Transgender study row resurfaces - August 23, 2007
An almighty row in the social sciences has surfaced in the pages of the New York Times. In 2003 psychologist J. Michael Bailey published a book about transgender women and triggered an argument that has since ranged from issues of academic freedom to alleged ethics violations to outright personal abuse. On his faculty website (he is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University) Bailey states: “The critics especially dislike my contention ... that transsexuals who are not homosexual are autogynephilic. … autogynephilia can be understood as sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman.”
“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar told the NY Times. Dreger’s investigation of the case came down firmly on Bailey’s side – it is available as a PDF file and seems to be slated for publication in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Critics disagree. Prominent among them is Lynn Conway, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. Conway claims the book “contains page after page of defamatory caricatures of transsexual women”. Her investigation into the book is not complimentary.
Whatever the rights and wrongs in this case the extreme nature of the argument is shocking. The Times article details how one transgender advocate downloaded pictures of Bailey’s children and posted them on a website with sexually explicit captions.
Comments
Some of us in the intersexed community are discussing the following
topic. I thought I would share this with you. Please feel free to
share this with anyone who might be interested. (This was sent to an
intersex support group after some members expressed concerns about
Dreger's recent paper which once again outs Anjelika as intersexed,
i.e. having a DSD - cryptochordism is very definitely a DSD and
Anjelika was born with this DSD and it is revealed once again in
Dreger's article.)
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Dear Members,
I have been very upset by what I consider to be the abuse of an
intersex research subject in Bailey's very small sample of
autogynephiles. I was so concerned that I called Anjelika Kieltyka
and had a long conversation with her. Here is what I found out from
Anjelika herself.
1) She adamantly opposed being used as a representative of
autogynephilia herself because she knew she did not fit the category
herself.
2) She formally expressed this opposition and challenged Bailey for
using her medical information in a way that she felt was manipulative
and inaccurate
3) She is intersexed but has identified more as trans
4) She is a femme lesbian (what I had suspected all along)
She is very angry that Dreger, who is an intersex activist, has
perpetuated this false description of her as an autogynephyle in her
recent article on the Bailey controversy because she invited Dreger to
come to speak to her personally and Dreger refused and would only have
a telephone interview.
She feels totally abused by what Dreger has done and intends to expose
her and Bailey for the continued abuse of her when they should have
known all along she was intersexed.
Manipulating medical information about a person who is intersexed to
try to prove anything about Male to Female transsexualism is
fraudulent because the research subject is not MALE to begin with but
intersexed.
Kind regards,
Curtis E. Hinkle, Founder of the Organisation Intersex International
http://tinyurl.com/2kv4dw
Posted by: Curtis E. Hinkle | September 1, 2007 04:32 AM