by Alice Dreger
I was pretty stunned. Others had told me about this tasteless stunt, but I had never seen it for myself. It was obvious James was trying to parody Bailey’s book, but to what end? What kind of person undermines a rights movement by using this kind of creepy tactic?
So I promptly wrote to the Northwestern Rainbow Alliance, first apologizing that I hadn’t previously introduced myself. I explained that being a long-distance part-timer based on the Chicago med school campus meant I had almost no interaction with the Evanston campus, where the Rainbow Alliance (like Bailey) was housed. I offered to speak sometime about intersex, and then got to why I was writing, namely to register my protest at James being invited to the campus. I said I didn’t think she was good for a scholarly institution, nor did I think she was good for trans rights. They didn’t answer. Frustrated, on the day before Mother’s Day in 2006, I blogged about this on my personal Web site. Knowing a bit about James’s tactics, I called the essay, “The Blog I Write in Fear.”
Behold the floodgates opening. Now a few people from the Northwestern Rainbow Alliance did write back to me, to take issue with my criticism of their decision, and several trans women did the same. Meanwhile, fan mail arrived from a number of sex researchers and from Bailey’s daughter, Kate, now a college student. Some trans women wrote to tell me that no matter how Bailey was wronged, he deserved whatever he got. A couple more trans women wrote to me that Bailey was right about them all, and James knew it—that that was the problem.
But the most interesting mail, from my perspective, came from trans women who wrote to tell me that, though they weren’t thrilled with Bailey’s oversimplifications of their lives, they also had been harassed and intimidated by Andrea James for daring to speak anything other than the politically popular “I was always just a woman trapped in a man’s body” story. They thanked me for standing up to a woman they saw as a self-serving bully.
In what in retrospect seems like a stupid move, I also made a point of writing to Andrea James to tell her about my blog and to suggest that she tone down her rhetoric lest she undermine the trans-rights movement. Oh, she didn’t like that. She didn’t like that one bit. She wrote back a series of nasty e-mails, including one referring to my son as my “precious womb turd.” (Paul soon took to asking after “the precious womb turd” when he called.) She also showed up at my office when she was in Chicago, leaving her card in my mailbox. Then she e-mailed me, subject line “Mommy Knows Best,” saying, “Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seem quite affable, and not as fearful as you. . . . Bad move, Mommy.” She closed, “We’ll chat in person soon.” My dean suggested I talk to university counsel, who asked that I check in with the university police.
Now that I’d learned a little more about one of Bailey’s chief critics, I knew I had to investigate this controversy. Now I really wanted to know what was going on here.
• • •
IT SOUNDS FUNNY TO SAY, because I had read Bailey’s book years before I met him, but it was only when I read it again alongside Blanchard’s papers, in order to start understanding the history of the controversy, that I truly became fluent in the division of male-to-female transsexuals into those who begin with homosexual desire and those who begin with amour de soi en femme. And as I did, the lives of trans women I knew personally suddenly started to make more sense. In fact, I now found one prominently featured section of Lynn Conway’s Web site—“Photos of Lynn”—sort of ironically funny. Here was this woman dedicating most of her life, it seemed, to attacking the concept of erotic arousal from the idea of being a woman as the basis for one form of male-to-female transsexualism, while simultaneously putting up—on her university Web site—multiple pictures of herself in a skimpy bikini, shot from various angles. In addition, there were pictures of Professor Conway in miniskirts, in a little black dress, and in her white bridal gown. As if that weren’t enough, Conway gave her measurements (41-32-41) and did not neglect to mention that her hair is light brown/auburn and her eyes are blue. Just your average computer engineering faculty Web site, nothing sexual, right?
But what astounded me even more than Conway’s Web pages was evidence that—before Conway had called them to arms—Conway’s two chief compatriots in the assault on Bailey’s reputation had pretty much acknowledged that they had been sexually aroused by the idea of being or becoming women. One of those two was Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished professor of economics and rhetoric at the University of Illinois, a woman who fell in as the third musketeer to Conway and James. As I started to figure out via my roughed out timelines and character files, at the height of the controversy, McCloskey had led an aggressive charge to deny Bailey’s book a prestigious LGBT literary award for which it had been nominated, and she had helped produce at least one of the formal charges made against Bailey.
Yet in Crossing: A Memoir, published in 1999, McCloskey had written the following about Donald, her pretransition self, in the third person:
When in 1994 he ran across A Life in High Heels, an autobiography by Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s group, the parts he read and reread and was sexually aroused by were about Woodlawn’s living successfully for months at a time as a woman, not her campiness when presenting as a gay genetic man in a dress. Donald’s preoccupation with gender crossing showed up in an ugly fact about the pornographic magazines he used. There are two kinds of cross-dressing magazines, those that portray the men in dresses with private parts showing and those that portray them hidden. He could never get aroused by the ones with private parts showing. His fantasy was of complete transformation, not a peek-a-boo, leering masculinity. He wanted what he wanted.
An erotic desire for transformation to womanhood? Hello. Reading this passage during my research, I recalled the time I had met McCloskey, well before Bailey’s book came out, when she and I were both invited to speak on a panel at her university. McCloskey is a very smart and witty speaker. As I recall, she began her presentation by startling the audience, saying, “These are my cheekbones.” She paused while we all sat amazed at her very feminine profile. And then she added, “I paid for them.” We laughed at her joke. McCloskey then went on to list other feminine parts she had purchased.
At one point in this anatomical audit, McCloskey talked about how she had had the bone of her forehead surgically shaved back to give her a more feminine head shape. As I remember it, as she explained this, she sort of closed her eyes and talked dreamily about how thrilled she had been, the first time she was in the shower and the water ran into her eyes, as it does on a natal woman. First off, I never knew this problem had a sex difference to it. But more important—huh? Why was she saying this as though she was recalling a magnificently sensual moment? Shampoo in your eyes as sexy experience?
And then there was this 1998 e-mail from another trans woman, a letter handed to me during my research by its original recipient, Anne Lawrence, a physician and sex researcher who self-identifies as an autogynephilic trans woman. Writing to praise Lawrence’s explication of autogynephilia, the correspondent first acknowledged that many transgender people reject categorization because:
A definition is inherently inclusive or exclusive, and there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t feel they belong in or out of a definition. I got body slammed by the usual suspects in 1996 for recommending a Blanchard book. Sure, he’s pretty much the Antichrist to the surgery-on-demand folks, and I’ve heard some horror stories about the institute he runs [the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, in Toronto] that justify the nickname “Jurassic Clarke.” However, I found many of his observations to be quite valid, even brilliant, especially in distinguishing early and late-transitioning TS [transsexual] patterns of thought and behavior.
The writer then went on to talk about herself:
I have noticed in most TSs, and in “surgery addicts” especially, a certain sort of self-loathing, a drive to efface every shred of masculinity. While I readily admit to my own autogynephilia, I woul
d contend that my drives towards feminization seem to have a component pushing me from the opposite direction as well [i.e., away from masculinity].
The author of this 1998 letter praising Blanchard’s work and readily admitting her own autogynephilia? None other than Andrea James.
• • •
OK, THIS WAS FASCINATING. A prior admission to autogynephilia from James and what seemed to amount to the same from McCloskey—plus something very much like an ongoing tacit admission from Conway?—lying behind the attempts to bury Bailey. All that spoke to motivation on the part of Conway et al. Of course, it didn’t make them guilty of anything, really (except maybe self-deception). And it certainly didn’t exonerate Bailey.
So I dug into this history, never imagining it would end up involving a hundred people and the collection of a few thousand sources, never imagining that it would be like doing a dissertation all over again, only this time with a steady undercurrent of unfamiliar fear. And as I began to dig into this history, it seemed very likely to me that Bailey had, in fact, committed various offenses. I would even have bet on it. There was so much smoke—there just had to be something burning.
But at that point—near the start of the long, unsettling trip—the only thing I felt sure of was this: That now, whenever I found myself standing in the shower trying to keep the shampoo from stinging my eyes, I couldn’t help but think hard about what you’re supposed to do when the facts seem to be leading you into danger.
CHAPTER 3
TANGLED WEBS
THE FORMAL COMPLAINTS as posted on Lynn Conway’s site suggested Mike Bailey had dragged a small group of trans women out of the closet and made public spectacles of them, ending their “stealth” lives passing as demure and ordinary women. But I soon learned that the real story was quite different.
A full decade before publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen, the trans woman known in the book as Cher—whose real name is now widely known to be Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka—had sought out Bailey, not the other way around, and Kieltyka had subsequently introduced Bailey to most of the other trans women mentioned in the book. Back in 1993, Kieltyka had seen Bailey on a Dateline NBC segment talking about tomboys. Soon after, she called Bailey’s Northwestern office, eager to tell him all about herself. Kieltyka wanted Bailey to understand that, despite the media stereotype of transsexual women as extremely femme and sexually attracted to males, she had had a more masculine-typical tomboy history and was attracted to women.
Kieltyka’s description made Bailey suspect that her story represented a classic case of autogynephilia, and as if to confirm his suspicions, at their first in-person meeting at Bailey’s office, Kieltyka brought as “show and tell” the female masks and prosthetic vulvas she had used pretransition to make erotic films in which she had played a woman. She soon also shared the video with Bailey, including clips that showed a pretransition Kieltyka fully costumed as a female, complete with glue-on vulva, fake breasts, and an elaborate female mask. The film culminated with Kieltyka as a woman simulating dildo-vaginal intercourse. For her part, Kieltyka didn’t see all this as evidence of autogynephilia; she saw her pretransition cross-dressing episodes as rituals or “dress rehearsals” leading her to understand that she was really a lesbian woman inside. She believed that her sexual use of women’s “foundational garments” had helped her to understand the feminine foundation of herself. But for his part, Bailey saw all this as evidence of amour de soi en femme—autogynephilia.
Although he thought her autogynephilic right from the start of their association, Bailey never gave Kieltyka any reason to think he thought less of her for having that sexual orientation. Bailey didn’t think anyone should be judged for her or his sexual orientation, because he believed that none of us chooses her or his sexual attractions. (He reserved negative judgment for sexual actions that directly involved someone who had not consented or could not really consent, like a child.) Indeed, Bailey always found himself admiring anyone who admitted to a socially shunned sexual orientation; he saw it as a sign of self-awareness, bravery, honesty, and integrity. As a consequence, he saw Kieltyka’s openness and pride about her autogynephilic sexual life history as nothing but admirable, and he let her know it by supporting her desire to present her interesting sexual history to others. For example, he invited her to lecture to the Northwestern students in his Human Sexuality class as part of a series of optional after-class sessions in which students could meet people with the kinds of sexual histories they were learning about in class. Bailey always let his after-class presenters have full control—to say and show just about whatever they wanted, and Kieltyka took full advantage of the opportunity to give elaborate multimedia autobiographical presentations. Twice she even opted to end her appearance by stripping naked. (She said she did this to make the point that transsexual women could be extremely attractive, even in the nude.) Kieltyka’s openness with Bailey and Bailey’s students—who over the years numbered in the thousands—was not atypical for her; Kieltyka also sought out (and took) opportunities to give public presentations about her life around the Chicago area, including on local television.
About three years into their acquaintance, Kieltyka came to Bailey to ask a favor. Since well before she and Bailey had met, Kieltyka had been acting as a kind of den mother to a sizable group of young transgender women in Chicago, mostly young Hispanic people transitioning from lives as ultrafemme gay men to straight women. Kieltyka (who is white and non-Hispanic) had been doing what she could to help these young people get safe access to hormones and surgery. Around 1996, Kieltyka came to Bailey to ask if he would be willing to write letters supporting her younger friends’ requests for sex reassignment surgery. At that time, most of the surgical establishment required letters from two psychological professionals before undertaking surgery on an adult trans patient, an onerous requirement for people without a lot of resources. Again in keeping with his sexual libertarianism, Bailey thought if he could help these capable, adult transgender women get what they wanted out of life simply by having a couple of short conversations and then writing what amounted to a letter of recommendation, he should. It would be up to the surgeon whether the candidate was ultimately accepted, but Bailey’s letters might help avoid frustrating expense and delay that these women and he saw as unnecessary. He ended up writing between five and ten of these short letters, including one for “Juanita,” the woman who would later claim he had had sex with her when she was his research subject.
In spite of what some critics of The Man Who Would Be Queen would later suggest, Kieltyka and Juanita were publicly out as trans women and out about their sexual histories well before Bailey’s book. Besides presenting themselves and their autobiographies to thousands of undergraduates, Kieltyka and Juanita also provided their stories for a 1999 article in the Northwestern student newspaper and a 2002 human sexuality educational video. For the newspaper article, Kieltyka and Juanita gave the reporter their life stories, their real full names before and after transition, and photos of themselves before and after. For the human sexuality educational videos, recorded to accompany a textbook Bailey was helping with, Kieltyka and Juanita opted yet again to proudly show their faces, give their real first names, and tell their sexual life stories. In her segment, Kieltyka again showed off her pretransition cross-dressing “props.” In her segment, Juanita—the woman who a year or so later would anonymously play a wounded, innocent shy girl outed and sexually used by the ruthless cad Bailey—went on like this, with a confident smile: “When I was a she-male [and] I prostituted myself, . . . I enjoyed it . . . easily making about a hundred thousand [dollars] a year.”
Over the years, Kieltyka did keep trying to convince Bailey of her vision of herself as something other than autogynephilic in sexual orientation. But the more she talked, the more she just seemed to embody Blanchard’s description of autogynephilia. When, near publication, Bailey showed Kieltyka the draft of what he had written about her in his book, she
took issue with none of the details about her sexual history, objecting again only to the label of autogynephilic. Understanding she didn’t like the label, Bailey and Kieltyka finally decided Kieltyka should be given a pseudonym for the book. She was given the name Cher, similar to Kieltyka’s chosen first name (Charlotte) and also the name of the musician whom Kieltyka resembled. Bailey also gave pseudonyms to the other real-life characters in the book, including “Juanita.”
It might seem odd that Kieltyka would continue to collaborate and associate with Bailey when she didn’t like how he was labeling her. But keep in mind that she heard nothing from Bailey that indicated he felt anything other than full acceptance (and even admiration) of who she was and how she had gotten there. What he wrote about her in the book was what he felt:
I think about what an unusual life she has led, and what an unusual person she is. How difficult it must have been for her to figure out her sexuality and what she wanted to do with it. I think about all the barriers she broke, and all the meanness she must still contend with. Despite this, she is still out there giving her friends advice and comfort, and trying to find love. And I think that in her own way, Cher is a star.