Bailey’s Baaaack … and He’s Pissed

Apparently, J. Michael Bailey is “back”, and he wants to make himself out as another Jordan Peterson - beset by the onslaught of “woke” attacking his work.  Bailey’s the same researcher who tried to define transgender people based mostly on his interviews of drag queens in a book titled “The Man Who Would Be Queen”.  

Now he’s gotten all hot and bothered about “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD).  A “diagnosis” proposed by Lisa Littman, and has about the same amount of intellectual validity as “Autogynephilia” (AGP) - a diagnosis proposed by Ray Blanchard years ago.  (If you’re interested in the background here, I’ve written a few pieces on Bailey’s work here)

His latest piece (it’s an editorial article, not actual academic research) is titled “My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored, But I Won’t Be”.  Apparently, he’s upset that a paper he co-authored was retracted. 

What was that paper about, again, Michael?  ROGD you say?  So that would be the bizarre concept that Lisa Littman dreamed up after talking to a bunch of Gender Critical parents, and not a single transgender youth?  That concept?  

Yup, sure sounds like it.  Littman’s 2018 paper was trash too - for the fundamental reason that it failed to actually explore what was happening with transgender youth, and for massive sampling bias.  What answers did you think you were going to get when the primary avenues of soliciting responses was through web forums full of Gender Critical parents?  

The Littman paper also made the assumption that “social contagion” was a valid construct when talking about gender identity, but never even made so much as an effort to look at it and validate the construct either through other literature, or as part of the research.  No, Littman just assumed it was valid the same way that Blanchard decided that transgender women “get aroused by the idea of having a vagina”, and that’s why they transition. 

Uh - no, Michael - that wasn’t “activist outrage”.  That was plain bad science, and anyone with a reasonable amount of understanding of the fundamentals of study design would pick up on.  It was striking that Littman’s paper was based on information from the parents, and not once did Littman talk to the teens being described.  Further, did Littman go to websites where people were trying to figure out how to support their children? No - she went to some of the most rancid websites on the internet and posted it there.  I can’t imagine how that would turn out (snark).  

I don’t know the full story behind the parting of ways between Littman and Brown University. I can only presume that when actual experts weighed in on the 2018 paper, and Littman’s refusal to do more than publish a minor revision to the title that perhaps things didn’t exactly go in Littman’s favour.  Universities are more than a little sensitive to having their names associated with Junk Science.

Here we also get a hint as to where Bailey is going.  Note the use of the word “progressive community”.  Now, I don’t know exactly what he means here, but it sounds a lot like he’s basically saying “OMG, look what’s happening over there!”, while he tries to claim some moral higher ground.  The problem is that he’s trying to imply some kind of “social contagion” is going on with groups of adolescent girls.  

Now we start getting into the particulars of this latest paper.  We have an “anonymous” author who just happens to have a transgender child that they think is experiencing ROGD.  At that point, didn’t it occur to you Michael that you have all sorts of problems with bias in the fundamental design of the study?  Did it not come to mind that perhaps this was repeating the mistakes that Littman has made in her study? You, of all people, with decades of academic experience should know how to identify flaws in the study design and approach that this person was taking.  

Oh wait - so not only did you repeat the fundamental error of the original Littman study (only talking to parents of transgender youth), you repeated the second error of recruiting only from sources where parents already believed the idea of ROGD?  That doesn’t “limit the research”, it all but invalidates it.  Those are such fundamental flaws that any objective review of the study design should have resulted in it being thrown in the wastebin. 

Which is exactly what other researchers demanded be done a range of concerns:

Here’s a link to the open letter.  Yes, it’s as bad as you might expect at this point, and the authors of the letter point out additional aspects of the “research” that are enormously problematic, not only for the paper itself, but for the general issue of ethics in research.  

Bailey goes on in his tirade to extoll the great wisdom of Ken Zucker, but let’s also remember that he has long acted as a skeptic of transgender youth in particular.  Ultimately, he was pushed out of Toronto’s CAMH gender clinic for using therapeutic strategies that were looking increasingly like conversion therapy techniques.  Zucker unquestionably made significant contributions to research on transgender people - in the 80s and 90s.  That’s a long time ago now.  For the last number of years, he has been part of  an increasingly isolated group that continue to promote constructs like AGP and now ROGD, while being considerably out of step with where the bulk of the literature has been pointing. 

Wrapping up his tirade, Bailey swears that he’s going to launch this huge, long term study.  Until such times as he publishes the study’s design, I’m going to assume he’s going to repeat the same errors.  His past track record doesn’t give me much reason to believe otherwise, and frankly collaborating with both Littman and Zucker on this study is hardly making me optimistic.  

Just to put my $0.02 in on study design, I don’t see one study here, I see a need for several studies that need to be done, and a lot of deep, detailed research in order to make it all fit together. 

First, a study needs to be undertaken to explore the notion of “social contagion” and to validate whether or not it is even applicable to gender identity.  I’ll be quite blunt, as it has been used to this point, the construct comes across as very similar to “tabula rasa” (blank slate) theory which led John Money to advocate that David Reimer be raised as a girl.  The outcome of that experiment was tragic indeed, but it’s also indicative that gender identity is not some easily mutable trait that is going to be influenced by peer pressure in school. Just about every transgender adult’s story seems to back that up - the peer pressure to conform with social expectations was crushing, and still they ended up transitioning. 

Second, once you have some sense that “social contagion” has a reasonable degree of validity, then you can set about designing a study that examines the distinction between “onset” of gender dysphoria (e.g.  when a person starts talking about it) and the actual experience of gender in the individual.  This applies just as much to adults as it does to youth.  Developmental psychology research shows quite clearly that children have a working understanding of gender somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5.  Such a study will help you design tools to assess the experience of the person. 

Third, once you have designed your tools for assessing traits, you will need to execute studies to demonstrate that they have appropriate levels of construct validity (that is to say that they assess what they’re supposed to), and that they are reasonably reliable.  

Then, and only then, do you have the fundamental materials you need to execute your longer term study.  Any reasonable version of such a study will need to:  

Recruit participants broadly. Recruiting participants solely from websites with specific biases isn’t anywhere near acceptable. 

Researchers will need to do more than just talk to the parents of transgender youth.  You MUST talk to the youth directly

Researchers will also need to assess the dynamics within the families, as well as those within the social circles of the youth.  In other words, are the youth reporting what they think they want their parents to hear; are they being given certain messages at home; etc.

The concept of “desistance” is going to come up here.  It will need to be carefully defined for the purposes of the study, because it has been grossly misused in the past, and if not carefully considered will become a serious problem in the analysis of any data gathered. 

If, after all of that analysis, you can find a considerable pattern of “peer influence” resulting in gender dysphoria being expressed, then you might have a credible basis for proposing an explanation like ROGD.  

I do not expect Bailey’s proposed study to be anywhere near this level of complexity and clarity.  He, along with Littman, have already demonstrated that they have an axe to grind.  I fully expect to see a repetition of the same errors that launched so much criticism of Littman’s original paper. 

Wow, Walt - Generalize Much?

If the latest utterances from Walt Heyer were the first you had ever heard from him, you could easily be forgiven for believing that the man had never had anything to do with the transgender community.  

Women—Simply Men with no Snoopy 

The real war on women today is being waged on the female gender by men who remove their tallywacker (Snoopy) and declare they are full-fledged women. 

These people, transgenders who are just men with no Snoopy, can use your restrooms and change the gender designation on their birth records and other ID to female. They’ll show you birth gender females a swinging thing or two by legally proving that you females are the same as men, just with no Snoopy. 

Transgender women, manufactured from men by surgery, have more protections under the law then you pesky women who were born female. 

Depending on what your view of female is, you may see transgender females (i.e., men who removed their tallywacker) as lovable little fuzzballs who need to be protected from the wacko, transphobic, homophobic, bigoted gender normals who were born male and female. 

Perhaps you see transgender women as men who enjoy what looks like childish play gone psycho with dress-up taken to extreme–copious amounts of makeup, flamboyant mannerisms, surgical breasts, facial work and yes, the removal of the old useless trouser snake known as "Snoopy." 

This post was prompted by talking with a woman I know who is outraged that birth gender women do not march by the thousands against lawmakers. She is appalled that a man without a dangling participle is made legally equivalent to a birth female. She feels that laws that protect surgically-produced replicas of women denigrate and ridicule real women and the female gender. 

In effect, the lawmakers are now saying that women are simply men with no Snoopy. Like it or not, it is the sign of our times.   

Walt Heyer

Apparently in Heyer's fevered mind, trans people are now part of the "war on women".  I'm not sure how he arrives at this, since it is conservative Republicans who are busily passing laws that disproportionately affect women for the worse, making reproductive health care all the harder to access, or forcing unwanted invasive procedures on women.

His characterization of transgender people as a whole sounds like something out of a couple of nights spent getting drunk in a drag bar, on par with the research that Bailey did for his book a few years ago.  It's funny how Heyer comes up with all sorts of generalizations about trans people, and yet I would wager he wouldn't be able to identify half of the trans people he interacts with on a daily basis.  

If recognizing women of transsexual history as women is somehow "denigrating" or "ridiculing" natal women, I'd love to hear just how that works.  I have yet to meet a transsexual whose life and experience could be argued as "denigrating" of women.  The only people that make such arguments are usually Radical Feminists and ultra-conservative religious demagogues who seem to think that womanhood (or manhood) are defined by chromosomes.  I have never seen a coherent argument which supports the contention that a MtF transsexual is somehow co-opting the female experience.

If Heyer was to actually think things through, what he would realize is that in many respects the places where law has engaged with the language of gender, it is no longer useful to do so.  Does it matter if your driver's license stipulates gender?  Probably not.  Last I checked, women can be just as lead-footed as men, and the speeding ticket is the same either way.  Outside of certain statistical applications, gender is utterly irrelevant.

Of course, in areas such as health care, women have specific needs that must be met that a male bodied person will never need.  I know of no transsexuals who stand in opposition to proper medical care for women.

Frankly, I'm beginning to suspect that Heyer is just jealous of the successful transitions that others have made simply because of his own failings.  

Lies, Damned Lies and Lousy Research

I'm a little late coming to this story - others have covered it before me, mostly because I haven't had time to give it the analysis it so richly deserves.

Entitled Legalizing Deception: Why “Gender Identity” Should Not be Added to Anti-discrimination Legislation, this article from Catholic Exchange comes as no real surprise, given the utterances from Pope Ratzinger.

However, this article is sufficiently awful as to deserve being examined in some detail. Superficially, it almost appears to have been researched fairly well and only on closer inspection do the problems with the foundations become apparent.

Such legislation is designed to give legal protections to those who reject the sex they were born with and want to be publicly accepted as the other sex -– the so-called ‘transsexuals,’ ‘transgendered,’ ‘gender queer,’ transvestites, and others. Such persons deceive themselves, deceive others, and are being deceived by mental health professionals and surgeons. The public is being deceived by the media and activists into believing that so-called ‘transsexuals’ were born with biological problems that are remedied by surgery and that it is possible to change your sex.

As an opening thesis, this sets the tone for the rest of the argument - essentially it is the often used claim that the transsexual is "deceiving" others. It also takes a gratuitous swipe at the treatment professionals that assist transpeople with the challenges that they face.

Let's see what else they have to say, shall we?

One lie leads to another. A clearly male person presents himself in public as a woman. He has had surgery and hormone treatments to perfect his impersonation and he demands that we pretend this makes him a woman. He wants us to use female pronouns when speaking of him and to allow him to use the ladies’ restroom. He also wants to change his birth certificate and driver’s license. While some persons who present as the other sex are obviously not the sex they pretend to be, others are able to deceive their sexual partners without informing them of their true sexual identity.

Persons who present themselves in public as the other sex say they need such protections because they are afraid of violence. This fear is real. When someone is deceived — particularly in such a personal matter has the sex of an intimate partner or potential spouse — anger is an understandable reaction. Violent acts can never be condoned, but if such legislation is passed those who have been deceived will be denied any legal recourse and the deceivers will be portrayed as victims.

If one were to blithely accept the thesis that transsexuals are "deceptive", this tautology makes sense. However, that is precisely the kind of reasoning that the defense in the Angie Zapata case tried. This "blame the victim" logic is wrong - no matter the circumstances. It has been tried repeatedly over the years, whether we are talking about rape, gay bashing or trans bashing.

However, the author is just warming his audience up at this point, before delving into his attempt to render transsexualism irrelevant or invalid as a condition. To do this, he turns to a particularly debatable bit of hypothesis:

Some males are autogynephiles, who began in adolescence to engage in paraphilic transvestite fetishism. A paraphilia is a sexual attraction to something other than another person. In this case a man is sexually aroused by to the image of himself as a woman.

The whole notion of autogynephilia is the invention of Anne Lawrence and Ray Blanchard. I know that Anne Lawrence self-identifies as autogynephilic, and she has written extensively about the concept. Many in the transsexual community disagree strongly with the very notion of autogynephilia - especially as a broad diagnostic notion.

My own thoughts on the idea have undergone some changes recently. I don't accept the idea as describing all transsexuals - it may describe a subset of those who seek transition and surgery, but I doubt that it describes very many. However, as a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago revealed, the notion of autogynephilia should not be used to exclude someone from access to surgery, since the post-surgical results for these people is generally positive. In other words, even if a transsexual is autogynephilic, that is far from fully describing the situation that individual is dealing with. (This conversation was with someone in the research/treatment community, and he had some very interesting things to say)

Those who are obsessed with the idea of being the other sex often resist therapy. They refuse to look at the psychological reasons for their desires. Some mental health professionals, frustrated by their inability to treat this disorder and concerned about their clients’ obvious dysphoria, are willing to go along with this deception. They give in to their clients’ demands and recommend a surgical solution to what they as therapists know is a mental health problem. They deceive their clients into believing that a “sex change” is possible.

The “sex change” surgeons know they can’t change a persons’ sex, they can only create a non-functional appearance of the other sex, but they also know they will be well paid for their skill and so go along with the deception.

These paragraphs grossly malign the treatment professionals who work with transsexuals. It characterizes them as "giving up" or worse being in it "just for the money". This is a gross misrepresentation of a group of professionals who came up with the WPATH Standards of Care, which are so carefully structured to ensure that the right steps are being taken.

Transsexuals are not typically resistant to therapy, but transsexualism in general doesn't respond to the therapy techniques used for other conditions such as OCD. There's decades worth of evidence for this. One cannot even call it an obsession and be correct in understanding what is going on.

This is not atypical when someone writes about transsexualism without actually understanding the condition itself, or worse, has a political agenda firmly rooted in perpetuating ignorance.

Lawrence also points out that when autogynephiles are not accepted as the sex they want to be they can be vulnerable to narcissistic rage, which is defined as the “disproportionate, compulsive pursuit of revenge that seeks to obliterate both the offense and the offender.”[6] ...
If you want to understand the full potential of such wrath, consider the case of John Michael Bailey, whose book The Man who would be Queen provoked retaliation from a small group of persons who didn’t like being labeled autogynephiles. They used the Internet to make outrageous accusations against Bailey, attacking his children, trying to turn colleagues against him, and to have him fired from his job.[8]

Ummm...no. Attempting to connect two, dramatically unrelated topics in this kind of manner is beyond irresponsible.

First of all, Bailey was castigated for publishing a book based on arguably awful research.

The broad base of the transgender community is rightly upset by that book, and seriously question both the validity of Bailey's work as well has his motives. Far too many people who have read Bailey's book have concluded that it doesn't describe their experience of being transsexual to accept it as being even remotely descriptive of the condition overall.

Lawrence applies the following clinical description of narcissistic rage to Bailey’s opponents:

…need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims… There is utter disregard for reasonable limitations and a boundless wish to redress an injury and to obtain revenge… The fanaticism of the need for revenge and the unending compulsion of having to square the account after an offense…The narcissistically injured… cannot rest until he has blotted out [the]… offender who dared to oppose him, to disagree with him.

Even if only a small number of autogynephiles are prone to narcissistic revenge, they could cause incredible harm to anyone who speaks the truth. They would see injury everywhere, file complaints, and institute lawsuits.

Has Anne Lawrence interviewed even a reasonable number of the people outraged by Bailey's book? That isn't a clinical description, it's conjecture. In this, I respect Ms. Lawrence's choice to defend someone whose work she respects. However, I do not think that it is even remotely reasonable to make such projections without actually doing some kind of sensible study of the people you are attempting to describe.

The laws adding “gender identity” to anti-discrimination legislation would allow men and women with serious psychological disorders, some of whom are prone to narcissistic rage and revenge to use the law to persecute business owners who are attempting to protect the privacy of customers in restrooms and locker rooms.

Oh yes, the "freak in the locker room/washroom" argument. This is nothing more than a sadly inadequate attempt to excuse discrimination and bigotry. While Ms. Lawrence has connected Narcissistic Rage to non-passing autogynephiles, I think that such a connection is at best debatable. I would like to see some population studies to investigate such claims. For now, I think it's important to note that the diagnostic criteria for Gender Identity Disorder make it quite clear that such a diagnosis should only be made in the absence of other significant disorders.

Further, most transsexuals are considerably better able to cope with adverse situations after transition than before. Also, the article is attempting to falsely characterize transsexuals as unstable and suffering from serious mental illnesses beyond their gender identity issues. Again, this is rarely the case, and the diagnostic criteria in the DSM IV TR safeguard against such situations.

And it gets worse. In some places, at age 11 these children who think they are the other sex are given puberty-blocking hormones so that secondary sexual characteristics do not appear. Then they are given hormones proper to the other sex, so that at age 18 they can be surgically mutilated. In other words, the entire educational, psychological, and medical establishment is conspiring to see that these children never receive proper treatment. There is no research on the long-term effects of these hormone treatments on developing the bodies and brain. Do we really believe that 11-year-old children have the judgment necessary to decide to permanently surrender their sexual identity and reproductive potential?

Worse? Obviously the author has no idea that the Endocrine Society has drafted treatment guidelines for transsexual persons - based quite strongly on the WPATH Standards of Care I referenced earlier.

... and yes, an 11 year old in the early stages of puberty (Tanner Stage 1 or Stage 2), may well have more than enough awareness of their inner gender being at odds with their body. Far too many transsexuals report awareness of something being awry long before any social gender awareness would have started to develop to ignore. While not all youth who experience cross-gender identity become transsexuals as adults, the interesting thing about the puberty stalling drugs is that once they are taken out of the picture, puberty can proceed normally (if a few years late, perhaps)

The interesting counter point is that even though a smaller fraction of childhood GID patients go on to pursue GRS as adults, the author has failed to note that by far the majority used to end up living as gay males. (At least in Dr. Richard Green's study). What would happen with these individuals if they had the option to transition during their formative teenage years? We do not know yet, but I suspect that we will find out in the years to come.

Sadly, the author of the column at Catholic Exchange appears to have gone out to find literature to support his preconceived notions about transsexuals, rather than bothering to educate himself about the topic as a whole. In doing so, his article rests almost entirely upon the heavily disputed works of Bailey, Blanchard and Lawrence.

To be perfectly honest, I would like to think that Anne Lawrence would be horrified to find her work being used in such a ham-handed manner to justify denying transsexuals protection from discrimination.

Check The Quality of Your Sources ...

I ran across this article which attempts to explain transgenderism in terms of homosexuality.

On first glance, it seems as though the author has made a sincere effort to do some serious research to build his position. As usual, when one starts digging through a paper like this more seriously, you quickly realize that the author doesn't really know what they are talking about.

Consider the following:

Transsexualism: A subset of transgenderism where the affected person desires to be the opposite sex and seeks sex-reassignment surgery and cross-hormone treatment. Transsexuals tend to cluster into two groups: those with straightforward opposite-sex identification and a more variable group consisting of those with opposite-sex identification in conjunction with autogynephilia.

Hmmm...I've read this before. Oh yes, it's a recycle of Blanchard's autogynephilia model, which Michael Bailey, Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence keep pushing. (and mercifully, only a handful of others)

And whom does the author cite?

1. ^ R. Blanchard, J Nerv Ment Dis 177, 616 (Oct, 1989).
2. ^ S. J. Bradley et al., Arch Sex Behav 20, 333 (Aug, 1991).
3. ^ R. Blanchard, J Sex Marital Ther 17, 235 (Winter, 1991).

Why, Dr. Blanchard himself. The use of the term autogynephilia might have existed in the DSM-IV, but I do note that my copy of the DSM IV-TR which is a more recent edition mysteriously does not contain 'autogynephilia' at all.

Thus passes the first mistake in the writing. Not only has the author chosen a poor classification model, but he seems to have chosen one that isn't exactly in widespread use.

The next mistake arises in what appears to be a quote lifted from another source (not one that is cited, sadly):

A number of transsexuals do not like being labeled homosexual. To address this issue, one should distinguish sex from gender identity. A person with male sex who has a female gender identity and is attracted to men would self-classify as a heterosexual because he believes that he is a woman. However, the standard conceptualization of a homosexual is based on biological sex, not gender identity.

Ummm...no. This is a very poor description of the distinction between a transsexual and a homosexual. The first point of error here is the anchoring upon "biological sex". The second point of error is to conflate someone's sexual identity with their gender identity.

Consider the following. A Male-to-Female Transsexual that identifies as heterosexual is attracted to men, as a woman. That is to say, she wants to interact with those men as a woman, and that includes in her intimate engagements with them. That is quite different from a homosexual male who is attracted to men, but wants to interact with those men as a man.

This is important, because it draws out a key distinction between gender and sexual identity. Further, it breaks the author's attempt to combine two distinct subjects. An additional consideration that needs to be examined is the fact that there are transsexuals who identify and live quite openly as homosexuals, and some bisexuals as well. The point being that one may transition gender roles, and still end up with an atypical sexual identity.

You might argue that because the author is building his argument up on the basis that sexual identity is based on biology that his argument holds. What I am bringing up here is that in fact it does not hold, especially when we are talking not so much about the physical aspects of sexuality, but the social aspects of sexual attraction. Further, as I have asserted above, gender and sexual identities are arguably quite distinct and deserve to be treated as such.

After making these mistakes, the author leaps into a series of arguments that fall into the "coincidence does not equate to causality" category.

Psychiatric morbidity, specifically of personality, mood, dissociative, and psychotic disorders is especially elevated among individuals with sex-identity disorders, and sex-identity disorders often occur as secondary to some other mental disorder.14 For instance, delusions about one’s physical appearance and a desire to drastically alter one’s looks are not unusual among schizophrenics;15, 16 about 25% of schizophrenics experience cross-sex identification at some point in their life.17, 18, 19, 20 The association between schizophrenia and increased odds of homosexuals interests is well-documented.

I love the use of terminology here. "Psychiatric Morbidity" - such a worrisome sounding bit of clinical language. All it really means is that some has a psychiatric condition of some sort or another. Given the breadth of what is contained in the DSM IV, that is hardly an indication of anything serious.

However, that is not my point here. The author is inferring that there is a direct relationship between atypical sexual or gender identity and various forms of mental illness. What he quietly ignores is the understanding that many of the co-existing conditions that occur in GLBT people are a direct consequence of the stresses of a hostile social context, not of being GLBT.

As for an increased probability that someone with schizophrenia will exhibit homosexual tendencies, that strikes as neither here nor there, since it doesn't follow from that reasoning that there is an increase in the chance of developing schizophrenia as a result of being GLBT. (although I'm sure the author would love for us to infer that, he fails to provide the evidence to make such a claim, and I dare say any such evidence would be very weak indeed)

Perhaps one of the funnier bits is the following attempt to link handedness to sexual and gender identity:

Left-handedness is associated with prenatal developmental disturbances, as evidenced by a higher incidence of first trimester-originating minor physical defects among left-handers.30 Behaviorally feminine boys who wish to be girls manifest elevated left-handedness/non-right-handedness.31 Both homosexuals32 and transsexuals33, 34 manifest elevated left-handedness/non-right-handedness.

Okay, so there is an increased number of left-handed people who are GLBT. Even if there is such a correlation, what of it? That's like looking at the department where I work, and wondering how it is that so many left-handed people wound up in our company's research department.

Left-handedness may or may not in fact have anything to do with prenatal development. To this point, we do not know, and to assume that there is any relationship between handedness and gender identity is going to be amazingly weak without serious amounts of corroborating data.

Lastly, through the entire article, the writer constantly combines sexual and gender identity related characteristics as if they are one in the same. In doing so, he tells us a great deal about how little he truly understands of the distinctions. There are some very good reasons why the relationship between the broad GLB community and the T community is very tenuous at times. Not the least of which is the reality that cross-gender identity is just as unsettling to GLB folk as it is to the straight community.

The author's credibility with me is already weak. Basing an argument heavily on the work of Bailey and Blanchard in particular is suspect indeed. Constantly confusing gender and sexual identity issues further erodes what little credibility he starts with. The reality of the writer's obvious bias shows up in this little bit of apologetics for Paul Cameron, a man whose research has long been discredited because of sloppy logic, and horrible methodologies - not to mention the man's blatant biases.

Dr. J. Michael Bailey Admits To Bad Science?

My 'bots are dredging interesting stuff up this morning. Today, I find myself pointed to a transcription of a radio interview with Alice Dreger and J. Michael Bailey that follows up on my earlier post on the furor over Bailey's book.

There's two things that leap out at me in this interview - and they are both statements by Bailey.

Bailey: Well, sure thing. This would be a pretty simple matter to tell you what the book was if there hadn’t been an intentional attempt to defame me and my book. I wrote what is commonly understood to be a popular science book, in which I reviewed serious academic work by myself and other scholars. And the serious scholar who did the traditional academic work, peer reviewed and published in respectable journals, who wrote about transsexuals, is a guy named Ray Blanchard from Toronto, who I think is the world’s expert in transsexualism. And I, kind of coincidentally, because they came to me and wanted to talk to me and tell me about themselves, I came to know a group of transsexual women in Chicago. I was struck when I got to know them that there seemed to be these two completely, utterly distinct types of transsexuals, and I had not known about that. I subsequently became familiar with Ray Blanchard’s work, which was published in the 80s and early 90s, and it completely explained what I was seeing. It made me understand. And so I consulted gender experts, allegedly, such as Randi Ettner, and I read autobiographies of transsexuals, and I was struck by how they don’t write about what I could plainly see with my eyes and was there in Ray Blanchard’s work. And so I decided to write my book in part because of this.

In short, Bailey is essentially arguing that Ray Blanchard's theory supercedes all the other work and study of cross-gender identified people (and in particular, transsexuals) as an explanatory model. While I don't think Blanchard is anywhere near the mark in his classification and evaluation of the evidence, I don't want to entirely dismiss his work which may well contain some valid observations. In short, the jury's still out on this one - I think the evidence I have seen substantially calls into question Blanchard's interpretation of things.

Additionally, Bailey appears to be admitting that his clinical work has not substantially been involved with transgender people, and that isn't an "area of specialization" for him. Which is roughly equivalent to this author writing a book on machine intelligence and claiming that I'm an authority in the subject when my own dalliances in software have only touched upon the notion from time to time.

It's the second part of Bailey's statement that leaves me a little thunderstruck. Basically, Bailey has admitted here to writing a book based on what he and Blanchard infer from what I will broadly call the "transsexual narrative" - oddly in areas such as sexual identity that he freely admits do not appear to any great degree in the narratives themselves. This is as close to a tacit admission of intellectual hackery as I've seen come from an author with Bailey's credentials.

I realize that in science one has to "read between the lines" that the evidence before you contains (whether we are talking about psychology or particle physics), but there are degrees to which such inferences can be made and supported. However, if transsexuals don't talk about their sexual identity in their narrative, it's probably because it isn't important to the discussion of gender identity!

This one statement is the gem that puts the whole Bailey/Blanchard thing into perspective - regardless of the actions of those who sought to intimidate or bully Bailey. His book, and theoretical assertions, are at best transcriptions of Blanchard's work, and inflated considerably by whatever anecdotal evidence Bailey chose to interpret through Blanchard's model.

It's a sad statement that the subtitle of Bailey's book talks of "The Science of Transsexualism", when more and more it becomes clear that very little science was actually involved in the writing of that book.

Dr. Michael Bailey and The Botched Theory

Recently, there's been quite a bit of rumbling in the blogosphere about this report on what happened to Psychologist J. Michael Bailey after he published a book entitled The Man Who Would Be Queen in 2003.

The book itself touched off a furor among transsexual and transgender people, in large part because Bailey's theory flew in the face of their individual experiences. I'll leave the dissection of Bailey's "theory" to others. In my view, it is sufficient to say that his theoretical construct is a bit of a "reductio ad absurdum" that attempts to define gender identity in terms of sexual identity... and in doing so fails utterly to address the narrative so common among transsexuals. I do not think Bailey is necessarily a homophobe (or transphobe, I guess), rather he just doesn't "get it".

That Bailey is reviled among the transsexual community is not a huge surprise. When your work is cited and reviewed favorably by NARTH, you have to know that the affected communities are not going to be overly impressed. When you walk up to an entire group of people and tell them that their experiences and self-definition are "invalid" in some way, you guarantee that you will earn their animosity. When the argument used is seen by many as weak, or not well supported by the evidence, then you can expect to experience a persistent and stubborn backlash.

The report I mentioned earlier does describe some pretty awful things that have been done by a few in response to Bailey's book. I do not condone threats of harm or outright attempts to blackball the man professionally.

That said, many are trying to claim that Bailey's experience is "chilling" to academic freedom. I disagree. Bailey's book is a mass market publication, which puts it firmly in the public square when it comes to the political discourse. Perhaps where Bailey's biggest error lies is in the reality that not only did he publish the book relying on his credentials to bolster his argument's credibility, he failed to put forth a compelling body of evidence to support his argument.

Perhaps this comment from Bailey (via Lifesite) tells us this most clearly:

Referring to the bitter controversy surrounding the work, Bailey stated on his website "Although the critics have produced a litany of alleged sins, their main complaint is something that I actually do write, and believe."

Well, since Bailey claims to be a scientist, he should be well aware that if he is going to put forth an argument that flies in the face of a great deal of evidence, his own model and evidence has to be pretty compelling. Simply writing a book like that from a perspective of "what he believes" would qualify as both irresponsible and a serious mistake.