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.