THE FORMAL COMPLAINTS as posted on Lynn Conway’s site suggested Mike Bailey had dragged a small group of trans women out of the closet and made public spectacles of them, ending their “stealth” lives passing as demure and ordinary women. But I soon learned that the real story was quite different.
A full decade before publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen, the trans woman known in the book as Cher—whose real name is now widely known to be Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka—had sought out Bailey, not the other way around, and Kieltyka had subsequently introduced Bailey to most of the other trans women mentioned in the book. Back in 1993, Kieltyka had seen Bailey on a Dateline NBC segment talking about tomboys. Soon after, she called Bailey’s Northwestern office, eager to tell him all about herself. Kieltyka wanted Bailey to understand that, despite the media stereotype of transsexual women as extremely femme and sexually attracted to males, she had had a more masculine-typical tomboy history and was attracted to women.
Kieltyka’s description made Bailey suspect that her story represented a classic case of autogynephilia, and as if to confirm his suspicions, at their first in-person meeting at Bailey’s office, Kieltyka brought as “show and tell” the female masks and prosthetic vulvas she had used pretransition to make erotic films in which she had played a woman. She soon also shared the video with Bailey, including clips that showed a pretransition Kieltyka fully costumed as a female, complete with glue-on vulva, fake breasts, and an elaborate female mask. The film culminated with Kieltyka as a woman simulating dildo-vaginal intercourse. For her part, Kieltyka didn’t see all this as evidence of autogynephilia; she saw her pretransition cross-dressing episodes as rituals or “dress rehearsals” leading her to understand that she was really a lesbian woman inside. She believed that her sexual use of women’s “foundational garments” had helped her to understand the feminine foundation of herself. But for his part, Bailey saw all this as evidence of amour de soi en femme—autogynephilia.
Although he thought her autogynephilic right from the start of their association, Bailey never gave Kieltyka any reason to think he thought less of her for having that sexual orientation. Bailey didn’t think anyone should be judged for her or his sexual orientation, because he believed that none of us chooses her or his sexual attractions. (He reserved negative judgment for sexual actions that directly involved someone who had not consented or could not really consent, like a child.) Indeed, Bailey always found himself admiring anyone who admitted to a socially shunned sexual orientation; he saw it as a sign of self-awareness, bravery, honesty, and integrity. As a consequence, he saw Kieltyka’s openness and pride about her autogynephilic sexual life history as nothing but admirable, and he let her know it by supporting her desire to present her interesting sexual history to others. For example, he invited her to lecture to the Northwestern students in his Human Sexuality class as part of a series of optional after-class sessions in which students could meet people with the kinds of sexual histories they were learning about in class. Bailey always let his after-class presenters have full control—to say and show just about whatever they wanted, and Kieltyka took full advantage of the opportunity to give elaborate multimedia autobiographical presentations. Twice she even opted to end her appearance by stripping naked. (She said she did this to make the point that transsexual women could be extremely attractive, even in the nude.) Kieltyka’s openness with Bailey and Bailey’s students—who over the years numbered in the thousands—was not atypical for her; Kieltyka also sought out (and took) opportunities to give public presentations about her life around the Chicago area, including on local television.
About three years into their acquaintance, Kieltyka came to Bailey to ask a favor. Since well before she and Bailey had met, Kieltyka had been acting as a kind of den mother to a sizable group of young transgender women in Chicago, mostly young Hispanic people transitioning from lives as ultrafemme gay men to straight women. Kieltyka (who is white and non-Hispanic) had been doing what she could to help these young people get safe access to hormones and surgery. Around 1996, Kieltyka came to Bailey to ask if he would be willing to write letters supporting her younger friends’ requests for sex reassignment surgery. At that time, most of the surgical establishment required letters from two psychological professionals before undertaking surgery on an adult trans patient, an onerous requirement for people without a lot of resources. Again in keeping with his sexual libertarianism, Bailey thought if he could help these capable, adult transgender women get what they wanted out of life simply by having a couple of short conversations and then writing what amounted to a letter of recommendation, he should. It would be up to the surgeon whether the candidate was ultimately accepted, but Bailey’s letters might help avoid frustrating expense and delay that these women and he saw as unnecessary. He ended up writing between five and ten of these short letters, including one for “Juanita,” the woman who would later claim he had had sex with her when she was his research subject.
In spite of what some critics of The Man Who Would Be Queen would later suggest, Kieltyka and Juanita were publicly out as trans women and out about their sexual histories well before Bailey’s book. Besides presenting themselves and their autobiographies to thousands of undergraduates, Kieltyka and Juanita also provided their stories for a 1999 article in the Northwestern student newspaper and a 2002 human sexuality educational video. For the newspaper article, Kieltyka and Juanita gave the reporter their life stories, their real full names before and after transition, and photos of themselves before and after. For the human sexuality educational videos, recorded to accompany a textbook Bailey was helping with, Kieltyka and Juanita opted yet again to proudly show their faces, give their real first names, and tell their sexual life stories. In her segment, Kieltyka again showed off her pretransition cross-dressing “props.” In her segment, Juanita—the woman who a year or so later would anonymously play a wounded, innocent shy girl outed and sexually used by the ruthless cad Bailey—went on like this, with a confident smile: “When I was a she-male [and] I prostituted myself, . . . I enjoyed it . . . easily making about a hundred thousand [dollars] a year.”
Over the years, Kieltyka did keep trying to convince Bailey of her vision of herself as something other than autogynephilic in sexual orientation. But the more she talked, the more she just seemed to embody Blanchard’s description of autogynephilia. When, near publication, Bailey showed Kieltyka the draft of what he had written about her in his book, she took issue with none of the details about her sexual history, objecting again only to the label of autogynephilic. Understanding she didn’t like the label, Bailey and Kieltyka finally decided Kieltyka should be given a pseudonym for the book. She was given the name Cher, similar to Kieltyka’s chosen first name (Charlotte) and also the name of the musician whom Kieltyka resembled. Bailey also gave pseudonyms to the other real-life characters in the book, including “Juanita.”
It might seem odd that Kieltyka would continue to collaborate and associate with Bailey when she didn’t like how he was labeling her. But keep in mind that she heard nothing from Bailey that indicated he felt anything other than full acceptance (and even admiration) of who she was and how she had gotten there. What he wrote about her in the book was what he felt:
I think about what an unusual life she has led, and what an unusual person she is. How difficult it must have been for her to figure out her sexuality and what she wanted to do with it. I think about all the barriers she broke, and all the meanness she must still contend with. Despite this, she is still out there giving her friends advice and comfort, and trying to find love. And I think that in her own way, Cher is a star.
As he worked on his book manuscript, Bailey’s generally warm and appreciative attitude toward all the trans women in his book must have led Kieltyka and Juanita to believe—and no doubt Bailey must have also believed—that his book would help advance the full acceptance of these women. Although he knew of the hatred some other transgender women had expressed online for Blanchard’s articulation of autogynephilia, it simply never occurred to him that any of the anti-Blanchard crowd could turn his friends Kieltyka and Juanita into weapons to be used against him. Nothing in their mutual history indicated that that possibility lay ahead.
• • •
WHEN The Man Who Would Be Queen finally came out, in the spring of 2003, the initial media buzz was positive, and many of the trans women whose stories Bailey had relayed actively helped him promote the book, as they had helped him in his writing. Within a couple of weeks of publication, the Chronicle of Higher Education sent its staff reporter Robin Wilson to Illinois to do a feature on Bailey and his book. Wilson, Bailey, and a group of trans women—including Anjelica Kieltyka and Juanita—all went out together to the Circuit nightclub. The resulting article, entitled “Dr. Sex,” indicated that Kieltyka had told the reporter Wilson she was not thrilled with Bailey’s labeling of her as autogynephilic: “Ms. Kieltyka says the professor twisted her story to suit his theory. ‘I was a male with a sexual-identity disorder,’ not someone who is living out a sexual fantasy, she says.” But the rest of the trans women seemed explicitly and unequivocally supportive of Bailey and his book. Wilson told her readers, “They count Mr. Bailey as their savior.” She explained:
As a psychologist, he has written letters they needed to get sex-reassignment surgery, and he has paid attention to them in ways most people don’t. “Not too many people talk about this, but he’s bringing it into the light,” says Veronica, a 31-year-old transsexual woman from Ecuador who just got married and doesn’t want her last name used.
So for the transkids at the outing, including Veronica and Juanita, everything seemed rosy. But for Kieltyka the scene had already started to turn dark. By the time of the get-together with the Chronicle reporter at Circuit, Andrea James and others unhappy with Bailey’s book had reached Kieltyka to register their displeasure with her “star” turn as proof of autogynephilia. Indeed, it appears that, within days of the book’s appearance, Bailey’s detractors had figured out who “Cher” was. And they wanted a word.
Now, to the average reader of the Chronicle, Wilson’s article made it sound as though Kieltyka had been mad at Bailey all along, that perhaps she had been duped into being the autogynephilic subject of his book. But what had changed between the book’s publication and the Circuit gathering was not Kieltyka’s knowledge of what Bailey thought of her or had written about her. What had changed was that Kieltyka found out she was quickly coming to be considered a pariah by certain transgender activists—the ones who detested any mention of autogynephilia. Kieltyka had found out that
AJ [Andrea James] and the rest of them wanted to lynch me, as they did Joan Linsenmeier [a colleague and friend of Bailey’s who had helped him with the manuscript] and anyone else connected with the book. They were about to hang me. I was told this by people that had frequented the Internet, and that’s why they gave me the link to contact Andrea James and Lynn Conway, because I was going to be hanged by them.
Yet in spite of this reasonable fear—that she was going to be “lynched”—Bailey and Kieltyka continued to speak with some warmth, each trying to mount defenses against a growing onslaught of criticism. Two weeks after she had read the published book, and one week before the gathering at Circuit with the Chronicle’s reporter, Kieltyka had written an e-mail to Bailey using the wry subject line “Cher’s Guide to Auto . . . Repair.” There she wrote, with her characteristic humor and liberal use of ellipses:
Dear Mike, . . . I followed up on the links to your difficulties with some hysterical women [an apparent reference to Conway and James] when you wrote . . . “I understand that [trans woman scientist Joan] Roughgarden is slated to review my book for Nature Medicine, and I am certain that this review will be as fair and accurate as her review of my Stanford talk.” . . . I really appreciated the sarcasm . . . just wear a bike [athletic] support to your next book signing or lecture. . . . you can borrow mine, I don’t use it nor need it anymore. . . . Your friend, in spite of spite, Anjelica, aka Cher
Until things got really hot—until at least a few weeks later—Kieltyka seemed likely to continue her affiliation with Bailey.
As it happened, however, Conway showed up. And not just online, but in person. She started making what she called “field trips” to Chicago. The purpose? “To meet and begin interviewing Bailey’s research subjects.” Via these field trips and interviews and Conway’s and James’s Web sites, the public image of the scene quickly changed into “Bailey versus all LGBT folk,” such that most people (like me) casually watching the kerfuffle soon thought all the trans women in Bailey’s book felt surprised, abused, and angry about the book’s contents.
Casual observers thus remained oblivious to something critical: even months into the mess, plenty of gay and transgender people who had read The Man Who Would Be Queen actually saw the book not only as an accurate accounting of various forms of “feminine males”—from femme boys to gay men to transkids to drag queens to cross-dressers to fully transitioned autogynephilic trans women—but also as wonderfully supportive of LGBT people. The reason for that would have been obvious, if you bothered to read the book: In it Bailey unequivocally supports the right of all people to be gender-variant, to enjoy whatever sexual orientations they have (so long as they’re not using anyone who can’t consent or hasn’t consented), to be recognized by the gender labels they choose for themselves, and to get whatever medical interventions they wish. But most people didn’t read the book; they read only the reports of Bailey’s alleged abuse. And so they understood this book to be a LGBT-bashing bible—specifically to be to the transgender community what Birth of a Nation had been to African Americans.
Nevertheless, if one read the book—something it seems few reporters on the controversy did—one would have quickly realized that it actually made perfect sense that the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) included The Man Who Would Be Queen as a finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/GenderQueer category. Although Conway’s site would claim that Bailey’s publicists had gotten the book nominated for that award, Jim Marks, then executive director of the LLF, later revealed that in fact the book “was added to the list [of nominees] by a member of the finalist committee and after the finalist committee had selected it, we went back to the publisher, who paid the nominating fee.” According to Marks, things turned ugly only when, immediately after the announcement of the finalists, Deirdre McCloskey contacted him to express her outrage. McCloskey told Marks the situation “would be like nominating Mein Kampf for a literary prize in Jewish studies. I think some apologies and explanations and embarrassment are in order.” Marks wasn’t sure what to make of all this:
While I was a little taken aback by the campaign of a university professor to relegate a book to a kind of Orwellian non-history, we might have considered taking administrative action and removing the book from the list if McCloskey’s view had been universally that of the transgender community. The LLF was in some senses an advocacy organization. Its stated mission was to advance LGBT rights through furthering LGBT literature. We would clearly have grounds for removing a book that was in fact hostile to the Foundation’s mission.
But Marks found that “McCloskey’s point of view, although widely shared, was not universally that of the transgender community. Among the torrent of e-mails we received, a minority came from transgender people who supported the book and urged us to keep it on the list.” Marks’s “main concern was maintaining the integrity of the nominating process.” He asked the finalist committee what to do; they revoted, and the vote came back in favor of keeping the book on the list.
A petition sprung up in protest, quickly reaching nearly fifteen hundred signatures. For her part, Conway encouraged her followers to go straight after the LLF committee members. She wrote on her site:
We thought you’d like to know who the gay men and lesbian feminists are who launched this attack on us. Following are the names, addresses, URL’s, and phone numbers of these people. We think that they should hear from you, so as to gain some comprehension of the scale of the pain they have inflicted on trans women throughout the world.
She added a note about lesbian feminist bookstores with a history “of welcoming only ‘womyn born womyn’”—a means of excluding trans women—and she “suggest[ed] that our investigators out there quietly gather evidence about any discriminatory policies employed by stores listed below, for future publication on this site.”
Meanwhile, under all this pressure, the LLF judges felt the need to vote one more time. According to Marks, on that round, one “member changed their vote and we withdrew the book from consideration.” For years afterward, Conway’s and James’s Web site continued to track Marks, eventually claiming he had been “ousted” over “mishandling of the Bailey matter,” something Marks insisted was not true.
The experiences of Kieltyka and Marks were hardly unique. Intimidation tactics flowed in every direction, with Andrea James showing a particular talent for this battle mode. She put up the page about Bailey sodomizing his kids and another page dedicated to making fun of his relationship with his girlfriend, suggesting that Bailey was autogynephilic. Soon anyone who said anything nice about the book became a featured evildoer at James’s site. A special circle of hell was reserved for Anne Lawrence, the transgender physician-researcher who dared to describe herself as autogynephilic and to promote Blanchard’s work. When in response to threatening e-mails from James, Lawrence refused to back off from support of Bailey and Blanchard, James mounted an extensive attack on Lawrence, making public an incident in which Lawrence had been accused of professional misconduct. James didn’t bother to tell visitors to her site that Lawrence had been fully cleared.
James even sent an e-mail message directly to all of Bailey’s departmental colleagues, while he was sitting chair, asking why they were allowing “someone suffering from what the DSM calls alcohol abuse and dependence” to lead the department. She told the Northwestern psychology faculty, “I’m sure some of you will continue to respond with self-righteous indignation or with fear of me and my message. For the rest of you, I hope this little rock tossed through your window makes a real human connection.” For her part, Conway called Joan Linsenmeier, whom she had found out was Bailey’s close friend at Northwestern. Linsenmeier later told me, “I don’t recall exactly what she said, but basically it was that some people with very negative feelings toward Mike knew where he lived, that this put him in danger, and that she thought I might encourage him to consider moving.”
Of course, most of what was going on remained completely invisible to the outside world. Most people didn’t read the book, they didn’t know the backstory, and Bailey and his colleagues didn’t generally make public the threats to which they were being subjected. (To do so would only have made them subject to more.) Instead, what people on the outside saw were tense news reports about formal charges being filed against Bailey: charges that he had been practicing psychology without a license, that he had been using transgender subjects in research without appropriate ethics oversight, that he had violated confidentiality rules, and that he had had sex with a transsexual research subject. Because Bailey had become worried enough about his job to retain a lawyer, and because the lawyer told him to shut up, the press could not even report what “he said” in response to what “she said.” Nothing makes you look guilty like “no comment.” As a result of all this, Bailey came across pretty clearly as an abuser, a trans-basher, and a sexual pervert. That was the Bailey I had pretty much expected to meet in Boystown.
• • •
AS I CREATED TIMELINES out of what sources were telling me about the Bailey book controversy, I suddenly realized something jarring: Even amid the powerful disinformation and intimidation campaigns, there had actually been one reporter who had had the opportunity to learn and tell a story much closer to the truth near the start of it all. This was Robin Wilson at the Chronicle of Higher Education. As her “Dr. Sex” feature had revealed, Wilson had personally witnessed firsthand the warm relationships between Bailey and his trans women friends and book subjects out at the Circuit nightclub that evening in May 2003. She had herself reported that these women saw Bailey as “their savior.” She had spoken to Kieltyka, who—while upset over the label of autogynephile—had had a long and collaborative history with Bailey.
Nevertheless, starting just a few weeks after “Dr. Sex,” Wilson published in the Chronicle a series of three terribly sober dispatches about the complaints being filed against Bailey. Wilson wrote these scandal reports as if she had just come upon the scene with no previous insider knowledge and no insider connections to use to figure out the truth behind this “controversy.” When I realized the strange role Wilson had played, I tried asking her and her editor why they hadn’t used her before-and-after-scandal positioning to ask deep questions about why Bailey’s relationships appeared, at least in public accounts, to have suddenly changed with these women. Wilson’s editor sent me back boilerplate: “We stand by the accuracy, and fairness, of Robin’s reporting and are not inclined to revisit decisions Robin and her editors made here with regard to what to include or exclude from those stories in 2003.” But I was left obsessing about an if: If Wilson had used her special journalistic position as someone who was there just before the mushroom cloud, she might have seen—right away—what I saw when years later I charted the journey. What appeared to have happened between the generally happy times that were still evident at Circuit and the unhappy charges was that Conway had shown up at the scene of the alleged crimes, angry about Bailey’s promotion of Blanchard’s taxonomy.
Now, maybe Wilson would have concluded that Conway had just educated all these women into understanding they had been abused. But if she had taken this or any other theory of what had changed the scene so dramatically, and then bothered to look into the actual charges, as I was finally doing years later, she might have seen them fall apart one by one. And then she could have reported that. Was Wilson a good liberal simply afraid to look as though she was defending a straight, politically incorrect sex researcher against a group of supposedly downtrodden trans women? Had Conway and James scared the crap out of her, as they seemed to scare everybody else? Or was the explanation simpler? Was it just that trying to figure out what the hell was really going on would have taken too much time and other resources?
Well, such an unquestioning approach wasn’t good enough for me. The more I dug, the more I wanted to find out the truth about all of the charges made against Bailey. With the distance of several years, I had an advantage: Many sources that might have otherwise been covered up if someone like me had been doing an investigation were right out there in the open, including on Conway’s gigantic Web site. And I could ask people to talk to me—people who at the time of the controversy might have been too afraid. Not everybody agreed to talk to me on the record. From the start, Conway refused, as did Juanita, but ultimately the great majority of people I contacted responded. Bailey was willing to answer any question and open his records to me. Kieltyka was similarly forthcoming, although at first I was worried about even talking to her, given her record of filing complaints. I decided to use for her a system I then used for all oral interviews, to protect myself as well as my subjects: When we talked, I wrote down what I heard, but then gave back the source the notes to change however she or he wanted. Sources could add, delete, and append anything they wanted. Only what the person returned counted as on the record.
Boy, what I got on the record! The interviews for this project turned out to be almost as emotionally jarring as the interviews I had once done with intersex people, so passionate were my sources. Indeed, after almost eleven hours of interviews with Kieltyka, I felt about as sorry for her as I was coming to feel for Bailey. Not only did she feel used up and spit out by Bailey, but she felt the same about Conway and company. They had swept into Chicago after the book’s publication, encouraging her to file complaints against Bailey, only to later dump her. By the time I talked to her, she had come to a conspiracy theory in which Conway had actually been using Bailey as a fall guy in a much larger anti-LGBT scheme. I couldn’t really follow that complex worldview, but her specific answers to my straightforward factual questions helped fill gaps in the written record.
It became steadily clearer that what Bailey had done wrong was both sadder and much less scandalous than we had all been led to believe. What did Bailey do wrong? Well, in retrospect, it’s clear he should have let Kieltyka know that it would be almost impossible to ever convince him that she wasn’t autogynephilic. If her hope of changing his mind had been what had kept her collaborating with him, ultimately exposing her to criticism nationally—although I wasn’t convinced it was what kept her collaborating with him—then he should have let her know in no uncertain terms that he was very unlikely to ever change his mind about her identity. I also found myself wishing he had started working much earlier to protect Kieltyka’s identity, so that she could avoid people like Conway who might eventually go after her for putting a human face on autogynephilia.
That said, from everything I could find, it seemed pretty clear that no matter what Bailey said or did, Kieltyka would have kept presenting herself and the details of her sexual history all over the place, with her face and real name. She had outed herself long before his book. The more I thought about it, the more it appeared that not only was Bailey not guilty of outing her, but he also could have justifiably portrayed Kieltyka in his book using her real name while identifying her as autogynephilic if he had wished. There were enough highly detailed public self-representations by Kieltyka that he could have simply drawn from those. Was it personally obnoxious of Bailey to label his friend with a term she didn’t want? Certainly. But she had hardly been secretive about the details of her sexual history, and he had not hidden his belief that she was autogynephilic. Bailey’s position was like having a friend who was obviously a homosexual man—who openly dated and partnered with men—but who got upset if he heard someone refer to him as a gay man. I suppose one ought to try to observe anyone’s preference for self-labels, but doing so can feel like playing pointless games. I got why Bailey had very little patience for a situation in which all the identifiers are there but you’re not allowed to apply a category label that you (and many with the identity) don’t see as inaccurate or offensive.
In spite of the real backstory of generally warm collaboration and openness, Conway had made it look as though Bailey had dragged all these trans women into his book and outed them without their knowledge and consent. One of the ethics charges made formally to Northwestern by three trans women for whom Bailey had written recommendation letters involved the claim that Bailey had treated what he learned in the conversations leading up to those letters as research material for his book. This supposedly represented an intentional breach of confidentiality. Yet Bailey was able to show me that two of those three women were not even in the book. (None of the reporters relaying this charge did the math.) The third complainant? Juanita. Bailey denied that he used in his book what he had learned in the short interviews that went into Juanita’s recommendation letter. I had no way to verify the truth of his denial, but I could verify this: Juanita had told the Northwestern investigatory committee convened in response to her complaints that she had known Bailey was writing about her in his book and that she had given him permission to do so. Moreover, before Bailey ever submitted his book for publication, like Kieltyka, Juanita had chosen to repeatedly tell intimate details of her life history publicly, to the Northwestern reporter (remember: giving her real names and photos before and after transition). She’d done the same thing in the video filmed with her written consent for a human sexuality textbook. And she’d done the same thing in person in Bailey’s after-class presentations, where the audience ultimately added up to thousands. I was also able to confirm, from written documentation provided to me by Bailey, that Juanita had met with Bailey at a local coffee shop to help him write up her story for his book.
It sure didn’t look to me as though Bailey would have needed to mine those letter-interviews to tell Juanita’s story in his book, what with all her cooperation and steady openness about her life history. From everything I could find, before Conway showed up, Juanita seemed downright excited about having her life story out there year after year in the public realm. She was like Kieltyka that way. In fact, the only time Juanita had ever had a pseudonym attached to her story was when Bailey had decided, late in his book project, to assign her one.
The record was clear: Of the four trans women personally known to Bailey who filed complaints to Northwestern about Bailey’s book, only two were in the book—Kieltyka and Juanita. These two had known Bailey was writing about them and had helped him. They had also known for years that he was writing about one as an autogynephilic transsexual and the other as a homosexual transsexual. Additional evidence came from a “sealed” complaint Juanita sent to Northwestern, posted on Conway’s Web site. There, Juanita said, “an early draft was not objectionable, but absolutely nothing like the spurious and insulting description he wrote about my life that did become part of that most hurtful book of his.” But in fact the only real changes from the “early draft” to the published version were mentions of Juanita’s marriage and subsequent divorce. Juanita knew Bailey was writing about her in his book as an example of homosexual transsexualism, and she raised no objections until Conway appeared with her own objections to Bailey’s promotion of Blanchard’s two-part taxonomy that saw Juanita as a kind of trans woman fundamentally different from Conway.
What about the claim that Bailey was practicing psychology without a license? This complaint was formally filed by Conway, James, and McCloskey with the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation. The trio’s claim found its basis in an assumption that Bailey would have needed a license as a clinical psychologist in order to provide letters of recommendation for the young trans women seeking sex reassignment surgery. As with just about every other cleverly packaged complaint, anyone watching casually from the outside would think this complaint was right on: Bailey, a psychologist, had written letters supporting requests for surgery, but didn’t have a license to practice as a clinical psychologist. Guilty! Right?
In fact, as the complainants surely would have seen by looking at the letters they used as evidence, Bailey never pretended to have done therapy with the trans women for whom he wrote letters of recommendation. Not only were these letters obviously based on a few short conversations, they specifically explained Bailey’s credentials, and therefore indicated the limits of those credentials. If it wasn’t clear to a surgeon from the letter that Bailey wasn’t a therapist engaged in deep identity analysis with these transitioning women or anyone else, the curriculum vitae Bailey attached to each letter would have driven home the point. Most important, the relevant Illinois regulations state that if an individual doesn’t get paid for services offered or rendered, that person is not required to have a license even if he or she is offering what looks like “clinical psychological services.” Bailey never took a cent from these women. Presumably all this was why the Illinois department never bothered to pursue the charge, although you’d never know that from reading the press accounts, which mentioned only the complaints, not that they had petered out.
Considering what had really happened, I had to conclude that this claim about practicing without a license wasn’t just false. It was appalling. Conway, James, and McCloskey had tried to use Bailey’s letters of support for trans women to string him up, whereas in providing those letters without great delay and without extracting thousands of dollars in therapy charges, Bailey had been trying to help lower barriers to wanted interventions for these women, exactly as many trans activists had sought for their community for years! The letters should have been cause for trans advocates to praise Bailey, not bury him.
Conway and company had also accused Bailey of violating federal regulations. They broadcast the claim that in “researching” trans women for his book, he had been conducting human-subjects research of the sort that requires approval and oversight from a university’s institutional review board, or IRB. They said he hadn’t got the required IRB approval. Again, to people outside academia, this sounded like a slam dunk. He’d written up these women’s stories in a book about “the science of gender-bending and transsexualism” (as the subtitle said), so surely they were “human subjects of research,” right?
No, actually not—and what really troubled me is that at least McCloskey (a wizard of language and categories) surely should have known this. IRB regulations, which were originally designed for invasive biomedical research, count as human subjects only those individuals who are enrolled in research that constitutes “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” For the purposes of his book, Bailey wasn’t engaging in novel scientific research of this type; he was just picking and choosing stories from real-life people he met to illustrate scientific theories he believed were already firmly established. One might try to claim (as complaints against him hinted) that in choosing whom to write about in his book, Bailey was engaging in psychological research to test Blanchard’s theory. But that would attribute to Bailey a more open mind than he in fact had about male-to-female transsexualism. The truth was that he had become a convert to Blanchard’s taxonomy long before he wrote about it. To say Bailey had been doing novel science in his book would be like saying that if you were on a walk with an evolutionary biologist and she chose to point out to you an evolutionarily interesting behavior of some nearby birds, she was doing research to test the theory of evolution. The personal stories in Bailey’s book were really just window dressing for a store Bailey had long since bought.
Now, Bailey had in fact enrolled some of the trans women he’d met in formalized scientific studies. This occurred, for example, when his lab was studying sexual arousal patterns in adult humans. The lab measured genital blood flow (something sex researchers believe indicates arousal) in natal men, natal women, and trans women while they were shown various kinds of pornography. But was Bailey studying the arousal patterns of these trans women in his lab without IRB approval? Nah. He had full approval for those laboratory studies. And of course he would have, because he understood that that was science, but telling stories about people to bring to life various theories is not.
What about the sex charge made by Juanita? When we got to discussing this, Bailey insisted, in his usual sexual-libertarian style, on discussing the principle at stake. He pointed out that there are plenty of instances where we might not find it unethical for someone to have sex with a person who happened to be a subject in his or her research project, particularly if the research subject were a competent adult, if the sex were unlikely to compromise the research, and if the research subject otherwise had no complicating relation to the researcher (e.g., was not also a patient of the researcher). I found his argument initially startling but ultimately convincing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there could be instances where the subject, the researcher, and the research would stand no particular risk if sexual relations occurred. Consider, for example, a five-year study of cholesterol levels in which an involved researcher and subject end up in their private lives having sex with each other a few times. Or imagine an anthropologist who, after living with a study group for years, ends up marrying and having sex with someone in the study group and continues the research for several years more.
Now, if a researcher were also a clinician treating a subject as a patient, that would make sex verboten. But a research relationship is not (and should not be) anything like a therapeutic relationship. Often research relationships are brief, impersonal, and unlikely to be compromised by sex. It seems silly to treat all research subjects (or all research projects) as so fragile that they will necessarily be put at risk by sexual relations. Grown adults in a research relationship—capable of having the consenting, mutually respectful relationship required by research—could in some cases legitimately decide that sexual relationships would not entail harm to them or the research.
Still, I wanted to know, did Bailey and Juanita have sex, as she said?
When I looked into this charge, I was surprised to discover that the notarized affidavit making this claim—posted on Conway’s site—consisted of only two sentences: “On March 22, 1998, Northwestern University Professor J. Michael Bailey had sexual relations with the undersigned transsexual research subject. I am coming forward after I learned he divulged his research findings about me in The Man Who Would Be Queen.”
This affidavit would have us believe that Juanita decided to come forward with this charge after (i.e., as a result of) finding out what Bailey had written about her. But the timing simply could not be true. The affidavit was dated July 21, 2003—months after Juanita had gone to Circuit to help promote the book, months after she had seen a draft, and four years after the student newspaper article describing Juanita’s role in Bailey’s book. These facts clearly contradicted the affidavit’s claim about order of events, a claim no doubt made to explain why Juanita waited five years to make the complaint. In addition, in spite of what the affidavit said, Juanita was not a research subject of Bailey by any normal definition on March 22, 1998. This claim would have been true only if the definition of “research subject” had been so broad as to include everyone you ever write about.
That said, I admit I was still dying to know whether they had had sex. Looking at photos and videos of Juanita, including an erotic seminude photo of Juanita that Conway posted on her site, I could well imagine that a straight guy who is not transphobic would be interested. (She’s gorgeous.) Alas, Bailey managed to ruin even that possibility. Knowing he had said previously in a rare public statement that he could prove they hadn’t done what she said if he needed to prove it, I pressed him for the proof. He promptly showed me documentary evidence that he was home with his kids in Evanston the night Juanita had claimed that she and Bailey had been getting it on in Chicago. His ex-wife had been away on her annual spring break, and by their usual agreement, Bailey had been at her home taking care of the kids and, based on the e-mail reminders from his ex-wife that Bailey showed me as his proof, also taking care of the children’s fish, hamster, and cat. When I asked Mike’s ex-wife, Deb Bailey, to confirm the dates and arrangement for me, she did. Tellingly, she was happy to help. Contrary to Andrea James’s portrayal of the family as pathological and dysfunctional, the Baileys remained close friends post-divorce, sharing parenting duties, as well as meals at holidays—and also sharing a unified defense against Andrea James.
The more I looked into the sex charge, the more it looked like a setup. Not only had the affidavit been witnessed by Andrea James and Lynn Conway, but the letter accompanying it to Northwestern specifically credited “Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, who have acted on our behalf to make Dr. Bailey accountable for his actions.” Nevertheless, I pressed Bailey. Might Juanita just have gotten the date wrong? Was he using a Clintonian definition of the phrase sexual relations? He was adamant, saying that although he had flirted with Juanita once or twice when they were socializing, there had never been anything that could be construed as sexual relations.
Unable to reach Juanita with an interview request through other channels, I asked Kieltyka to put me in touch with her. Kieltyka responded that Juanita wasn’t interested in talking to me. But Kieltyka herself was willing to elaborate on the sex charge:
[Juanita] told me the day after Bailey drove her home from the Shelter nightclub that Bailey had tried to do something. . . . That they had “messed around”—She was being slightly evasive and uneasy so I left it alone. [Five years later, in the summer of 2003] when Lynn Conway [was] over my house, Juanita was there, and that’s when she told the two of us that Bailey in fact had had sex with her. This was the first time that I found out it wasn’t that he had ‘tried something’—it was that he had tried to have sex with her. But that he couldn’t get it up.
Wait, Bailey had tried something but failed? I pressed on.
DREGER: So you’re saying she said he tried but he didn’t get it up?
KIELTYKA: Right.
DREGER: And she told that to Conway and McCloskey.
KIELTYKA: Right.
DREGER: And then [in the formal charge] to Northwestern she said that they had had sex.
KIELTYKA: I’m not sure what the letter says. . . . I think it says “sexual relations”—just like El Presidente Clinton. . . . It all is a matter of a definition of what sexual relations is. Because there was fingering, that she was giving him a hand job, I don’t recall exactly.
Kieltyka seemed to explain it all when she ended the conversation this way: “Anyway . . . from the moment that Andrea James and Conway wanted to use the sex with a research subject as a way of getting Bailey, I wasn’t enthusiastic.”
• • •
AFTER NEARLY A YEAR of research, I could come to only one conclusion: The whole thing was a sham. Bailey’s sworn enemies had used every clever trick in the book—juxtaposing events in misleading ways, ignoring contrary evidence, working the rhetoric, and using anonymity whenever convenient, to make it look as though virtually every trans woman represented in Bailey’s book had felt abused by him and had filed a charge.
“Narcissistic injury,” the physician-researcher Anne Lawrence said to me, by way of explanation. “Followed by narcissistic rage.” That, she told me, was the only real way to explain what happened to Bailey. The whole thing had been an attempt to kill the messenger bringing a message that Lawrence guessed wounded the accusers’ senses of self. They didn’t want to hear what Bailey said, so they had to make him just go away—and make sure no one else ever tried it again.
For the sin of speaking honestly about autogynephilia, Anne Lawrence had become the third leg of the “Bailey-Blanchard-Lawrence Axis of Evil.” Yet somehow, throughout the attacks from Lynn Conway and Andrea James (who had once been her friend), Anne had soldiered on, publishing narratives from trans women like herself who are autogynephilic, doing research that showed that autogynephilic males who want sex-reassignment surgery and are screened by professionals are on average better off after surgery, and providing clinical care to those who needed to be reassured, from a woman who knows, that being autogynephilic in your sexual orientation doesn’t make you less genuinely transgender, no matter what some self-appointed “trans advocates” say. Anne had even worked to change the official standard of care so as to provide easier access to sex-changing hormones and surgeries for all trans people. When we became friends, she showed me a photo of her, Mike Bailey, and Ray Blanchard sitting on a couch together and doing that little pinky-on-the-lips thing that the villain does in the Austin Powers movies. It cracked me up.
But God almighty, what this crew hadn’t been through. And not just them. James had also gone after other self-identified autogynephilic trans women, and also after self-identified transkids (the group Blanchard had called homosexual transsexuals). About those attacks, one day Paul wrote to me to say that there was a Bailey-defense Web site, www.transkids.us, edited by Kiira Triea. Could that be the same Kiira Triea of the intersex rights movement, he wondered, the one who had made the satirical phall-o-meter and had provided her autobiography for my edited collection, Intersex in the Age of Ethics, now wrapped up in the Bailey book controversy? I looked at the site. How many Kiira Triea’s with that wicked a sense of humor could there be?
Thanks to Paul’s tip, I reconnected with Kiira, whom I hadn’t talked to since we worked on the intersex book in 1999. In that book, she had told readers that her mother had been given progestin to prevent a miscarriage when she was pregnant with Kiira. Although Kiira was genetically female and had ovaries and a uterus, her genitals looked male when she was born because of the progestin. So Kiira was labeled and raised as a boy, but turned out to be a real sissy boy, and by puberty a boy-crazy femme boy. Eventually recognized as intersex, Kiira landed in John Money’s clinic. Money was deeply annoyed at this fourteen-year-old who was messing with his theory that gender and sexual orientation result from nurture, not nature. Money tried to use masculinizing hormones to make this annoying boy more boyish. When they failed, Money “let” Kiira become a girl and gave her sex reassignment surgery. So Kiira was not just intersex but had had the life of a typical transkid, too. She’d been a femme gay boy who became a woman. No wonder she related so easily to other transkids. No wonder she was defending Bailey.
Kiira gave me all sorts of much-needed sympathy over my run-in with Andrea James (she’d had one too) as well as over my unwanted exit from ISNA (she’d had a similar thing with Bo). Honestly, it was like one of those weird moments when you’re in Paris and you take a wrong turn and find yourself in some back alley and run smack dab into a friend you haven’t seen since college. I asked Kiira to help me understand it all. Basically, she explained to me, Bailey and Blanchard and Lawrence were right. She pointed out that Mike had been incredibly thickheaded about some things, like about his assumption that transkids end up prostituting themselves and shoplifting because that’s what they like to do. That’s how they survive, she said, adding an observation from her transkid friend Alex: “Claiming that transkids may be especially suited for prostitution because they sell themselves when they are destitute is like believing that people in famine ravaged countries are especially adept at dieting.”
That aside, Kiira said, Blanchard’s taxonomy was right. She told me to think back to all those trans women who joined ISNA, wanting to be told they were hermaphrodites, looking for some explanation for their sexual feelings and their feelings that they were women in spite of a life of masculine signs. Kiira reminded me how decent many of those trans women had been, helping us early in the intersex-rights movement. I immediately thought of Maxine Petersen, a post-transition self-identified autogynephile who had worked in Ray Blanchard’s clinic, helping women like her. I thought of four other trans women friends whose friendship I now knew I could never dare to mention in public, lest they be taken as hostages in this war. Those are the people who need you to tell the truth about what happened, Kiira said to me, meaning the transgender people whose identities were being disappeared by those bent on a self-serving narrative.
She was right, of course. As scared as I was getting, I knew I had to write up what I had found out about the Bailey book controversy. Even while my stomach hurt from the thought of the backlash that would surely be directed at me, the scholar and the activist in me felt as I had at the start of the intersex-rights movement: that I was suddenly seeing a truly oppressed population who had been made nearly invisible by people inconvenienced by their reality. Only in this case, it had happened at the hands of their own kind.
• • •
THERE ARE NOT a lot of places that will take a book-length academic article, even one that people consistently call “a real page-turner.” I negotiated consideration of my tome by the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the highly rated journal of the old-boy sexologists. It was true that Mike, Paul, Anne Lawrence, and Ray Blanchard were all on the editorial board, and that would look funny. But it was also true, I knew, that no one could ever really dispute anything important in what I had found. Plus, surely nowhere else would take this kind of article under the terms I wanted: I wanted the right to make it available to all for free online, and to have it published on paper as well, full-length, uncut, so that it would be readily accessible in all reputable academic libraries. I also insisted that Conway and Bailey both be given an opportunity to respond in the very same issue in which my work was published. The editor of Archives, the child psychologist Ken Zucker, told me he’d go one better and let anyone write a response and publish anything reasonably related to my article. Up to that moment, Zucker and I had only had tense encounters, as my work on intersex had steadily criticized the pediatric gang with whom he ran.
Using this open-dialogue approach to my “target article” meant Zucker had to release a copy of it after it was peer-reviewed but before it was published, so that people could write their responses for the dedicated issue. I knew from my intersex experience that if I wanted to get anywhere in terms of public understanding of what had happened, I needed the press to get in on the story early. So I sent out a cold-call e-mail to Benedict Carey of the New York Times, and to my relief, he replied with interest. Carey had previously written about Bailey’s work on bisexuality and had taken crap from none other than Conway for it. (She went after Bailey on everything.) This prior history made me nervous about appearances: Didn’t Conway’s previous attack on Carey give him an apparent conflict of interest, I asked? He explained to me that if people were allowed to use any criticism to neutralize reporters, the free press would die, and his editors understood that. I felt a glimmer of hope for the Fourth Estate.
With a copy of my paper in hand, Carey did his homework, calling all the major characters, checking my claims against theirs. Conway refused to talk again, but it was now obvious that they all knew what I had found and that they were worried, because they started to really come after me online. As I waited after the release of my article, wondering if the Times would ever report on it, I watched my Google rankings being taken over, almost in an instant, by James and Conway’s claims about me. I was being reconstructed as an enemy of intersex people and an enemy of all LGBT people. And how did they portray my exit from Michigan State? Predictably, my choice to give up tenure was simply reconstituted as my having been driven out for bad behavior.
Finally, Carey’s piece was published in the Times, and he amazed me by his ability to sum up the salient points in a couple thousand words. More important, Carey’s report turned around the public story of what had really happened. Mike was elated. Mike’s family was elated. Ray Blanchard was elated. Scientists all over the world were elated.
Me—well, it’s not as though I didn’t know what was coming, as though I didn’t know that it would just get worse after the positive press coverage of my work, first in the Times, then in the International Herald Tribune, then even in the Advocate, the national magazine dedicated to LGBT politics. But somehow it felt shocking anyway—page upon page on the Web, “exposing” me as a right-winger, a fake, a eugenicist.
For her part, McCloskey wrote to the New York Times to say that “the Bailey group” had paid for my work, and she put a copy of her letter to the editor on her Web site. The truth was that I had paid for the whole thing out of my own puny part-time income, and that I had felt the need to try to hide the project from Northwestern as much and as long as possible, worried that they’d fire me for stirring up more trouble from this crowd. It would have been very easy for them to do so; I was on a one-year, part-time job with no contract. Several of my colleagues had made perfectly clear that this one “wasn’t worth it.” I wasn’t sure Northwestern would now feel I was worth it. I tried to remind myself I’d been looking for a way out of academia. But I also tried to get Northwestern’s general counsel to tell McCloskey to stop defaming me by saying Bailey had paid for my work. They told me they didn’t work for faculty; I’d have to get my own lawyer.
Honestly, I have forgotten a lot of what happened during the worst of the storm. I remember debating Joan Roughgarden of Stanford (the trans woman scientist) live on public radio in the Bay Area, and getting really upset at listening to her not just repeat the false charges against Bailey, but also inflate them. I remember having to put my friends under strict rules not to tell me what they were finding on the Web about me. I remember being afraid to open my e-mail, even though so much of it came from trans women thanking me for “telling the truth.” I remember trying really hard to focus on the fact that I had a PhD and that no matter what they did, no one could take that from me. I remember hosts of my invited academic lectures calling to tell me they were getting angry mail about my having been invited to speak and asking me if they needed to call campus security. I remember one morning, sitting on the kitchen floor and crying into my hands as quietly as I possibly could, while my son sat in the next room waiting for his breakfast.
I think the lowest point was one Saturday night when I opened my mail near midnight and found out that a trans woman named Robin Mathy was filing ethics charges against me with my dean. Mathy considered me unethical for publishing the work in Archives (because it was the journal of the sexologists, including Bailey, Blanchard, and Lawrence), and unethical for concluding, in my article, that sex with a research subject is not always problematic. In that bit of my article, I’d gotten personal, saying that if everyone we write about is a research subject, and sex with research subjects is always wrong, then I had violated that rule because I often write about my husband. I mean, once you understood what Mathy was really charging me with, her claim was ridiculous—especially given that she also made the complaint to the American Psychological Association, and I’m a historian. (I felt like suggesting she also send her complaint to the American Dental Association and the greengrocers of America.) But she had professional mental health credentials and a trans identity card, and she was good at making things sound official, and I knew perfectly well that now they would all use this to say, “Dreger has been charged with ethics violations involving a question of sex with research subjects.” And people wouldn’t look up the details. They never look up the details.
Perhaps most disorienting of all was now being held up as a hero by all these guys whose work I had criticized. Even Steven Pinker from Harvard—who had gotten swept in years ago by blurbing Bailey’s book—wrote to say how impressed he was with my article. He offered me an introduction to his agent. In reply, I asked him to support an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I needed to feel that I was still a scholar, no matter what they said about me.
In my application, I proposed to look at conflicts involving scientists and activists over matters of human identity as they play out in the Internet Age. What’s that the Brits say? “In for a penny, in for a pound.”