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Book Launches Controversy Among Transsexual Women
by Debra Hyde
05-28-2003
You would think that a book that provides a new look at transsexualism would be welcomed as a further understanding of gender identity, but the exact opposite is happening among some segments of the transgender community. Claiming that J. Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsseuxalism denies the baseline truth of how they define themselves, post-op transsexual women are organizing against Bailey's work.
Already two online repositories exist to address Bailey's book. Organized by noted computer scientist Lynn Conway and by Ts RoadMap author Andrea James, one site assesses Bailey's views and how he developed them while the other serves as a clearinghouse on this divergent school of thought.
The controversy centers first on how transsexualism is defined. The dominant approach -- one that gender counselors, endocrinologists, surgeons and psychiatric professionals currently use -- is called Gender Identity Dysphoria (GID) where an individual's gender feelings conflict with their assigned birth gender. In laymen's terms, the awareness that you were born into the wrong body. This schema has qualifying criteria for diagnosis and it is not at all dependent on sexual orientation.
Bailey, by contrast, views transsexual women as either "transsexual homosexuals" -- extremely feminine gay men who assume a feminine role, dress as women and use women's name, and have sex with masculine men -- or as "autogynephiliacs" -- men who are erotically obsessed with themselves as women but were not feminine in boyhood and came to their transsexualism during an adolescence that included masturbating while cross-dressed. The theory of autogynephilia originated with sexologist Ray Blanchard who says that it is "best conceived as misdirected heterosexuality" (Bailey, 166) and its subjects aren't women trapped in men's bodies (Bailey, 168). Both are dependent on an attraction to men, although the latter perceives a man as a prop in one's fantasies.
Women transsexuals find fault with Bailey's views and object to his views for several reasons. First and foremost, because Bailey rejects the well-established GID approach in favor of his own approach, he sees his subjects as homosexual men and rejects them as women. "Blanchard and Bailey consider MtF transsexuals to be men, period, whether pre-op or post-op," writes Lynn Conway on her site. "Just ask them point blank and they will tell you this." To post-op transsexual women, this represents a major step backwards.
Second, Bailey relies on an old, outdated version of how the gay community organized itself as a cultural backdrop for his views. At one time, gay men themselves saw no distinction between drag queen and transsexuals, but as trans-awareness gained momentum and as gay and lesbian activism matured to include bisexual and transgendered identities in the 1990s, a distinction and heightened awareness emerged within the gay community.
The greatest catalyst came when the 1999 beating death of of soldier Barry Winchell brought his lover, Calpernia Addams, into the media limelight. The media kept portraying her as a drag queen when she was, in fact, a transitioning pre-op woman who didn't see herself as a gay man. The high-profile incident forced gay and lesbian activists and communities to acknowledge the unique characteristics of transsexualism and to treat them with greater understanding.
Bailey, however, has not updated his outlook to reflect these new distinctions. He seems particularly behind the curve to Conway and James when it comes to understanding the cultural underpinnings of transsexuals. For many immigrant latina, hispanic, and caribbean girls, for example, only "gay boy" or "travesti" are available to them as identities within their ethnic heritage. Transsexualism has not yet earned social recognition there. For transsexuals in general, entering the gay community was once a means to test out their female identities before stepping fully into transition. "However," says Lynn Conway at her website, "these girls are usually not interested in gay sex with gay men because those men wants boys and those girls do not want to have anyone see or play with their males parts, reminding them that they have them."
In other words, transsexual girls never wanted gay sex to begin with. "They wanted male attention as any other girls would," Conway wrote. "The TS girls themselves didn't go to those gay bars for sex, but went there in order to safely dress as females and be 'seen as women.' "
To be fair, Bailey is a long-standing, major proponent of the genetic underpinnings of homosexuality and a vocal skeptic of reparative therapy. He also caught flack from conservative forces in 2002 when the National Institutes of Health funded a study he is co-authoring which measures the sexual response of straight and lesbian women as they view various categories of explicit materials.
Even in his book, he shows compassion for his subjects. Musing about the value of preventive efforts to deter feminine boys from transsexualism, he says, "It is conceivable to me that transsexuals who avoided the trauma and shame of social ostracism and parental criticism would be happier and better adjusted than the gay men whose masculinity came at the expense of shame and disappointment." (Bailey, 33) He goes on to speculate that because more humane treatment of feminine boys might result in more boys wanting to become women, it might be wise to let them begin transitioning in their mid-teen years.
However, the transsexual women who object to Bailey's book claim the fundamental underpinnings of Bailey's theories have the potential of doing damage. Because he sees categorically fails to perceive them as women, they will lose ground in their fight for gender understanding should his book become de rigueur in university syllabuses throughout the United States.
They have some reason for that concern. Bailey's book was published by an imprint of the National Academies Press, a publisher with the leverage to get its books into college courses throughout the country. Transsexual activists are concerned that if Bailey's views become integrated into undergraduate courses, they will be forever stamped as male by Bailey's school of thought.
A better alternative, they say, is using a book like Mom, I Need to be a Girl, which they claim gives a clear look at trassexualism as an intense manifestation of transgenderism and the inner urgency for resolution that transsexuals feel. From the start of the book, Danielle, its protagonist, is seen as a girl, and the book closely follows the more global and generous GID model.
Although the GID model was propagated with the introduction of sex reassignment surgery in the United States in the 1960s, public awareness lags far behind. According to Conway, "It has been a slow process for the general population to become aware of the reality that there are tens of thousands of postop trans people among us -- and that many of them are never recognized as anything but in their new social gender."
If Bailey's book fails to capture academia, it might be more because of its lack of rigor than because of its subject matter. The Man Who Would Be Queen is largely anecdotal and, as noted by Saralyn Chesnut, Ph.D. and director of Emory University's Office of LGBT Life, relies on randomly-chosen subjects. It has no footnotes or bibliography, and at most lists one or two resources per chapter instead. It does not provide specific data, only stories about individuals and summaries of studies he and others have conducted.
But the transgendered/transsexual community might not want to become complacent if Bailey's book fails to gain ground. Bailey's recent research topics include a long-term tomboy study that aims to "(a) characterize precisely the ways in which they are masculine and the ways in which they are typically feminine, and (b) find out what happens to them as they grow up. We are still recruiting new tomboys and hope to follow them for many years." The differences between femme men and butch women, Bailey says in his book, are not simply direct opposites of each other. "Rather than attempting to force them together," he writes in the preface to The Man Who Would Be Queen, "I decided to focus on males. Masculine females deserve their own book."
Sounds like fair warning in the making.
This article previously appeared at the now-defunct Yes Portal website as part of its news and entertainment coverage.
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