A “Bailey Controversy� Follow-Up, by Julia Serano

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word performer, trans activist, and biologist.
Back in August 2007, I posted a critique of a NY Times article regarding what has come to be known in the transgender community as the “Bailey controversy.� Briefly, in 2003, psychologist J. Michael Bailey published a book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism, that forwarded three of the most commonly repeated sexualizing stereotypes of trans women: that we are either gay men who transition to female in order to attract straight men, fetishists who transition in order to fulfill some kind of bizarre sex fantasy, and/or that we are “especially well suited to prostitution.� The book was not only extremely trans-misogynistic, but it was marketed to a largely trans-ignorant lay audience as “science.� A broad consensus of trans activists, allies and advocates found the book to be unapologetically pathologizing, sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and a distortion of both trans women’s experiences and the scientific literature. The resulting backlash against the book was fierce and (as with any backlash) had its ugly moments. But it was also empowering in many ways as it represented the first time that the transgender community en masse stood up and forcibly challenged a theory forwarded by members of the psychological/gatekeeper establishment who hold institutional power over us.
The NY Times article, however, didn’t concern itself with the psychiatric sexualization of trans women. Instead, it portrayed Bailey as a “scientist under siege� who was unfairly attacked by transsexual activists who tried to “ruin� him. This flip-flop of a premise—depicting Bailey as though he was the “minority� who was oppressed at the hands of “powerful transsexual women�—came directly from an article written by Alice Dreger which is slated to be published in the sexology journal Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB) later this year. ASB is also including 23 “peer commentaries� on her article from people on both sides of the debate. A list of the accepted commentaries has recently been released (the one that especially caught my eye was the sure-to-be-patronizing contribution from sexologist Richard Green entitled “Lighten Up, Ladies�).

Like many trans activists, I feel that Dreger’s article is horribly biased and dismissive of trans women’s concerns about Bailey’s book. I won’t bother critiquing it in detail here—those interested can simply read my “peer commentary.�
Anyway, last week there was yet another development in the ongoing Bailey saga. The Northwestern University school newspaper (where Bailey and Dreger are professors) reported that psychologist Robin Mathy, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Medical School, filed ethics charges against both Dreger and Bailey. The charges center on a possible conflict of interest regarding Dreger’s submission of her paper to ASB given the fact that Bailey is on the editorial board of the journal, and that the editor of ASB, Ken Zuker, has collaborated with Bailey in the past and shares many of his views on transsexuality. According to the article, Mathy believes that by submitting her paper to ASB, Dreger attempted to bypass the peer review process.
Mathy’s other complaints include allegations that Bailey misrepresented himself as a psychologist, and the fact that both Bailey and Dreger have apparently argued that there is nothing inherently wrong with having sex with a research subject (something that Bailey was accused of earlier in the controversy). Frankly, given how sexist and sexualizing Bailey’s book is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he believed that having sex with a research subject was no big deal. But for Dreger—who is a professor of *bioethics*—to forward such a view seems completely dumbfounding.