Evolutionary psychology (EP) is an ideology within psychology that proposes that neurological traits and behaviors have been shaped by sexual selection to serve survival and reproduction. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould described it as “Darwinian fundamentalism” because of the field’s rigid and dogmatic misunderstanding of evolution.
Evolutionary psychologists often engage in unfalsifiable theorizing about gender roles, derisively dubbed “just so stories” after the erroneous folk legends about how animals got various charateristics. Evolutionary psychologists are particularly fond of making claims about behaviors that allegedly evolved in prehistory. They then use the claims to explain and even justify sexist sterotypes.
Sex and gender minorities pose a special dilemma for evolutionary psychology: we muddle what they see as simple formulas regarding reproduction and sex differentiation.
If you think about gender diversity as a value that eludes full human understanding within a scientific language, like pi in mathematics, gender diversity exposes the limitations in EP’s system of representation. Rather than appreciating and understanding the elegance and intricacy of this mysterious value of gender diversity, evolutionary psychologists are suggesting we essentially round pi to a nice easy-to-understand integer by saying there are two sexes and rounding off the little fractions of sex and gender minorities to make the other equations easier.
J. Michael Bailey
J. Michael Bailey is a transphobic eugenicist and evolutionary psychologist trying to figure out “the puzzle of sexual roientation” within the dogma of evolutionary psychology. Bailey claims there are two, and only sexes, and two, and only two two “types” of trans women that fit into this paradigm: extremely gay males with a fetish for straight males and extremely paraphilic males with a fetish for their feminized selves.
This simplistic definition allows for an easy answer to the problem we pose for EP. Of course, this model is worthless given existing and upcoming reproductive technologies that bypass natural selection.
Nonetheless, Bailey insists this model is correct, since conceding it is not would open up a huge flaw in that worldview and hypothesis. In Bailey’s world, it is very important that gay/straight and male/female binaries be defended and justified.
This of course leads to fundamentally flawed results from calculations with this rounded number, but that hasn’t stopped Bailey and friends from a vigorous defense of this decision to simplify humanity to a Mendelian quadrant of XX/XY.
In the EP worldview, gay people are “a big mistake” evolutionarily (as J. Michael Bailey calls it), or perhaps more generously an evolutionary paradox: why does a trait that leads to fewer offspring persist?
I’ll have much more to say on this matter in the future, but evolutionary psychology is a very attractive field of inquiry to eugenicists and others who believe that all humans are not equal, and that many are in fact unfit or maladaptive. These people who measure human worth by a narrow definition of “intelligence” or reproductive capacity are the leading edge of the upcoming bioethical battle regarding diversity of all sorts, from genetics to gender.
Evolutionary psychologists and like-minded academics connected to anti-transgender activism include:
Gould, Steven Jay (June 12, 1997). Darwinian Fundamentalism. New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06/12/darwinian-fundamentalism/ https://archive.is/NPzx5 [archive]
Havens, Kiera (June 13, 2013). Box of Rocks #3 — Never Change.Medium https://medium.com/@Keira_Havens/box-of-rocks-3-never-change-80b879237314
Wren B, Launer J, Reiss MJ, Swanepoel A, Music G. Can evolutionary thinking shed light on gender diversity? BJPsych Advances. 2019;25(6):351-362. https://doi.org/10.1192/bja.2019.35
Hagen, Edward (2004). Evolutionary psychology FAQ. http://human.projects.anth.ucsb.edu/evpsychfaq.html [archive]
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. Here’s something I’ve 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.
“A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal.” The study is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.
The study’s four authors include Bailey and three graduate students in Northwestern’s psychology department, Chivers, Gerulf Rieger and Elizabeth Latty.
To rule out the possibility that the differences between men’s and women’s 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 women’s was.
“This shows that the sex difference that we found is real and almost certainly due to a sex difference in the brain,” 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 “men trapped in men’s bodies” phrase that got so many people at each other’s 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 can’t 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.
Bailey’s KOOP-Fm interview is an excellent illustration of how supporters of Blanchard’s typology alter terminology to make extremely misleading statements without technically lying. When discussing the idea of “autogynephilic” 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 it’s not about autogynephilia, it’s just they feel like women so they dress like women and any male who wore frilly lacy panties would become sexually aroused. I don’t think so.
Note that he didn’t actually use the word transsexuals. He just said “autogynephilic males.” This is a reference from page 173 of Bailey’s book, concerning heterosexual crossdressers, not transsexuals. However, since in Blanchard’s crazy little world transvestism and transsexuality are both subtypes of “autogynephilia,” Bailey can use “autogynephilic males” 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, “Well, you’re getting ready…you’re putting on your panties…you’re putting on your stockings…” they get erections!
The “evidence” on “males who denied ever crossdressing fetishistically” is Blanchard’s 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 “autogynephilic” Bailey can make statements about “autogynephilic males” and be presumed to be talking about transsexuals when he’s 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 “autogynephilic transsexuals” 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 “autogynephilic individuals” to hide the fact that he’s actually talking about crossdressers, not transsexuals. Even then, it’s a pretty tenuous leap.
He’s essentially arguing that:
1. Blanchard did a study showing that what he terms “non-homosexual” transsexuals at the Clarke showed a lot of social desirability bias, while what he terms “homosexual” transsexuals at the Clarke showed a little social desirability bias, and crossdressers at the Clarke showed none. (from Blanchard’s 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, “nonhomosexual” transsexuals probably lie about it too, because the ones at the Clarke showed social desirability bias.
Even if you take Blanchard’s interpretation of his data at face value, this is questionable at best. If you compared “non-homosexual” transsexuals to, say, people you suspect are pedophiles, both would probably deny molesting children, but that doesn’t 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 aren’t, and transsexuals the Clarke considers to be “homosexual” have a somewhat easier time doing so than those the Clarke considers to be “non-homosexual.” In other words, social desirability isn’t a personality feature of transsexuals per se, it’s 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 “ace gender therapist.” (Is that statement supposed to make us laugh or cry?) Then again, Maxine Petersen is transsexual herself, so maybe she’s lying? Oh wait, that’s right, we only lie when we say anything the Clarke clinicians don’t want to hear.
Oh, there’s also something on Bailey’s webpage about how transsexuals probably lie about autogynephilia because of the way some people choose socks. Yeah, I didn’t 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
• A Critique of the Autogynephilia Hypothesis (by Catherine Anderson, Ph.D.)
• A note on gender tests http://www.tsroadmap.com/mental/gendertests.html
• DSM-IV-TR on gender identity “disorder” by American Psychology Association /info/gender-identity-disorder.html
• LINK: The Empire Strikes Back: A posttranssexual manifesto (by Sandy Stone, Ph.D.) http://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back
• LINK: Beyond gatekeeping: truth and trust in therapy with transsexuals (by Maureen Osborne, Ph.D.) http://www.antijen.org/psychol/osbo1.html
• 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.
James Cantor is an American-Canadian psychologist and anti-transgender extremist.
Cantor is an online troll best known for promoting fringe and regressive beliefs about sex and gender minorities. Cantor has special contempt for the transgender rights movement. Cantor’s questionable beliefs and practices involve:
Sexual attraction to minors
Child-sized sex dolls: Cantor says “no evidence suggests sex dolls increase any risk of harm to anyone.”
Promotes Virtuous Pedophiles and other pedophilia support organizations
Promotes non-affirming models of care like “watchful waiting” and gender identity change efforts
Testifies against affirming healthcare for gender diverse youth
Depsite frequently presenting as being an ally to trans people, Cantor is widely considered a major figure in anti-transgender extremism.
Cantor is one of the most vocal supporters of colleague Ray Blanchard and Blanchard’s disease model of trans women and those attracted to us. Cantor is also a major supporter of fired sexologist Kenneth Zucker’s “therapeutic intervention” on gender diverse children that has been widely outlawed.
Cantor was one of the earliest and most tenacious supporters of J. Michael Bailey’s transphobic 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Cantor often appears on conservative outlets to criticize and complain about the transgender community.
Cantor was forced to apologize by former employer CAMH for attacking trans guest lecturer Kyle Scanlon. Cantor has been banned from many online groups for aggressive behavior toward those who disagree about sex and gender.
In 2019, Cantor criticized the mainstream consensus statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics for rejecting Cantor’s non-affirming model of care for gender diverse youth. Cantor calls this “watchful waiting,” but he AAP calls it “delayed transition” and advises against it.
In 2022, Cantor submitted a report to end state-funded healthcare for transgender residents of Florida. The report was apparently originally funded by conservative Christian organization Alliance Defending Freedom. A rebuttal to Cantor noted:
James Cantor’s document, presented as Attachment D to the June 2 Report, also faces serious questions about bias and lack of expertise. In a 2022 case, a federal court took a skeptical view of Cantor’s purported expertise, noting that “the Court gave [Cantor’s] testimony little weight because he admitted, inter alia, to having no clinical experience in treating gender dysphoria in minors and no experience monitoring patients receiving drug treatments for gender dysphoria.20 Cantor’s document is nearly identical to what appears to be paid testimony in another case, where Cantor’s declaration was used to support legislation barring transgender athletes from sports teams,21 Troublingly, Cantor’s appearance in that case seems to have been funded by the Alliance Defending Freedom (“ADF”),22 a religious and political organization that opposes legal protections for transgender people and same-sex marriage23 and defends the criminalization of sexual activity between partners of the same sex.24 Because Cantor provides no conflicts of interest disclosure, readers cannot ascertain whether Florida AHCA also paid for Cantor’s report and whether Florida officials were aware that the Cantor report reused his work for (apparently) the ADF.
James M. Cantor was born on January 2, 1966 in Manhasset, New York and grew up in nearby Sayville. Parents Henle Cantor (born 1943) and Stuart “Stu” Cantor (born 1940) married in 1965. Cantor’s parents owned a parts-related business serving Pepsi plants outside the United States. Cantor has two younger siblings, David and Leah.
Cantor earned a bachelor’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master’s degree from Boston University, and a doctorate from McGill University in 1999. Cantor’s advisors were Irv Binik and James Pfaus. Cantor did postdoctoral training with Ray Blanchard.
Cantor founded the Toronto Sexuality Centre and has worked there with Morag Yule, Marie Faaborg-Andersen, and Ian McPhail.
Cantor is married to psychologist Neil Pilkington.
Cantor JM (2019). Transgender and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents: Fact-Checking of AAP Policy. J Sex Marital Ther. 2020;46(4):307-313. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2019.1698481. Epub 2019 Dec 14.
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, I’m 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. It’s a very messy imbroglio which brings with it questions of research ethics, sexual and gender identity, and charges on both sides of immorality. We’ll attempt to sort it all out and hear from both sides, next after this.
(music break)
Krasny: From KQED public radio in San Francisco, I’m Michael Krasny. Good morning and welcome to this morning’s 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 yesterday’s New York Times, and he said it was “one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.” 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. He’s 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. She’s 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 Evolution’s Rainbow, and welcome Joan Roughgarden.
Roughgarden: Thank you.
Krasny: And I want to do this sort of in seriatim, we’re going to hear from what I call the Bailey-Dreger side first, and then we’ll 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 let’s 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, doesn’t 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. It’s really impossible to know. So I’ll say a bit about the science behind this.
Krasny: Let me stop you there for a second, and thank you for making that—I didn’t 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 let’s 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 hadn’t been an intentional attempt to defame me and my book. I wrote what is commonly understood to be a popular science book, in which I reviewed serious academic work by myself and other scholars. And the serious scholar who did the traditional academic work, peer reviewed and published in respectable journals, who wrote about transsexuals, is a guy named Ray Blanchard from Toronto, who I think is the world’s expert in transsexualism. And I, kind of coincidentally, because they came to me and wanted to talk to me and tell me about themselves, I came to know a group of transsexual women in Chicago. I was struck when I got to know them that there seemed to be these two completely, utterly distinct types of transsexuals, and I had not known about that. I subsequently became familiar with Ray Blanchard’s work, which was published in the 80s and early 90s, and it completely explained what I was seeing. It made me understand. And so I consulted gender experts, allegedly, such as Randi Ettner, and I read autobiographies of transsexuals, and I was struck by how they don’t write about what I could plainly see with my eyes and was there in Ray Blanchard’s work. And so I decided to write my book in part because of this.
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, women’s 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 individuals—who remember, begin life as men—this 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 there’s 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, it’s anecdotes. And you’ve been singled out for a lot of criticism, particularly with some things gay men—let me just get you on record on this—gay 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 you’ve been charged with—
Bailey: You sound like you’ve 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 didn’t 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] That’s what I said. I didn’t say they were suited, although—you know, I don’t know what that means. And I also said that in my observations, that Latina women are more likely than —or I’m sorry, Latina transgender people—are more likely than white transgender people to be a certain type of transsexual, that is the other type that we haven’t talked about yet. [183] I just talked about what I noticed with my eyes. I didn’t talk about them having genes. [183] If you’re 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 she’s 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 I’m 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 wouldn’t say that I’m 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 research—what 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 Blanchard’s work. And Blanchard’s work is science. So that’s clinical studies and laboratory studies and things like that. So I think there’s a real difference there, and I wouldn’t say that I’m somehow a defender of Blanchard’s theory or a defender of Bailey’s 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 didn’t like.
Krasny: Well, one of those women who’s 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 intersex—
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 didn’t 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 “he said she said” 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 baseless—and that they must have known were in fact baseless—and 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 been—as far as I could find from my intense investigation—were not true. Now, Professor Conway says that she hasn’t 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 don’t take her—you know… “I haven’t had a chance to respond” kind of claim as being false, frankly. I think she’s had plenty of chances to respond. In fact, most of what I do in the article is actually taken from Conway’s own site. She has been so obsessed with Professor Bailey—and with ruining Professor Bailey and anybody associated with him—that 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 “confidential,” but they’re all right there.
Krasny: There’s stuff on the site even about his children as I understand it.
Dreger: Well, that stuff actually she didn’t put up, although she links to it. That’s put up by a woman named Andrea James who’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t take it as a satire as you might imagine, they took it as a personal threat, basically. And I’ve talked to them about that, and it’s actually in my article.
Krasny: Alice Dreger again is with us from East Lansing—she’s Associate Professor of Clinical and Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern—and 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, she’s Professor of Biological Science at Stanford University, author of Evolution’s Rainbow, well-known transsexual and academic. Professor Roughgarden, I know this has you pretty exercised. Let’s find out why. You’ve used the word “fraud” to me repeatedly.
Roughgarden: Yes I have, and thank you for inviting me. It’s interesting listening to the dialogue we’ve just heard. From my standpoint the situation is fairly clear, and it’s been clear for several years. The book by Bailey was initially advertised as science, and there’s no doubt about this. For example, The National Academy of Sciences letterhead had an advertisement that read “Gay, Straight, or Lying? Science has the answer,” and conclusions were promised that “may not always be politically correct, but are scientifically accurate, thoroughly researched, and occasionally startling. And the bottom headline to the cover of Bailey’s book says “The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism.” But in point of fact, there is no science in the book, as they’re 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 admits—states in the book—that he met while “cruising” (page 141) [141] in “The Baton, Chicago’s premier female impersonator club.” [186] And so based on a sample size of six, he’s tried to draw the conclusions that he’s just mentioned. And furthermore, he didn’t 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 there’s a narrative in his book called “the Danny narrative” which is apparently completely fabricated. So as an act of science, this is fraudulent.
Krasny: I read that Danny narrative. How do we know it’s 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 it’s not?
Roughgarden: Well, we don’t, but it’s 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 refers—one example quotation involves this “Juanita,” in which he says—
Krasny: The one with which he’s alleged to have sex with, we should say for the record, yes.
Roughgarden: And he goes on to say, quote in the book, “Her 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.” [191] And then he goes on, he actually says this in the book on page 183: “About 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.” [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: “The brains of homosexual people may be mosaics of male and female parts.” [60] Gay men’s pattern of susceptibility to mental problems reflects their femininity: “The problems that gay men are most susceptible to—eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders—are 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.” [83] So basically, if Bailey hasn’t insulted you, you’re no one.
Krasny: Joan Roughgarden, again with us here in studio, is Professor of Biological Science at Stanford and author of Evolution’s Rainbow. I wanted also to get Mara Keisling in this. Mara is Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Mara Keisling, there’s something that has emerged out of this, those who are sympathetic with Professor Bailey—the power of a subset of transsexuals to ruin a man’s life—and it does seem to be us versus them.
Keisling: Well, let me just echo Dr. Dreger for a second. We’re talking about two different issues here. One is the alleged ruining of a man’s life. And the other was what was this, and I hate to use the word “study” as it’s been used here, but going back to Professor Bailey’s 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 everybody’s 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 then—based on these seven people—he then says there are only two types of transsexuals, and I think Professor Roughgarden just did a good job of explaining that. But it’s equivalent to me saying, “Well, I talked to three professors on the phone today, and I can tell you that all professors live in California, Michigan, or Illinois.” It’s 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. It’s called The MAN Who Would Be Queen. And I think it’s unclear if “the man” refers to gay people or trans people, although it’s pretty clear that they’re interchangeable in this context to a large extent. But then there’s a picture, which is clearly meant to be a muscularized calf in high heels. And it’s 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, I’m going to have to come in here, because I think you can hear our theme is coming up. We’re 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 you’re listening to us or however—radio, internet, Sirius satellite, join us: 866-733-6786. Or you can send an email forum@kqed.org. I’m Michael Krasny.
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Krasny: This is Forum. I’m Michael Krasny. We’re 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, we’ll 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 Evolution’s 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: forum@kqed.org. 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 he’s heard here—I want to afford him the opportunity to do that—but 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 we’ve heard Professor Roughgarden say that you made this out of whole cloth, so I’d like to know what you have to say to that.
Bailey: I think her accusation reflects the degree of accuracy to which we’ve 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 he’s 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 it’s clear to anybody who reads the book, there is a very systematic and large set of studies by Ray Blanchard, and that’s where the science comes from. I don’t know why it’s so hard for them to understand, so I assume that this is what they prefer your listeners to believe. And it’s—
Krasny: Let me—
Bailey: It’s false.
Krasny: Let me ask Professor Roughgarden about that, because there’s been a good deal of criticism about the… Mr. Blanchard’s research as well from you and others, this what’s been called this “subset” of transsexuals.
Roughgarden: Right, um—we have to be clear that the issue here is not whether or not there exist some people who satisfy the narrative of… that they’re 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 it’s 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 wasn’t advertised as being about Blanchard’s work, and Blanchard’s data are not actually presented in the book. The book is all about Bailey’s work. But if you go back to Blanchard’s 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 contentious—and we have Joe, a caller from Idaho who says “What’s the argument?” 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 everyone’s level of education. But from somebody who’s 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 can’t categorize these two people, or these people into two groups, or two subsets… well, they do it to all males, you’re 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 it’s a halfway decent book. I’ve never read it, it sounds like the guy’s opinion, and people are up in arms about it. Again, it’s a civilized Jerry Springer Show. I just don’t get it.
Krasny: Well, that’s the first time we’ve 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 happened—somehow this has now been framed as a bunch of crazy transsexuals got all crazy, and they’re crazy… when in fact what’s 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, “Wait a minute, here’s how we react to that academically.” And then other people join in, and that’s how academic things are supposed to happen. And so we steered clear of it initially, just because academics were reviewing it, responding to it, didn’t like it, thought it was junk science, and stated that. You know, I was asked by an interviewer the other day, “Was it fair that they tried to get Dr. Bailey in trouble with Northwestern University?” And that was such an absurd question to me, because what from my view as a non-academic—although I taught college a long time ago, I don’t now—but from my view as a non-academic, an academic wrote something and other academics responded to it, and that’s how academia is supposed to work.
Dreger: (unintelligible)
Krasny: Alice Dreger, I know you want in here, yeah…
Dreger: Yeah, sorry I lost you a little after the break. Yeah, you know I think Ms. Keisling does wonderful work, and it’s really important work politically. But I think that’s 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 Conway’s site, the kinds of things, of stuff you see on Andrea James’ site is not academic. I would challenge anybody to Google “Bailey Conway timeline” 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 wouldn’t have represented any violation of ethics in any kind of reading of normal ethics reading. So I think it’s easy to say that, “Well, this is an academic dispute,” but it’s 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 Conway’s 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 questions—we don’t try to create heat for the sake of creating heat, or have people slugging each other—but 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, you’re on the air.
Jen: Hi, yes, thank you very much for taking my call. I’m actually surprised I got through because I’ve tried to call before. This is airing in San Francisco, where I’m sure lots of people are interested in this topic. Anyway, I guess I’m calling because I’m up in arms—and I apologize because I haven’t read the book—but I’m very interested in what’s 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, I’m actually looking at Ray Blanchard’s 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 it’s 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 they’re attracted to women, which again, would—
Bailey: What website, what URL are you looking at?
Jen: Genderpsychology.org
Bailey: (laughs) That’s not Ray Blanchard’s website. Alice Dreger, you want to take that?
Dreger: (laughs) That’s not at all Ray Blanchard’s website. This is one of the things that’s happened–
Jen: Well, what’s his website?
Dreger: This is actually a website of an enemy of Blanchard’s who doesn’t like his theory.
Jen: Well, what’s his website?
Dreger: His website would be at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, he’s got a very dull website, in fact, that just basically presents his research papers in a very scholarly fashion.
Jen: Well, I’m a molecular biologist, I can understand this stuff.
Dreger: One of the things that’s happened is that the folks who don’t 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, “Gosh, you say the most outrageous things,” but in fact that’s not actually what’s going on.
Krasny: There has been in fact on some websites charges that Mr. Blanchard has—I should say Professor Blanchard as well as Professor Bailey—are actually saying that transsexuals are perverts, that they’re against sex reassignment surgery, things of that sort, so lots of stuff has gone on here that rhetorically just doesn’t 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 investigated—or whatever the right terms are—at 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, don’t you think?
Keisling: Absolutely. And I think if you read—I think Professor Roughgarden read from their… I think that’s where she was reading from, their initial announcement of the book… that caused a real problem. Again, framing this as science. What’s—the thing that’s 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? That’s not my expertise. But I don’t 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 don’t see how this campaign of defamation requires me to open up my entire personal life to everybody, so—
Krasny: Let me just ask you—
Bailey: Everything that I—
Krasny: Let me—
Bailey: Everything that I’m willing to say about my personal life I’ve already said, and you should probably be asking Alice Dreger…
Krasny: All right, I’m not asking you a personal question, I’m asking you what I hope will be a professional question, and Alice Dreger maybe because it’s—because 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 don’t have to know what they were.
Dreger: Yeah, there’s no evidence in fact that he resigned because of the investigation. He says otherwise, Northwestern says otherwise… the dates don’t make any sense. Why would he have resigned in October of 2004 if the investigation finished in December of 2004?
Krasny: That’s what I wanted on the record, thank you for that.
Bailey: I don’t know why you were asking my critic about the issue of consent and so on. I don’t 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, or—
Keisling: Professor Bailey, that was the point I was making. That’s not for me to pass judgment on.
Krasny: Yeah, but Professor Roughgarden—
Bailey: That’s why I don’t know why he asked you.
Krasny: Um, I asked for an opinion, just like you have given forth opinions here. We’ll hear other opinions, in fact. Let’s go to another caller. Mike, you’re on the air, good morning. Mike, are you there?
Mike: Hello?
Krasny: Go ahead, you’re on the air.
Mike: Yes. Dr. Bailey, these are really hot issues that have political implications that are current right now, and there’s 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? I’ll take your answer off the air.
Krasny: Thank you for your call.
Bailey: I believe my book, if you will read it—and most people who are talking about it and yelling about it haven’t—you will find it to be an enormously sympathetic portrayal of both gay men and transgender males, and that’s in part why it was nominated for a Lambda Award until Conway et al. managed to get it off the nomination list. So I assume—I certainly have worked to eliminate any bias. I don’t know if I’ve 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 that—some of those seeking grant money were actually told to dissociate themselves from Professor Bailey? That’s a charge from Professor Bailey’s bailiwick, so to speak.
Dreger: That’s 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 haven’t done that specifically, and that’s 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: I’d like to add to this, though, that from my perspective, the implications of this science—that I consider to be fraudulent and unfounded—are that it gets incorporated into textbooks and used for instruction in medical schools. And we find for example in Simon LeVay’s 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 they’ve—whether the doctor’s been indoctrinated in some science which is both pejorative and unfounded. And that’s why it’s very important to make sure this isn’t seen solely in terms of personalities. And as Mara says, as the events that took place after the publication of the book. It’s 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 that’s coming up is quite a distraction from where the serious issues lie.
Krasny: We go to more of your calls and we’re joined by Ben. Morning, Ben.
Ben: Yes, hi—this is Ben Barres, I’m a professor at Stanford. So, I think an important point that really hasn’t 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. Bailey’s book is using questionable science, I think both his and Blanchard’s, to further oppress these people. And so I’d like to ask Dr. Bailey—he feels he’s 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 to—so just let me address the general point first. Again, I reject the assertion that it’s 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, they’ve 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 that’s 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 they’re homosexual with respect to their birth sex—that is, they like men—is a type of, if you will, very feminine gay man… who decides for various reasons that he would be more happy living his life—“his,” meaning before transition—as 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 don’t think he’s 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: That’s typical of Professor Barres’—
Ben: I’m quoting your book.
Bailey: I say “they’re best suited”? Is that a quote?
Ben: Your book is very clear on that.
Bailey: Does it say the words “best suited”? Does it say the words “best suited”? If not, I think that you are—
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 “best suited.” And I—
Ben: Just answer the question, do you feel so or not?
Bailey: I don’t say “best suited” and I don’t think they are best suited.
Krasny: I think you answered the question.
Bailey: They’re better suited than genetic women are.
Roughgarden: He says “especially suited.”
Krasny: You say “especially suited,” you have that there, the quote?
Roughgarden: I have the quote, yes. [reading from page [185]] “…transsexuals might be especially suited to prostitution.”
Krasny: Professor Bailey?
Bailey: Well, I think that reflects what I just said, especially compared with genetic women. That’s not like “best suited,” like that’s the best thing they could ever do.
Krasny: All right, let me go to some more of your calls. We’re going to Richard next. Richard, you’re on.
Richard: Hello, yeah, I was just kind of—I heard some of the stuff that Michael Krasny was saying about your study, and I have some objections to it. I mean, I’m a black male, and I’m 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… I’ve experienced a lot of this recently where I’ve got people sniffing around me, trying to determine, I guess, what it is that they think that I am. And I’m just sort of minding my own business and now… I kind of think one thing you might be ignoring.. I think there’s a lot of things you might be ignoring in your study. One is economic factors. I mean, if people, poor people, can’t 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 can’t find jobs. And then you also have health factors. If you’ve 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 there’s 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 what’s considered female-typical breast growth in men, although it happens in so many men I think there’s a problem with thinking of it as female-typical. But it’s got a bigger question in how that Bailey talked about this. And one of the things I’ve uncovered in the work that I’ve was doing was this videotape of this woman identified as “Juanita” in the book, And one of the things that happened was that “Juanita” 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 don’t think she should have any shame. I don’t think there’s 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, “I 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.” And so I think one of the things that’s happening with this representation of Bailey as if he’s the only person who’s ever said this stuff. But in fact “Juanita” herself—who ends up charging him with all sorts of things after she meets Conway—in 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, we’re 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, it’s 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 bigotry—I mean, someone is entitled to be bigoted if they want—but 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 that’s now grown up around Northwestern—and that Alice unfortunately has become involved with—is 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 I’ll 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 Evolution’s 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 I’m 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 men’s 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 men’s pattern of susceptibility to certain (but not all) mental problems reflects their femininity. The problems that gay men are most susceptible to—eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders—are 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 Chicago’s premier female impersonator club, featuring several past Miss Continentals, including the gorgeous Mimi Marks.”
[191] “Furthermore, I do not believe that Cher’s attraction to men is as intense or as unambiguous as that of homosexual transsexuals. She is autogynephilic, and men’s 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.”
Seth Douglass Roberts was born on August 17, 1953. Roberts earned a bachelor’s degree from Reed College in 1974 and a doctorate from Brown University in 1979.
Roberts taught in the notably conservative psychology department at University of California, Berkeley from 1978 until retiring in 2008. Roberts joined the faculty of Tsinghua University in Beijing from 2008 until 2014.
In late March 1998, Bailey and Roberts both presented at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. Bailey promoted “gay gene” work, and Roberts presented on “neuroticism and self-esteem as indices of the vulnerability to major depression in women.”
“Autogynephilia”
Roberts gave Bailey’s book one of many 5-star Amazon shill reviews after Bailey solicited them. This is the only book review Roberts ever made on Amazon.com under that account:
a masterpiece, May 6, 2003 Seth Roberts (Berkeley, California USA)
This is the best book about psychology for a general audience I have ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of them. When I taught introductory psychology, I used to assign several books of this sort, so I was always keeping an eye out.
It is extremely well written; it is based on excellent research; and its subject is complex, powerful, and poignant. That’s why it is so good. If How The Mind Works deserves to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize then Bailey deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Roberts also had a correspondence with Deirdre McCloskey after Alice Dreger and Benedict Carey teamed up to present Bailey as a “scientist under siege.” McCloskey had previously published the review “Queer Science” in Reason in 2003.
Death
Roberts was a kind of quack that appeals to techno-utopianists and self-styled “rationalists” by claiming to succeed at “lifehacking” via self-experimentation. Roberts was a regular contributor at Quantified Self and other lifehack platforms. Roberts claimed to have personally cured acne, insomnia, poor mood, and weight gain, among other things, through self-experimentation.
Roberts was a self-proclaimed diet guru who sold a popular 2006 book called The Shangri-La Diet. Despite having no good peer-reviewed evidence that it worked, Roberts recommended drinking oil and personally ate unhealthy amounts of butter, claiming it had health benefits. On January 4, 2014 Roberts boasted:
I eat a half stick (60 g) of butter daily. It improves my brain speed. After I gave a talk about this, a cardiologist in the audience said I was killing myself. I said I thought my experimental data was more persuasive than epidemiology, with its many questionable assumptions. The new data suggests I was right — butter does not increase heart attacks. It also supports my belief that by learning what makes my brain work best, I will improve my health in other ways (such as reduce heart attack risk).
Roberts collapsed and died a few months later, on April 26, 2014. The cause of death was ruled “occlusive coronary artery disease” and “cardiomegaly.” Roberts’s final column was published posthumously “with a heavy heart” and titled “Butter Makes Me Smarter.”
References
Staff report (September 2014) Seth Douglass Roberts ’74.Reed https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/september2014/seth-roberts-1974.html
Dubner, Stephen J. (May 12, 2014). Seth Roberts R.I.P.Freakonomics https://freakonomics.com/2014/05/seth-roberts-r-i-p/
Obituary (May 8, 2014). Seth Douglass Roberts.San Francisco Chronicle https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sfgate/name/seth-roberts-obituary?id=17645317
Slack, Gordy (March 2007). The self-experimenter.The Scientist vol. 21, issue 3, p. 24. https://www.the-scientist.com/the-self-experimenter-46756
Dubner, Stephen J. (September 16, 2005). Seth Roberts, Guest Blogger: Finale?Freakonomics https://freakonomics.com/2005/09/seth-roberts-guest-blogger-finale/
Dubner, Stephen J.; Levitt Steven D. (September 11, 2005). Freakonomics: Does the Truth Lie Within?New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/does-the-truth-lie-within.html
Roberts Seth (August 13, 2007). Can Professors Say the Truth? https://sethroberts.net/2007/08/13/can-professors-say-the-truth-part-1/ [archive] also on HuffPost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/can-professors-say-the-tr_b_60781
Roberts S (2006). Dealing with scientific fraud: A proposal. Public Health Nutrition, vol. 9, pp. 664-665. https://doi.org/10.1079/PHN2006963
Roberts S, Gharib A (2006). Variation of bar-press duration: Where do new responses come from? Behavioural Processes, vol. 72, pp. 215-223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2006.03.003
Sternberg S, Roberts S (2006). Nutritional supplements and infection in the elderly: Why do the findings conflict? Nutrition Journal, vol. 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2891-5-30
Roberts S (2005). Guest-blogs at www.freakonomics.com: Pleased to Meet You, Dietary Non-Advice, Freakonomics and Me, Acne, The Elephant Speaks, Thank You.
Roberts S (2004). Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 27, pp. 227-262. replications. Excerpt in Harper’s. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x04000068
Gharib A, Gade C, Roberts S (2004). Control of variation by reward probability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 30, pp. 271-282. https://doi.org/10.1037/0097-7403.30.4.271
Carpenter KJ, Roberts S, Sternberg S (2003). Nutrition and immune function: Problems with a 1992 report. The Lancet, vol. 361, p. 2247. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(03)13755-5
Gharib A, Derby S, Roberts S (2001). Timing and the control of variation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 27, pp. 165-178. https://doi.org/10.1037/0097-7403.27.2.165
Roberts S, Pashler H (2000). How persuasive is a good fit? A comment on theory testing. Psychological Review, vol. 107, pp. 358-367. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.358
Roberts S, Neuringer, A (1998). Self-experimentation. In K. A. Lattal and M. Perrone (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in human operant behavior (pp. 619-655). New York: Plenum. ISBN 9781489919472 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1947-2
Roberts S, Sternberg S (1993). The meaning of additive reaction-time effects: Tests of three alternatives. In D. E. Meyer and S. Kornblum (Eds.) Attention and Performance XIV: Synergies in Experimental Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Neuroscience. MIT Press. pp. 611-653. ISBN 9780262290906 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1477.001.0001
Roberts S (1987). Less-than-expected variability in evidence for three stages in memory formation. Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 101, pp. 120-125. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7044.101.1.120
Michael Kuban is a Canadian psychologist who served as manager of the Kurt Freund Phallometric Lab at the notorious Clarke Institute in Toronto.
Background
Michael Edward “Mike” Kuban was born in 1962 and earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Lethbridge in 1987, then attended University of Toronto, earning master’s degrees in 1992, 1996, and 2000.
Kuban began working at the Clarke Institute in 1990. In 2015, Kuban began working with therapist Rob Peach.
Freund K, Kuban M (1993). Toward a testable developmental model of pedophilia: The development of erotic age preference. Child Abuse & Neglect , vol. 17, 1993, pp. 315-324. https://doi.org/10.1016/0145-2134(93)90051-6
Blanchard R, Barbaree HE, Bogaert AF, Dickey R, Klassen P, Kuban ME, Zucker KJ (2000). Fraternal birth order and sexual orientation in pedophiles. Arch Sex Behav. 2000 Oct;29(5):463-78. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1001943719964
Blanchard R, Klassen P, Dickey R, Kuban ME, Blak T (2001). Sensitivity and specificity of the phallometric test for pedophilia in nonadmitting sex offenders. Psychol Assess. 2001 Mar;13(1):118-26. https://goi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.13.1.118
Blanchard R, Christensen BK, Strong SM, Cantor JM, Kuban ME, Klassen P, Dickey R, Blak T (2002). Retrospective self-reports of childhood accidents causing unconsciousness in phallometrically diagnosed pedophiles. Arch Sex Behav. 2002 Dec;31(6):511-26. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020659331965
Blanchard R, Kuban ME, Klassen P, Dickey R, Christensen BK, Cantor JM, Blak T (2003). Self-reported head injuries before and after age 13 in pedophilic and nonpedophilic men referred for clinical assessment. Arch Sex Behav. 2003 Dec;32(6):573-81. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026093612434
Cantor JM, Blanchard R, Christensen BK, Dickey R, Klassen PE, Beckstead AL, Blak T, Kuban ME (2004). Intelligence, memory, and handedness in pedophilia. Neuropsychology. 2004 Jan;18(1):3-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/0894-4105.18.1.3
The APA was founded in 1892. Nineteen divisions were approved in 1944, and by 2007 there were 54 divsions.
APA Division 44, which is the APA’s division for psychologists who are sex and gender minorities or who specialize in the topic, was a stronghold of anti-trans psychologists for many years.
In 2024 they had approximately157,000 members,
2008 Task Force
In 2008 APA published a controversial report prepared Task Force consisting of several people heavily involved in promoting disease models of trans and gender diverse people, including Kenneth J. Zucker and Anne Lawrence.
2024 policy resolution
On February 28, 2024, APA published a policy resolution after it passed 153-9.
David Sylva is an American psychologist whose graduate work involved questionable studies about sex and gender minorities.
Background
David M. “Dave” Sylva was born in July 1980. Sylva did graduate work with controversial Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey. Bailey is well known for work in the field of anti-LGBT eugenics, which Bailey euphemistically calls “parental selection of children’s sexual orientation.” Bailey’s other students at the time included Gerulf Rieger, Chris Skidmore, and Elizabeth Latty.
One of Sylva’s early projects was to claim that gay men can be identified by their stereotypical gait.
Bailey claimed for years that male bisexuality did not exist, stating that men are “gay, straight, or lying.” After taking money from the American Institute of Bisexuality, Sylva and Bailey grad students Jeremy Jabbour and Luke Holmes magically “discovered” bisexual orientation among men.
After the bisexuality organization paid Sylva to “discover” male bisexuality, Sylva’s 2012 dissertation was titled “Neural Correlates of Sexual Arousal in Bisexual, Homosexual, and Heterosexual Men.” Since that payoff, Sylva’s work has been used to shore up one of Bailey’s other claims: that women may not have a sexual orientation.
Impact on transgender clients at Kaiser
Following this amazing “discovery” with Bailey, Sylva then began working for insurance company Kaiser Permanente in California.
Licensure:
NPI Number: #1790106961
Medical license: PSY26122 (CA)
Though Sylva is a member of WPATH, sex and gender minorities should avoid getting healthcare from Sylva due to this professional affiliation with J. Michael Bailey and associated anti-trans psychologists.
Safron A, Sylva D, Klimaj V, Rosenthal AM, Li M, Walter M, Bailey JM (2018). Neural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Women. Scientific Reports. 8: 673 https://doi.org/10.1038/srep41314
Safron A, Sylva D, Klimaj V, Rosenthal AM, Li M, Walter M, Bailey JM (2017). Neural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Men. Scientific Reports. 7: 41314 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18372-0
Jabbour J, Holmes L, Sylva D, Bailey JM (2020). Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117 (31) 18369-18377 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2003631117
Klimaj V, Safron A, Sylva D, Rosenthal AM, Li M, Walter M, Bailey JM (2021). Sexual Orientation and Neuroanatomy: An MRI Study of Gray Matter Differences in Homosexual, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Women and Men. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zuyhp
Klimaj V, Safron A, Sylva D, Rosenthal AM, Li M, Walter M, and Bailey JM (2021). Comparing the Structure and Function of Social-cognition-related Brain Areas in Bisexual, Heterosexual, and Homosexual Women and Men. PsyArXiv, August 16 https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/62wvd
Sylva D, Safron A, Rosenthal AM, et al. (2013) Neural correlates of sexual arousal in heterosexual and homosexual women and men. Hormones and Behavior. 64: 673-84 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2013.08.003
Sylva D, Rieger G, Linsenmeier JAW, Bailey JM (2010). Concealment of sexual orientation. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 39: 141-52 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-008-9466-2
Can you tell whether someone’s gay just by the way he or she walks?
David Sylva wants to know. He straps bright red lights to people’s bodies and videotapes them walking in the dark. He then shows the videotape to observers (who won’t be biased by clothing or hairstyles since the walker is in the dark) and asks them to guess the walker’s sexual orientation.
Sylva’s observations focus on the physical characteristics of the individual’s stride, such as the closeness of the knees.
Why does Sylva, a graduate student at Northwestern University, care so much about how gay people walk? Because he’s one of a growing number of researchers who think sexual orientation may be as basic as how you walk, something inborn that you don’t choose.
David Sylva, a graduate student at Northwestern University, has been studying individual walking styles to see if homosexuals’ strides are different from those of their straight counterparts. He hopes the data will give support to the nature side of the sexual orientation argument.
Connie Lee (July 6, 2007). Research points to inherit [sic] trait for homosexuality; some dispute. The Purdue Exponent. http://www.purdueexponent.org/index.php?module=article&story_id=6347 [archive]
Los Angeles: Health Education and Psychiatry Offices
David Sylva, PhD SPC
Marc Breedlove is an American psychologist and anti-transgender activist.
Background
Stephen Marc Breedlove was born in 1954 in Missouri. After graduating from Springfield High School in 1952, Breedlove aerned a bachelor’sdegree from Yale University, then attended University of California, Los Angelesm earning a master’s degree and doctorate.
Breedlove was a professor of psychology at the notoriuosly transphobic psychology department at University of California, Berkeley, from 1982 to ~2002. Breedlove then moved to Michigan State University.
Breedlove was featured on a show about homosexuality with Bailey and his usual suspects:
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. Marc Breedlove, professor* 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.
What’s the fuss about? Read the book, think for yourself
Why this vehement response to this terrific book? Because Bailey describes male-to-female transsexuals who report an experience that is quite different from the familiar “a woman trapped in a man’s body”. Bailey never casts doubt that there are such people, in fact he interviews and describes several. But he finds that not all M2F transsexuals fit that mold. So the fuss you’re reading in these reviews are from M2F transsexuals who refuse to acknowledge that other M2F transsexuals might have a different experience than their own. There’s no reason to think the women Bailey interviewed would have been lying to him, and why isn’t their experience as valid as yours, mine or that of other transsexuals?
So get past all the landmines the critics are trying to use to deflect you from reading a thought-provoking, honest and entirely sympathetic view of the fascinating phenomenon of transsexuality.
By the way, it’s a great read, not at all stodgy. I promise you the pages will fly by.
Whom You Love (2014)
In 2012 Breedlove launched a failed crowdfunding campaign for a film called Whom You Love: the biology of sexual orientation. The project was then relaunched and reached half its original funding goal.
In 2014, Breedlove released a series of YouTube videos on a channel with that name, featuring many key anti-trans activists in academia.
Maxine E. Petersen-Lee is a Canadian psychologist and prominent supporter of disease models of gender identity and expression. Petersen is transgender and is best known for being quoted by J. Michael Bailey in The Man Who Would Be Queen saying, “Most gender patients lie.”
Background
Petersen earned a master’s degree from University of Toronto in 1986 with a thesis titled “Male gender dysphoria and criminality.” Petersen then worked at Toronto’s notorious Clarke Institute, making a gender transition in 1991. Petersen worked closely with Ray Blanchard, Betty Steiner, and Robert Dickey at “Jurassic Clarke,” as the facility was known for its regressive views and policies. Petersen was called an “ace clinician” by Bailey. Petersen and spouse had two children before divorcing. Since starting a new relationship, Petersen sometimes uses the surname Petersen-Lee. Petersen has lived in Innisfil, Ontario and participated in motorsports competitions.
Biographer Zagria Cowan outlined just a few of the ways Petersen was involved in gatekeeping:
In 2000, she and Robert Dickey denied Synthia Kavanagh approval for SRS in that, being in prison, she could not do a Real Life Test. In the same year they were quoted in Vivian Namaste’s book defending the requirement that a trans person should do a year’s Real Life Test before starting hormones, and as critical of activists demanding hormones and surgery as a right. In September 2003 Maxine testified at an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal that government funding should be re-instated for SRS. In November 2003 she resigned from HBIGDA X (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now WPATH) when her boss Ray Blanchard did because it criticized Michael Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, 2003, an act which she described as ‘political correctness’. She now lists her name as Maxine Petersen-Lee and offers private counselling.
Resignation from HBIGDA (2003)
Petersen was part of the committee that revised the HBIGDA Standards of Care in 1998. Petersen resigned from the organization when boss Ray Blanchard did.
From: Maxine Petersen Sent: 11/5/03 8:10 AM Subject: Letter of Resignation November 4, 2003
Walter J. Meyer, III., M.D. President, Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Department of Psychiatry University of Texas Medical Branch 301 University Blvd. Galveston, TX 77555-0189 USA
Bean Robinson, Ph.D. Executive Director, Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association 1300 South 2nd St., #180 Minneapolis, MN 55454 USA
Dear Drs. Meyer and Robinson:
I am writing today regarding the letter sent on behalf of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Board of Directors and Officers in response to a letter from a number of transsexual Internet activists who have taken exception to the work of Professor J. Michael Bailey.
As a transwoman and a member of the committee that was responsible for the 1998 revision of the Standards of Care, I am intensely saddened and shocked that the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association has taken such an irresponsible action. I have worked for more than twenty-one years for the betterment of hundreds of transsexual patients/clients and have consistently supported healthcare funding for sex reassignment surgery in my home province. I have also published a number of papers on the treatment of transsexual individuals.
As recently as September of 2003 I testified against our government at a Provincial Human Rights Tribunal in support of a number of complainants seeking to have funding for sex reassignment surgery restored to our publicly funded Provincial healthcare plan.
The actions of the Board in this matter have tarnished the reputation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. By failing to grasp the importance of scientific research to be above the political correctness that is so pervasive in our society, you have perhaps unwittingly but clearly sent a signal to other researchers that they “dare not” explore certain areas of research for fear of the same or similar threat to their career. If there has been any breach of ethical standards, it is up to Northwestern University to investigate these allegations, and that is what they are in the process of doing.
I am certain not one of us wants to see the day when politics trumps scientific inquiry. I have noted recently the considerable justifiable concern expressed by scientists in the U.S. about the Federal Government interfering with or even hinting at withdrawal of funding for research in sexology and the chilling effect this appears to have had on researchers. It is ironic that the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association seems to have taken a page out of the book of the Bush government and done exactly the same thing.
Regrettably, your actions leave me with no option but to resign my membership in the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association.
Sincerely,
Maxine Petersen, MA, C. Psych. Assoc. Coordinator, Gender Identity Clinic Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Lecturer, University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry
Johnson, Micheline (2017). A History of Trans-People. In A History of Trans, a Canadian Perspective. https://web.ncf.ca/fm120/Trans/History/Chapter_2-Trans-People.pdf
Influx (June 2, 2008). CAMH Support Group, Part 2.I’m In Flux. http://iminflux.blogspot.com/2008/06/camh-support-group-part-2.html
Bailey JM (2003). The Man Who Would Be Queen: the science of gender-bending and transsexualism. Joseph Henry Press ISBN 978-0309084185
Namaste VK (2000). Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. University of Chicago Press, 199-201. ISBN 978-0226568102
Levine SB et al. (1999). The Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality. Volume 11, 1999 – Issue 2Pages 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1300/J056v11n02_01
Petersen ME, Dickey R (1995). Surgical sex reassignment: A comparative survey of International centers. Archives of Sexual Behavior, volume 24, pages135–156 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01541578
[Publications under the name Leonard H. “Len” Clemmensen]
Stermac L, Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Dickey R (1991). Group therapy for gender-dysphoric heterosexual men, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 17:4, 252-258. https://doi.org/0.1080/00926239108404349
Blanchard R, Steiner BW, Clemmensen LH (1989). Prediction of Regrets in Postoperative Transsexuals. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, February 1, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1177/070674378903400111
Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH (1988) A test of the dsm‐III‐R’S implicit assumption that fetishistic arousal and gender dysphoria are mutually exclusive. The Journal of Sex Research, 25:3, 426 432. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551472
Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Steiner BW (1987). Heterosexual and homosexual gender dysphoria. Archives of Sexual Behavior. volume 16, pages139–152. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542067
Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Steiner BW (1985). Social desirability response set and systematic distortion in the self-report of adult male gender patients. Archives of Sexual Behavior 14, 505–516. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01541751
Blanchard R, Steiner BW, Clemmensen LH (1985). Gender dysphoria, gender reorientation, and the clinical management of transsexualism. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 53(3), 295–304. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.53.3.295
Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Steiner BW (1983). Gender reorientation and psychosocial adjustment in male-to-female transsexuals. Archives of Sexual Behavior12, 503–509. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542212
Clemmensen LH (1990). The “Real Life Test” for Surgical Candidates, in Blanchard R, Steiner BW (eds). Clinical management of gender identity disorders in children and adults (pp. 121-135). ISBN 978-0880481878
Clemmensen LH (1986). Male gender dysphoria and criminality. University of Toronto, Unpublished master’s thesis, 1986.
Blanchard R, Steiner BW, Clemmensen LH (July 1985). Gender Dysphoria, Gender Reorientation, and the Clinical Management of Transsexualism. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 53(3):295-304. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.53.3.295
Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Steiner BW (1983). Gender reorientation and psychosocial adjustment in male-to-female transsexuals. Archives of Sexual Behavior 1983 Dec;12(6):503-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01542212