English-speaking world) are in sex work at least for a while (see South America, South and Eastern Europe and South-East Asia)."

BTW, what about South Asia? Your post just reminded me of this recent article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7265463.stm

"A controversial new talk show has hit TV screens in southern India.

"The programme, 'Ipadikku Rose', is not only unusual in its subject matter but its new host has certainly broken from the ranks.

"The programme is hosted by Rose, who used to be a boy called Ramesh.

"She is India's first transgender person to host their own talk show on TV...

"...Transsexuals are know as or 'hijras' in India.

"Traditionally they have been surrounded by superstition and myth but modern society has been less tolerant of them.

"Many are shunned by their families and find it hard to obtain conventional jobs and turn instead to begging and prostitution for a living..."

Firstly I want to make this assertion... Scientist are human beings and so will have bias's. We can try to put them aside but they have a way of leaking into what we do. So while I am certain their is bias at work here and perhaps a bit of a bunker mentality on the part of ASB and it's editorial board... Who can blame them. They are under attack allot these days. that leads to a situation where things that are not really science end up in a scientific journal. Like Dreger's report.... I would say it's more like a piece of journalism that if anything should be put out in book form. But it is not itself journal material.

I also have to agree with both UCLAbodyImage and Julia about the whole notion of a paraphilia being a load. The whole reason that concept exist is the same reason that Blanchard's theory is even as controversial as it is.

That reason is that we live in a sex negative society. Sex itself is bad to our society. (Consider the fact that a pastor down south felt the need to put up a bill board advertising the fact that sex inside a heterosexual marriage is not a sin.)

So often when this matter was explained to me the reason given for it's offensiveness was "it confuses sex with gender", or "It says i did this because of sex". Well? Why is sex automatically a bad reason to do something? it's just as intrinsic and "hard wired" as any other behavior. At least it is according to every bit of reputable research that has been done on the etiology of sexual orientation. I have some direct experience of a variety of cultures from the Islamic to the Native American. Only in ours is sex itself automatically bad and dirty (where in the others it's morality depends on circumstances.)

Discalimer: My own impression of all this is colored by my own personal experiences. I have lived in Chicago all my life. I met Bailey briefly a few times back before the book. I saw him in action and found him to be a pleasant man to know. I saw what he saw and his observations are genuine (Blanchard's theory is another story). To be frank some of the things written by critics like Dr. McCloskey were quite hard on not only Bailey but on those he named "homosexual" transsexuals.

hi everyone,

the last couple of posts raise some important issues. I think that there are two reasons why many trans women are so vocal about sexuality and gender being different. First, many of us experience them as being different.

When I was first struggling with my desire to be female, I assumed I was gay (based on what I knew mostly from TV). Frankly, I was really surprised and confused when my sex drive kicked in during puberty and I found I was attracted to women. From my own experience, and those of others, I feel strongly that sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression are largely separable in many people, both trans and non-trans alike.

The second reason for the protests, as previous comments suggested, is that we live in a sex negative culture, which means that people who can be sexualized for any reason are delegitimized. It pisses me off when Bailey complains about trans women who refuse to talk about their sexualities, because he has no idea how frustrating it can be to have your entire existence dismissed as a "fetish."

But at the same time, I think some trans women are a little to quick to distance themselves from trans women who are sex workers. As with women more generally, the difference between who is a sex worker and who isn't has way more to do with class and race privilege (and with trans folks, "passing" privilege) than anything else...

We should get it straight that the problem with Bailey's book is not that he compares us to sex workers, but that he nonconsensually sexualizes us.

-julia

If I may piggyback on what Julia's said, it is frustrating as a transsexual person to have my gender and my body reduced to issues of sex. Further, I'm not just a transsexual woman, but I'm also a woman.

While I find the sexualization of transsexual women troubling, I find the contrast to how sexologists view transsexual men to be doubly so. Blanchard and Bailey don't (to my knowledge) address transsexual men. I'm also not aware of any researchers who have reduced transition from woman-to-man as the consequence of a fetish.

It's not just a matter of sexologists dismissing my gender transition, it's a matter of scientists (and society in general) making my life as a woman all about sex. As people have pointed in countless threads on this and other feminist blogs, it's exceeding rare to see men's genders and bodies reduced to sex; which is why I think discussions on Bailey et al. belong on this site-- it's not just a queer issue, it's a feminist issue.

EASTSIDEKATE: "I guess I just think you're missing one of the main points Bailey's critics are making. On the one hand, there has been a sort of professional critique of his methodologies."

I completely agree with you - Bailey is surely heavily influenced by growing up in a society where the sexes are thought to be polar opposites and where gender atypical behavior is stigmatized. In many instances, the insensitivity he displays towards the opinions of transsexual women does make you question what other biases he might hold.

I do think Bailey's worst offense is being so dismissive of the experiences shared by trannsexual women.

As a scientist, I do think it is his responsibility to not simply accept a person's own explanation for their behavior - there are just too many instances in psychology where individuals can have one very detailed view of what caused their behavior but careful experimentation shows that a completely different cause was operating.

But I think his current framing of "if it disagrees with the hypothesis, then it is likely a politically motivated fabrication or narrative that the individual might believe even if it is not true" makes it almost impossible to test his model. There is no doubt he should have been more receptive to ideas that challenge his pre-existing biases - there are just so many trannsexual women who share stories that don't match his framework.

EASTSIDEKATE: "Blanchard and Bailey don't (to my knowledge) address transsexual men. I'm also not aware of any researchers who have reduced transition from woman-to-man as the consequence of a fetish."

I think that is absolutely true.

STASSA: "On the very other hand, and sort of like UCLAbodyimage (who sounds a lot more academic than I'm comfortable with in discussions of gender identity)"

Umm... since I am an academic studying issues related to gender and sexuality I think I'll take that as a compliment :-). At least I sound academic, whatever the reality is :-).

I admit to being completely biased in this area. When I first heard of this controversy, I was completely, utterly, and strongly biased in favor of Bailey.

I knew nothing about the controversy other than the fact that Bailey had proposed a biological model for transsexuality and that some activist groups were really angry about it and started attacking him and his family personally. And that there was some allegation of him having sex with a research participant.

I think there is a natural tendency for people to protect their ingroup - to protect science from constraints from political and social forces. That's how I saw this issue initially.

I think the postings the past year by Julia, Boo, EastsideKate, Elyse, Hfarmer, and others have really opened my eyes to all of the politics and biases operating behind the scenes (among both the researchers and the critics). I just wanted to say that you have really changed the way I think about the issue and that your ideas are having an impact on the way academia functions. As a result of this whole affair, I think there is much more awareness of the issues faced by transsexuals among sex researchers.

On the "Core Autogynephilia Scale," note that seven out of eight questions ask if one has ever been aroused "while" doing something, whereas only one asks if one has ever been aroused "by" something."

Second Wave Feminists smelled the rat in the room when it comes to the male dominated psych establishment years ago. See Anne Koedt's "radical Feminism for Naomi Weisstein's "Psychology Constructs the Female or The Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist (with some attention to the fantasies of his friends, the male biologist and the male anthropologist)

When misogynistic dicks, which is what most psych establishment males are construct women as pathological is it any coincidence that they see male to female transsexuals as pathological? After all male and masculine is normal, female and feminine is abnormal.

Am I alone in noticing how the act of pathologizing is always directed at those people born transsexual who move from male to female and never towards those who move from female to male?

I was a transkid, I came out at 21 in 1969. At that point I liked men, worked as a sales woman and later as a counselor. This made me Androphilic although never in the manner described by Bailey, Blanchard and Lawrence. Later I came out as lesbian and started working in computers. This according to the same set of assholes would make me Autogynaphilic.

The big problem with this label is in the details. Virtually every single woman's fashion magazine sells a brand of AGP. Identification with other women is a part of female sexuality and fashion magazines give women this idealized image for them to fantasize about being. This differs from male oriented magazines where the male gaze is directed towards pictured female as an object upon which he acts.

So basically BB & L are pathologizing some relatively basic components of female sexuality when they occur in transsexual to female people.

This is egregious misogyny made all the more obvious when transsexual to male people are not subjected to the same scrutiny.

We should get it straight that the problem with Bailey's book is not that he compares us to sex workers, but that he nonconsensually sexualizes us.

As should be clear by now, there's a whoooooole lotta different problems with the book. As regards this particular one, I'd have to frame it a bit differently. It seems to me this particular problem is not so much that Bailey talks about transwomen being sex workers, it's that there's an extremely strong undercurrent suggesting that transwomen (at least the young attractive ones he's into) are more or less incapable of being anything but sex workers. There is the consistent suggestion that young transwomen are incapable of forming meaningful committed sexual relationships, both from his choosing to interview sex workers (and more significantly omitting from the book people in those circles he came across who weren't sex workers, like "Victoria"), and from the one story he includes of a transwoman who tried to get out of sex work and got engaged but ended up chucking the engagement and going back to prostituion. I'm sure that individual story is true, but he uses it to try and illustrate a claim that, basically, cheap meaningless sex is all trannies are good for. Like when he rhtorically asks himself if he was going to have sex with a woman who was trans, would he want to know she was trans, and concludes probably not. After all, since she's trans, it could never be anything more than a quickie fling anyway. (And as we all know, cisgendered sex workers never have any trouble finding spouses and leaving that life behind, as evidenced by the documentary Pretty Woman.)

Blanchard and Bailey don't (to my knowledge) address transsexual men.

Under Blanchard's model, trans men are pretty much all "homosexual transsexuals." The existence of huge numbers of gay and bi transguys is basically ignored, I would guess because they haven't yet figured out a way to sexualize them.

@Boo

It seems to me this particular problem is not so much that Bailey talks about transwomen being sex workers, it's that there's an extremely strong undercurrent suggesting that transwomen (at least the young attractive ones he's into) are more or less incapable of being anything but sex workers.

I don't get that from Bailey's book at all. What I see in his book is a reporting of the facts on the ground he saw here in Chicago. Not that all we can be is prostitutes but that many of us are or have been prostitutes. I mean what do you want him to do? Lie.