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J. Michael Bailey was visiting the popular Chicago nightclub Crobar to recruit subjects for a study on transsexuals and drag queens, and found himself especially entranced by a transsexual he called Kim. “She is spectacular, exotic… and sexy,” he wrote in The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. “Her body is incredibly curvaceous, which is a clue that it may not be natural…. It is difficult to avoid viewing Kim from two perspectives: as a researcher but also as a single, heterosexual man.”
It’s this sort of rumination that has gotten Bailey, now chairman of Northwestern University’s psychology department, and an expert on the biological origins of human sexuality, into trouble. His book, published last year, has sparked both a bitter ideological dispute and an ongoing university investigation that will likely have ramifications far beyond the Bailey case.
In the minefield of sexual research on human subjects, preconceptions can easily taint observations, and the intimacy between researcher and subject can overtake objectivity. The Man Who Would Be Queen is presented as science, but at times it seems more like a voyeuristic memoir by a man admittedly fascinated by the links between sexuality and gender.
Some transsexuals have charged that the book is lurid and unscientific, with a half-dozen (some of whom have never met Bailey) complaining to Northwestern that he failed to obtain written “informed consent” from his human subjects—a federal and university requirement for scientific research. One transsexual further claimed that Bailey had sex with her two years after writing a letter backing her sex-reassignment surgery, an allegation Northwestern subsequently dismissed.
The crux of the issue is whether or not Bailey’s book is science, or a work of journalism. If it isn’t science, Bailey would have had no obligation to follow regulations on scientific research requiring that he submit his project proposal to a Northwestern University Institutional Review Board; nor would he have needed his pseudonymous subjects’ formal written consent.
“I have done nothing wrong,” says Bailey, suggesting he was being pilloried for his iconoclastic views. “It is my belief,” he continues, “that everything that has happened originated with the hatred [by many transsexuals] of the ideas in the book.”
In fact, Bailey points out, the most contentious of these ideas aren’t even his. The Man Who Would Be Queen relies on sexologist Ray Blanchard’s classifications of transsexuals as either “homosexual transsexuals,” extremely feminine gay men, or as “autogynephiles,” men who become women as a result of an acute sexual fetish.
It’s the “autogynephilic” label that has incited much of the anger against Bailey. Randi Ettner, a psychologist and author, says that the autogynephilic profile applies, at most, to “a very small minority” and is greatly oversimplified. “You have people who are filled with shame anyway, and you’ve cast them all as sex workers and people who are obsessed with sexuality,” she says. “He’s set back the field 100 years, as far as I’m concerned.”
Ettner’s book, Gender Loving Care: A Guide to Counseling Gender-Variant Clients, embodies the more commonly accepted view that transsexuality is “gender dysphoria”—or unhappiness with one’s biological sex—that “contains no explicit sexuality.” She writes that “gender variance...exists on a continuum, with transsexualism at one extreme.”
Bailey himself had never met a transsexual until he was contacted a decade ago by C. Anjelica Kieltyka, an artist and an advocate for the trans community who had seen him on television. She said her aim was “to educate him” about transsexuals. As Bailey recounts in the book, his education took him to Chicago bars frequented by Kieltyka’s transsexual friends. Soon, he was writing letters backing their sex-reassignment surgeries. Kieltyka and others reciprocated by speaking to students in Bailey’s popular “Human Sexuality” class.
Today, Kieltyka, who says she’s the autogynephilic character “Cher” in the book, is among Bailey’s fiercest critics. “He turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” she says, citing his unflattering portrayals of her and her friends. “He crossed so many lines that the lines themselves are confusing.”
For his part, Bailey calls his book a work of “popular science,” and says he reached his conclusions “from personal contacts” and “understanding these people |
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