Politics in scholarly drag: Dreger's assault on the critics of Bailey.

Dreger defends Bailey at length and assaults those like me who disagreed with his book and his behavior. Why is the Clarke Institute theory of gender crossing so bad? For one thing, it has trivial scientific support. Dreger claims throughout her long essay that, on the contrary, it has a lot. But look at her citations, which again and again are to the same handful of papers. For another, most students of the matter don’t believe the Clarke Institute. Look at the immense literature, which neither Bailey nor Dreger have much studied, saying that gender crossing is a matter of free choice of identity, not sex, sex, sex. And the worst feature of the theory is the treatment it inspires at the Institute and elsewhere. As Bailey (2003) himself notes, ‘‘some psychiatrists refuse to recommend for sex reassignment any man who has had even one incident of erotic crossdressing’’ (p. 174). That is the problem. That, and the murders and lesser mistreatments which can be laid at the door of those who have wanted so very much and for so very long to define a free human choice as a sexual pathology. Dreger is correct that Bailey doesn’t really get going in his distaste for late-transitioning gender crossers until late in the book, where he describes them as liars (p. 146) who are best classified with ‘‘masochism, sadism, exhibitionism,...necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophilia’’ (p. 171), needing ‘‘curing’’ (p. 207). Admittedly, Bailey’s view of early transitioning gender crossers is little better, since they apparently are inclined to ‘‘shoplifting or prostitution or both’’ (p. 185) and to taking jobs as strippers (p. 142). How he would know any of this scientifically, considering that most MtF gender crossers early or late disappear without comment into the female population, is never made clear. Indeed, Bailey and his little group of followers claim that nothing can be learned about gender crossing from actually talking to the tens of thousands of people worldwide who have been through it. You see, unless gender crossers agree with the Clarke Institute theory based on a few sexualstimulation studies (which never have female controls, by the way), they are liars or self-deluded. So much for the bulk of the evidence available to serious students of the matter. It’s like doing astronomy without looking at the sky. That’s why Bailey feels no responsibility as a scientist to read anything or listen to anyone beyond a sample of convenience sized 7 gathered in the gay bars of Chicago. He claims for example to have read my own book, Crossing: A Memoir (McCloskey, 1999). But you can tell immediately from his brief description of it in his own book that he’s fibbing. He writes that McCloskey ‘‘focuses on the standard transsexual story (‘I was always a female’).’’ No I don’t. He said in an interview with the Chicago Reader in 2003: ‘‘Deirdre says he [get it? ‘he’] was really a woman inside. What does that mean really? What does it mean to say you were a man but you ‘felt like a woman’?’’ But I said nothing of the kind. To be sure, the ten-second journalistic take on gender crossers is that they are ‘‘women trapped in a man’s body.’’ But that’s not how I felt, nor is it how anything like all gender crossers have felt. When I was a man, I felt like one. Why do Bailey and Dreger have such difficulty understanding human choice and change? I suppose it’s because they are enamored of a behaviorist meta-theory that says that people just are this or that, from birth, despite all the anthropological and psychological and literary evidence to the contrary. Born a man, always a man, even if a queer man who gets off on gender change. ‘‘Bailey and Blanchard aren’t interested in whether people’s narratives fit Blanchard’s theory,’’ Dreger writes D. McCloskey (&) Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, UH 2100, Harrison and Morgan, Chicago, IL 60605, USA e-mail: deirdre2@uic.edu