page_title: Andrea James
section_title: Writing and activism
hierarchical_section_title: Andrea James / Writing and activism
caption_attribution_description: Featured Session on transgender topics featuring Andrea James and Calpernia Addams at the 2006 Out &amp; Equal Workplace Summit.
context_page_description: Andrea Jean James is an American transgender rights activist, film producer, and blogger.
context_section_description: James writes about consumer rights, technology, pop culture, and LGBT rights. She has contributed to Boing Boing, QuackWatch, eMedicine, The Advocate, The Huffington Post and Wikipedia.
  Together with Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, James was a driving figure in protests—described in 2007 as "one of the most organized and unified examples of transgender activism seen to date"—against J. Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003). In the book, Bailey argues that there are two forms of transsexualism: one a variant of male homosexuality, and the other a male sexual interest in having a female body, a taxonomy critics see as inaccurate and damaging. James argued that the book is a cure narrative, framed by one case report about a six-year-old child, that exemplifies the academic exploitation of transgender people.
  The dispute became heated when James posted a page on her website containing photographs of Bailey's children, alongside sexually explicit captions that quoted or parodied material in Bailey's book. Bailey accused her of harassment, as did Alice Dreger, a colleague of Bailey's at Northwestern University; Dreger tried to stop James from speaking at the campus about the controversy. James responded that the page was intended to echo what she saw as Bailey's disrespect toward gender-variant children.
caption: James and Calpernia Addams at the Out and Equal Workplace Summit, 2006
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