David Buss is an American evolutionary psychologist whose life’s work is dedicated to maintaining and reinforcing a sex binary.
Buss is a frequent supporter of anti-trans psychologist J. Michael Bailey. Of all the people in the investigation to date, Buss has the most overlapping interests and experiences with Bailey:
Buss earned a doctorate in the notoriously anti-trans psychology department at University of California, Berkeley in 1981.
Buss was married to Cynthia Louise “Cindy” Refhues (1958-2012) in 1981.
The Man Who Would Be Queen
He was cited in promotional materials for Bailey’s book.
âBailey is one of a rare breed of writers who manages to combine first-rate science with deep
psychological understanding, resulting in great breadth of vision. He takes us on an unforgettable
journey into the minds and lives of feminine men. Bailey skillfully interweaves vivid case studies
with cutting-edge scientific findings, placing both in a deep historical context from the sexual
playground of ancient Greece to the dilemmas of gender in the modern world. Refreshingly
candid, remarkably free of ideology, this book is destined to become a modern classic in the field.
But readers should be prepared to have some cherished assumptions about human nature
shattered.â
â David M. Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind
Sexuality and Its Disorders
College textbooks on psychology and human sexuality are consistently among the most transphobic knowledge produced in academia. A 2017 textbook by Mike Abrams lays out Buss’s views.
Teachings
A reader reports:
“Every Spring semester since 2016, Dr. Buss has co-taught PSY 306: Introduction to Human Sexuality, a seminar class, with Dr. Cindy Meston. The class is taught in a live-streaming, online format. There’s a little studio on-campus. The professors show up 15 minutes before class time, then sit in the studio to give their lecture in front of some cameras and a small live studio audience of 20 of their students. That lecture gets broadcast live to a much larger number of students – typically between 250 – 700 students each semester. So, 1000s of students have seen this class. Each semester, there is a lecture on Gender Dysphoria. I’ve attached a .txt file of the transcript. Here’s a particularly concerning section from that class (as spoken by Dr. Meston):
I think what’s happening is that people are more aware of the disorder. Absolutely, people like Jazz Jennings. This is the little girl that was on the 20/20 video you watched. She is now a huge voice for the transgendered community. She’s set up a foundation. She’s done a lot of good will for the transgender community. She has put out many videos giving advice and education. She’s had a reality show.
There was actually the first transgendered doll launched a few years ago in her image. So people like this, people like, and a few years ago, the very first transgendered Playmate appeared.
So what’s happening is there’s a lot more talk about transgender, a lot of famous people have come forward to talk about their struggle with gender dysphoria, and so this has been, has had a remarkable good impact, I believe, in the sense that, when it’s so much more visible and so much more talked about, people become educated.
They learn about the disorder, and when you learn about a disorder then you’re less afraid of it. And not always, sadly, but a lot of the time, people become more accepting, and you know, we see now, compared to even a decade ago, that there are policy changes made with regard to transgendered individuals in, for example, washrooms.
So that’s something that never would have occurred even, you know, a decade ago. So this awareness has clearly made many people more comfortable in coming forward and talking about their problem, and seeking help, which is a good thing.
Now, I want to mention, just on the other hand, why sometimes social media may not be in one’s best interest. So what is happening is that, among young people, teenagers, early 20s, there’s this rise in the prevalence rates of gender dysphoric individuals. That’s really unusual and it doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of what we know clinically, and have known for many, many years about individuals who have gender dysphoria.
So, for example, adults, who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they almost always have been either diagnosed as having childhood gender identity dysphoria, or gender dysphoria I should say, and if not diagnosed as a child, they showed signs as a child. Their tales are that they have struggled with this most of their lives, or there has been some pattern very early on that there were signs of gender dysphoria. This group that has emerged in young people presents a very different picture.
They present, often, as suddenly realizing they’re gender dysphoric, and so some researchers are concerned by this, and clinicians, and have talked about this disorder, which has been given the name rapid-onset gender dysphoria. And rapid-onset gender dysphoria is exactly as it sounds, the development of gender dysphoria begins suddenly, during or after puberty, in adolescents or a young adult, who would not have met the criteria in childhood.
So this is not a typical etiology because, as I just described, the typical etiology is that they would’ve met the criteria in childhood. And so this has led to a debate or a discussion in the research and clinical community as to the possible role of social media and online content in possibly leading a group of young adults to self-diagnosing themselves incorrectly as having gender dysphoria.
Now, we know that, oftentimes, depression, or anxiety, or autism, individuals along the autism spectrum, some of you may have heard the term, Asperger’s. This term is no longer used in the DSM, it’s now just considered part of the autism spectrum, but it refers to individuals who struggle somewhat with social aspects of their lives.
And sometimes, what may be happening is individuals who are experiencing some type of mental disorder, they google on the internet, or they do some research online to figure out what’s wrong with them, and there’s so much information out there now on transgendered individuals, that they may be incorrectly identifying as a transgendered individual as opposed to some other underlying mental disorder.
$325,000+ in salaries for Zucker & Blanchard to pathologize trans people
Transgender taxpayers in Canada help foot the bill for their own pathologization, helping to pay nearly $328,000 in 2008 to two conservative Toronto psychologists working to turn back the clock on the rights of sex and gender minorities worldwide.Public disclosure documents show that Ray Blanchard was paid over $172,000 in 2008, and Kenneth Zucker was paid over $155,500. Both men work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. This former “lunatic asylum” is home to the most notorious and regressive facility in the world dedicated to preventing and “curing” gender non-conforming behavior in children and adults.
Both Blanchard and Zucker are also heavily involved in the political push within psychology to continue labeling sex and gender minorities as disordered and diseased. Homosexuality was depathologized in 1973, but these men have an obvious and substantial financial interest in not just maintaining the status quo, but in expanding the definitions of sexual “disorders” that can be applied to all people. Their CAMH clinics are major recipients of taxpayer funds via the provincial and federal healthcare systems in Canada, so more “disordered” people mean more money for their clinics and themselves.
Motivations
Both men are not just driven by money. They are also driven by a desire to promote their own reactionary beliefs about sex and gender minorities.
Zucker is the world’s foremost proponent of reparative therapy for gender-variant youth. The few clinics that do this reparative therapy treat up to 30 times more children assigned as boys at birth. This remarkable statistic reflects the deeper hatred of boys who are “too feminine.”
Zucker’s therapy for these children includes forcing them to stop wearing pink or purple, or creating art with those colors. He also prohibits playing with or drawing pictures of girls. Parents are expected to enforce this behavior through withholding attention and affection until the children conform.
Blanchard seeks a broad expansion of the definition of “paraphilia” to include anyone attracted to someone who is not “phenotypically normal.” Under such a definition, being attracted to people who are obese, disabled, or even taller or shorter than “normal” could be reduced to a paraphilic disorder. Blanchard reserves special contempt for transsexual women, for whom he has created a rigid taxonomy in which they are either a type of gay man or a sexually obsessed fetishist. He once declared to the Toronto Globe and Mail that a transsexual woman who has transitioned is merely “a man without a penis,” echoing his fixation on “phallometrics,” the measurement of penile length, width, and tumescence when subjects are exposed to erotic stimuli. The field of “phallometrics” was developed by Blanchard’s mentor at CAMH to determine if army recruits were gay or not. Blanchard, who has not disclosed his own sexual orientation publicly, is considered an expert in determining the size and tumescence of male genitalia.
Decades of self-preservation and self-promotion
American citizens Blanchard and Zucker left the United States for Canada in the midst of the Vietnam War, then stayed in Canada after President Ford declared amnesty for draft evaders. This instinct for self-preservation is echoed in their efforts to keep taxpayer money flowing into their clinics. They frequently claim in their defense that they support medical procedures for trans people, but that is because any tax money allotted for that went directly to their clinics. Their support of these procedures meant more money for them. When they did control all acccess to trans health services in Ontario, they rejected more than 90% of applicants at their clinics and were known for long wait lists and regressive requirements. This led most trans people in Canada to seek health services from other sources. CAMH’s own Diversity Program Office published a report critical of their approach and attitudes toward the trans people they are paid to serve. They have responded to criticisms from outside their organization by using CAMH lawyers to threaten SLAPP suits. In one instance, they threatened Professor Lynn Conway with a libel suit for simply posting a link to another website.
Both men have methodically worked to shore up their job security over the years by politicking their way into key positions at organizations that set policy around sex and gender minorities. Zucker and Blanchard are hoping to codify their ideologies in the 2012 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Both are on the committee dealing with sex and gender “disorders” along with several like-minded associates. They seek deeper entrenchment of existing “diseases” and a broad expansion of concepts like “paraphilia” to include attraction to anyone who is not “phenotypically normal.” By most accounts, their efforts will likely be rewarded, and their worldview will be codified for more than a decade. The next edition of the DSM would not be published until after both men are retirement age in the 2020s.
Any funding secured for trans health directly benefits them
Though many in the Ontario transgender community have been critical of these men for years, activists have had limited success. That’s because most funding for trans health services goes directly to CAMH, who’ve had a controlling monopoly over the lives of trans people. Until the tax dollars that keep these bigots in business are diverted to better options, any funding victory for trans people in Ontario will be an even bigger victory for CAMH and its employees.
Effectively, the Ontario Ministry of Health is subsidizing the pathologization and stigmatization of transgender people worldwide by funding these CAMH “experts.” It’s time to let Ontario legislators know the harm they are doing to trans people worldwide. Once CAMH is out of the picture, trans people will be able to move toward true equality and access to health services for all.
Zucker was listed on a show about homosexuality with J. Michael Bailey and his usual suspects. Bailey replaced Zucker as an officer at the International Academy of Sex Research, publishers of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. This publication is the source for nearly all problematic “science” produced on gender variance in the English language.
The Sex Files HOMOSEXUALITY IN THIS EPISODE
Why are some people gay? That’s the $64,000 question – at least in the scientific community. Is it something genetically predetermined? Or does environment have an impact on whether an individual turns out to be gay or lesbian? These questions are beginning to be probed in ways that might finally be leading to an answer, and the Sex Files has interviewed the foremost authorities on the topic to uncover some of those scientific clues:
Dr. Devendra Singh, University of Texas psychologist specializing in the evolutionary significance of human physical attractiveness
Dr. Ken Zucker, head of the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity Clinic at the University of Toronto’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry
Dr. Ray Blanchard, head of the Clinical Sexology program at the University of Toronto’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry
Dr. Michael Bailey, professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois and specialist in the genetics and environment of sexual orientation
Dr. Marc Breedlove, professor of psychology* specialising in the sexual differentiation of the brain.
* The original episode guide described Dr. Breedlove as a “professor of psychology at UCLA.” Dr. Breedlove noted in 2008 “I am not, and have never been, a professor of psychology or of anything else at UCLA.” Breedlove earned his Ph.D. at UCLA but taught at UC Berkeley before taking an appointment at Michigan State.
Petition: “To the Honourable George Smitherman, Minister of Health and Long-Term Care for Ontario – Against human rights violations of apparently gender variant children and adults” http://www.petitiononline.com/hrights/petition.html
The trans community was galvanized in opposition following reports of Bailey’s lurid book tour lectures. In the lecture witnessed by Stanford evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden, Bailey was misusing images and video of very young gender diverse children without their knowledge or consent.
Bailey’s crass presentation of these children was punctuated with laughter from assembled psychology professors and future clinicians. It reminded many trans people of the abuse and reparative therapy they had endured as children from similar academics.
Bailey and his colleagues featured in his book are the main proponents of reparative therapy on small children to change their gender identity and expression. This practice is outlawed in many places and has been described as child abuse.
Historians consider the international transgender response to this book to be one of the most significant moments in the history of the global transgender rights movement.
The parts in bold led to our community’s unprecedented efforts to ban unethical practices that harm our children.
Stanford Daily report (2003)
Stanford Daily, April 25, 2003 CAMPUS VIEWPOINT
Psychology lecture lacks sensitivity to sexual orientation
By JOAN ROUGHGARDEN, GUEST COLUMNIST
On April 23, Psychology Prof. Michael Bailey from Northwestern University presented a lecture entitled “Gender Nonconformity and Sexual Orientation” to the Stanford University Psychology Department as part of its regularly scheduled departmental lecture series.
The audience, including about 10 faculty and 100 students, enjoyed laughing at pictures, quotations and voice recordings of gay, lesbian and transgendered people. The material consisted mostly of film clips and animated cartoons. At no point was the audience admonished to assume a professional decorum. No faculty challenged the scholarship, and criticism of the evidently limited sampling was left to several graduate students.
Bailey was introduced as “controversial,” someone whose work has important implications for law, medicine and social policy and as a successful teacher whose courses feature “Transsexuals stripping after class.” (First big laugh.) The initial photographs included a male-bodied child wearing her mother’s shoes, when the second round of laughter erupted. A female-bodied child was then shown in male clothes and quoted as saying she “wanted a penis,” again producing laughter. In another example, an older child in a clinical setting was given the choice of toys and chose a doll and a wig. She was quoted as saying, “1 hate my hair,” greatly amusing the audience.
Bailey’s main claim is that 75 percent of gender-variant male-bodied children grow up to be gay men. Furthermore, gay men questioned about their childhood report more feminine identification on the average than straight-identified men. A similar claim is made for gender-variant female-bodied children growing up to become lesbians, though with less certainty. Therefore, Bailey’s thesis is that gay men are more feminine than straight men, lesbians more masculine than straight women and that transgendered people do not exist as a distinct category but as an extreme gender-variant “subtype” of homosexuality.
Bailey did not present, much less do justice, to the many alternative theories and supporting data that conceptualize gender identity and sexual orientation as distinct axes of description.
Bailey followed this claim with more photographs and film clips. Two gay men were interviewed and the audience was invited to sharpen their ability to discern a gay male from a straight male â to train their “gaydar” (his word) and “pick up the vibes.” An animated cartoon showing effeminate gestures for a gay man was contrasted with one depicting a macho manner for a straight man, again sending the audience into peals of laughter. He then proceeded to show clips of a drag queen and a transgendered woman.
The transgendered woman was described as “an extremely feminine gay man who decided to become a woman.” Bailey would show bar graphs (without error bars) purporting to show that gay men and straight men prefer “casual sex” more than straight women, and straight women also prefer this type of sexual behavior more than lesbian women. The transgendered woman was claimed (though no data given) to be as sexually active in casual sex as a straight man or gay man, and for this reason had to be considered a gay man “himself.”
The lecture continued with a catalogue of diagnostic criteria to include in one’s “gaydar” for accurately discerning gay people from straight people, a project that drew an approving wisecrack from one faculty member. Using Northwestern undergraduates as subjects (“Northwestern has a good theater department”) he developed a rating for gay presentation, leading to the phrase, “the gayest-rated gay man.”
Then voices of two gay men and two straight men were played and the audience was asked to guess who was gay and who was straight. Those who guessed correctly grinned with joy and were applauded by their neighbors, leading to the conclusion that if a gay sounds really gay, then he probably is. If Bailey had presented a scholarly account of his theory in comparison with alternative theories of gender expression and sexuality, he would not have had to rely on a comical and vulgar performance to garner audience support.
Finally, Bailey presented the book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” in which he identifies the other “subtype” of transsexual as someone motivated by fetishistic body morphing, a largely obsolete idea that originated with Ray Blanchard. Bailey said his seminar had avoided the “really controversial” material that was available in his book. The official publicity for the book distributed at the Denver American Association for the Advancement of Science Convention in February, leads with the phrase “Gay, Straight, or Lying? Science Has the Answer” and ends with the claim that Bailey’s conclusions “may not always be politically correct, but they are scientifically accurate, thoroughly researched and occasionally startling.” Instead, many are now offering the book as the latest example of junk science and are appalled at the National Academy’s complicity in the sensationalizing of lesbian, gay and especially, transgendered people.
Bailey’s book is fulfilling the prophesy of being “controversial.” Gay, lesbian and transgendered people are organizing protests at bookstores around the country and are writing critiques in every media outlet possible.
To many observers, Bailey appears to be a rather dumb, stubborn, dense and possibly deceptive regular guy with some experience in locker-room humor. Meanwhile, the day before, on April 22, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the California State Assembly passed a bill extending California’s housing and employment nondiscrimination laws to cover gender-variant people, including transvestites and transsexuals. The bill will soon move to the state senate and will proceed to the governor. The political progress being made by gay, lesbian and now transgendered people greatly exceeds that in academia, if the homophobic and transphobic welcome to Bailey given by the Stanford Department of Psychology is any indication.
Joan Roughgarden is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford. She can be reached at [email protected].
Psychology grad students respond to controversial lecture
This letter is in response to Joan Roughgarden’s guest column, “Psychology lecture lacks sensitivity to sexual orientation” (April 25). We regret that there were any misunderstandings on the part of Roughgarden regarding the Psychology Department’s colloquium. However, we feel that her recounting of the event was inaccurate, and we would like to offer our opinion from the perspective of graduate students in the Psychology Department.
Roughgarden makes two claims in her column. One, that the talk given by Northwestern University Michael Bailey was poorly presented and without merit. We have no dispute with this claim. The speaker’s data were poor, and his conclusions based on those data were severely lacking in merit and validity. No one we spoke with following the talk found his conclusions to be persuasive or scientifically valid, and that was made clear in the questions and critique he received from graduate students and faculty members following the talk. The second point Roughgarden makes is that the audience response was homophobic and supportive of Bailey’s view. She cites “peals of laughter” of the audience at several points within the talk, as well as a lack of criticism by those present as evidence of this support. There was, in fact, criticism by both professors and students regarding the scientific validity of the evidence presented. While the criticism was limited to the merit of the research, it was in no way supportive, and, in our view, was a clear indication of the critical and dismissive view of the audience toward this research. In addition, Roughgarden made the inaccurate assumption that the audience was laughing because it was reveling in some communal homophobic expression. The audience’s laughter was partially a reaction to the absurdity of some of Bailey’s claims, a reflection of embarrassed discomfort with the glib comments made by Bailey and unease about being asked to participate in Bailey’s guess-who’s-gay experiments.
The Psychology Department is committed to examining scholarly work documenting the true experience of different peoples and, in particular, of studying the processes that have heretofore been in large part omitted from psychological study, including the study of gender, race, social class and sexual orientation. We have a particularly strong research program in questioning stereotypes about marginalized groups. Bailey was included as a speaker in our colloquium series to further our understanding of the psychology of individuals in the gay, lesbian and transgendered communities. That his talk did nothing to elucidate our knowledge of those processes was extremely unfortunate, but we fully support the process that brought him to our campus.
KELLY MCGONIGAL Doctoral candidate, Psychology JULIE MCGUIRE Doctoral candidate, Psychology TECETA THOMAS Doctoral candidate, Psychology
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
Originally published by Donna Rose, who writes:
The following is the transcript of an interview with J. Michael Bailey, author of the controversial book, âThe Man Who Would Be Queenâ. It aired on KOOP-FM, Austin, TX in May 2003. I provide no personal opinion or slant, instead choosing to print the words exactly as they were spoken in the hopes that the reader will make their own decisions regarding what is said. Whether you agree with him or not, I think you will find his thoughts very interesting.
http://www.donnarose.com/JMBInterview.html
I’ve marked some noteworthy comments in bold.
Transcript
Interviewer: In your book you state that most gay men are feminine, or at least theyâre feminine in certain ways. I was wondering, what does âfeminineâ mean to you?
JMB: Well, umm, I think that in general, âfeminineâ is a murky term. But to say that itâs murky doesnât mean that itâs meaningless. I think “feminine,” in general, means âfemale-likeâ but there are different ways that one can be female-like. There are ways in which gay men, on average, are somewhat female-like and there are ways in which, on average, gay men are not at all female-like. And the ways in which they are include superficial aspects of behavior such as movement and voice, and then interests, occupational and recreational interests, you know⊠often in their childhoods many gay men have⊠will recall, umm, having feminine behaviors such as a preference for female activities and games and female playmates and a dislike of stereotypic male activities such as rough play and competitive sports. So those are the ways in which, on average, and⊠Iâm going to stop saying that âon averageâ because itâs annoying to have to keep saying it. Itâs probably annoying for you to hear it over and over. While I do, let me just say that all of these things that Iâm saying donât apply to all gay men and there are some gay men who are as masculine in any way as the typical straight man and there are some straight men who are feminine, ahh but on average, there are these significant differences between the two groups, so when I say gay men and straight men differ, thatâs that way in which I mean it.
I: Do you think that the post-modern disapproval of stereotyping has actually impeded the scientific process?
JMB: Yeah, I do. I… well⊠I think that there are a number of, or at least a couple of main issues that have impeded scientific progress in this area. One of them is the disapproval of stereotyping but, you know, the other is discomfort with this particular stereotype by, uh, not only letâs say the âpolitically correctâ but also by gay men themselves. Many gay men, uhh, have extreme discomfort with the idea that they might be feminine. And, ahh, I think that stems from two different sources. First of all, um, I think that gay men who were feminine boys had a hard time being feminine boys. Our society is not kind to feminine boys and I think that some gay men internalize the shame that they were made to feel, um, and actually have come to feel, even if they wouldnât explicitly acknowledge this, that there is something wrong with male femininity.
I: You have this phrase, âfemophobia.” Is that a phrase that you coined or is thatâ
JMB: Femophobia is a phrase that I coined, although, uhh, independently another writer named Tim Bergling wrote a book called Sissyphobia about the same phenomenon. And the other thing relates to a finding that we got in a scientific study, and thatâs the finding that, uh, gay men, in seeking romantic partners, tend to be really prejudiced against feminine guys. And so to say that a gay man might be feminine, in a way is to say that he might be unattractive.
I: Do you think that all men display feminine characteristics?
JMB: You know, I donât think that every action any man does his whole life is classifiable as masculine. But, you know, all of these things are relative traits. Itâs not that you either are masculine or feminine. Itâs how are you compared with other people.
I: You know, your book actually winds up discussing mostly feminine men and then, um, transgender⊠what I would call transgender people.
JMB: Uh-huh.
I: And so, I was wondering, to you, whatâs the difference between transsexual and transgender? Since the modern movement is really pushing towards the word âtransgender,â why bring âsexualâ back into the lexicon?
JMB: I think that⊠I donât really care what word we use as long as weâre speaking in way that leads to correct understanding and, uh, I believe that a subgroup of the transgendered have a very different understanding of motivations than I do and I frankly think that my understanding is more accurate.
I: Your book actually introduces the concept of the homosexual and then the autogynephilic transsexual. Do you care to elaborate a little bit for our audience?
JMB: Sure. By the way, this terminology is not mine. That particular part of the book, the third section on transsexualism, is based upon the work of a psychologist named Ray Blanchard, and Blanchard proved, I think, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there are two very distinct types which he calls âhomosexual transsexualismâ and the other kind he called ânon-homosexual transsexualism.â A homosexual male-to-female transsexual is a transsexual who is unambiguously attracted to males. Um, and I believe that this type of transsexual is essentially a type of gay man who is very feminine and very gender dysphoric. That is, they really donât like, for example, having a penis. One thing that I write about in the book, uh, is that one element of some of their motivation, of this type anyway, is because some of them are far more attractive as women than they are as men â particularly because they tend to be extremely feminine men â and as I say, most gay men donât want to be romantically involved with very feminine men. So, thatâs the first type.
Uh, the other, the second type â the one that invented the word âtransgenderismâ is more likely to be in identity politics and so on. These include primarily transsexuals that Blanchard classified as non-homosexual and basically that means that any natal male that is naturally born male who wants to become a woman or who has become a woman, and theyâre not unambiguously attracted only to men. What Blanchardâs, um, discovery, and this is the most brilliant aspect of it, is that they are motivated by something called âautogynephilia.â Autogynephilia is, um, the sexual arousal and attraction to the idea of oneself as a woman. That is, these individuals⊠and their primary sexual object is not some person on the outside, but itâs some person on the inside. And that is, the idea or the image of themselves as a woman.
I: What do you think about the, um, common saying that, you know, âI am just a woman trapped in a manâs bodyâ or âIâm a lesbian woman trapped in a manâs body.â
JMB: Well, you know, it depends upon what one means by being a woman trapped in a manâs body. You might mean two things. If all you mean is that itâs a person who was born a man who really wants to become a woman then sure, I agree. But I donât think thatâs what they mostly mean. I think that they mean that they are âlikeâ a woman, in the sense of having the same psychology and feelings that a woman has. And I donât think that autogynephilic transsexuals do. I think that autogynephilic transsexuals are much more like heterosexual men than they are like women. Ah, in contrast I think homosexual transsexuals, uh, do have a strong flavor of being a woman trapped in a manâs body although even they have some atypical traits for a female.
I: One of the things that was mentioned in the book about the autogynephillic transsexual was the fact that theyâre interested in themselves as sexual objects as a woman, and proof for this was things like wearing womenâs undergarments and masturbating.
JMB: Right.
I: And that made me wonder if, perhaps, they were not just attracted to women and the idea of a woman was sexually arousing in the same way that a gay man might wear a jockstrap and masturbate.
JMB: Well, I donât think so. Um, and itâs not just wearing female undergarments, uh, you know, I have somebody I write about in my book, Cher, uh, is an autogynephilic transsexual who is also a friend of mine. She used to wear, um, fake breasts and fake vaginas when she was a man, and film herself, uh, simulating intercourse with a⊠with a basically a robot, and that was extremely erotic to her. Uh⊠You know, I just donât think straight men really find the idea of wearing frilly undergarments to be sexy, uh, and this has actually been studied. Autogynephilic males will become sexually aroused in the lab if they listen to a narrative about cross-dressing whereas men without any history of erotic cross-dressing do not become aroused. Regardless, some of them insist that, you know, that itâs not about autogynephilia, itâs just they feel like women so they dress like women and any male who wore frilly lacy panties would become sexually aroused. I donât think so.
I: Do you think that there is any consensus at all, amongst the psychological community, that the homosexual transsexual is, I donât know, somehow acceptable versus the autogynephillic somehow being a disorder?
JMB: There is not, uh, widespread discussion of this distinction. Uh, I think that my book, uh, breaks ground that way. I mean, these ideas have been around for a decade, but the fact that non-homosexual transsexuals are motivated by autogynephilia is not known and I think that that relates to your question. I think that those types of transsexuals tend to dislike discussion of autogynephilia; many of them deny that it applies to them. However, Blanchard showed the ones who deny it also show evidence for it. So, for example, males who denied ever cross-dressing fetishistically, if you bring them to the lab and you measure their erections while they listen to a narrative saying, âWell, youâre getting ready⊠youâre putting on your panties⊠youâre putting on your stockingsâŠâ they get erections! Now, why would they deny it? Well, I think itâs because, in part, people in our society are very judgmental about sexual motivation. Some people are able to accept the âwoman trapped in the manâs bodyâ justification for getting a sex change but they have much more of a problem accepting the idea that somebody has some sort of sexual âattachmentâ to this image of themselves as a woman. Personally, I donât think either is a superior justification. To me, theyâre both good excuses. All I want to know is, is somebody going to be happier if they get a sex change than they were before? If so, good for them.
I: One of the researchers that you mentioned was Ken Zucker, who is the head of the child and adult gender identity clinic in Toronto. He was representing the view that Transsexualism was wrong and that he would suggest treating the gender identity disorder in childhood while he was kind of, uh, value-neutral concerning homosexuality. How can one make a distinction between a feminine gay man and someone whoâs going to become a transsexual?
JMB: You actually raised two issues, and let me address both of them. First off, is kind of a value issue of, you know, does he say that transsexualism is âbadâ and I think many people who are sympathetic to transsexuals still think that transsexualism would be good to avoid if one could. Because this involves major surgery, it involves, often, an adjustment in oneâs social life that requires a level of acceptance in society that we just donât have yet. I know transsexuals who say that they think that it should be considered a disorder because it would have been good if they had been cured of it.
Another question is, how do you distinguish feminine gay men from homosexual transsexuals? Do you mean in childhood, how do you know who is going to become what?
I: You seem to suggest that you needed to treat this condition during childhoodâŠ
JMB: Right.
I: What if you make a mistake? How can you tell the difference between someone whoâs just feminine and someone who wants to become a woman later in life?
JMB: Let me start by telling the listeners an important fact. There are boys who, ah, I think itâs reasonable to think of them as transsexual children. These are boys like, in the file âMa Vie en Roseâ who want to be girls, and they are pervasively and persistently feminine in a number of ways, and they would be happy to be girls. Now, those boys who have been followed-up â boys who start out that way â usually become⊠not transsexuals but gay men. A few of them are transsexuals but not nearly as many as are gay men. There is a number of questions, like âHow does that happen?â âHow do you know which ones are going to be gay men and which ones are going to be transsexuals?â and so on. Now, nobody really knows, you know, because we canât do controlled scientific studies on kids like that. Zucker thinks that these kids who become gay men, he thinks that thatâs the more desirable outcome than being transsexual because transsexualism is a hard life.
I: It sounds like people have been saying that about, uh, just being a gay person, in general.
JMB: Yeah. Well, thatâs⊠but I⊠Zucker also thinks that what distinguishes those who become gay men versus those who remain transsexual is, in part, how theyâre reared, and if they do not have systematic pressure to masculinize, he believes, then they may not. So, a parent who never puts their foot down and takes away the Barbie dolls and so on, Zucker believes, ahh, risks having a transsexual child more than those who do make a persistent effort to masculinize the child. Iâm very torn. I know mothers in this situation..
I: Well, should we encourage of should we be discouraging that behavior?
JMB: I donât⊠I donât⊠I donât know. I donât know. I see both sides. Because we really donât know⊠I mean, letâs assume that Zucker is right, and he might be, then should we enable these kids to become women as soon as they can? Maybe we should! Maybe we should keep our minds open and… and say that these boys will have a better life if theyâre allowed to become girls as adolescents. Thatâll keep them from masculinizing, and theyâll be prettier, and so on⊠ahh, if we can⊠ahh facilitate their sex change earlier. I mean, what are the chances that people are going to do that?
I: It seems such a murky situation cause, I mean, on the one hand I definitely did display some feminine characteristics as a child and was told I was âwrong,â but then I have a straight friend who was allowed to play with Barbie dolls. And then you have the autogynephilic transsexuals who are, by all means, masculine during their childhood andâŠ
JMB: Okay. Letâs not get the situation overly murky. There is a clear, strong correlation between these very strong feminine traits and a homosexual outcome. Now, I personally donât see a homosexual outcome as any kind of problem. A transsexual outcome is a harder case for me because, you know, I have transsexual friends. I quite like them, but I think that theyâve had a very hard time and theyâve had to undergo some very risky medical procedures, too. I think weâve got to be honest about the potential tradeoffs here, and that is if weâre gonna struggle for a more gender âkindâ world that there might be more transsexualism and if so, is that okay with us? Are we willing to accept that? And maybe we are⊠maybe we should be.
I: Speaking of feminine characteristics, in your book you were talking about the high number of gay men who have dancing careersâŠ
JMB: Uh-huh.
I: âŠand you seem to indicate that there is some latent cause. You have your son saying, you know, why do you think that gay men are more likely to be dancers and he says, âbecause dancing is feminine and gay men tend to be feminine.â
JMB: Right.
I: Is it possible that there are social factors, rather than biological factors at play? Cause you seem to be building a case that there are feminine career tracks that gay men are interested in. It seems possible that masculine men are just discouraged from being dancers.
JMB: Well, I think itâs both ways. As masculine men are discouraged byâŠI mean⊠ALL men are discouraged from being dancers in a certain way, you know? In our dance study we, uh, asked how people got interested in dance and we found that, actually, straight men â on average â got into it a couple of years earlier than they gay men. You know how they got into it? They got into it because their parents made them. The gay men got into it on their own. Something happened⊠they saw something on tv⊠they went to a dance performance⊠they said, âOh, I love that! I want to do that!â And, you know, what is it about dancing⊠I mean, I do think that dancing, uh, is a feminine activity, but what is it about dancing thatâs feminine? I donât really know, but I think that that is the cause of the relation between male sexual orientation and interest in dancing careers.
I: There is some data that was in the book that, I have to admit, I got upset about. I guess itâs that most of it was pre-AIDS dataâŠ
JMB: Uh-huh
I: âŠand one was saying that a typical gay male has 500 sex partnersâŠ
JMB: Well, I didnât say âhas.â I… I think I said that was a study in San Francisco before the AIDS epidemic. And it also⊠it gets a little more complicated with gay men, because what does one mean by sex partner? We should be clear that gay men are not just counting anal sex when they are listing their sex partners. They are counting oral sex, theyâre probably counting manual sex⊠So, I think if heterosexual people counted those they would have more than they think of when they think of their âsexâ partners. Nevertheless, Iâve done several studies and gay men always have substantially more partners than straight men.
I: Well, you also talk about monogamous relationships between homosexual men usually become open relationships within five years. You know, speaking as a gay man whose adolescence happened after AIDS, I think the entire atmosphere for dating, and for monogamy, and casual sex, has really changed. And Iâm surprised that this book is still quoting those older datas.
JMB: The study I⊠that we have been talking about is one by David McWhirter which is well over a decade old. However, I have lots of gay friends and they all conform to that generalization. That is, the ones who have been together for five years are not monogamous.
I: When youâre comparing, um, gay people to straight people are you looking at gay club-going men and straight club-going men?
JMB: Well, I think that, for many of our studies weâve advertised in urban publications. Gay Chicago is a bar magazine, and TheChicago Reader is a very alternative publication. Ah, and so⊠yeah⊠I think actually, they tend to be comparable in their lifestyle and I would say that actually, thatâs a bias against my hypothesis. I think it minimizes differences in partner numbers between gay and straight guys. Because the fact is, gay men who read Gay Chicago and respond to our ads are probably more typical gay men than the straight people who read The Chicago Reader.
I: How do you think that gay and straight men are alike?
JMB: Uh, well, I think that the whole thing with sex partners is⊠and the fact that gay men have more⊠is a function of the ways in which gay and straight men are exactly alike. And that is the fact that they both find casual sex to be gratifying and, uh, exciting. Much more so than women do, on average. The difference is that gay men can get it because their partners are also into casual sex. So, um, I donât think that gay men are psychologically promiscuous. I think theyâre just like straight men. They just are able to realize their desires more easily than straight men.
Another way is that gay men are like straight men in being shallow and focused on physical looks as partner. Itâs not that woman are necessarily deep. Theyâre more concerned with, like, resources and dishinâ and that kind of thing whereas men are focused on how the face and the body looks.
Ah, another way in which theyâre alike⊠their interest in looking at naked people, erotica â that is a male sort of thing. Men pay money to watch videos of people having sex with each other. Well, the big markets for that are straight men and gay men.
I: You mention findings that, uh, being gay has biological background and one of them was the INAH 3. Could you elaborate?
JMB: In 1991 Simon LeVay published a study in The journal Science that made the front pages across the nation and got him on Oprah. This was the study showing that, in a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, which has long been known to be important for sexual behavior, there was a small group of cells called the nucleus, that was larger in straight men than in gay men. And gay menâs INAH3 looked like that of women. This was a very exciting finding because it was in the right region of the brain and it was the way, you know, people thought it might turn out that since women and gay men are both interested in men, that they should have similar sexual orientation centers. Now, this was an autopsy study and it depended upon people of known sexual orientation having died and it was made possible by the tragic AIDS epidemic. This study hasnât been followed up until recently when a guy named Bill Byne repeated the study, didnât have quite as many subjects as LeVay had, and my sense of his replication is it looks similar to what LeVay found. That he was, in fact, on to something. So, I think that there is likely something there, and I think that type of research is potentially quite valuable.
I: Do you think the finding that there is a gay gene will lead to gays being treated as handicapped?
JMB: Well, let me give a little context to this. Uh… Greenberg and I have collaborated on papers and neither he nor I thinks that there is anything wrong with being gay. The issue, though, is I have had people say, âYou know, youâve got to stop doing your research because weâre gonna find something that allows people to manipulate sexual orientation or test for it, and then theyâre going to do terrible things like, abort fetuses with the gay gene, and so on. First of all, I would say that those scenarios are scientifically very impossible. But secondly, I think that theyâre hysterical because the people making these claims are not thinking through the ethics of it. And these are the same people who think that abortion on demand for any reason is no business except for the woman who wants to have the abortion, and then theyâre at the same time raising the spectre of murdering gay babies when they would never countenance the word âmurderâ in any other discussion of abortion. So anyway, I think that, uh, Greenbergâs analysis which I talk about in the book is, uh, actually very cogent. And it is that changing the sexual orientation of a baby from gay to straight, or for that matter, from straight to gay, really doesnât have any ethical import, first of all, and to get to your question if we find a gene or if we find a brain region or any kind of biological factor influencing sexual orientation will it lead to gay people being thought of as handicapped, I donât see how that would happen. For any people who differ in their behavior there must be, at some level, biological differences between them because at some level of explanation everything is biological. And, that doesnât mean that people who behave differently than the norm are handicapped.
I: Recently there has been some discussion about the evolutionary advantages to being gay. Um, specifically, the idea of the pack mentality. The idea that if youâre in a family of three, letâs say, and all of your brothers and sisters have children and you donât then you can use your resources to help those children rather than spread it out amongst more children. Then also the issue of zero population growth. How do you feel about some of these evolutionary arguments?
JMB: Well, the evolutionary hypotheses about homosexuality, and I have reviewed these very carefully… Iâm writing a paper on them… they have all been, in my opinion, quite lame, um, and this is another place where sensitivity has impeded careful thought. I mean, one thing to realize is that evolutionarily, homosexuality is a big mistake. And, I donât mean anything bad by saying that because lots of good things, that we would like to have more of, would be evolutionary mistakes. People being extremely kind to strangers and giving poor strangers lots of their money, that would be a great thing. But evolutionarily, it would be a terrible mistake. And when I say something would be a big mistake I just mean I donât see how it would ever evolve. And I donât see how homosexuality has ever evolved and remained in our population at relatively high rates: 1, 2, 3, 4 percent?! Thatâs very high for something that has vastly reduced fertility related to it. And I shouldâŠuhh⊠the flip side of when I say itâs an evolutionary mistake certain things that are evolutionarily clearly adaptive include jealousy, selfishness, the uh willingness to commit infidelity, all those things. Those are very evolutionarily adaptive. But, theyâre not good, right? So by saying something is an evolutionary mistake or evolutionarily adaptive thatâs not a value judgement. Thatâs just counting number of descendents one leaves. So the hypotheses that people have raised to explain homosexuality have included all kinds of things like population control. Thatâs a non-starter because nothing can ever be explained at such a group level because you could always have selfish people who would thwart population control and they would, um, they would win the evolutionary race.
The other hypothesis which weâve actually investigated empirically, uh, is what I call the âkind gay uncleâ hypothesis. That instead of, uh, investing in his own offspring, uh, a gay man invests a lot in his, uh, nieces and nephews. Well, first of all, empirically we donât find much evidence that gay men do that. But secondly, the amount by which they would have to do that in order to make up for not having children or having, you know, half the number of children⊠actually we⊠the best estimates are that gay men have about one fifth the number of children than straight men⊠the amount of investment that they would have to do would be tremendous. They would have to devote their lives to helping their nieces and nephews and of course they donât do that.
I: I was wondering, can we expect a book about masculine women and transsexuals in that community?
JMB: We certainly should have one. Uh⊠and⊠there are such books, you know, about the individual topics⊠there are books about tomboys, there are books about female to male transsexuals, and there are certainly books about lesbians, including butch lesbians. But it would be good to have them all in one book, I think. And if youâre asking me am I going to write a bookâŠsuch a book? I donât know. No time soon. Iâm still involved in the controversies and discussions about my current book and I have a lot of work to do in that domain. SoâŠ
I: Well, I really want to thank you for your time and this interview. I think itâs been really informative.
JMB: Well, I think you have asked very thoughtful questions, and I hope I said some things you can use.
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One of our investigators retrieved this from three attached files mentioned by Pinnel and sent the following analysis:
What’s really important about these documents is one was written by Bailey, on his outdated little Mac, on December 3, 2002.
I decoded all three and was able to open them directly in Microsoft Word and see all three authors stats and electronic signatures, as well as see their thinking in their own words before the book went to press.
These docs are very damning, and really show some of the backroom thinking that was going on. JHP and Bailey won’t be able to back away from their own words on what they “meant” and what they “intended” when it’s all right here in black and white!
[controversial ideas.doc]
The Man Who Would Be Queen by J. Michael Bailey
This book is controversial. It is about feminine men, from before birth to adulthood, to the rebirth experienced by those who decide to become women. Its three sections include one on very feminine boys, one on gay men, and one on transsexuals. These meld scientific studies with stories about real people.
Male femininity is a phenomenon that most people find interesting but which has been ignored by science due to concerns ranging from social conservatism to sensitivity (or less charitably, political correctness). For example, despite widespread stereotypes that gay men tend to be feminine, research related to the stereotype has only recently been conducted.
Here are some of the topics and questions the book addresses:
FEMININE BOYS
Do very feminine boys become gay men?
Yes they usually do. As adults, nearly all are attracted to men.
Are feminine boys born or made?
Scientific studies of rare conditions in which boys are changed into girls soon after birth show that even the most extreme social manipulation canât make a feminine boy. They seem to emerge that way from the womb.
How often do feminine boys become transsexual adults?
Although most feminine boys become gay men rather than transsexuals, a significant minorityâperhaps 10%âof very feminine boys will choose to become women.
Do feminine boys need therapy to make them happy and well-adjusted adults?
This is controversial, and participants in the controversy tend to ignore the best points of the other side. On the one hand, treatment that focuses on extinguishing feminine behavior may make the boys masculine at the expense of shame and self-hatred. On the other hand, if we could make society completely accept feminine boys, more of them might choose to change into women.
GAY MEN
Are gay men feminine, like stereotypes suggest, or are they masculine, like social scientists have asserted for thirty years?
Yes. That is, gay men are a mixture of masculine and feminine traits. In some respects, they are remarkably feminine, but in some others, they are as masculine as straight men.
Gay men do in fact have feminine occupational and recreational interests, and this affects the jobs they choose and the ways they spend their time.
Gay men are also feminine in their speech patternsâthere is a âgay voiceââand in their movement.
In some other ways, gay men are just like straight men. These include many aspects of sexual behavior. For example, gay men and straight men both enjoy casual sexâbut gay men are able to have much more casual sex, because their partners also enjoy it.
Do some gay men act feminine in order to be accepted by other gay men? Do feminine and masculine gay men pair up as âhusband and wife?â
No. Actually, gay men dislike feminine attributes in their romantic partners. Virtually all gay men prefer masculine rather than feminine partners.
Are gay men born or made?
Born. The best evidence for this is the feminine boys who will become gay men. These boys act that way despite, not because of, the social influences that surround them.
Arenât we all really bisexual, like the ancient Greeks?
No. Men tend to be attracted to either men or women, but not both. Furthermore, the existence of feminine gay men transcends cultures and time.
TRANSSEXUALS
Are transsexuals women trapped in menâs bodies?
No. First of all, there are two very distinct types of males who become females. (Few scientists, much less laypeople, have understood the difference between them.) One of themâthe type that likes only menâis naturally feminine in many respects, but not in all. The other is not at all feminine except as the result of effort.
What about men who become women only to be lesbians?
This is the second type of transsexual. They are primarily sexually attracted to the image of themselves as women, but they also are attracted to women.
Are transsexuals born or made?
The feminine transsexual is born feminine. However, whether he elects to become a woman depends on lots of social feedback. For example, will he be more attractive as a man or as a woman? The other, non-feminine, type of transsexual seems to develop his unusual sexual preference (for himself as a woman) without any social input.
Are transsexuals happy once they become women?
For the most part, they are happier than they were as men. However, they still do not lead conventional lives.
See the main page on Robin Pinnel for more materials put out by Joseph Henry Press.
J. Michael Bailey is Chair of the Department of Psychology and Professor at Chicago’s prestigious Northwestern University. A Ph.D. graduate of Louisiana’s Baylor University [sic â Bailey’s PhD was at University of Texas at Austin], he is trained in clinical psychology and known as a sexologist. The bulk of his research has concerned the behavioral and vocal mannerisms of gay men.
This year, Bailey made a play for the big timeâif one considers the talk show and lecture circuit the big timeâvia a book published under the imprint of the prestigious National Academies of Science. The title is The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism.
This choice of title is unfortunate in any number of ways. First, despite Bailey’s claims otherwise, it is deliberately sensationalistic, misleading, and demeaning to the purported subject population. It seems designed to sell books rather than describe what Bailey’s book is about. There is, in fact, no man “who would be queen.” Second, most of the book is devoted to male homosexuality rather than transsexualism; why does the subtitle not reflect this? Third, and far worse, both the author and publisher have touted the book as being based on science and research. It is not science. Fortunately, most reviewers have recognized this. Finally, both the subtitle and NAS imprint imply that Bailey has widespread knowledge of transsexualism. This is not true; Bailey met his (few) transsexual subjects in Chicago’s gay and trans bar scene at two in the morning.
Moreover, according to at least five transsexual women who have filed complaints at Northwestern in regard to Bailey’s behavior, he misled them by not telling them that they were research subjects. Bailey is now under investigation by Northwestern’a most serious matter.
Bailey’s book is important because it has brought to the forefront two issues; gay femininity and autogynephilia. Gay men have been slow to react to the exaggerated and stereotypic pictures Bailey paints of them in his books and at his lectures, but transsexuals, outraged by Bailey’s blanket statements that he “knows” their intimate psychologies and his intimations that if transsexuals disagree with his assessments of them, they’re lying, have been quick on the uptake. Reactions have been critical and in some cases personal.
The real importance of Bailey’s book is not that it paints a sloppy and inaccurate picture of transsexuals (it does), but that it hoists the petard of autogynephilia, a theory that depicts transsexuals as sexual fetishists and denies the existence of gender dysphoriaâand that he has done so with the tacit approval of the National Academies of Science.
Here are the highlights of the controversy to date.
MarchTMWWBQ is released, with claims by the author and publisher that it is based on science. A cover blurb by Dr. Anne Lawrence calls the book “… a wonderful book on an important subject.”
April University of Michigan Professor Emerita Lynn Conway fires the opening salvo to a group of trans friends via e-mail, expressing her “extreme concern about the publication of Bailey’s book by the National Academy Pressâand her fears that the Academy imprimatur would mislead people into thinking the book was sound science, when in fact it was very one-sided and very defamatory of transsexual women.” Conway continues to document happenings on her website, updating it frequently.
25 April On Conway’s website, Stanford Professor of Biological Science Joan Roughgarden reviews a presentation by Bailey on 23 April at Stanford University; she describes Bailey as mocking and stereotyping gay men and transsexuals.
4 May Saralyn Chesnut, Ph.D., Director of the Office of GLBT Life at Emory University, describes a lecture by Bailey at Emory on 8 April. Chestnut writes, “I found him to be arrogant, unprofessional (he smelled of alcohol at 4:00 in the afternoon) and absolutely boastful about how ‘scandalous’ and ‘outrageous’ his book is, as if that were more important than academic rigor. I’ve never heard an academic proudly use words like that to describe his/her work.” (from Conway’s website).
5 May The National Academies of Science begin to get letters of complaint about TMWWBQ. The Academies eventually receives letters from, among others, Christine Burns of Press for Change, Joan Roughgarden, Karen Guerney of the Australian W-O-M-A-N Network, Dallas Denny, editor of Transgender Tapestry, Monica Casper, Executive Director of the Intersex Society of North America, and faculty members of leading universities.
9 MayAnjelica Kieltyka, “Cher” in Bailey’s book, sends e-mail pleas to Andrea James and Lynn Conway, explaining what had happened to her and seeking their help.
20 June “Dr. Sex,” an article on the TMWWBQ controversy, appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education; this is the first mention of the controversy in the mainstream press. “Mr. Bailey’s work on transsexuals, unlike his scientific research on gay men, is anecdotal and his book doesn’t cite any figures to back up his claims. In his defense, he says he ‘went every place I could think of that I’d find a decent chance of finding transsexuals’ to talk to and observe. That often meant gay bars near his home…”
23 June Conway sends an open letter to the administration of Northwestern University, alerting them to the NTAC press release.
23 June Andrea James, who has been tracking the Bailey brouhaha on her website, posts a blistering critique of Anne Lawrence, in which she describes Lawrence’s 1997 resignation from her position as an anesthesiologist after conducting an unauthorized and clearly unethical genital examination of an unconscious patient. This resulted in an investigation by the State of Washington Department of Health. James’ website includes images of the Adverse Action Report generated by the investigation.
23 June James also alleges that Lawrence made unwanted sexual overtures to her while photographing James’ genitalia.
3 July Kieltyka files a formal complaint with Northwestern University. Kieltyka had previously revealed that she was the subject called “Cher” in TMWWBQ. She states that she was misled by Bailey, who she had contacted years ago after seeing him on television, and who she says did not reveal to her or other transsexuals that he was doing research. By mid-July, four more subject-complainants have come forward.
17 July Articles in The Daily Northwestern and The Chronicle of Higher Education report that the university has begun investigatory proceedings in response to complaints about unauthorized use of human subjects.
17 July An article on Conway’s website, posted on 29 July, reports that Kieltyka, who attended the annual meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research at Indiana State University to call attention to Bailey’s behavior, reports that she was prevented from handing out information there and was asked to leave by the police.
19 July According to an account from an attendee of the conference, posted on 28 July on Conway’s website, Kinsey Institute Director John Bancroft rises from the audience at the Q&A session after a presentation by Bailey at the national meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research and tells Bailey, “Michael, I would caution you against calling this book ‘science’ because I have read it … and I can tell you it is NOT science.”
19 July Bailey “vacates his position” as IASR Secretary-Treasurer.
29 July Lynn Conway and Dierdre McCloskey file a formal complaint with Northwestern about Bailey’s research behavior.
31 July Bailey tells The Daily Northwestern that he told IASR in February about his decision to resign. The article also reports that Bancroft would not confirm that he made the statement reported on Conway’s website. The Daily Northwestern article reports that two more transwomen have filed complaints against Bailey, bringing the total to five.
20 Oct. HBIGDA President Walter J. Meyer III, M.D. and HBIGDA Executive Director Bean Robinson, Ph.D. respond on behalf of the HBIGDA Board of Directors to a letter sent on 14 June by Drs. Lynn Conway, Dierdre McCloskey, Ben Barres, Barbara Nash, and Joan Roughgarden, expressing their concerns about Bailey. HBIGDA declines to investigate Bailey on the grounds that he is not a member of the association, and calls for all parties in the controversy to exercise professionalism. Meyer and Robinson write that HBIGDA has plans to express its concerns about Bailey directly to Northwestern University.
4 Nov. The Clarke’s Ray Blanchard, who coined the term autogynephilia based on his empirical work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, writes Meyer & Robinson, resigning from HBIGDA on the grounds of HBIGDA’s “appalling decision… to intervene in Northwestern University’s investigation into the allegations… against Prof. J. Michael Bailey.”
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Background
Homosexuality may represent “a developmental error.”
Bailey JM (1999). Homosexuality and mental illness. Archives of General Psychiatry. 1999 Oct;56(10):883-4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10530627
“Prostitution is the single most common occupation that homosexual transsexuals in our study admitted to.”
Bailey JM (2003). The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. Joseph Henry Press. p. 184 http://books.nap.edu/books/0309084180/html/184.html
“To focus on this question, we have to assume that whatever means parents will use to do this are, in themselves, morally acceptable. So, if you have any problem at all with abortion, assume that pregnant women can guarantee a heterosexual child by, say, taking a pill, or avoiding certain foods, or even by reading their children certain bedtime stories. What would make avoiding gay children wrong?”
Bailey JM (2003). The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. Joseph Henry Press. p. 114 http://books.nap.edu/books/0309084180/html/114.html
Selected letters and comments from correspondentsI am very happy to announce that I’m getting inundated with email on this matter. All of it is very welcome, but I feel some of it is worth sharing with everyone. This page puts forth wisdom and insight from readers just like you, and my responses when applicable. Please note that I do not necessarily agree with all the comments below, but I felt they might be helpful or interesting for others who are working to deal with this issue. Excerpts from V__’s letter on “autogynephilia” and its flaws: But before I get too lengthy, I want to get to the heart of my purpose for this e-mail. And that is the concept of “Autogynephilia”. I’ve recently come to believe that this concept is the result of research that didn’t quite go far enough. A few months ago I attended a lecture about sexual addictions given by a prominent local Psychologist who specializes in addictions of all kinds. Additionally, in a brief follow-up, I attended a few group-therapy sessions of men with various sexual addictions. In this lecture he came to a point of describing his own sexual addiction throughout much of his adolescence and early adulthood – compulsive masturbation. In tying this anecdote to his patient-studies, he illustrated what to me was a very lucid observation and one which I feel could shed new light on the whole concept of Autogynephilia.
The observation is/was that, like many other addictions, sexual addictions can be born out of deep suppression and/or internal self-loathing, primarily as secondary to things such as trauma or over-controlling parents/spouses, for examples. The causes of suppression and self-loathing are, of course, virtually innumerable, so he didn’t go much into that except to describe his own awful upbringing and how, indirectly, compulsive masturbation became an escape? a way of self-medicating, if you will. Not that this was a conscious effort. Rather, he explains it as a subconscious process.
Without going into much more extensive detail, I feel that I cannot do this the justice it deserves, but I hope what I’ve described can offer you some idea of the conclusion I’d LIKE to draw – that perhaps erotic arousal associated with cross-dressing has much more to do with internal conflict and suppression than with some skewed sexual proclivity. I have to say that, as I sat in this lecture, the lights started coming on. Add to that the credible research found in more recent publications and I feel that the issue of autogynephilia is one which needs to be revisited and, hopefully revised. Excerpts from R__’s letter on Bailey, with my reply on “social canalization”: The transsexual portion of this book dwells on the path taken. Does this mean they started from different places? Maybe. But maybe it is based on the decisions we make at a young age. Those who decide to hide their differences at a young age to try and fit in and those who don’t. The crux of that decision can flavor the rest of someone’s life. Someone who doesn’t try to suppress it will have a rougher time socially, hence a rougher time in schoolwork and at home, and THAT causes the situation where they end up in the different job roles. One who suppresses and tries to fit in, may shut inside themselves a lot more. They apply themselves to schoolwork or some other safe activity. Being too social is opening the opportunity for the hidden information to slip out. To hide in a world of controllable logic (computers) is a natural reaction to a fear of socialization. Further attempts at suppression lead to military careers and/or marriage. Okay, its just a theory, but it covers the split.
My reply: This is an extremely important issue, and one I would love to hear more on. Hereâs something Iâve been reading on the matter:
http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v2n2/dalli.html
According to Valsiner (Valsiner, 1985; Valsiner & Hill, 1989), children are socialized into culturally acceptable ways of acting in given situations through a process of social canalization. In Valsiner’s framework, children’s development of acting and of thinking is explained through the mutually related functioning of three zones. The first zone is called the “zone of freedom of movement” (ZFM) and refers to the structure of the environment that is functionally available to the developing child at a given time. The limits of this zone are negotiated with the caregivers and change as the child develops or moves into an area with a different physical structure. For example, the ZFM of a child may be the playpen or the front yard.
The second zone is the zone of promoted action (ZPA). This term refers to the set of objects and actions that the child’s social environment actively promotes to the child to use and perform. The ZPA may be observed in the parents’ and other people’s preference structure of the child’s different actions. This preference structure includes the actions and social expectancies that others promote as desirable for the child. As the child develops, he or she internalizes the social expectancies and gains knowledge about the acceptable and expected way of acting in a given situation. Once gained, this knowledge may be used in any way by the child. Valsiner and Hill (1989) give the example of an adolescent who in a social situation knows the rules of courtesy well but decides to not act appropriately and instead “cuts” another (p. 165). Valsiner (1985) calls the ZPA an important “selective canalizer of the child’s actions” but also says that the structure of the ZPA can undergo dynamic transformation because it is negotiated in adult-child interaction.
The third zone is the well-known Vygotskian zone of proximal development (ZPD) and refers to the subset of ZPA actions that could be actualized with the help of other people. According to Valsiner (1985), the difficulty with this zone is that often one cannot know which actions actually constitute the ZPD because the existing structure of the ZFM and ZPA may restrict the opportunities of testing the limits of the ZPD. For instance, if the act of holding a fork is not within the ZPA or ZFM of a 16-month-old, it may not be possible to see if the 16-month-old child is physically capable of holding the fork. Thus, the ZPD-ZPA relationship is seen to determine what can or cannot be performed next by the child.
Valsiner, Jaan. (1985). Parental organization of children’s cognitive development within the home environment. Psychologia, 28, 131-143. Valsiner, Jaan, & Hill, Paula E. (1989). Socialization of American toddlers for social courtesy. In Jaan Valsiner (Ed.), Child development in cultural context (pp. 163-179). Toronto: Hogrefe & Huber. An e-mail from a Jewish transgender woman concerning her reactions to Bailey’s lectures [ 4-30-03 ]: Frankly, the report of Bailey’s lecture disgusts me more than almost anything else I’ve read about him. As a Jew whose mother grew up in Nazi Germany, it reminds me of nothing more than one of those lectures by Nazi “experts” on “physiognomy” about how you tell someone’s a Jew — by their big hooked noses, naturally. Just like you tell gay people by how they talk. I’m sure such lectures were accompanied by similar gales of laughter.
I (and the wonderful woman who is my partner) had such strong personal reactions to the whole idea of trying to identify and single people out in that disgusting way, that I felt I had to say something. I still remember my mother’s story about how when she was a child in Germany, after Hitler came to power but before she was prohibited from attending school with non-Jewish children, a Nazi party official came to her school one day to lecture on the “Aryan” ideal — and, out of the whole class, actually selected my mother, who had light hair, green eyes, and “Aryan” features, as the perfect example of Aryan girlhood. As you can imagine, he wasn’t pleased when he found out she was Jewish. So, you can see, sometimes the “experts” are wrong. From www.greengourd.blogspot.com Is this what research about gay sexuality has come to? This is from a Chronicles of Higher Education piece on J. Michael Bailey, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism:Gay men have more feminine traits than straight men, he writes, including their interests in fashion and show tunes and their choice of occupations, including florist, waiter, and hair stylist. If a man is feminine, says Mr. Bailey, it is a key sign that he is gay. And if a man is gay, Mr. Bailey says he can tell a lot about what that man’s childhood was like. He “played with dolls and loathed football” and “his best friends were girls,” he writes in the book.
Um, maybe the problem here is that Bailey refined his so-called theory “during his visits to gay bars near his home” in a gay neighborhood in Chicago. Would he have found men with different interests and experiences in a different neighborhood? At leather bars or biker bars? Mightn’t the gay men who “played football and loathed dolls” have been at a baseball game, or at home watching a Blackhawks game, or changing their transmission fluid? Maybe visiting bars at one time and place isn’t the best way to gather information about a phenomenon that has transcended particular times and places? From The Guardian Steven Pinker
J Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen (Joseph Henry) is an engaging book on the science of sexual orientation. Though highly sympathetic to gay and transsexual men, it has ignited a firestorm by claiming that transsexuals are not women trapped in men’s bodies but have either homosexual or autoerotic motives. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,986174,00.html From K on 15 June 2003 I’m thinking that a point being missed in all of the discssion is that this isn’t just about transphobia.
Let’s say J. Michael is describing non-transsexual women. It might look like this:
“There are two types of women – the first are pretty, feminine love to please their man and are limited quite naturally to occupations such as hairdressers, entertainers and prostitutes.” One can imagine it not being far off for him to advise this group that to keep her man happy; she should meet him when he comes home from work everyday with a martini and wearing a neglegee’
“The other are “mannish looking”, work in fields like science, law enforcement and construction. They are attracted to other women and the defining point of their existence is this deviant compulsive sexual thought and behavior” Sound familiar?
Besides the horrible transphobia – the misogyny is appalling!!! Let’s remember this is a guy who states he doesn’t understand female sexuality at all. Not transwoman or non-transwoman – he certainly seems to feel a need to define and control it though; doesn’t he? Again – sounds familiar. Faculty members show off talents at DM fund-raiser “Hansen said DM[Dance Marathon] hopes to have more faculty performers at future talent shows. For example, if students raise $3,000, Fenrich and psychology Prof. Michael Bailey will dress in drag and sing a duet together during DM.” Daily Northwestern 3 March 2003 http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/03/03/3e636ad17fbdf
Letter from Sarah
I got the following letter in July 2003:
I don’t know if this is of interest to you, I wrote it at as an answer to a woman (with a TS history) who couldn’t understand our hate against B, B and L. If you find use of it, feel free to do so. The language has been slightly revised.
Kind regards
Hi T
Yes. There are a lot of hate in all this. If one hate, one expresses ones anguish and fears, but one do not necessarily communicate, that is trying to get the other person to understand. As many on this list I hate. But I will try to explain WHY to you (I am not trying to patronize you!):
Some of my ancestors lived in the ghetto. Outside Venice in Italy, In Prag and at the then German-Polish border. They didn’t want to live in the ghetto. They where forced to; by the Venetian merchant nobles, by the Habsburg monarch and the German Kaiser. The where forced to live there because they where considered as “untermenchen” (the term existed looong before Hitler). What my ancestors wanted was to leave the ghetto, live the life of “normal” people. When Hitler and his gang came to power they used the noble science of race biology to legitimize their ideology that Jews (and Gypsy’s) where “untermenchen”. They even turned the star of David to the sign of stigmatization of the Jews, to identify them as non-humans. And they reinforced the ghetto. Then came the final solution…
Many of us has felt since our infancy that we are women, but that we were born with an handicap that we had to correct. And we did. Now we only want to go on with our lives – be normal women. As my ancestors wanted to be normal people.
But no, there are people out there, who in the name of the noble science of psychology, want to give us a David’s star, to confine as in the pathologic ghetto of transgenderism. These people (it may the Protestant extreme right, the Catholic extreme right, the Islamic extreme right or the Orthodox Jewish extreme right) are happy to get science to legitimize their claims. And many scientists are profiteers of their need.
These scientists now tell us (and the world at large) that we are not women. We are perverted men. Either extremely feminine gay men, who like to live out our attraction to men, or fetishised heterosexual men, who want to live out our fantasy to inhabit a female body.
Some of these scientists just like us to accept (in a positive spirit) these desires and live with them. But that means that they want to force us to live in the transgender ghetto, as body-modified men. In the ghetto, because outside no-one accepts a body-modified man.
This seems to be the standpoint of Anne Lawrence (Some people have insulted Anne Lawrence by calling her Mr Lawrence. But in some respect this insult is logical because she cannot live out her fantasy of inhibiting a woman’s body, if she was forced to live the life of a woman. She can only live it out if she is recognized just for living out her fantasy. So she stays in the ghetto. By choice; an uncle Tom).
But others would like to treat us, give us therapy so that we could become “normal”. And it is perhaps not by hazard that electric chocks are gaining in popularity again among American psychiatrists.
Some, like Reker, even want to force a reverse srs on us.
Racial biology never recommended extermination of the “untermenchen”, they just studied the “objective” differences between them and real humans. The psychologists claim to do the same with us.
But then the “plan” (or rather plans) in the minds of their political patrons is bigger than us. Gays should get therapy also. And in the mind of some of them women are also “untermenchen”. The Talibans didn’t even give women passports or identity cards, as they where not considered as humans.
Farfetched? In the early 1930’s Germany was one of the most modern societies in the world. Hitler was VOTED to power in 1932.
Long ago? Not more than that when in school in the 1960’s I had a friend whose father woke up every night out of nightmares produced by the anguish that while in the resistance of the Warsaw ghetto he had killed German soldiers with piano wire.
It is evident from what I have written that I hate. I don’t necessarily expect you to share this hate, or even accept it. But I hope I have managed to communicate my motivations to hate.
âA Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal.â The study is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.
The studyâs four authors include Bailey and three graduate students in Northwesternâs psychology department, Chivers, Gerulf Rieger and Elizabeth Latty.
To rule out the possibility that the differences between menâs and womenâs genital sexual arousal patterns might be due to the different ways that genital arousal is measured in men and women, the Northwestern researchers identified a subset of subjects: postoperative transsexuals who began life as men but had surgery to construct artificial vaginas.
In a sense, those transsexuals have the brains of men but the genitals of women. Their psychological and genital arousal patterns matched those of men — those who like men were more aroused by male stimuli and those who like women were more aroused by the female stimuli — even though their genital arousal was measured in the same way womenâs was.
âThis shows that the sex difference that we found is real and almost certainly due to a sex difference in the brain,â said Bailey
Bailey’s systematic distortion of transsexualism
by Elizabeth
Editor’s note: Elizabeth has contributed several pieces for this section.
Andrea has stated, correctly, that a lot of the problems surrounding B-B-L involve their use of language. Bailey describes us in highly insulting terms throughout his book, Blanchard and the Clarke idiots insist on calling us men, Lawrence promoted that stupid âmen trapped in menâs bodiesâ phrase that got so many people at each otherâs throats, etc. Focusing solely on the insensitivity of the language and how insulting it is however has two unfortunate effects: it enables Bailey to claim we just canât handle him being such a politically incorrect badass, and it overlooks the fact that their particular word choices can paint a very distorted picture of the facts simply by a slight alteration of the terminology.
Baileyâs KOOP-Fm interview is an excellent illustration of how supporters of Blanchardâs typology alter terminology to make extremely misleading statements without technically lying. When discussing the idea of âautogynephilicâ transsexuals Bailey states:
Autogynephilic males will become sexually aroused in the lab if they listen to a narrative about cross-dressing whereas men without any history of erotic cross-dressing do not become aroused. Regardless, some of them insist that, you know, that itâs not about autogynephilia, itâs just they feel like women so they dress like women and any male who wore frilly lacy panties would become sexually aroused. I donât think so.
Note that he didnât actually use the word transsexuals. He just said âautogynephilic males.â This is a reference from page 173 of Baileyâs book, concerning heterosexual crossdressers, not transsexuals. However, since in Blanchardâs crazy little world transvestism and transsexuality are both subtypes of âautogynephilia,â Bailey can use âautogynephilic malesâ to make a true statement about crossdressers which, applied in this misleading context, will sound like a statement about transsexuals. He made an even more misleading statement in his next response in the interview, where he claimed:
I think that those types of transsexuals tend to dislike discussion of autogynephilia; many of them deny that it applies to them. However, Blanchard showed the ones who deny it also show evidence for it. So, for example, males who denied ever cross-dressing fetishistically, if you bring them to the lab and you measure their erections while they listen to a narrative saying, âWell, youâre getting readyâŠyouâre putting on your pantiesâŠyouâre putting on your stockingsâŠâ they get erections!
The âevidenceâ on âmales who denied ever crossdressing fetishisticallyâ is Blanchardâs 1986 paper “Phallometric detection of fetishistic arousal in heterosexual male cross-dressers.” Again, this is a study of crossdressers, not transsexuals, but since both are presumed âautogynephilicâ Bailey can make statements about âautogynephilic malesâ and be presumed to be talking about transsexuals when heâs actually talking about crossdressers. This is a pretty standard tactic in pseudo-science: just redefine the terminology to make your thesis correct, e.g. Bailey redefines transsexual as anyone seriously considering a sex change, Blanchard redefined it as anyone who said they felt like a woman (even though crossdressers do both those things all the time). Bailey plays the same trick in his book, where chapter nine is supposed to tell us about âautogynephilic transsexualsâ but then ends up discussing mostly heterosexual crossdressers and justifies lumping them together on the basis of research which itself confused the differences between the two groups. He plays the language trick again on the page on his website devoted to the book controversy, where under the heading about TSs who deny being autogynephilic he uses terms like âautogynephilic individualsâ to hide the fact that heâs actually talking about crossdressers, not transsexuals. Even then, itâs a pretty tenuous leap.
Heâs essentially arguing that:
1. Blanchard did a study showing that what he terms ânon-homosexualâ transsexuals at the Clarke showed a lot of social desirability bias, while what he terms âhomosexualâ transsexuals at the Clarke showed a little social desirability bias, and crossdressers at the Clarke showed none. (from Blanchardâs 1985 paper “Social desirability response set and systematic distortion in the self-report of adult male gender patients”)
2. Blanchard then did a study showing that heterosexual crossdressers who deny an erotic component to their crossdressing became aroused hearing crossdressing narratives.
3. Since the crossdressers lied about sexual arousal to crossdressing, ânonhomosexualâ transsexuals probably lie about it too, because the ones at the Clarke showed social desirability bias.
Even if you take Blanchardâs interpretation of his data at face value, this is questionable at best. If you compared ânon-homosexualâ transsexuals to, say, people you suspect are pedophiles, both would probably deny molesting children, but that doesnât mean both groups are lying. This argument falls completely flat when you consider that the transsexuals at the Clarke are desperately trying to convince the clinicians to let them access medical services while the crossdressers arenât, and transsexuals the Clarke considers to be âhomosexualâ have a somewhat easier time doing so than those the Clarke considers to be ânon-homosexual.â In other words, social desirability isnât a personality feature of transsexuals per se, itâs just something brought on by the repressive treatment environment of the Clarke.
Of course, Maxine Petersen says we all lie, and Maxine Petersen is an âace gender therapist.â (Is that statement supposed to make us laugh or cry?) Then again, Maxine Petersen is transsexual herself, so maybe sheâs lying? Oh wait, thatâs right, we only lie when we say anything the Clarke clinicians donât want to hear.
Oh, thereâs also something on Baileyâs webpage about how transsexuals probably lie about autogynephilia because of the way some people choose socks. Yeah, I didnât get it either.
This page gives an overview of issues raised by J. Michael Bailey’s book on gender variance.
J. Michael Bailey is Chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University. In March 2003, he published a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. Many see this book as the most defamatory book written about gender variance since Janice Raymond wrote The Transsexual Empire in 1979.
Introduction to taxonomies and theory
âą A Critique of the Autogynephilia Hypothesis (by Catherine Anderson, Ph.D.)
âą A note on gender tests http://www.tsroadmap.com/mental/gendertests.html
âą DSM-IV-TR on gender identity “disorder” by American Psychology Association /info/gender-identity-disorder.html
âą LINK: The Empire Strikes Back: A posttranssexual manifesto (by Sandy Stone, Ph.D.) http://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back
âą LINK: Beyond gatekeeping: truth and trust in therapy with transsexuals (by Maureen Osborne, Ph.D.) http://www.antijen.org/psychol/osbo1.html
âą LINK: Joan Roughgarden’s works
Dr. Roughgarden is a Stanford biologist whose new book Evolution’s Rainbow explores the “social selection” theory of gender variance and sexual orientation. She has just published two excellent articles highly critical of recent books by evolutionary psychologists Thornhill & Palmer and J. Michael Bailey.
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard is a key figure in anti-transgender extremism. This biographical page supplements the overview of the harm his biased and unscientific ideas have caused.
Background
While working at Torontoâs notorious Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Blanchard accused me of spreading âmisinformationâ (Blanchard 2009), so letâs get all of Blanchard’s biographical details out on the table in order to make my point more clearly.
As I mentioned in the earlier article (James 2009), Blanchard is widely reviled by trans people. Blanchard once declared that a trans woman who has transitioned is merely “a man without a penis,” and said of trans men, “They get a kind of lump that in the best, most expensive, $100,000 cases, kind of, maybe, look like a penis from across a room.” (Armstrong 2004). Blanchard’s comments on trans peopleâs genitalia reflect a fixation on “phallometrics,” the measurement of penile length, width, and tumescence when subjects are exposed to erotic stimuli. The field of phallometrics was developed by Blanchard’s mentor Kurt Freund at CAMH to determine if army recruits were lying about being gay to avoid military service where gay men were banned from serving. Blanchard, who obviously gay, is considered an expert in determining the size and tumescence of male genitalia.
Blanchard and since-fired sexologist Kenneth Zucker weaseled their way onto the committee rewriting the section on sex and gender minorities in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Zucker is the world’s foremost proponent of reparative therapy to âcureâ gender-variant youth. Blanchard seeks a broad expansion of the definition of “paraphilia” to expand this mental illness to include anyone attracted to someone who is not “phenotypically normal.”
Blanchard took umbrage at my publication of publicly available 2008 taxpayer-funded salary info and my comment that Blanchard and Zucker both left America for Canada during the Vietnam War.
Why is Blanchard so touchy about military matters, and what personally motivates Blanchard’s lifeâs work? What drives this key figure in the oppression of sex and gender minorities? Since Blanchard feels entitled to ascribe labels and motivations to others, letâs turn the tables. Why is Ray so reticent about revealing his own sexual interests and behavior, when his career involves âcatchingâ people not being open and honest about their sexual interests and behavior?
Early years
Blanchard’s full name is Ray Milton Blanchard III.
Blanchardâs parent Angelina Celi was born in 1917. Blanchardâs other parent was Aviation Metalsmith Second Class (AM2c) Ray Milton Blanchard Jr.
Ray III was conceived in early 1945, and Ray Jr. was lost at sea on 19 March of that year in the Japanese attack on the USS Franklin (USS Franklin 2008). Ray III was born 9 October 1945, according to a bio Ray III paid to place in Marquis Whoâs Who (Marquis 1984), a questionable vanity publication for narcissistic strivers (Carlson 1999).
Ray III identifies as Ray Jr.’s âfirst, only, and posthumous childâ (Blanchard 2009). Thatâs quite a burden to bear. Hereâs the scenario: young closeted kid with strong Catholic roots spends formative years alone with a widowed parent, who is understandably depressed about Ray Jr.’s being killed in action. Ray III’s namesake made the ultimate sacrifice, and Ray III gets Catholic indoctrination about carrying on the family name, hereditary line, and what-not. Ray III is taught by priests about sin and is expected to produce Ray Milton Blanchard IV after settling down with a nice Catholic girl. Only problem: Ray III thinks girls are icky.
Then the day comes when itâs no longer just Ray III and widowed parent. Enter a stepparent, a Navy veteran and a volunteer firefighter (Inquirer 1992). In a nice Catholic ceremony, Angelina (Celi) Blanchard marries Anthony F. Ruggero (1917-1992). They start their family in Hammonton, New Jersey, where Angelina and Anthony are residents. By the time Ray III in grade school, there are two stepbrothers, Jim and Bill, about a decade younger than Ray III. Quite a shift in family dynamics. Angelina Ruggero has a new surname, so Ray III is the only remaining Blanchard in the household, in memory of Ray Jr.
Academia and âfitnessâ for military service
Blanchard is a pretty brilliant person who puts great energy into living up to the high expectations for a sole surviving namesake. Knowing deep down that the Catholic ideal of marrying and procreating is never going to happen, Blanchard focuses on other forms of getting approval, like school. With the likely help of the Survivors’ and Dependents’ Educational Assistance Program, Blanchard goes to a great school, then on to grad school in Illinois in 1967.
Vietnam sidebar: Meanwhile, further south in Illinois, Blanchardâs future CAMH collaborator Kenneth Zucker is one of the key campus leaders in the Vietnam protest movement at Southern Illinois University, staging mock trials and declaring people war criminals in absentia (Lagow 1977). Zucker headed to Canada eventually just to be safe. Their future collaborator Richard Green had the same idea: âI left Los Angeles in 1964 to avoid the Vietnam War by going to NIMH [National Institutes of Mental Health]â (Green 2004). One interesting phenomenon with anti-Vietnam people: they were right once as young people in the 1960s, so they often think they are always right, even decades later. Green handed over the editorial control of Archives of Sexual Behavior to Zucker, to continue pushing their ideology about sex and gender minorities.
Hearing your whole life that your namesake you never knew got killed in war is pretty good incentive for self-preservation. As Blanchard asserts, avoiding the draft was a moot point, since Blanchard was classified 4-A, as the sole surviving offspring of a servicemember killed in action. As long as war was not officially declared, Blanchard was safe. Further, the draft was implemented for those ages 18 to 26, and Blanchard was at University of Illinois until 1973, the year he turned 28. That would have allowed for a student deferment even if war had been declared. As I said earlier, Ray moved to Canada in the midst of the Vietnam War (1973) and has remained, even after all the drama about the U.S. draft was resolved.
What Blanchard fails to address is the real misrepresentation here, the elephant in the room, and my original point: not the 4-A classification, but the 4-F classification. 4-F was the designation used to declare gay servicemembers âunfitâ for military service (Dode 2004). In other words, 4-A was pretty much the best reason to be exempt; 4-F was pretty much the worst reason to be exempt. While Blanchard was never classified 4-F because of the superseding exemption, had Blanchard been drafted, there was a very real possibility of outright rejection at induction or dishonorable discharge for being gay, had he made it through the screening process. As of late 2009, the US military still has this as official policy. His fatherâs military service stands as the height of honor and the ultimate sacrifice, yet Ray might have been denied outright as âunfit,â or if he got in, he might have been discharged at the hands of military psychiatrists, the ultimate dishonor.
World War II sidebar: From when it was first implemented, the 4-F designation had become a badge of dishonor, using the eugenic terminology âunfitâ for service. It included a broad range of physical and mental reasons. Even after the war, people labeled 4-F were subject to discrimination and were seen by many as less valuable than those who served. It created a significant rift and a social hierarchy that suggested all men were not created equal, a sentiment at the heart of eugenic ideology (Wake 2007).
The best way to understand Ray Blanchard as a human is to consider the mindset of gay priests. Good Catholics who thought girls were icky often saw the priesthood as the Catholic version of 4-A instead of the Catholic version of 4-F. Priesthood is the most honorable reason not to have a family. Being a sodomite was the most âunfitâ reason.
Gay priests and gay psychologists serve the same purpose and hold the same position within an oppressive power dynamic. More on this in the following sections,
First published 2 November 2009. In this section:
Ray Blanchard motivations for oppressing sex and gender minorities https://web.archive.org/web/20130324133848/tsroadmap.com/info/ray-blanchard-motivations.html
Toronto: epicenter of pathologization of sex and gender minorities
Blanchard, Ray, Collins, Peter (1993). Men with sexual interest in transvestites, transsexuals, and she-males. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Volume 181 – Issue 9.
Blanchard, R., & Bogaert, A. F. (1996). Homosexuality in men and number of older brothers. American Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 27â31.
Blanchard, Ray @ ASSTAR (2009). âDSM-IV Paraphilias Options: General Diagnostic Issues, Pedohebephilic Disorder, and Transvestic Disorder,â Annual Meeting of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, Alexandria VA, April 2009, http://individual.utoronto.ca/ray_blanchard/index_files/SSTAR.html
Blanchard, Ray (22 October 2009) [via Maxine Petersen]. Response to â$325,000+ in salaries for Zucker & Blanchard to pathologize trans people.â http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/zucker-blanchard-salary.html
Thank you for calling my attention to the misleading information posted on the Internet by Andrea James.
My 2008 salary included a one-time buyout for unused vacation time (I had about six months’ worth of it) and does not reflect my annual base income.
At the time of the Vietnam war, I had an unusual exemption. According to my draft card (which I still have) it was a 4-A. This exempted me from the draft, in peacetime, as the sole surviving male heir of a serviceman killed in a foreign war. The US Congress never declared war on Vietnam, so it was technically peace time for the purposes of this draft law (or policy, whatever it was). My father, Ray Milton Blanchard Jr, a sailor in the US Navy, was lost at sea on 19 March 1945, in the bombing of the aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin. My mother was a few months pregnant with me at the time. I was the first, only, and posthumous child of Ray Jr.
In brief, I did not come to Canada to escape the draft. I had no incentive to do so.
Regards, Ray
[editorâs note: this base salary is only one of Blanchardâs revenue streams.]
Carlson, Tucker (8 March 1999), “The Hall of Lame”, Forbes Magazine. http://www.forbes.com/forbes-life-magazine/1999/0308/063.html
As most of those listed in the book know, entries in Who’s Who are mostly self-reported and largely unchecked, making it the ideal place to tidy up an uneven educational or work history⊠Indeed, the first clue that Who’s Who is a vanity publication is the “Thoughts on My Life” feature that appears beneath some entries.
Diamond, Milton and H. Keith Sigmundson (1997). Sex reassignment at birth: Long-term review and clinical implications. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1997;151(3):298-304.
Dode, Lee (2004). A History of Homosexuality. Trafford Publishing, ISBN 9781412015387, p. 87
The psychiatrists had several choices of phraseology if they considered homosexuality a personality disorder or the expression of another kind of personality disorder. They could term a person a âpsychopath,â âschizophrenic,â ânormally imbalanced,â âweak psychological origins,â âarrested aggressive,â âpurposefully immoral,â âcontaining a neurosisâ or maybe âanother natural human traitâ which psychiatrists knew would not be acceptable to military standards. All categories were considered by the military to classify the person as â4 Fâ, undesirable for military service. Habitual criminals were also considered â4 Fâ.
In WWII, there were 2400 Army doctors and 700 Navy doctors who served as psychiatrists, many inadequately trained with poorly trained back-up personnel. Their policy was to discharge, court-martial, or reassign suspected homosexuals.
Military intelligence officers interrogated suspected military men for the names of other gay military and places the homosexuals met. Many innocents were arrested and imprisoned. Congress passed the May Act in 1941 giving the military the power to arrest and close businesses, and it was used against gays and their meeting places. Imprisonment gave way to military discharges for â4 Fâ, unfit for military service.
Freund, K., J. Diamant, and V. Pinkava. 1958. “On the validity and reliability of the phalloplethysmographic (Php) diagnosis of some sexual deviations.” Rev Czech Med 4:145-51.
Freund, Kurt (1963). “A Laboratory Method For Diagnosing Predominance Of Homo- Or Hetero-Erotic Interest In Male.” Behav Res Ther 21:85-93.
Green, Richard (2004). In Memoriam: Judd Marmor, MD. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 33, Number 4 / August, 2004, pp. 327-328.
âI left Los Angeles in 1964 to avoid the Vietnam War by going to NIMH.â
Hill D.B., Rozanski C., Carfagnini J., Willoughby B. (2006). Gender Identity Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence: A Critical Inquiry. pp. 7-34. In Karasic D, Drescher J (Eds.) Sexual And Gender Diagnoses of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual (DSM): A Re-evaluation . Haworth Press ISBN 0789032147
Inquirer staff report (December 29, 1992). South Jersey Deaths: Anthony Ruggero. Philadelphia Inquirer
ANTHONY RUGGERO, 75, of Hammonton, died Sunday at home.
Mr. Ruggero was a former lieutenant with Hammonton Volunteer Fire Co. 1 and a lifelong resident of Hammonton. He was a World War II Navy veteran and a member of American Legion Post 186, Hammonton.
Survivors: his wife, Angelina; three sons, Ray Blanchard of Toronto, Jim of Haddonfield and Bill of Monmouth Junction; two grandchildren, and a sister, Marie Stretch of Ocean City.
Services: friends may call, 11 to 11:45 a.m. today, Marinella Funeral Home, 102 N. Third St., Hammonton; Mass, noon today, St. Martin de Porres Church, South Egg Harbor Road, Hammonton; entombment, Greenmount Cemetery, Hammonton.
Lagow, Larry Dwane (1977). A history of the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University. Ph.D. dissertation; typescript in Hoover Institution Archives.
Ken Zucker, a member of the SIPC*, was reported in the student newspaper the Daily Egyptian as conducting mock trials. At least one person was found “guilty” of “all the war crimes he committed against the Vietnamese,” according to Zucker. Student body Vice President Rich Wallace later introduced Zucker at a Board meeting, where Zucker read a list of demands which called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam first and foremost. On Wednesday, January 21, 1970, the Student Senate passed what was reported by the Dally Egyptian as a “hastily drawn” resolution supporting the SIPC.
*Southern Illinois Peace Committee, founded by Bill Moffett in 1967 as an anti-war splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society.
LalumiĂšre, M.L.; Blanchard, R.; Zucker, K.L. (2000): “Sexual orientation and handedness in Men and Women: a meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 126, 575-592.
Lawrence, Anne (1996). Taking Portlandiaâs hand.
http://www.annelawrence. com/twr/portlandia.html [deleted by Lawrence]
Lawrence, Anne (2008). Shame and Narcissistic Rage in autogynephilic transsexualism. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 37, Number 3 / June, 2008.
When John Bancroft, the head of the Kinsey Institute, criticized Blanchard crony J. Michael Bailey for marketing a lurid book as âscience,â Lawrence leapt to Baileyâs defense online:
“Bancroft’s remark was followed by utter silence in the room, as though no one could believe that anyone would say something so tactless. It was as though Bancroft had stood up and loudly farted — people looked at each other in embarrassment for him. “
Lawrence, Anne (August 23, 2004). Bancroft’s “not science” comment.
According to another attention-craving eccentric who defends Blanchard, Lawrence is the source of false rumors that the author of this profile declared bankruptcy. Iâll have additional examples of Lawrenceâs rage in an upcoming profile.
Marquis Whoâs Who, Inc. (1984) Blanchard, Ray. Who’s Who in Frontier Science & Technology , p. 66. ISBN 083795701X
BLANCHARD, RAY MILTON, psychiatry institute research psychologist; b. Hammonton, N.J., Oct. 9, 1945; s. Ray Milton and Angelina (Celi) Ruggero. A.B., U. Pa., 1967; M.A., h4U. Ill.-Urbana, 1970; Ph.D., 1973. Cert. psychologist Ont. Bd. Examiners. Psychologist Ont. Correctional Inst., Brampton, Can., 1976-80; research psychologist Gender Identity Clinic, Clarke Inst. Psychiatry, Toronto, Ont., 1980â. Killam fellow Dalhousie U., Halifax, N.S., Can., 1973. Mem. Internat. Acad. Sex Research, A, Psychol. Assn., Can. Psychol. Assn. Subspecialty: Gender identity disorders. Current work: Taxonomy of gender identity disorders; psychosocial adjustment of transsexuals; phallometric assessment of sexual anomalies. Home: 32 Shaftesbury Ave Toronto ON Canada M4T 1A1 Office: Gender Identity Clinic Clarke Inst Psychiatry 250 College St Toronto ON Canada M5T 1R8
Newbery, Lillian (November 27, 1984). Trans-sexuals happier after operation, MD says. Toronto Star.
Sullivan, Nikki (2008). Dis-orienting Paraphilias? Disability, Desire, and the Question of (Bio)Ethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Volume 5, Numbers 2-3 / June, 2008, 183-192. See also Moser, Charles (2008). A Different Perspective. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 37, Number 3 / June, 2008, 472-475.
Wake, Naoko (2007). The Military, Psychiatry, and “Unfit” Soldiers, 1939â1942 Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2007 62(4):461-494; doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrm002
Harry Stack Sullivan’s failure to protect homosexual men from medical and social stigmatization by screening them out of the armed forces.
Wise TN, Lucas J. (1981). Pseudotranssexualism: iatrogenic gender dysphoria. J Homosex. 1981 Spring;6(3):61-6. See also Prince, Virginia (1978). Transsexuals and pseudotranssexuals. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 7, Number 4 / July, 1978, 263-272.
USS Franklin (CV-13) (21 February 2008). Ship’s Company Killed In Action.
http://www.ussfranklin.org/kia/sc.html Ray M. BLANCHARD, Jr. AM2C 19 March 1945
Previous:Â Toronto: epicenter of pathologization of sex and gender minorities
All of Ray Blanchardâs work is about to be eclipsed by what will be Blanchardâs most enduring legacy: the broad expansion of âparaphiliaâ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) to further oppress sex and gender minorities as mentally disordered. Blanchard plans to expand it to include attraction to anyone who is not âphenotypically normalâ (ASTAR 2009). Blanchard now wants to expand this disorder to include attraction to people who are too fat, too skinny, too old, too young, too tall, too short, too disabled, or any other characteristic that makes people not ânormal.â
His taxonomy of trans women has already reduced all our relationships to paraphilia. People who love trans women have a paraphilia he calls âgynandromorphophiliaâ (Blanchard 1993), and trans women who get in relationships are merely using their partner as a paraphilic prop in a narcissistic fantasy (Sullivan 2008). This echoes outdated assertions that gay people canât have a ânormalâ relationship.
Itâs amazing to me that someone whose sexuality was depathologized by psychiatry the very year he got his Ph.D. would be so hell-bent on imposing that very oppression on others. Yet here we are. The biggest step backwards in the history of sexology is about to happen, thanks to Ray Blanchard. He probably wonât live to see what a problematic figure he will become within his own field, becoming like John Money: someone where itâs hard to separate the good from the bad. The DSM-V will be Blanchardâs âJohn/Joanâ case (Diamond 1997): the cringe-inducing career misstep that will define his life and career to the lay public.
Whatâs most interesting is how these âexpertsâ feel entitled to define and label others, then get their panties in a bunch when labels and motivations are ascribed to their own actions. Itâs as if they use âscienceâ and self-mythologizing to assert a âtruthâ about themselves and their unassailable objectivity. Iâm sure Ray thinks that being openly gay would bring his own objectivity into question. Good science stands up to that scrutiny, though. With good science, someoneâs professional or personal information is irrelevant. The only place the identity of the scientist comes into play is with subjective stuff like plethysmography or proposed taxonomies and terminology. When a subjective claim about an object of study is made, it is scientifically imperative to examine the subjectivity of the person making the claim. Hence this analysis.
Perhaps Ray Blanchardâs peers will see what a remarkable psychological case study he is. Better yet, perhaps some day Ray Blanchard will be a little more open and honest about himself. All this might help explain why he believes other people canât be trusted to be open and honest about their sexualities.
Good scientists make full disclosures so peers are aware of potential bias and conflicts of interest in their work. Perhaps Ray Blanchard will finally start making full disclosures. It would be far better if he let everyone know that his entire career has been undertaken for the most personal reasons imaginable. But as weâve seen in his case, Ray Blanchard is more interested in applying labels to others than acknowledging labels that apply to him. It is his blind spot and his hubris; the flaw that sends him stumbling away from sound science and down the unlit paths of pathology and oppression.
Toronto: epicenter of pathologization of sex and gender minorities
Previous:Â Ray Blanchard motivations for oppressing sex and gender minorities
Ray Blanchardâs mentor Kurt Freund (1914-1996) was also an expert in psychiatric screening of military recruits based on sexual orientation (Freund 1963). Freund ended up significantly shaping public policy and public perception of sex and gender minorities in the second half of the 20th century. Freund is the developer of the penile plethysmograph (Freund 1958). He was commissioned by the government to use it in the psychiatric screening of military draftees in his home country (now called the Czech Republic). People there were attempting to avoid conscription by claiming to be gay. Freundâs device was developed to see if gay erotica turned them on, simplistically assuming that erection = gay, non-erection = nongay.
Blanchard is the only smart guy currently working on sex and gender at CAMH. The rest of them range from utterly mediocre to downright inept. Itâs got to upset Blanchard that someone less intelligent but more political like Ken Zucker makes a better base salary despite being younger. Zucker has been a politician since his days as a Vietnam War protestor, so Blanchard will always take the back seat in the leadership department. Blanchard does share two things with his less talented colleagues: rigidity and unmitigated arrogance. As with most pathological science, they have insulated and isolated themselves from mainstream science through academic logrolling and nepotism, creating little organizations and journals where they can make sure their worldview prevails unchallenged.Blanchardâs bid for immortality
Itâs the end of the genetic line for Ray, a bitter pill to swallow for a sociobiologist. They often have this quaint heterosexist notion that âevolutionary fitnessâ is based on oneâs number of offspring. So whatâs Rayâs bid for immortality? Barring sperm donation, itâs going to be discovering and coining things, an unfortunate obsession found in a certain kind of academic. This goes beyond the âsignificant contributionâ scholars are supposed to make as they move through the lock-step management chain of academia. Blanchardâs ideas are his children.
I imagine a number of questions turn over in Rayâs mind a lot:
Why am I gay?
Was my birth father gay?
How can I connect myself to a man I never met?
Why do attention-craving eccentrics rally around me and my work?
Why are cross-dressing psychologists so enamored of my work?
What do Maxine Petersen, Steven Pinker, J. Michael Bailey, Anne Lawrence, and Seth Roberts all have in common (besides psychology)?
Rayâs bid for immortality has led to an enduring legacy. His work on male birth order and sexuality will probably stand up to further scientific scrutiny (Blanchard 1996). His work on handedness and sexuality seems to have promise as well (LalumiĂšre 2000). This work makes even more sense when considered in context of his family dynamic.Blanchard and company will also be known for using CAMH to set up the worldâs largest publicly-funded forced feminization sex dungeon and transgender reparative therapy clinic (Hill 2006). Applicants (supplicants, really) are carefully screened to include only the most indigent, low-functioning members of society, unable or unwilling to obtain services elsewhere. The regressive requirements at CAMH attract people who get off on humiliation, creating a convenience sample of the bottom 10%: the most eccentric and least successful segment of the transgender community (Newbery 1984).
Cross-dressing sidebar: Transgenderists like Anne Lawrence and Maxine Petersen serve as mini-Blanchards, reproducing the same desire for respect and control by seeking power over a community rather than for it. They are two key promoters of Blanchard and his work. Petersen is a rather dim person who seems genuinely baffled as to what the problem is; Lawrence, by far the smarter of the two, knows exactly what the problem is. Lawrence claims to be a community pariah because of the proselytizing for Blanchard. Both are in fact heroes in their own tiny community of what used to be called âpseudotranssexualsâ (Wise 1981). They are, however, pariahs in the larger community. The conflict arises from their assertions that they are transsexual, citing Blanchardâs paraphilic model of gender variance as âproofâ of their identities. The transsexual community has rejected both of them as respected authorities. In an apparently unintentional case of self-projection, Lawrence chalks up negative reaction to Blanchardâs ideology as ânarcissistic rageâ (Lawrence 2008). Petersen and Lawrence will continue to be Blanchard stooges because itâs the only place they get the attention and validation they seek. Lawrence has even written about being a âpriestessâ (Lawrence 1996), as if restrictive gatekeeping of trans health services is some sort of religious ritual controlled by nuns and priests.
Is there more to the story of how Rayâs life experiences shaped his ideology? You betcha. Can I tell you what else? Not just now.
While these issues have all made news over the years, they are about to take a back seat to the issue that will define Blanchardâs career: his planned expansion of paraphilia as a disease, as discussed in the next section.
Next: Ray Blanchard’s problematic place in history
Ray Blanchard motivations for oppressing sex and gender minorities
âMale gender dysphorics, paedophiles, and fetishists:” How Ray Blanchard sees us
The quotation in the title above is from a 1993 paper by sexologist Ray Blanchard. [1] Blanchard is affiliated with Torontoâs Clarke Institute, long known as âJurassic Clarkeâ among transsexual women for its outdated and draconian rules imposed upon women in our community seeking health services. In Blanchard’s worldview, transsexual women are males whose condition is on a continuum with the other groups he studies.
Background: The Clarke Institute
The Clarke Institute is named after Charles Kirk Clarke (1857-1924). Clarke oversaw the two largest Canadian mental hospitals before accepting a government mental-health post. In addition to his desire âto keep this young country sane,â he sought to advance the psychiatric professionâs influence in making medical and political decisions.
Typical of âprofessionalsâ who are unable to see (or worse) unconcerned about larger systems which influence their realm of expertise or narrow interests, Clarke was an early proponent of eugenics, emphasizing the importance of restrictive laws that would limit the immigration and marriage of theâ defective.â [2] During his tenure, foreign-born patients made up more than 50 percent of the institutionalized population in Canada. [3]
As Katherine Wilson notes:
Psychiatric diagnosis on the basis of social, cultural or political affiliation evokes the darkest memories of medical abuse in American history. For example, women suffragettes who demanded the right to vote in the early 1900s were diagnosed and institutionalized with a label of “hysteria” (Mayor, 1974). Immigrants, Bolsheviks and labor organizers of the same era were labeled as socially deviant and mentally defective by prominent psychiatric eugenicists, such as Dr. Charles Kirk Clarke. [4]
Christened with his name, the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry opened for business in 1966. A young staff member recalls those early days:
My first impression of psychiatry in Toronto was that it was rather parochial in outlook and had a distinct British socio-biological emphasis and little interest and much scepticism about psychoanalysis. [âŠ] The Clarke, instead of being an ivory tower, seemed more like a cold cement fortress. [5]
Enter Ray Blanchard
Ray Blanchard came to “The Clarke” after studying sexual behavior in criminal men, pedophilia in particular. He began his work with Kurt Freund, who brought Blanchard into Clarke, and who himself is an expert in the area of “phallometric testing,” a “psychophysiological method for assessment of erotic preferences in males” — strap a “strain gauge” around a guy’s penis, show him pictures of whatever, and draw your own conclusions. Indeed, the Clarke Institute’s own literature states,
The Clarke Division Phallometric Laboratory was established by Kurt Freund, M.D., D.Sc., the first clinical sexologist to use penile plethysmography to assess erotic preferences in men. It is the oldest laboratory in North America for the phallometric assessment of sex offenders and paraphilics, and its instrumentation for the collection and processing of phallometric data is still the most sophisticated in North America, or indeed, in the world. [6]
The problem with penile plethysmographs (PPGs) is that they are like lie detectors (polygraphs): they measure a body response, but the data is open to interpretation. For this reason, they are often challenged as evidence in court, as with lie detectors. As the Skeptic’s Dictionary notes:
A man or woman may be aroused by the sight of animals copulating or be aroused by a film of a woman eating a banana and a man eating a fig in particularly provocative ways. Still, they may have no desire to engage in bestiality or have sex with a bowl of fruit. A heterosexual man or woman may be aroused by the sight of lesbians engaging in oral sex, but have no desire to have sex with lesbians or in the presence of lesbians.
Strong arousal need not imply strong desire for what causes the arousal; and weak arousal need not imply weak desire. Furthermore, no test can determine whether a person will act on his feelings and desires. [7]
This is the major controversy in Blanchard’s work: interpretation of data, and issues of his subjectivity, based on his assumption that transition is about erotic preference. While this may describe someone like Anne Lawrence, who considers her sex drive “that which moves us most,” many of us feel this is not an accurate or even correct description of our motivation for transition. Cause and effect may be difficult to distinguish.
Blanchard has headed both the department for sex offenders and the department for gender identity. In fact, patients have told me that in the past The Clarke was set up so sex offenders and transsexual women shared a hallway, offices, waiting room, and even staff, who would essentially just “change hats” whether they were seeing a transsexual woman or a sexual predator. Imagine the dynamic that created. It was under these conditions that Blanchard made many of his observations regarding people presenting with gender issues.
A reader writes:
Blanchard, like many researchers of his day (and sadly today as well) take their base assumptions from their formal training and experience. Homosexuality may be out of the DSM, but it was not that long ago that it was considered itself a psychopathology. The psychological community’s exposure to “things trans” was for many, many decades the paraphilia and festishism that spring from transvestism. Erotic preference is, I think, an important key to understanding all the “taxonomy” of Blanchard.
In his research approach (and many, many others’), their tacit assumption is the problem lies solely in the mind, be you a pedophile or paraphiliac or gender dysphoric (the “constructionist” approach versus “essentialist”). This naturally leads in the matter at hand to focusing on erotic preference as the “natural” dividing line.
Put yourself in Blanchard’s shoes (or Bailey’s for that matter). They genuinely and honestly do not believe the claims of people like ourselves that we are who we are. To them, we’re men, and it’s just that simple. They take that stance not even as a conscious effort — it’s just where they came from as psychologists. The fact they might use the pronouns we prefer is just a way of humoring the patient, but in no way implies or lends credulity in their minds to the legitimacy of their use.
Not only do they see us as men, but they also consider transsexual women to be liars, guilty of “systematic distortion.” Below is an abstract from a Blanchard paper (when Blanchard says “heterosexual” and uses male pronouns, he means transsexual women attracted to women):
The tendency for a heterosexual subject to describe himself in terms of moral excellence or admirable personal qualities was significantly correlated with scores in the ‘transsexual’ direction on all eight sexological measures; for the homosexual subjects, only one correlation was significant. [… It] is possible that the differences in the histories produced by transvestites and heterosexual transsexuals are exaggerated to an unknown degree by the motivation of the latter to obtain approval for this operation. The findings do not diminish the important distinction between these groups, but they do suggest caution in interpreting the self-report data that have been used in comparing them. [8]
We find ourselves in a no-win situation in changing their viewpoint. We are males to them, and when we try to explain why we feel this is not accurate, we are unreliable reporters who can’t be trusted.
Karen Gurney writes:
The problems I see, with the Blanchard position is that:
(a) it falls into the fundamental trap of trying to put overarching labels (either/or) on a group which is the epitome of diversity itself;
(b) it fails to recognise the physical intersexual nature of transsexualism – the incongruence between the phenotypical and neurological sexes;
(c) it seeks to attribute the psychological manifestations of neurological sex solely to “sexual desire” and does not reflect the John/Joan evidence which was so revealing of the shortcomings of psychological thought in regard to then accepted notions that gender is constructed;
(d) it is inherently disrespectful of the experiences of the majority of us who live with transsexualism, and especially those who pioneered the way by undergoing essentially primitive surgeries (as the transsexual men forgotten by Blanchard and Bailey still do) which did not produce wholly functional genitals, sacrificed all sexual sensation for the sake of harmonising “mind” and body, and were carried out in often ill-equipped clinics in faraway places (I have a friend who had her surgery in Casablanca in the early 1960’s);
(e) it is predicated on the notion that sex assignment at birth is immutable and hence is opposite the medical rationale applied to many thousands of intersex individuals each year that, where sex is atypical or ambiguous, a medical construction is a valid response, and the legal position that such a constructed sex is valid (I do not seek to justify the ethics of such assignments where they are carried out shortly after birth but point to the many XY females who are happy in their opposite gender role and are accepted as females for all purposes); and
(f) it fails to account for the experiences of a significant number of intersex individuals who do not fit into a theory which is based on the dichotomy of both sex and gender and whose gender, like their sex, is ambiguous.
In 1998, the Clarke merged with three other mental health and addiction facilities: the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the Addiction Research Foundation, and the Donwood Institute. Collectively, they are now known as the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) [9]
Perhaps we should think of The Clarke the way they think of transsexual women. They can change their name and act like a mental health facility, but deep down they are still the same fossilized institution that pathologized homosexuality and continues to pathologize those who do not fit society’s standards for male and female.
From Blanchard to Bailey
From Blanchard’s work comes Bailey’ popularization of Blanchard’s observations and theories, where we become exotic or pathetic males driven by sexual urges to drastic ends. As Katherine Wilson notes:
Much psychiatric literature about transgender people is shockingly similar to that published about homosexuality before it was depathologized. It is based on a presumption that cross-gender identity/expression is by definition pathological, is focused on unsubstantiated theories of psychodynamic (mother-blame) cause and anecdotal case studies of institutionalized subjects, denies the existence of healthy productive TG people in society, and ignores anthropological evidence of accepted cross-cultural TG roles. These tired old myths were debunked for sexual orientation 25 years ago and have been recycled to target transgender individuals. [4] (emphasis mine)
As we continue to see more work into the field of biologic and genetic investigations of sex and sexuality, it is very important to do what we can to help those undertaking this work to understand the larger systems in place, outside their realms of expertise. To ignore the historical context and the important ethical and political issues involved in this type of research has shown to be disastrous throughout history.
These people may consider themselves above criticism, especially critical comments by those from whom they make their livings, but they do so at their own peril, and at the peril of society.
It’s impossible to separate ideological commitment from the highly specific historical contingencies bearing upon psychology and medicine in this time and place. This can certainly be demonstrated in Clarke’s work on eugenics, which diffused through society and later accreted around fascism and Nazism. Those of us outside psychiatry, and those of us directly affected by the profession, must raise these important issues and maintain a rigorous critical viewpoint. In that way, we can hope to avoid having what appear to be “facts” misinterpreted, by both researchers and the public.
Bailey’s interest in biological and genetic causes of sexuality and transsexualism does not occur in a vacuum, and he is not as “objective” as he’d like to think. As occasional Bailey co-author Richard Pillard notes:
No scientific knowledge is risk-free, and this must surely include genetic investigations of sexual orientation. One might take a sort of perverse comfort in knowing that homophobia, like racism (and all the xenophobias), exists regardless of whatever might be considered “the facts” of the moment. Research on human sexuality will, by its nature, evoke resistance and fear, to some extent legitimately. [10]
Draft version. Many thanks to those who contributed materials. Please contact me with comments.
References
1. Erotic target location errors in male gender dysphorics, paedophiles, and fetishists. Freund K, Blanchard R, Br J Psychiatry 1993 Apr;162:558-63
2. Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940. Ian Robert Dowbiggin. Cornell University Press, 1997.
7. Social desirability response set and systematic distortion in the self-report of adult male gender patients. Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Steiner BW, Arch Sex Behav 1985 Dec;14(6):505-16
8. www.gicofcolo.org/gd/writings/faqpsy.html
9. http://www.camh.net/
10. “The Genetic Theory of Sexual Orientation” in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Winter 1997, pp. 61-67.
My Experiences at the Clarke Institute
Editor’s note: Leslie has graciously honored my request for submissions from women who had dealings with the Clarke Institute in Toronto. Leslie’s story tells the sad tale of the Clarke’s faded glory. Now that they do not hold any purse strings, they have no power to speak of over local transgender populations. Leslie found them to be “a bunch of dirty old men, masquerading as clowns… stuck in the ‘ivory tower’ mentality of an old, fossilized institution which has grown arrogant and believes it is above questioning.”
“The Clarke” may have changed their name to Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), but they remain as out of touch as ever with the patients they purport to help.
Thanks to Leslie for sharing her important story with such thoughtfulness and detail!
My Experiences with the Clarke Instituteâs Gender Identity Clinic
First let me say that I did not have a bad time during my 4 visits to âthe Clarkeâ. On the first occasion they were helpful; the second, polite and mildly complimentary; the third depressing because it was the support group full of depressed people and the last, just plain irrelevant.
I have always been a woman, but was in denial until September 2000. Once I admitted that my condition was gender dysphoria I had to do something about it. Three friends had been to the Clarke Clinic and I knew of no other place where the condition was dealt with. After almost a year of trying out herbals, which did nothing, I had a check-up with my family doctor and broached the subject. He readily agreed to refer me to the Clarke. That was in August 2001 and the appointment came up in April 2002.
During the intervening months four things happened. A friend offered me a bottle of Premarin and I eagerly began taking it on October 9, 2001. From a Yahoo group I found out about a doctor in Toronto who would prescribe hormones. He in turn found me a caring psychiatrist. I was forced out of my home by my family. So when I went to the Clarke it had already passed the time when I needed them for anything.
The biggest crisis in my life came on Valentineâs Day 2002. I was forced out of my home by my adult son, with my spouseâs agreement. They were extremely unhappy that I was âcrossdressingâ â never in front of them and never to the extent of interfering with my familyâs welfare. They refused to consider any information I gave them and wouldnât talk about it. Being ejected without warning was a total shock to me, and I looked around for help and support. The Clarkeâs information package said they could help in a crisis, so I e-mailed and got an appointment with their only TS employee one week after my ouster.
First Contact
I had female clothes, but since the issue with my family seemed to be the clothing I wore, albeit always outside of the house, I stayed in self imposed male clothing for the first month of my separation from my family. I went to the appointment, February 21, 2002, dressed as a man, but still on hormones and still knowing I was a woman. I was received courteously by Ms Maxine Petersen and given ample time to tell my story. Her reaction, and that of everyone else, was that it was plainly wrong for this to have been done to me. I explained that the combination of my spouse and adult son against me made continuing to live there impossible. I was not about to get into a fist fight, something I had never been good at.
I remember asking if it was possible to be a transsexual and live as a man all or most of the time for the rest of my life. She said she didnât know⊠which was a wise answer. We discussed an appointment for my spouse, but she said it would be better for her to see the social workers. Maxine felt unable to deal with irate wives herself. She told me my spouse would be able to come to my April evaluation days as long as I signed a release. While I passed this information on, I found that she had no wish to be involved in either way.
I felt affirmed and relieved that my personal understanding of my enforced leaving home was a sound interpretation. Of course, nothing further could be done to help me get back home without at least minimal cooperation from my spouse. Sadly, that was not forthcoming.
Second Contact
By the time my official evaluation came up I had seen my psychiatrist a couple of times and found him professional, caring and very helpful. He had counseled about 65 Trans patients during his long career. By this time I had given up hope of ever being re-united with my family and had transitioned to full time living as a woman, on March 13, 2002.
April 15 and 16, 2002, were my days at the Clarke. I didnât know what to expect, and was prepared to walk away if I didnât like what I found. I was pleasantly surprised. They no longer put sensors on the genital organs and show dirty pictures to test for gender dysphoria. That would have been sufficient for me to walk outâŠ
First, I saw Maxine and was greeted warmly. I felt a lot more confident than at my last visit, as I was reconciled to probably losing my marriage, though not by my choice. I gave her my two photos as requested, âcrossdressedâ (actually neither was that as they both showed me as a woman), my questionnaire and my biography. We chatted for almost an hour and she rather apologetically asked me what turned out to be the key question at the gender clinic: âWhat do you think about when you are masturbating?â I told her. I was rather amused that they considered masturbation habits to be relevant to the diagnosis of gender identity.
My next interview was with Dr. Choy. He was also friendly and apart from saying with a smile that I had jumped 2 or 3 steps ahead of where I should be it was a pleasant experience. He also asked about my masturbation fantasies and I told him the same story.
Finally I was seen my Dr. Dickey, chief psychiatrist of the gender clinic. He was accompanied by his nurse, an older woman. He was very relaxed and gave me his opinion that gender dysphoria was a condition from birth. He also asked about my masturbation fantasies and I gave him the same answer. That was the most significant question I was ever asked, but clearly shows confusion between gender and sex. Or, perhaps an attempt to prove the validity of the autogynephilia theory of Dr. Ray Blanchard.
He asked me what I did about facial hair removal and I said I shaved. He advised me to start my electrolysis now. It wasnât bad advice, but I didnât have the money and they of course pay for nothing. It amused me that he felt he had to tell me that women donât have facial hair! I was offered a piece of paper that he proposed was a âpretend ticketâ for sexual re-assignment surgery and asked if I would take it. Of course the answer was yes â a no-risk, no-brainer decision since they didnât fund it any more anyway. I guess I passed the test.
He asked me for any comments on their service to me and I had to mention that it had taken 7 months to get an appointment. He pulled a sad face and I sympathized that they had budget and staff cutbacks. He seemed glad to have the understanding and support from me⊠say, who was the therapist here?
In response to his inquiry as to any final questions I might have I asked this: âI donât mean to be impolite, but can you tell me why I might ever want to come here again?â He took it well, thought a minute and came up with three possible reasons. First, if my psychiatrist didnât work out they could provide that for me. Second, if I needed a letter for surgery, after a full two years of full time experience of course, they could do that for me, or provide the supporting letter. Third, I could attend their support group.
I had not heard the last item mentioned yet that day, but now it had become the âJewell in the Crownâ. I knew about it, so I said, âBut, I canât go there yet.â He seemed taken aback and said, âOf course you can go. You can go as a man; you can go as a woman; you can go dressed as a bunny rabbit!â While I was amused, and I think it was just his wacky but well meaning way of telling me that there was no dress code, it did make me wonder about this man. I later characterized them all as a bunch of dirty old men, masquerading as clowns!
After the hour the nurse walked me out to the locked door â this is a high security facility. She asked me if it was my own hair (no, Iâm bald) and complimented me on my good taste in clothes (white blouse and tan knee-length skirt). She spoke rather distastefully of the âcrossdressersâ they sometime saw who dressed too flamboyantly.
The next day I was scheduled to see Dr. Betty Chan, Endocrinologist and Internist, at her office away from the Clarke. I say scheduled because even though the printed copy I had with me said 10, they had me down for 11 am. So I went and had a coffee first.
I had brought a photocopy of my latest blood test results, which she seemed glad to have. I was interviewed briefly about general health, and my HRT regimen. Then I was asked to strip down, in private, put on a paper dress and lie down for a physical examination. She was very discreet and gave me the same courtesy she gave all her female patients. She checked my blood pressure and said it was too high so I should ask my doctor to double my spironolactone and halve my Premarin. (The first my doctor agreed with and did, but he laughed and dismissed the second as typical of the Clarkeâs extreme conservatism.) When I was about to leave I asked for my blood test results back and she seemed a bit taken aback that I wanted them, but photocopied them and returned my copy. She told me I didnât need to come back, which was good as I had no need or intent to return anyway! To be fair to her, I should mention that she had a cold and was probably not feeling well.
The months went by and I was busy moving and re-establishing myself as a woman, in my new community. I knew the support group didnât meet in July and August, and I had nothing back from the evaluation days. I e-mailed Maxine on May 14, 2002, asking about both and received no answer until late July. She told me then that she had been very ill and off work, which I sympathized with in my return mail. The recommendations following from the evaluation had not been sent out during her time off to recuperate, but she said they were the standard ones: continue transition; be under medical supervision for HRT; wait full 2 years before surgery. She gave me the date of the first support group meeting, and I resolved to attend it.
Third Contact
Wednesday September 18th, 2002, at 6 pm I went up to the 4th floor of the CAMH building and found over a dozen people waiting to be let in behind the locked door for the first meeting of the season. All were male to female types. One of them I knew already and said hello to her. I wore womenâs cargo pants and a top and most were similarly dressed. A couple wore skirts and blouses, conservative and tasteful. Many made no attempt to look like women. Some looked scared.
We were taken to a crowded room which had about 18 chairs, for 16 of us. There was no coffee or other refreshments. We were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. Nothing that took place in that room was ever to be revealed outside or we would be banned! Was I joining a secret society? I could understand that since this group was open to every variety of crossdresser, transgender and transsexual, privacy was important for some. Maxine was in attendance, but said little. She introduced a student who was really to be in charge, a nice young woman who was pleasant, but detached. I had the feeling that the prevailing atmosphere was, âWe know you arenât really women, and you know it too, but we will all pretend so you can feel good about yourselves.â I didnât feel good. I knew I was a woman and found them condescending and oppressive.
We went around the circle introducing ourselves. There were 2 or 3 post-ops but most had not transitioned yet. Some were depressed, some hostile, some paranoid. I felt uncomfortable as I had none of these problems. My intro was brief and to the point: hormones begun October 9, 2001, transitioned March 13, 2002, surgery scheduled November 21, 2002. Most of the people told stories of doom and gloom. Problems in womenâs washrooms, hair removal that hadnât worked, rejection by families, severe depression not fully responding to treatmentâŠ
I told my little story about the two Pentecostal evangelist ladies who had visited me a few weeks before and didnât understand what I meant when I said I wouldnât be acceptable in their church because of my âgender dysphoriaâ. Iâd had to say something to enlighten them, so I made the explanation that âI used to think I was a man, but I havenât had any surgery yet.â They immediately told me that I should remain the way God made me and not do anything to alter my body. They took my hands and prayed for me very movingly, always using âherâ and âsheâ. I had initially marveled that these were so untypical of many Christians who criticize and ridicule transsexuals. It struck me several hours later that they were convinced I was a genetic female who had at one time been tempted to masculinize myself!
I made the point that while I have a very femme body and pass easily, I believed that the most important ingredient was confidence. It could have happened to any one of them if they just believed in themselves. A few people were impressed favourably. Most just sat there… they preferred to tell their sad takes of woe and receive sympathy. The leaders did very little to guide the discussion or give helpful advice to anyone. They looked bored. They told one woman that she transitioned backwards because she did it at work before she transitioned at home. I felt sad for her. It wasnât a confidence builder. I felt very much out of place. Iâd gone into every possible situation before and since my transition and felt completely at home, but I wanted to get out of this artificial and stultifying place. When it was announced that our time was up at 7:30 pm I was glad to get out of there, and never went back. They had nothing to offer me. If I went weekly I would have been depressed!
A long time Clarke girl told me later that the Clarkeâs method was to deliberately intimidate, so you would be able to stand up to the scorn and ridicule of the outside world. I found that strange as the outside world was a very comfortable place for me to live and be at ease in. Only the contrived Clarke atmosphere was hard to take. There is such a thing as anticipating trouble, so that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy⊠I think they do their clients no favours by this âprogrammeâ.
Fourth Contact
I was expecting a 6-month recall interview and sure enough, a week before I went to Thailand for my surgery the envelope arrived. It had been sent to my old address in Bowmanville. I checked, and I had advised the Clarke of my current address in August. More surprises ahead! Inside, the letter said, âDear Andrewâ, which was never a name I owned or used. Furthermore, the date of my appointment was to be November 20, the day before my surgery, when I would already be in Thailand. I had mentioned that at the support group, but obviously it hadnât made it into the system.
I phoned and left a message explaining why I wasnât going to make it on that date on their voice-mail, then e-mailed and ccâd to Maxine. Within 20 minutes I had a reply, apologizing profusely and thanking me for my âgenerous offerâ to keep in touch after my surgery. Since it was worded so winningly I decided that I would contact them on my return, once I felt up to it.
In early February I e-mailed Maxine and said that I was ready have the interview. She asked me to come in on February 28, 2003. I told her I was the biggest success story she would ever have sitting in her office. I showed her my psychiatristâs letter to my surgeon, and my surgery photos. I offered to e-mail them to her, and did so at her request. She was interested in my psychiatrist and said she would invite him to join their new advisory committee. I told her I knew about it, but I wasnât interested in applying to join the committee.
I discussed âwhat the Clarke could do for peopleâ and asked why they doubled the Harry Benjamin standards. She told me about a few F to M TSâs who had dropped out of the programme and come back years later to thank her for not giving them hormones and thereby causing permanent sterility within months. That was the basis of their âhigherâ standards. I mentioned that a few handouts would really help clients: steps in transitioning; friendly electrologists; legal name change etc. She agreed it was a good idea. But after over 25 years in the business of âhelpingâ Trans people they had nothing to give them.
Maxine was surprised to hear that the SRS surgeons in Thailand donât follow the Harry Benjamin Standards. I was surprised that she was so unaware of that fact, and that many hundreds of people from all around the world prefer to go half way around the world rather than submit to the humiliation of the treatment gender clinics like the Clarke mete out.
I told her I try to steer as many people as possible away from the Clarke and to my own doctors, who give excellent service. She just shrugged. In light of their meager resources and diminishing budget I asked if I could volunteer and help them in some way. She said no, the only possibility was the advisory committee. I suggested that since they were not my support group I thought they should at least pay for parking, since I was aiding in their research. I was frostily told that they never did that.
So we didnât part on the friendliest of terms, which was not my intention. She is a nice woman and as helpful as she can be within the restrictions the institution places on its staff. It seems the idea of being responsible to their clients is offensive to them. They are stuck in the âivory towerâ mentality of an old, fossilized institution which has grown arrogant and believes it is above questioning.
In ConclusionâŠ
When they were the gatekeepers for government funded SRS they had great power. Now they are irrelevant, but still keep on in the same authoritarian way. Perhaps it is a good thing to have them to care (?) for those with serious co-morbid conditions beside gender dysphoria. It seems that many in the âsupport groupâ have fallen through the cracks of the health care system and they at least have something there. I know several people personally who went away from the Clarke weeping, yet found help elsewhere. There is no way of knowing for sure, but I believe the number may be quite high. They are success stories in the Clarkeâs book, because they left the programme voluntarily and didnât make the âmistakeâ of transitioning and SRS. At least the Clarke interprets it this way as they have lost touch with them. Iâm told some former clients have committed suicide in despair of ever getting help, but I canât verify that.
Would I go back if invited? Probably, but they wonât like the questions I ask and I doubt if I will hear from them again. I am not going to be put onto their committee and thereby neutralized as a critic of their practices and policies. Itâs too bad they are so insular as they are the only âofficialâ gender clinic in the province of Ontario. This means that every doctor has them in his reference book, and will send patients with gender issues only to them, unless they have specifically asked for another doctor.
I got what I wanted and needed without any help from the Clarke. It felt pretty good that I had gone through the evaluation and was treated with courtesy and compliments. Itâs easy for me to âblend inâ with feminine features and only 5â8â tall, but I wonder, do the big, angular girls have such a good experience from the Clarke?
Maxine did admit grudgingly that âmaybeâ I was one of the ones who didnât need a full 2 year âreal life testâ. Iâm told she took more like 5 years to make up her own mind. I knew after a week that this was the only life for me. I resent the fact that these people deliberately hold back very promising candidates for hormones and surgery just because they wonât treat them as individuals. Itâs a âone size fits all approachâ but we are not all the same! They donât trust us to tell the truth about our transition dates. You have to change your name to an unmistakably female name (mine wouldnât do) and show education receipts or pay stubs to prove you have lived it. Apparently âBig Brotherâ knows best⊠in their book.
I was 3 months on hormones before I found my hormone doctor and only 5 months full time before my psychiatrist recommended me for surgery. That would be considered irresponsible by the Clarke, but for me it was appropriate and worked. I like the way my psychiatrist put it better: âAny nurse, or secretary, can go down a check list and tell you when you have qualified for hormones or surgery. I assess you on the basis of my 23 years of working with trans clients and you are a classical transsexual.â I would never have heard that kind of statement at the Clarke.
Iâm now 3 years post-op and living a happy and anonymous life in the community with my partner. I accompanied her just a year ago to the same SRS surgeon I used and her results have been equally good. Iâve had little contact with the CAMH Gender Clinic but sometimes talk to their clients.
One girl who went on their advisory board confided in me that they were still rigidly standing by their old principles and she doubted they would ever change. I had anticipated that. Another contacted me because she was due for an appointment and couldnât get a reply back from them. She eventually did, and I had lunch with her in the CAMH Cafeteria. Itâs a huge 12 story building with all sorts of addiction and mental health clinics. It might have been my imagination but I thought we got a lot more rude stares from passers by than I had in other restaurants.
My opinions of this venerable old institution have changed very little in the intervening years. I still think they do more harm than good, but in a time of penny pinching by the government perhaps that problem will solve itself. What we need is more private physicians and psychiatrists who will give proper care to those who wish to transition and the means of finding them easily. Too many doctors would rather not touch anything as controversial as feminizing transsexuals. Even the Clinics who do give care to transsexuals are notoriously conservative. One of them has a used needle disposal system in their patientsâ washroom, with a notice that they operate a needle exchange. However, they still insist on a minimum 3 month wait after first contact before prescribing hormones and have turned some down. One candidate who was turned down for health reasons came to me for information. She has been happily on âoffshoreâ hormones for 6 months with no ill effects and is planning on SRS next year. Why are hormones considered more dangerous than illegal injectable heroin?
Our provincial government is considering re-listing SRS as a surgery that is funded by our health care system, but moving painfully slowly in that direction. If they do I want 3 new standards built into the plan: 1) free choice of the preferred surgeon (with a reasonable maximum limit on the price of course), 2) approvals by nothing more restrictive than the Harry Benjamin Standards â http://www.hbigda.org/soc.htm , and 3) allocation of sufficient funds to clear the 7 year backlog and provide enough surgeries to meet the real needs, not the 10 a year that it averaged before. Not to be too much of a pessimist, but I have my doubts that they will ever actually pay for it again.
My experiences
by Sharon
In the mid 1970’s, when I was in my early twenties, I sought the assistance of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry’s gender identity program. The conflict between my gender identity and my sex arose at about age 9. By age 12, I had come to understand that I was in fact a girl, and that I needed to change my body to conform to the way I felt inside.
At about this time, the newspapers reported the first experimental organ transplants, and the enhancement of topless dancers’ breasts using silicone injections, which led me to speculate whether or not the same methods could be used to make my body female.
Unfortunately, I was very tall for my age – already over 6 feet, and still growing rapidly. I knew that this would be great obstacle to passing as a woman, and it was a tremendous source of anxiety.
I needed to start shaving at a younger age than most boys I knew. Had I been a boy, this might have been a source of pride and self-confidence, but I was a girl, so it was hell.
At about age 13, I read a newspaper article about transsexualism, and the existence of endocrinological and surgical treatment. It was a great relief to know that I was not alone, and that medical treatment existed. Through my adolescence, I never wavered in my desire to be female in all respects.
The Clarke made clear from the outset that research was the major focus of their program. I was supportive of their conducting research, but I soon realized that they offered precious little in the way of treatment, and then only to the small fraction of applicants they accepted into their program. They scheduled numerous appointments for all manner of tests and interviews. I was interviewed by at least two of their staff psychiatrists, including Dr. Freund, who tried to console me by pointing out that this problem was not my fault. I already knew that. The other psychiatrist focused a lot on my height, and pointed out that I would have a lot of problems, which of course, I already knew.
Several of my appointments were at nearby hospitals for various medical tests. I recall that one of them involved some sort of an imaging scan. I handed the test form to the technicians, one of whom giggled when she read on it “transsexual”, Fortunately, all other medical professionals I encountered at the hospitals treated me with respect.
My assessment by an endocrinologist led to the one bright spot in my Clarke experience. He was new to their program, and I recall that they talked him up as being a leader in his field, and something of a coup to have on their team.
I found him understanding, and willing to help. As part of his assessment, he asked to see me completely in the nude, so that he could get a sense of what hormones might do for me. While acknowledging that my height was an obstacle, he expressed the opinion that my body could be successfully feminized using hormones. This was music to my ears!
Even better, he offered to start me on estrogen right away, and I was thrilled to accept. At my first opportunity the next day, I presented my prescription to a local pharmacist, but there was a set-back. I was told that they could not provide the prescribed dose. At first they refused to explain the problem, but eventually told me that the unit of measure was out by a factor of 1000, e.g. micrograms vs milligrams. Fortunately, they were able to reach the endocrinologist by phone and quickly resolved the problem, but it was a nervous moment.
It felt wonderful to start on hormones. Soon, I had a follow-up meeting with the endocrinologist, at which he asked me a favour – would I be willing to meet some of his medical students, to provide them an opportunity to meet someone like me. He wanted to include that experience in their training, in the hope of promoting better understanding. Recalling the giggles from the imaging technician, I could see the potential benefit, so I readily agreed. We had the meeting, and it went very well. Needless to say, I was feeling much better about the Clarke’s program.
With the completion of the medical tests, my appointments reverted to the Clarke. As I recall, one of the staff asked how I liked their new endocrinologist. I responded very positively, and expressed my joy at finally having been prescribed estrogen. Upon hearing this, the staff member freaked, and next thing I knew, I was confronted by more senior staff, who told me that the endocrinologist had not been authorized to prescribe the hormones to me. They demanded that I turn over the unused portion of the drug, else they would drop me from their evaluation.
I felt I had no real choice in the matter, so I reluctantly complied. It was a huge let down, and from that point, the Clarke experience was just something to be endured.
One of their evaluations required that I present myself dressed as woman for an interview with one of their staff, which was to be videotaped. Since I had not transitioned, and would not have passed in public, they agreed that I could change into my feminine attire on the premises. They left me alone to change in the studio where the interview was to be taped, but soon I noticed the cameras slewing to aim at me. The bastards were taping me dressing! I complained, afterward, but they just sloughed it off. It was now becoming clear that I was much more of a test subject to them, than a human being. One of the final tests involved the plethysmograph. A contraption designed to measure penile response while the subject is shown various pictures. I was told not to speak, and to focus my attention on the pictures. I was surprised to find that some of them were from the session for which I had dressed as a woman. I remember little else about the test itself.
Afterward, I chatted briefly with the test conductor, as we walked down the hall. Trying to make the best of the awkward situation, I commented that I guessed it was valuable to have the opportunity to obtain scientific data on transsexuals. To which he responded that few true transsexuals were available for study, in contrast with homosexuals, who were available “by the wheelbarrow”. Clearly, I was just a data point to him.
Finally, I met with Dr. Steiner and several other of the staff, who told me, “You are not a transsexual, and you do not need a sex-change, at least not now.” Dr. Steiner warned against rushing to feminize myself on hormones, because in her opinion that accounted for most of the sex-change. I was told that I required years of intensive psychotherapy, and they offered to recommend some doctors. I told them, “thank you for nothing”, and walked out. I was little more than a research subject to them – research that spawned such nonsense as Dr. Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia.
Within a year, I found a gynecologist who readily agreed to my request to begin hormone treatment. My body responded wonderfully to estrogen, and within two years, I had a pleasing bosom, and my hips had filled out – finally skirts fit properly! Having greater access to my female emotions was great, as was losing my male sex drive.
In the end, I found the prospect of transition too daunting. I was not at all confident that I could overcome the problems of my great height. I did not have the emotional strength to deal with the rejection of family, and the abuse of strangers. Living as a man is hell for a woman, but living as a woman seen by everyone as a man, likely would be even worse.
Nevertheless, I completed facial electrolysis, and I love the softness of my skin. My hair is shoulder length, femininely cut, and I love it! I have never for a moment regretted feminizing my body. After twenty five years, I could not imagine not having breasts. For me, some feminization has proven much better than none. It made my life bearable, though far from happy. Successful transition is the only way to have a chance at true happiness.
I am fortunate to have meaningful and intellectually stimulating hobbies, into which I can escape for brief periods. I am also fortunate to have a few good friends.
Sharon
—
Toronto Star, Tuesday, November 27, 1984 Trans-sexuals happier after operation, MD says By Lillian Newbery Toronto Star Page H2
The vast majority of men and women who had surgical sex changes in Toronto say they prefer their new gender. Most support themselves in society without welfare or unemployment insurance.
Dr. Mary Steiner, head of the Gender Disorder Clinic and the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, said recently the favorable results probably reflect the strict evaluation given those who seek such surgery. Only 1 in 10 men who request it are approved.
The Gender Identity Clinic assesses individuals who dress as the opposite sex, long to be the opposite sex or believe that inside they really are the opposite sex, research co-ordinator Leonard Clemmensen said during a recent research open house at the institute on College St.
In the most extreme cases, called trans-sexuals, the sense of belonging to the opposite sex is âlongstanding and unalterableâ and leaves them feeling constantly unhappy.
âIf the patient has been definitely diagnosed as trans-sexual, has no other major psychiatric disorder and has proven ability to function in society as a member of the opposite sex, then the clinic may recommend sex reassignment.â
The Gender Identity Clinic contacted 38 women who became men and 41 men who became women, representing 77.5 per cent of all sex reassignments coordinated through the provincial institute in the past 15 years.
The study included only people who had the surgery a year or more before and the average time between the date of surgery and follow-up was 47.4 months.
Only one of the group said she was âunsureâ if she still wanted to live as a female and none said they wish they hadnât had the sex change. All but five said they prefer their current gender and would undergo such surgery again. One homosexual male changed to a female, three heterosexual males changed to females and one female changed to a man said they would âprobablyâ choose the change if they had the decision to make over again.
One of the aims of the program has always been to end up with people who are self-supporting in society, Steiner said. Usually they hold jobs on a lower level than before the sex change, although some have returned to their old jobs.
Of 79 studied, 69 sustain themselves in society without welfare or unemployment insurance benefits.
All the 38 women who underwent the sex change had been attracted to females before the surgery. Of the 41 men: 32 known as homosexual trans-sexuals had been attracted to other males before surgery; nine known as heterosexual trans-sexuals has been attracted to females. Thirty-nine of the 79 live with a member of their own biological sex in a stable relationship.
If you had dealings with the Clarke Institute and the Gender Identity Program, particularly with Ray Blanchard, we hope you’ll contact me to share your story.
References
2. Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940. Ian Robert Dowbiggin. Cornell University Press, 1997.
Blanchard, Ray, Collins, Peter (1993). Men with sexual interest in transvestites, transsexuals, and she-males. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Volume 181 – Issue 9.
Blanchard, R., & Bogaert, A. F. (1996). Homosexuality in men and number of older brothers. American Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 27â31.
Thank you for calling my attention to the misleading information posted on the Internet by Andrea James.
My 2008 salary included a one-time buyout for unused vacation time (I had about six months’ worth of it) and does not reflect my annual base income.
At the time of the Vietnam war, I had an unusual exemption. According to my draft card (which I still have) it was a 4-A. This exempted me from the draft, in peacetime, as the sole surviving male heir of a serviceman killed in a foreign war. The US Congress never declared war on Vietnam, so it was technically peace time for the purposes of this draft law (or policy, whatever it was). My father, Ray Milton Blanchard Jr, a sailor in the US Navy, was lost at sea on 19 March 1945, in the bombing of the aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin. My mother was a few months pregnant with me at the time. I was the first, only, and posthumous child of Ray Jr.
In brief, I did not come to Canada to escape the draft. I had no incentive to do so.
Regards, Ray
[editorâs note: this base salary is only one of Blanchardâs revenue streams.]
Carlson, Tucker (8 March 1999), “The Hall of Lame“, Forbes Magazine. http://www.forbes.com/forbes-life-magazine/1999/0308/063.html
As most of those listed in the book know, entries in Who’s Who are mostly self-reported and largely unchecked, making it the ideal place to tidy up an uneven educational or work history⊠Indeed, the first clue that Who’s Who is a vanity publication is the “Thoughts on My Life” feature that appears beneath some entries.
Diamond, Milton and H. Keith Sigmundson (1997). Sex reassignment at birth: Long-term review and clinical implications. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1997;151(3):298-304.
The psychiatrists had several choices of phraseology if they considered homosexuality a personality disorder or the expression of another kind of personality disorder. They could term a person a âpsychopath,â âschizophrenic,â ânormally imbalanced,â âweak psychological origins,â âarrested aggressive,â âpurposefully immoral,â âcontaining a neurosisâ or maybe âanother natural human traitâ which psychiatrists knew would not be acceptable to military standards. All categories were considered by the military to classify the person as â4 Fâ, undesirable for military service. Habitual criminals were also considered â4 Fâ.
In WWII, there were 2400 Army doctors and 700 Navy doctors who served as psychiatrists, many inadequately trained with poorly trained back-up personnel. Their policy was to discharge, court-martial, or reassign suspected homosexuals.
Military intelligence officers interrogated suspected military men for the names of other gay military and places the homosexuals met. Many innocents were arrested and imprisoned. Congress passed the May Act in 1941 giving the military the power to arrest and close businesses, and it was used against gays and their meeting places. Imprisonment gave way to military discharges for â4 Fâ, unfit for military service.
Freund, K., J. Diamant, and V. Pinkava. 1958. “On the validity and reliability of the phalloplethysmographic (Php) diagnosis of some sexual deviations.” Rev Czech Med 4:145-51.
Freund, Kurt (1963). “A Laboratory Method For Diagnosing Predominance Of Homo- Or Hetero-Erotic Interest In Male.” Behav Res Ther 21:85-93.
Green, Richard (2004). In Memoriam: Judd Marmor, MD. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 33, Number 4 / August, 2004, pp. 327-328.
âI left Los Angeles in 1964 to avoid the Vietnam War by going to NIMH.â
Inquirer staff report (December 29, 1992). South Jersey Deaths: Anthony Ruggero. Philadelphia Inquirer
ANTHONY RUGGERO, 75, of Hammonton, died Sunday at home.
Mr. Ruggero was a former lieutenant with Hammonton Volunteer Fire Co. 1 and a lifelong resident of Hammonton. He was a World War II Navy veteran and a member of American Legion Post 186, Hammonton.
Survivors: his wife, Angelina; three sons, Ray Blanchard of Toronto, Jim of Haddonfield and Bill of Monmouth Junction; two grandchildren, and a sister, Marie Stretch of Ocean City.
Services: friends may call, 11 to 11:45 a.m. today, Marinella Funeral Home, 102 N. Third St., Hammonton; Mass, noon today, St. Martin de Porres Church, South Egg Harbor Road, Hammonton; entombment, Greenmount Cemetery, Hammonton.
James, Andrea (2007). Plethysmograph: A disputed device. Transsexual Road Map.
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/plethysmograph.html
James, Andrea (2009). $325,000+ in salaries for Zucker & Blanchard to pathologize trans people. Transsexual Road Map
Lagow, Larry Dwane (1977). A history of the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University. Ph.D. dissertation; typescript in Hoover Institution Archives.
Ken Zucker, a member of the SIPC*, was reported in the student newspaper the Daily Egyptian as conducting mock trials. At least one person was found “guilty” of “all the war crimes he committed against the Vietnamese,” according to Zucker. Student body Vice President Rich Wallace later introduced Zucker at a Board meeting, where Zucker read a list of demands which called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam first and foremost. On Wednesday, January 21, 1970, the Student Senate passed what was reported by the Dally Egyptian as a “hastily drawn” resolution supporting the SIPC.
*Southern Illinois Peace Committee, founded by Bill Moffett in 1967 as an anti-war splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society.
LalumiĂšre, M.L.; Blanchard, R.; Zucker, K.L. (2000): “Sexual orientation and handedness in Men and Women: a meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 126, 575-592.
Lawrence, Anne (1996). Taking Portlandiaâs hand.
http://www.annelawrence. com/twr/portlandia.html [deleted by Lawrence]
Lawrence, Anne (2008). Shame and Narcissistic Rage in autogynephilic transsexualism. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 37, Number 3 / June, 2008.
When John Bancroft, the head of the Kinsey Institute, criticized Blanchard crony J. Michael Bailey for marketing a lurid book as âscience,â Lawrence leapt to Baileyâs defense online:
“Bancroft’s remark was followed by utter silence in the room, as though no one could believe that anyone would say something so tactless. It was as though Bancroft had stood up and loudly farted — people looked at each other in embarrassment for him. “
Lawrence, Anne (August 23, 2004). Bancroft’s “not science” comment.
According to another attention-craving eccentric who defends Blanchard, Lawrence is the source of false rumors that the author of this profile declared bankruptcy. Iâll have additional examples of Lawrenceâs rage in an upcoming profile.
BLANCHARD, RAY MILTON, psychiatry institute research psychologist; b. Hammonton, N.J., Oct. 9, 1945; s. Ray Milton and Angelina (Celi) Ruggero. A.B., U. Pa., 1967; M.A., h4U. Ill.-Urbana, 1970; Ph.D., 1973. Cert. psychologist Ont. Bd. Examiners. Psychologist Ont. Correctional Inst., Brampton, Can., 1976-80; research psychologist Gender Identity Clinic, Clarke Inst. Psychiatry, Toronto, Ont., 1980â. Killam fellow Dalhousie U., Halifax, N.S., Can., 1973. Mem. Internat. Acad. Sex Research, A, Psychol. Assn., Can. Psychol. Assn. Subspecialty: Gender identity disorders. Current work: Taxonomy of gender identity disorders; psychosocial adjustment of transsexuals; phallometric assessment of sexual anomalies. Home: 32 Shaftesbury Ave Toronto ON Canada M4T 1A1 Office: Gender Identity Clinic Clarke Inst Psychiatry 250 College St Toronto ON Canada M5T 1R8
Newbery, Lillian (November 27, 1984). Trans-sexuals happier after operation, MD says. Toronto Star.
Sullivan, Nikki (2008). Dis-orienting Paraphilias? Disability, Desire, and the Question of (Bio)Ethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Volume 5, Numbers 2-3 / June, 2008, 183-192. See also Moser, Charles (2008). A Different Perspective. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 37, Number 3 / June, 2008, 472-475.
Wake, Naoko (2007). The Military, Psychiatry, and “Unfit” Soldiers, 1939â1942 Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2007 62(4):461-494; doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrm002
Harry Stack Sullivan’s failure to protect homosexual men from medical and social stigmatization by screening them out of the armed forces.
Wise TN, Lucas J. (1981). Pseudotranssexualism: iatrogenic gender dysphoria. J Homosex. 1981 Spring;6(3):61-6. See also Prince, Virginia (1978). Transsexuals and pseudotranssexuals. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 7, Number 4 / July, 1978, 263-272.
These links are provided for those interested in this site’s historical coverage of Blanchard
Ray Blanchard on transsexualism
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/ray-blanchard.html
Ray Blanchard motivations for oppressing sex and gender minorities
ray-blanchard-motivations.html
Toronto: epicenter of pathologization of sex and gender minorities
ray-blanchard-hypotheses.html
Ray Blanchard’s place in history
ray-blanchard-history.html
Notes, updates, further reading
ray-blanchard-notes.html
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
San Francisco Public Radio station KQED featured a discussion of Alice Dreger‘s defense of controversial psychologist J. Michael Bailey, author of the 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen. “Transgender Theories” aired 22 August 2007 on Forum with host Michael Krasny.
Alice Dreger Associate Professor of Clinical and Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Northwestern University
Joan Roughgarden Professor of Biological Science, Stanford University
Mara Keisling Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality
Transcript
Krasny: From KQED public radio in San Francisco, Iâm Michael Krasny. Coming up next on Forum, outrage and allegations have been hurled back and forth over the controversial work of a Northwestern psychologist explaining what he views as the motivations behind why some men become women. Itâs a very messy imbroglio which brings with it questions of research ethics, sexual and gender identity, and charges on both sides of immorality. Weâll attempt to sort it all out and hear from both sides, next after this.
(music break)
Krasny: From KQED public radio in San Francisco, Iâm Michael Krasny. Good morning and welcome to this morningâs Forum program. In 2003 Northwestern Psychology Professor J. Michael Bailey published a work on gender-bending and transsexualism called The Man Who Would Be Queen, a study of feminine roles. The work has outraged transsexuals because of its thesis that some of the men who become women are motivated by largely erotic attachments and sexuality, rather than the long-held view that men who become women largely do so because they feel like women trapped in the bodies of men. Or to put it more plainly, that male-to-female transsexuality can be rooted in sexual attraction rather than in possessing or coveting an inner female self or soul. This part of the work of Professor Bailey caused a firestorm, and there followed allegations against him, as well as allegations against those who strongly disagreed with his methods and conclusions about trans men. An investigation took place at Northwestern, and web postings appeared charging Professor Bailey with illegal and unethical conduct, and targeting both him and his loved ones. Many of the feelings on both sides remain raw and damaged, and in fact Benedict Carey reported on this in a discussion that went on controversially at the International Academy of Sex Research in Vancouver. This was reported in yesterdayâs New York Times, and he said it was âone of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.â We want to try to sort all this out and what is at stake in the argument, and why it has created such a firestorm that really continues right up to the present. Let me tell you who is joining us for this hour. We have with us by phone Dr. J. Michael Bailey. Heâs Professor of Psychology at Northwestern and joins us from Evanston. Good morning to you.
Bailey: Good morning.
Krasny: I also have with us Dr. Alice Dreger, who is Associate Professor of Clinical and Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern, and she joins us from East Lansing this morning. Welcome to you.
Dreger: Thank you.
Krasny: And we are also joined this morning by Mara Keisling, who is Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Sheâs with us from St. Augustine, Florida. Welcome, Mara Keisling.
Keisling: Thank you, Michael.
Krasny: Here in studio, we want to welcome Joan Roughgarden, Professor of Biological Science at Stanford University, author of Evolutionâs Rainbow, and welcome Joan Roughgarden.
Roughgarden: Thank you.
Krasny: And I want to do this sort of in seriatim, weâre going to hear from what I call the Bailey-Dreger side first, and then weâll hear from Joan Roughgarden and Mara Keisling, who take strong exception to the study and what it puts out there. Professor Bailey, let me begin with you, and letâs get you on the record here in terms of what you see is the minefield you stepped into here. It has to do, as I said, with the nature of transsexual sexuality, I suppose, more than anything else, doesnât it?
Bailey: Well, it does, but before I address that specifically, I want to point out some inaccuracies in the way you kind of began, one of which is the implication that my book offended all transsexual women. That is certainly not the case. It offended a subset of transsexual women. And the percentage of the transsexuals who it offended is impossible to tell, because the transsexuals who approve of the theories that I wrote about are so intimidated by the people like Lynn Conway, who have attempted to suppress this work. Itâs really impossible to know. So Iâll say a bit about the science behind this.
Krasny: Let me stop you there for a second, and thank you for making thatâI didnât want to give the impression that it was anything other than a subset, because I would agree with that characterization. But Ms. Conway did write to us, and I think one of the big arguments seems to be calling this science. You said it was a book in which you interviewed people for a book, as opposed to being taken seriously as perhaps science or research⊠or nothing other than a social or soft science, so letâs maybe distinguish that if we could.
Bailey: Well, sure thing. This would be a pretty simple matter to tell you what the book was if there hadnât 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 worldâs 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 Blanchardâs 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 donât write about what I could plainly see with my eyes and was there in Ray Blanchardâs work. And so I decided to write my book in part because of this.
Krasny: What was there is what I described earlier as erotic attachment.
Bailey: Well, you simplified a bit. That was the key thing that was missing, which is an erotic motivation in some males to become women. And this is expressed most commonly and most early in these individuals as erotic crossdressing. So when they first go into puberty, they discover that it really turns them on to wear, say, panties, womenâs panties, and look at themselves in the mirror, and to masturbate and so on. And there are various manifestations of this trait, which is called autogynephilia: auto (self), gyne (woman) philia (love for). In a subset of autogynephilic individualsâwho remember, begin life as menâthis drive manifests as the desire to have female anatomy. And these are the males most likely that go on and get sex reassignment surgery and become women.
Krasny: And we should mention that this was actually nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, but thereâs been a lot of opposition aside from the subset of transsexuals. Dr. John Bancroft, for example, Director of the Kinsey Institute, said this is not science, itâs anecdotes. And youâve been singled out for a lot of criticism, particularly with some things gay menâlet me just get you on record on thisâgay men supposedly, you said, are suited⊠you said, some gay men are suited to be florists or beauticians, Latinos have genes that suit them for transsexualism, and they are more likely to be prostitutes, so youâve been charged withâ
Bailey: You sound like youâve been reading straight off of Lynn Conway’s website.
Krasny: I have. I want to give you every opportunity to answer her charges here.
Bailey: I didnât say any of those things that way. All I did was notice some things. Is this controversial that gay men are more likely than straight men to be florists? [66] Thatâs what I said. I didnât say they were suited, althoughâyou know, I donât know what that means. And I also said that in my observations, that Latina women are more likely than âor Iâm sorry, Latina transgender peopleâare more likely than white transgender people to be a certain type of transsexual, that is the other type that we havenât talked about yet. [183] I just talked about what I noticed with my eyes. I didnât talk about them having genes. [183] If youâre going to be summarizing things that are really negative about me from Lynn Conway’s website, we will be here all week, and we will make no progress.
Krasny: Lest we do that, let me go to Professor Dreger, who has written a very strong and passionate defense of your work and of you. And sheâs again Associate Professor of Clinical and Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern. And she has actually said in her paper, which is going to appear in the Archives of Sexual Behavior next year, that she sees this as a problem with science and free expression, and of accusations that are groundless. I want to find out Professor Dreger from you if it indeed is not the case, as I understand it, that you had your own concerns and skepticism about these theories when you started out⊠before you became a rather passionate defender of Professor Bailey.
Dreger: Yeah, I guess I should correct the misperception that Iâm a defender of Professor Bailey. What I did was to look very carefully at the history of what happened with regard to this book controversy. And what I did was do an in-depth one year long study, which essentially ended up in a book-length article that you can read online now. What I did was try to figure out what happened in terms of this controversy. So I was much less interested in the question of, and am much less interested in the question of the theory itself⊠than in fact what happened when he put forth this theory that turned out to be unpopular among this particular subset of transwomen. And so I wouldnât say that Iâm a strong and passionate defender of Bailey and his work. What I would say is that I am strong and passionate defender of the right to free speech, and also to scientific progress, and of people being able to study things that may be unpopular though scientific. A good example of that is John Bancroft of Indiana University, as being portrayed as having been somebody who denounced Bailey as not being a scientist. But I have talked to Bancroft myself, I interviewed him for this, and in fact what he was saying is actually what Dr, Bailey just said, which is that the book is not science in the traditional sense of the book was not original researchâwhat the book was is a scientific popularization. Bancroft told me and I think would tell you that it was based on scientific theories, in particular Blanchardâs work. And Blanchardâs work is science. So thatâs clinical studies and laboratory studies and things like that. So I think thereâs a real difference there, and I wouldnât say that Iâm somehow a defender of Blanchardâs theory or a defender of Baileyâs work. What I would say is that I looked at what happened to Bailey and was stunned and shocked to discover what three transwomen in particular did to try to basically ruin him because he was putting forth a theory they didnât like.
Krasny: Well, one of those women whoâs been mentioned already, Lynn Conway, said your history was one sided, was paid for by the sex research consortium at Northwestern.
Dreger: Yeah, Lynn Conway is actually making that up entirely. There is no sex research consortium at Northwestern. Northwestern could confirm that for you and would be happy to do so. I am paid out of an entirely different system than Bailey is. We are in different colleges. I am paid out of the medical school system. My research budget is mine to do with what I please, and this is exactly what I do in all sorts of different projects.
Krasny: We should mention you are an intersex researcher and activist and longtime veteran advocate of intersexâ
Dreger: Indeed, I helped lead the Intersex Society of North America for ten years, which is part of how I got into this. Because I had heard through the gender activist grapevine, which I was part of, that Bailey was this horrible person. And I simply believed it all. Conway was in fact a donor to the Intersex Society, so she and I knew each other that way. In fact, I had invited her over to my home one day, because we both live in Michigan, to help out a colleague of mine who was considering sex reassignment surgery. And she was very kind, and came over and spent a couple of hours with this friend of mine. And I left them alone so they could do one-on-one peer support. I had heard all of these terrible things about Bailey, so when a mutual friend finally introduced us last year in February of 2006, he stuck me as somebody who didnât seem at all like what I was hearing. And so I became interested. And then one of the three transwomen who went after him actually went after me for complicated reasons, so then I became even more interested and decided to do this study. I really expected when I started doing this history that I would end up with a âhe said she saidâ kind of story, that there would be a misunderstanding. And I was absolutely shaken to my core to discover what I did find, which was that they had absolutely charged him with things that were baselessâand that they must have known were in fact baselessâand made his life absolute hell and nearly got him basically thrown out of the scientific profession in some ways⊠because people became so afraid of associating with him because of all these charges that in fact had beenâas far as I could find from my intense investigationâwere not true. Now, Professor Conway says that she hasnât had a chance to respond to this, but in fact I tried every which way but Sunday to get her to talk to me, and she refused. And this claim that the New York Times piece was published without her consultation, I also think is false. Mr. Carey at my request gave her a copy of my article so she could respond to it three weeks ago. So I simply donât take herâyou know⊠âI havenât had a chance to respondâ kind of claim as being false, frankly. I think sheâs had plenty of chances to respond. In fact, most of what I do in the article is actually taken from Conwayâs own site. She has been so obsessed with Professor Baileyâand with ruining Professor Bailey and anybody associated with himâthat I was able to take largely things off of her site, and simply connect the dots in terms of what she did. All these things that she organized in terms of charges at Northwestern, she puts on her site. She calls them âconfidential,â but theyâre all right there.
Krasny: Thereâs stuff on the site even about his children as I understand it.
Dreger: Well, that stuff actually she didnât put up, although she links to it. Thatâs put up by a woman named Andrea James whoâs a trans woman out of Los Angeles, and Andrea James basically does whatever she can to harass people who cross her. Bailey crossed her in this way by talking about a theory she didnât like, so he [sic] went after his children by putting up photos of them when they were in grade school and middle school blocking out their eyes and putting basically obscene captions underneath. She says it was a satire, meant to be of his book, but his children didnât take it as a satire as you might imagine, they took it as a personal threat, basically. And Iâve talked to them about that, and itâs actually in my article.
Krasny: Alice Dreger again is with us from East Lansingâshe’s Associate Professor of Clinical and Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwesternâand will have a piece appear in the Archives of Sexual Behavior next year on the whole history of this. Joan Roughgarden is here with us in studio, sheâs Professor of Biological Science at Stanford University, author of Evolutionâs Rainbow, well-known transsexual and academic. Professor Roughgarden, I know this has you pretty exercised. Letâs find out why. Youâve used the word âfraudâ to me repeatedly.
Roughgarden: Yes I have, and thank you for inviting me. Itâs interesting listening to the dialogue weâve just heard. From my standpoint the situation is fairly clear, and itâs been clear for several years. The book by Bailey was initially advertised as science, and thereâs no doubt about this. For example, The National Academy of Sciences letterhead had an advertisement that read âGay, Straight, or Lying? Science has the answer,â and conclusions were promised that âmay not always be politically correct, but are scientifically accurate, thoroughly researched, and occasionally startling. And the bottom headline to the cover of Baileyâs book says âThe Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism.â But in point of fact, there is no science in the book, as theyâre apparently now agreeing. And on the whole, the book as a work of science is fraudulent. It presents only interviews of six subjects that Bailey himself admitsâstates in the bookâthat he met while âcruisingâ (page 141) [141] in “The Baton, Chicagoâs premier female impersonator club.” [186] And so based on a sample size of six, heâs tried to draw the conclusions that heâs just mentioned. And furthermore, he didnât correctly and rigorously transcribe the narratives from those people. He relied on his memories of what they told him. And he manipulated those narratives, because when they said things he disagreed with, he in turn argued with them. So the data are corrupted and tampered with throughout. And then there are these additional charges of the absence of consent by the women. Some of the women claim to have had sex with him as well. And thereâs a narrative in his book called âthe Danny narrativeâ which is apparently completely fabricated. So as an act of science, this is fraudulent.
Krasny: I read that Danny narrative. How do we know itâs completely fabricated? I found it a pretty fascinating narrative actually.
Roughgarden: Yeah, well it would be if it were true.
Krasny: How do we know itâs not?
Roughgarden: Well, we donât, but itâs been reported not to be true. And so this is what surrounds the supposed data in the book. And so issue number one with Bailey is the fact that the… the claim that the science is fraudulent, and number two, that there is manifest bigotry throughout the book. And let me read, if I might, three quotations there that illustrate the manifest bigotry. One of them refersâone example quotation involves this âJuanita,â in which he saysâ
Krasny: The one with which heâs alleged to have sex with, we should say for the record, yes.
Roughgarden: And he goes on to say, quote in the book, âHer ability to enjoy emotionally meaningless sex appears male typical. In this sense, homosexual transsexuals might be especially suited to prostitution.” [185] Homosexual transsexuals “lust after men.â [191] And then he goes on, he actually says this in the book on page 183: âAbout 60% of the homosexual transsexuals and drag queens we studied were Latina or Black.” [183] Latina people “might have more transsexual genes than other ethnic groups do.â [183] Very clearly racist. And then number three, the third one, is a particularly interesting one and gets at both women and gays at the same time: âThe brains of homosexual people may be mosaics of male and female parts.” [60] Gay menâs pattern of susceptibility to mental problems reflects their femininity: “The problems that gay men are most susceptible toâeating disorders, depression, and anxiety disordersâare the same problem that women also suffer from disproportionately.” [82] “Learning why gay men are more easily depressed than straight men may tell us why women are also.â [83] So basically, if Bailey hasnât insulted you, youâre no one.
Krasny: Joan Roughgarden, again with us here in studio, is Professor of Biological Science at Stanford and author of Evolutionâs Rainbow. I wanted also to get Mara Keisling in this. Mara is Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Mara Keisling, thereâs something that has emerged out of this, those who are sympathetic with Professor Baileyâthe power of a subset of transsexuals to ruin a manâs lifeâand it does seem to be us versus them.
Keisling: Well, let me just echo Dr. Dreger for a second. Weâre talking about two different issues here. One is the alleged ruining of a manâs life. And the other was what was this, and I hate to use the word âstudyâ as itâs been used here, but going back to Professor Baileyâs book, what is that? This would have been just some obscure thing that just happened and dissipated and nobody ever heard of it again had it not been for four things: One: The way it was presented as a scientific study. And everybodyâs talked quite a bit about that. Had this been called Stuff I Suppose after Meeting Some People in a Gay Bar, that probably would have lessened the attention it got from trans people. Second: In the book, he thenâbased on these seven peopleâhe then says there are only two types of transsexuals, and I think Professor Roughgarden just did a good job of explaining that. But itâs equivalent to me saying, âWell, I talked to three professors on the phone today, and I can tell you that all professors live in California, Michigan, or Illinois.â Itâs kind of that stark. Third: There were the questions of impropriety and inappropriate following up of human subject rules. And then fourth: Just the way the book was sensationalized, even in its visuals. Itâs called The MAN Who Would Be Queen. And I think itâs unclear if âthe manâ refers to gay people or trans people, although itâs pretty clear that theyâre interchangeable in this context to a large extent. But then thereâs a picture, which is clearly meant to be a muscularized calf in high heels. And itâs trying to sensationalize it to⊠obviously to sell the book. But really to follow in the theme that Professor Bailey follows throughout the book, of trans people being well-suited for prostitution, and really being just men.
Krasny: Mara Keisling, Iâm going to have to come in here, because I think you can hear our theme is coming up. Weâre coming to our break, and I want to give out the phone number for those of you who would like to join us, you are cordially invited to do so. Our toll-free number for your calls is 866-733-6786. Again, toll-free from wherever youâre listening to us or howeverâradio, internet, Sirius satellite, join us: 866-733-6786. Or you can send an email [email protected]. Iâm Michael Krasny.
(break)
Krasny: This is Forum. Iâm Michael Krasny. Weâre talking about a debate that began a number of years ago with the appearance of a book by Professor Michael Bailey of Northwestern called The Man Who Would Be Queen. And it continues to cause a good deal of stir as it was reported in the New York Times yesterday in a discussion of this controversy that took place at the International Academy of Sex Research in Vancouver. We have on the line with us Dr. Bailey, who is the author of the book and the subject of a great deal of this controversy, as well as Dr. Alice Dreger who is Associate Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern, who did a history of this affair, weâll call it. And we also have with us Mara Keisling on the line, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. And with us in studio, Professor Joan Roughgarden, Professor of Biological Science at Stanford and author of Evolutionâs Rainbow. You are indeed welcome to join us. Our toll-free number again for your calls is 866-733-6786 or you can email us: [email protected]. Before I go to your calls and emails, I wanted to go back to Professor Dailey [sic]. I know he wants to respond to many of the things heâs heard hereâI want to afford him the opportunity to do thatâbut what I am really interested in, because I said I read the section on “Danny” and I found it fascinating. A boy who was what Professor Bailey calls a feminine man and an outcast going back to really before kindergarten and cross-dressing at an early age, wanting all kinds of girly things and playing with dolls and so forth. And weâve heard Professor Roughgarden say that you made this out of whole cloth, so Iâd like to know what you have to say to that.
Bailey: I think her accusation reflects the degree of accuracy to which weâve become familiar with Dr. Roughgarden. I⊠Not only does “Danny” exist, but I am⊠I have several informants who keep me apprised of his development, and now heâs a happy, out gay man, as I predicted in the book. And I would say that both the critics in the studio there, either have not read my book, or they are lying about it. And that is, both of them, are saying that the only evidence I present for the theory of transsexualism that I espouse in the book is my interviews, or whatever⊠my associations with several transsexual women. That is utterly false as I said earlier in the show, and itâs clear to anybody who reads the book, there is a very systematic and large set of studies by Ray Blanchard, and thatâs where the science comes from. I donât know why itâs so hard for them to understand, so I assume that this is what they prefer your listeners to believe. And itâsâ
Krasny: Let meâ
Bailey: Itâs false.
Krasny: Let me ask Professor Roughgarden about that, because thereâs been a good deal of criticism about the⊠Mr. Blanchardâs research as well from you and others, this whatâs been called this âsubsetâ of transsexuals.
Roughgarden: Right, umâwe have to be clear that the issue here is not whether or not there exist some people who satisfy the narrative of⊠that theyâre motivated to become transsexuals because of a sexual motivation. The issue is whether or not you can take all transsexuals and subdivide them exclusively into two subsets, with characteristics associated with each subset. And everyone who knows transsexuals knows that there are a lot of individual narratives. And all the work prior to Blanchard was involved with an elaborate taxonomy with different kinds of gender- and sexuality-variant people. And there are of course different sexuality- and gender-variant expressions in other cultures around the world. So itâs ludicrous on its face to think that you can subdivide all of transsexuals into these two categories that Bailey and Blanchard before him were pushing. Now, the book wasnât advertised as being about Blanchardâs work, and Blanchardâs data are not actually presented in the book. The book is all about Baileyâs work. But if you go back to Blanchardâs work, you again do find that the existence of these two clean-cut categories is a figment of imagination⊠because Blanchard sent out a bunch of questionnaires, and he has three different studies in which the results of the questionnaires are tabulated, and you see a scattering of all sorts of answers to the questionnaires. And trying to find that they coalesce into two distinct clusters is really an exercise in pure imagination.
Krasny: Seems to be the heart of one of the arguments that has been so contentiousâand we have Joe, a caller from Idaho who says âWhatâs the argument?â I guess⊠Does that make it a little more clear, Joe, what you just heard?
Joe: Well, yes, yes, I appreciate your taking my call and I must say I am impressed by everyoneâs level of education. But from somebody whoâs just switching around the Sirius satellite radio, and I tune in, it sounds to me like an educated Jerry Springer Show, and real civilized. I hear the one doctor or professor say that you canât categorize these two people, or these people into two groups, or two subsets⊠well, they do it to all males, youâre either normal or gay, right? You just kind of divide them into two groups, so⊠this argument to me is… so, this guy wrote a book, it seems like itâs a halfway decent book. Iâve never read it, it sounds like the guyâs opinion, and people are up in arms about it. Again, itâs a civilized Jerry Springer Show. I just donât get it.
Krasny: Well, thatâs the first time weâve been called a civilized Jerry Springer Show (laughs). Thank you for the call.
Keisling: Can I jump in there, Michael, for a second?
Krasny: Yes, please do, it’s Mara Keisling.
Keisling: I was just about to say when we went to the break, when this book came out, my organization, the National Center for Transgender Equality, was relatively silent on the topic. And there was a good reason for that, and it really ties in with this Jerry Springer idea here. What happenedâsomehow this has now been framed as a bunch of crazy transsexuals got all crazy, and theyâre crazy⊠when in fact whatâs happened here is an academic wrote a book, and other academics, and some other people, but mostly other academics with really incredible academic credentials, just as Professor Bailey seems to have, they said, âWait a minute, hereâs how we react to that academically.â And then other people join in, and thatâs how academic things are supposed to happen. And so we steered clear of it initially, just because academics were reviewing it, responding to it, didnât like it, thought it was junk science, and stated that. You know, I was asked by an interviewer the other day, âWas it fair that they tried to get Dr. Bailey in trouble with Northwestern University?â And that was such an absurd question to me, because what from my view as a non-academicâalthough I taught college a long time ago, I donât nowâbut from my view as a non-academic, an academic wrote something and other academics responded to it, and thatâs how academia is supposed to work.
Dreger: (unintelligible)
Krasny: Alice Dreger, I know you want in here, yeahâŠ
Dreger: Yeah, sorry I lost you a little after the break. Yeah, you know I think Ms. Keisling does wonderful work, and itâs really important work politically. But I think thatâs a little bit of a misrepresentation of what happened. And as somebody who delved into the history, what I see is that it started with an academic discussion, but it very quickly morphed into something else entirely, which was a personal attack on Michael Bailey, and everything he stood for, and all of his friends, and all of his colleagues who chose to stand by him. The kinds of things you see on Lynn Conwayâs site, the kinds of things, of stuff you see on Andrea Jamesâ site is not academic. I would challenge anybody to Google âBailey Conway timelineâ and take a look at what Lynn Conway has done⊠and to see it as like anything what academics do, which is to meet each other on the point of concepts, and to look at the evidence, and to do careful reasoning, and to have discussions in that way. This looks nothing like that. What concerns me is that Professor Roughgarden is repeating charges, and is in fact even misrepresenting those charges. For example, before the break she said some of the women claim to have had sex with him. One woman claims to have had sex with Professor Bailey, and as I show in my article, the evidence for that is very poor, and even if he did, in fact, it wouldnât have represented any violation of ethics in any kind of reading of normal ethics reading. So I think itâs easy to say that, âWell, this is an academic dispute,â but itâs really not. What we see here is an academic who chose to write a popularization, said some stuff that was unpopular, and then was the subject of a most extraordinary system of attack. And really, I would call it a system of attack, and I think if you look at Conwayâs site, you would agree with me.
Krasny: And let me say also that we do run a very civil discourse type program here, but I think there are serious questionsâwe donât try to create heat for the sake of creating heat, or have people slugging each otherâbut there are questions of scientific research, there are questions of free expression, there are questions of how the internet is used. Accusations and denials and attacks, and all of that⊠and I want to go to more of your calls. Jen, join us, thanks for waiting, youâre on the air.
Jen: Hi, yes, thank you very much for taking my call. Iâm actually surprised I got through because Iâve tried to call before. This is airing in San Francisco, where Iâm sure lots of people are interested in this topic. Anyway, I guess Iâm calling because Iâm up in armsâand I apologize because I havenât read the bookâbut Iâm very interested in whatâs going on. I actually had a couple of comments. One comment, first of all, I have a lot of trans friends, although most of my trans friends are female to male, and actually one of my best friends is female to male. And I wondered, Iâm actually looking at Ray Blanchardâs site here online⊠I wondered if this reasoning also applied to female to male transsexuals in his work, and it sounds like it does.
Krasny: No, actually I think, Professor Bailey, you stated pretty clearly from the beginning, that this is a research project for someone else, right?
Bailey: That is correct, and I happen to know that Ray Blanchard thinks itâs very unlikely that any analogue of autogynephilia exists in genetic females.
Krasny: Jen, you had some more comments, please.
Jen: OK, well online it says a female to male attracted to women is driven by his attraction to women to become a man. Which is saying that basically a female to male wants to change their sex to become a man because theyâre attracted to women, which again, wouldâ
Bailey: What website, what URL are you looking at?
Jen: Genderpsychology.org
Bailey: (laughs) Thatâs not Ray Blanchardâs website. Alice Dreger, you want to take that?
Dreger: (laughs) Thatâs not at all Ray Blanchardâs website. This is one of the things that’s happened–
Jen: Well, whatâs his website?
Dreger: This is actually a website of an enemy of Blanchardâs who doesnât like his theory.
Jen: Well, whatâs his website?
Dreger: His website would be at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, heâs got a very dull website, in fact, that just basically presents his research papers in a very scholarly fashion.
Jen: Well, Iâm a molecular biologist, I can understand this stuff.
Dreger: One of the things thatâs happened is that the folks who donât like this stuff have put up websites that represent themselves as being the websites of these people saying outrageous things. And then people say to us, âGosh, you say the most outrageous things,” but in fact thatâs not actually whatâs going on.
Krasny: There has been in fact on some websites charges that Mr. Blanchard hasâI should say Professor Blanchard as well as Professor Baileyâare actually saying that transsexuals are perverts, that theyâre against sex reassignment surgery, things of that sort, so lots of stuff has gone on here that rhetorically just doesnât have much basis for it. Let me thank the caller. However, what about the issues, and let me go to you on this, Mara Keisling, what about the issues that we keep hearing about with Professor Bailey failing to get institutional board permission on human rights subject research, lacking informed consent from research subjects, that these are in play as issues, and these are certainly what brought the Northwestern investigation into play.
Keisling: Well, yeah, and absolutely in the context in which I mentioned them was again, this would have been much less of a big deal had those issues not arisen. And those were reviewed and investigatedâor whatever the right terms areâat Northwestern where they should have, and they probably do on a regular basis with lots of different kinds of research. And had there not been those claims, and had there not been other conditions not being met, my comment is that this would not have been a big deal.
Krasny: I think, excuse, me, I think one of the things that made it a big deal was the imprint of the National Academy of Sciences, donât you think?
Keisling: Absolutely. And I think if you readâI think Professor Roughgarden read from their⊠I think thatâs where she was reading from, their initial announcement of the book⊠that caused a real problem. Again, framing this as science. Whatâsâthe thing thatâs really hard to do here is to separate these two issues. The one is the initial book, and the second is the story behind what happened after the book. So when I mentioned earlier about academics responding as academics do, I still stand by that. Were there non-academics responding? Sure. Were there academics responding in non-academic ways? Thatâs not my expertise. But I donât pass judgment on those charges, you know. They were investigated as they should have been investigated.
Krasny: Professor Bailey, can you let us know why you left the chairmanship? You were Chair of the Psychology Department, as I understand it, at Northwestern.
Bailey: You know, I donât see how this campaign of defamation requires me to open up my entire personal life to everybody, soâ
Krasny: Let me just ask youâ
Bailey: Everything that Iâ
Krasny: Let meâ
Bailey: Everything that Iâm willing to say about my personal life Iâve already said, and you should probably be asking Alice DregerâŠ
Krasny: All right, Iâm not asking you a personal question, Iâm asking you what I hope will be a professional question, and Alice Dreger maybe because itâsâbecause he has been defamed, and I want to give him every opportunity to clear his name here. If he resigned because of the investigation as has been alleged, then that probably ought to be made clear. If he resigned for other reasons, we donât have to know what they were.
Dreger: Yeah, thereâs no evidence in fact that he resigned because of the investigation. He says otherwise, Northwestern says otherwise⊠the dates donât make any sense. Why would he have resigned in October of 2004 if the investigation finished in December of 2004?
Krasny: Thatâs what I wanted on the record, thank you for that.
Bailey: I donât know why you were asking my critic about the issue of consent and so on. I donât think she has any expertise or knowledge about that. Alice Dreger just did a big investigation of that, and I think you should be asking her.
Krasny: Well, orâ
Keisling: Professor Bailey, that was the point I was making. Thatâs not for me to pass judgment on.
Krasny: Yeah, but Professor Roughgardenâ
Bailey: Thatâs why I donât know why he asked you.
Krasny: Um, I asked for an opinion, just like you have given forth opinions here. Weâll hear other opinions, in fact. Letâs go to another caller. Mike, youâre on the air, good morning. Mike, are you there?
Mike: Hello?
Krasny: Go ahead, youâre on the air.
Mike: Yes. Dr. Bailey, these are really hot issues that have political implications that are current right now, and thereâs a lot of heterosexism rampant in our culture, as the first caller indicated. Are you aware of any of your own personal biases around these matters? And what have you done to take care of those, and amp up your personal cultural competence around those issues? Iâll take your answer off the air.
Krasny: Thank you for your call.
Bailey: I believe my book, if you will read itâand most people who are talking about it and yelling about it havenâtâyou will find it to be an enormously sympathetic portrayal of both gay men and transgender males, and thatâs in part why it was nominated for a Lambda Award until Conway et al. managed to get it off the nomination list. So I assumeâI certainly have worked to eliminate any bias. I donât know if Iâve been successful, but I actually think that my book is very sympathetic. It really calls for tolerance for feminine males and for transsexuals, and I think that reasonable people would agree with me.
Krasny: And I know that Professor Dreger does, but I want to ask Professor Dreger about something else, which is thatâsome of those seeking grant money were actually told to dissociate themselves from Professor Bailey? Thatâs a charge from Professor Baileyâs bailiwick, so to speak.
Dreger: Thatâs actually something that Ben Carey at the New York Times was able to uncover. I was not able to get anybody on the record to say that sort of thing, because I didnât ask them specifically about that. Ben Carey at the Times interviewed a number of scientists who told him they had been told by various granting agencies that if they had any association with Bailey they should downplay it, because in fact it wasnât going to make them look good in the granting system.
Krasny: Have you compared this or have others compared this to the Helmuth Nyborg episode, the Danish researcher who was fired back in 2006 after he reported a slight IQ difference between the sexes?
Dreger: Others have done that. I havenât done that specifically, and thatâs another example though, of where researchers go into controversial areas and say things that are unpopular. And rather than responding basically to the work in terms of the evidence and the reasoning, they go after the individuals. And that is something that has been frankly problematic since the time of Galileo.
Krasny: Joan Roughgarden.
Roughgarden: Iâd like to add to this, though, that from my perspective, the implications of this scienceâthat I consider to be fraudulent and unfoundedâare that it gets incorporated into textbooks and used for instruction in medical schools. And we find for example in Simon LeVayâs large over $100 textbook, this science which is at best controversial, and as I say, in my view, completely fraudulent. And what this does is it means that a transgender patient of a doctor has to look at the doctor and wonder whether or not theyâveâwhether the doctorâs been indoctrinated in some science which is both pejorative and unfounded. And thatâs why itâs very important to make sure this isnât seen solely in terms of personalities. And as Mara says, as the events that took place after the publication of the book. Itâs the book itself and the research that it claims to present and popularize which is where the real problem lies in my view. And all this personality stuff thatâs coming up is quite a distraction from where the serious issues lie.
Krasny: We go to more of your calls and weâre joined by Ben. Morning, Ben.
Ben: Yes, hiâthis is Ben Barres, Iâm a professor at Stanford. So, I think an important point that really hasnât come out on the show yet is that transgender people as a group are amongst the most oppressed and disparaged groups in this country, perhaps in the world. Dr. Baileyâs book is using questionable science, I think both his and Blanchardâs, to further oppress these people. And so Iâd like to ask Dr. Baileyâhe feels heâs been defamed. The transgender people feel rather defamed as well, and I would be very grateful if he could directly address whether he still feels many transgender people are best suited for work in the sex trades.
Bailey: You want me toâso just let me address the general point first. Again, I reject the assertion that itâs all transgender people who are offended by my book. Many transgender people are actually very happy that people are finally talking about this phenomenon called autogynephilia, which they feel captures their motivation. Now of course when certain transgender people such as Anne Lawrence have publicly come out and said that, theyâve been the object of attack and defamation by Andrea James and Lynn Conway, who almost invariably erect a web page devoted to very negative publicity about them. So I think thatâs what I will say.
Krasny: Well, what about what the caller says about making the connection between this transgender and the sex trade?
Bailey: OK, the idea is that the other kind of transsexual, which Blanchard calls a homosexual male to female transsexual, meaning theyâre homosexual with respect to their birth sexâthat is, they like menâis a type of, if you will, very feminine gay man⊠who decides for various reasons that he would be more happy living his lifeââhis,â meaning before transitionâas a woman. I think that men in general, including heterosexual men, including homosexual men, even including very feminine homosexual men, have a greater propensity to enjoy casual sex than women do. If this is a news flash, you all need to get out more. And homosexual male to female transsexuals for whatever reason tend to be male typical in that respect.
Krasny: And you find that offensive, Ben?
Ben: I donât think heâs answered my question. Does he think that some transgender people are best suited for work as prostitutes in the sex trades? Yes or no?
Bailey: Thatâs typical of Professor Barresââ
Ben: Iâm quoting your book.
Bailey: I say âtheyâre best suitedâ? Is that a quote?
Ben: Your book is very clear on that.
Bailey: Does it say the words âbest suitedâ? Does it say the words âbest suitedâ? If not, I think that you areâ
Ben: Just answer my question, whatever your book says. Do you feel that transgender people, some of them, are best suited for work as prostitutes?
Bailey: I never said âbest suited.â And Iâ
Ben: Just answer the question, do you feel so or not?
Bailey: I donât say âbest suitedâ and I donât think they are best suited.
Krasny: I think you answered the question.
Bailey: Theyâre better suited than genetic women are.
Roughgarden: He says âespecially suited.â
Krasny: You say âespecially suited,â you have that there, the quote?
Roughgarden: I have the quote, yes. [reading from page [185]] â…transsexuals might be especially suited to prostitution.â
Krasny: Professor Bailey?
Bailey: Well, I think that reflects what I just said, especially compared with genetic women. Thatâs not like âbest suited,â like thatâs the best thing they could ever do.
Krasny: All right, let me go to some more of your calls. Weâre going to Richard next. Richard, youâre on.
Richard: Hello, yeah, I was just kind ofâI heard some of the stuff that Michael Krasny was saying about your study, and I have some objections to it. I mean, Iâm a black male, and Iâm not that well off, but you know, I have a bit of an organic problem. I have gynomastia, so does that mean I now have to⊠Iâve experienced a lot of this recently where Iâve got people sniffing around me, trying to determine, I guess, what it is that they think that I am. And Iâm just sort of minding my own business and now… I kind of think one thing you might be ignoring.. I think thereâs a lot of things you might be ignoring in your study. One is economic factors. I mean, if people, poor people, canât find jobs, then what else are they going to do? I mean, some of them probably are turning to the sex trade simply because they canât find jobs. And then you also have health factors. If youâve got people, possibly like me, that have got male breasts, where do we go to get help? Do we just get cataloged as possibly some sort of drag queen, while some of your men want to sniff around and determine our sex?
Krasny: Professor Bailey, I think thereâs a question in there. Do you want to respond?
Bailey: You know what, I think because of her background, Alice Dreger is a better person to address that question.
Dreger: Yeah, I actually would love to. First, the caller is talking about gynecomastia, which is whatâs considered female-typical breast growth in men, although it happens in so many men I think thereâs a problem with thinking of it as female-typical. But itâs got a bigger question in how that Bailey talked about this. And one of the things Iâve uncovered in the work that Iâve was doing was this videotape of this woman identified as âJuanitaâ in the book, And one of the things that happened was that âJuanitaâ participated very willingly in a sex textbook video. And in that, she talks very openly about being a sex worker with no shame, and frankly, I donât think she should have any shame. I donât think thereâs a problem with people who are able to choose sex work, truly choose it, doing it. But she talks very openly about doing it, making $100,000 a year, and about really, really enjoying sex with men. She said, âI did it because I enjoy sex with men. I like men and I enjoy doing it, and I make a lot of money out of it.â And so I think one of the things thatâs happening with this representation of Bailey as if heâs the only person whoâs ever said this stuff. But in fact âJuanitaâ herselfâwho ends up charging him with all sorts of things after she meets Conwayâin fact said in this 2002 video that she was a sex worker, she enjoyed making the money, and she really enjoyed casual sex with men.
Krasny: All right, weâre coming to the end of the program, and I want to give Joan Roughgarden a final word here. What do you object most to in this study? The science, or the lack of science, should we put it?
Roughgarden: Well, yeah, from my position, itâs the fraud and the bigotry. And the implication of the fraud is of course that it gets incorporated uncritically into textbooks, and which then feed an institutionalization of prejudice. And the problem with the bigotryâI mean, someone is entitled to be bigoted if they wantâbut this creates a culture of siege at Northwestern. And it interferes with the possibility of developing research questions in an uncoerced and free way. And I think that the culture of siege thatâs now grown up around Northwesternâand that Alice unfortunately has become involved withâis hurting that institution. And I think that the administrators there have to be more courageous about looking into this situation.
Krasny: It was hurt a lot more by a man named Arthur Butz, who Iâll just, for the sake of memory bring up here, but I want to thank Professor Bailey who is Professor of Psychology at Northwestern⊠for his book again, The Man Who Would Be Queen. And Professor Alice Dreger, Associate Professor at Northwestern Clinical and Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Thanks also to Mara Keisling, Executive Director of National Center for Transgender Equality, and to Joan Roughgarden, Professor of Biological Science at Stanford and author of Evolutionâs Rainbow. And thanks to you, our listeners. We are appreciative of you being with us. Our producers are Robin Gianattassio-Malle, Keven Guillory, and Dan Zold, and Iâm Michael Krasny.
Please contact me with any corrections.
References
All quotations below were read or discussed during the program and are from Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Numbers refer to the page containing the quotation. Notes are in italics and indented.
Page #:
[60] “Psychologist Sandra Witelson has hypothesized that the brains of homosexual people may be mosaics of male and female parts, and I think she is right. This mixture explains much of what is unique in gay menâs culture and lives.”
[66] “Here in Chicago just past the turn of the century, I think I observe a preponderance of gay men in the following occupations: florists, waiters, hair stylists, actors (or at least acting students), classical musicians (but not rock musicians), psychologists (or at least psychology students) and psychiatrists, antique sellers, fashion and interior designers, yoga and aerobics instructors, masseurs, librarians, flight attendants, nurses, clothing retail salesmen (e.g., at the Gap and Banana Republic), web designers (but not software or hardware designers), and Catholic priests.”
[82] “Another possibility is that gay menâs pattern of susceptibility to certain (but not all) mental problems reflects their femininity. The problems that gay men are most susceptible toâeating disorders, depression, and anxiety disordersâare the same problems that women also suffer from disproportionately.”
[83] “Learning why gay men are more easily depressed than straight men might tell us why women are also.”
[141] “I have had only limited success tonight recruiting research subjects for our study of drag queens and transsexuals and am cruising the huge club one more time before leaving.”
Note: Here, Bailey is talking about the gay night at Crobar, and not the Baton. Bailey does discuss the Baton starting at page 186(see below).
[183] “About 60 percent of the homosexual transsexuals and drag queens we studied were Latina or black. The proportion of nonwhite subjects in our studies of ordinary gay men is typically only about 20 percent. Alma says she thinks that Hispanic people might have more transsexual genes than other ethnic groups do.”
Note: Bailey frequently attributes controversial statements to other people. By deferring to spokespeople like Dreger or his graduate students, he can later say, “I never said that.”
[185] “Although Juanita is so feminine in some respects, even some behavioral respects, her ability to enjoy emotionally meaningless sex appears male-typical. In this sense, homosexual transsexuals might be especially well suited to prostitution.”
[186] “The Baton is Chicagoâs premier female impersonator club, featuring several past Miss Continentals, including the gorgeous Mimi Marks.”
[191] “Furthermore, I do not believe that Cherâs attraction to men is as intense or as unambiguous as that of homosexual transsexuals. She is autogynephilic, and menâs place in her sexual world is complicated. So the loss of a potential sex partner is less of a loss, overall, to Cher than it is to the homosexual transsexuals, who simply lust after men.”
Note: In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
Psychologist J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University related several stories in The Man Who Would Be Queen which he obtained from transgender women while presenting himself as a clinical psychologist. Bailey was not licensed to practice by the State of Illinois and has never been licensed there.
My initial inquiry
1 March 2004
Illinois Department of Professional Regulation 320 West Washington Street, 3rd Floor Springfield, IL 62786
To whom it may concern:
I am conducting an investigation of a psychologist named John Michael Bailey, Ph.D. Please provide any documentation from your department regarding four matters:
Evidence regarding any application for licensure in clinical psychology by John Michael Bailey, Ph.D. between 1993 and present.
Evidence regarding any granting of licensure in clinical psychology for John Michael Bailey, Ph.D. between 1993 and present.
Clarification of Illinois law as it pertains to Dr. Bailey; namely, whether he was required to be licensed in order to enter into therapeutic relationships and diagnose clients between 1993 and present.
Determination whether Dr. Bailey is in violation of 225 ILCS 15/16.5 and 225 ILCS 15/26, practicing without a license, which may carry civil and criminal penalties.
The first two requests regarding application and certification are routine. Your online lookup provided four licensees with the last name Bailey, none of whom were the subject of this investigation. I have enclosed a check for $20 to cover the certification fee.
The other two requests are more complex and require some background information.
Prior to 1993 and continuing to the date of this letter, Dr. Bailey has been an employee of Northwestern University in Evanston, in their Department of Psychology. Dr. Bailey is currently under investigation by Northwestern regarding his professional and procedural conduct when interacting with human subjects. I am trying to determine if he has violated your departmentâs regulations.
At issue are several therapeutic relationships Dr. Bailey undertook with gender-variant clients since 1993. According to Standards of Care established by HBIGDA, an organization of professionals specializing in the needs of gender-variant people, clients must obtain approval from a licensed and credentialed mental health professional to receive medical services. [1]
I am in possession of three letters from Dr. Bailey on Northwestern letterhead, sent on behalf of three separate clients to three different surgeons who follow the HBIGDA Standards of Care. In each of these letters, Dr. Bailey holds himself out as âan expertâ and implies that he has the required documented credentials.
I am unable to ascertain if Dr. Bailey was licensed to enter into such clinical relationships, or if licensure was required for him. A reading of 225 ILCS 15 seems open to interpretation whether Dr. Bailey is required to be licensed to perform clinical psychology.
It is clear that Dr. Bailey held himself out to these clients and practitioners as rendering clinical psychological services, and that this may not have been for money, but for âother consideration,â namely gathering data for a book published in 2003, or for sex, as alleged by one woman who states she received an âapproval letterâ and later performed a sexual favor for Dr. Bailey.
Any assistance your office can provide in this matter would be deeply appreciated. I am happy to pay any reasonable fees associated with processing and duplication.
References:
1. Standards of Care Version 6: âThe mental health professional should have documented credentials from a proper training facility and a licensing board.â
I, Daniel E. Bluthardt, to hereby certify that I have been designated by the Director as keeper of the records and seal of the Department of Professional Regulation, a department of the government of the State of Illinois, and that a standard search of the available records of this office indicates the following:
THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT JOHN MICHAEL BAILEY DOES NOT NOW HOLD NOR HAS EVER HELD LICENSURE UNDER THE CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST LICENSING ACT.
Department records were searched based upon the exact name and profession, as provided. Any variation in the name or profession may produce different results.
The information above is the only certification information provided by this Department. If other information is needed, it must be obtained from the above-named individual or the agency or institution which initially generated the information. To expedite the certification process, the above format is the standard format prepared for all professions regulated by this Department.
[SEAL] [SIGNED] Daniel E. Bluthardt [initialed] Deputy Director Licensing & Testing Division Respond to:
320 West Washington 3rd Floor Springfield, Illinois 62786 217/785-0800 TDD 217/524-6735 www.dpr.state.il.us James R. Thompson Center 100 West Randolph Suite 9-300 Chicago, Illinois 60601 312/814-4500
James, Andrea; Conway, Lynn; McCloskey, Deirdre (April 6, 2004). Re: Professor J. Michael Bailey of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University performed unlicensed clinical therapy. https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/Clinical/NU.Clinical.Complaint-open.pdf
Dreger AD (2008). The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://10.1007/s10508-007-9301-1 Full text: http://www.bioethics.northwestern.edu/faculty/work/dreger/controversy_tmwwbq.pdf [archive]
Resources
Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (/idfpr.illinois.gov)
