Galileo's Middle Finger

by Alice Dreger

  Thanks to Paul’s tip, I reconnected with Kiira, whom I hadn’t talked to since we worked on the intersex book in 1999. In that book, she had told readers that her mother had been given progestin to prevent a miscarriage when she was pregnant with Kiira. Although Kiira was genetically female and had ovaries and a uterus, her genitals looked male when she was born because of the progestin. So Kiira was labeled and raised as a boy, but turned out to be a real sissy boy, and by puberty a boy-crazy femme boy. Eventually recognized as intersex, Kiira landed in John Money’s clinic. Money was deeply annoyed at this fourteen-year-old who was messing with his theory that gender and sexual orientation result from nurture, not nature. Money tried to use masculinizing hormones to make this annoying boy more boyish. When they failed, Money “let” Kiira become a girl and gave her sex reassignment surgery. So Kiira was not just intersex but had had the life of a typical transkid, too. She’d been a femme gay boy who became a woman. No wonder she related so easily to other transkids. No wonder she was defending Bailey.

  Kiira gave me all sorts of much-needed sympathy over my run-in with Andrea James (she’d had one too) as well as over my unwanted exit from ISNA (she’d had a similar thing with Bo). Honestly, it was like one of those weird moments when you’re in Paris and you take a wrong turn and find yourself in some back alley and run smack dab into a friend you haven’t seen since college. I asked Kiira to help me understand it all. Basically, she explained to me, Bailey and Blanchard and Lawrence were right. She pointed out that Mike had been incredibly thickheaded about some things, like about his assumption that transkids end up prostituting themselves and shoplifting because that’s what they like to do. That’s how they survive, she said, adding an observation from her transkid friend Alex: “Claiming that transkids may be especially suited for prostitution because they sell themselves when they are destitute is like believing that people in famine ravaged countries are especially adept at dieting.”

  That aside, Kiira said, Blanchard’s taxonomy was right. She told me to think back to all those trans women who joined ISNA, wanting to be told they were hermaphrodites, looking for some explanation for their sexual feelings and their feelings that they were women in spite of a life of masculine signs. Kiira reminded me how decent many of those trans women had been, helping us early in the intersex-rights movement. I immediately thought of Maxine Petersen, a post-transition self-identified autogynephile who had worked in Ray Blanchard’s clinic, helping women like her. I thought of four other trans women friends whose friendship I now knew I could never dare to mention in public, lest they be taken as hostages in this war. Those are the people who need you to tell the truth about what happened, Kiira said to me, meaning the transgender people whose identities were being disappeared by those bent on a self-serving narrative.

  She was right, of course. As scared as I was getting, I knew I had to write up what I had found out about the Bailey book controversy. Even while my stomach hurt from the thought of the backlash that would surely be directed at me, the scholar and the activist in me felt as I had at the start of the intersex-rights movement: that I was suddenly seeing a truly oppressed population who had been made nearly invisible by people inconvenienced by their reality. Only in this case, it had happened at the hands of their own kind.

  • • •

  THERE ARE NOT a lot of places that will take a book-length academic article, even one that people consistently call “a real page-turner.” I negotiated consideration of my tome by the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the highly rated journal of the old-boy sexologists. It was true that Mike, Paul, Anne Lawrence, and Ray Blanchard were all on the editorial board, and that would look funny. But it was also true, I knew, that no one could ever really dispute anything important in what I had found. Plus, surely nowhere else would take this kind of article under the terms I wanted: I wanted the right to make it available to all for free online, and to have it published on paper as well, full-length, uncut, so that it would be readily accessible in all reputable academic libraries. I also insisted that Conway and Bailey both be given an opportunity to respond in the very same issue in which my work was published. The editor of Archives, the child psychologist Ken Zucker, told me he’d go one better and let anyone write a response and publish anything reasonably related to my article. Up to that moment, Zucker and I had only had tense encounters, as my work on intersex had steadily criticized the pediatric gang with whom he ran.

  Using this open-dialogue approach to my “target article” meant Zucker had to release a copy of it after it was peer-reviewed but before it was published, so that people could write their responses for the dedicated issue. I knew from my intersex experience that if I wanted to get anywhere in terms of public understanding of what had happened, I needed the press to get in on the story early. So I sent out a cold-call e-mail to Benedict Carey of the New York Times, and to my relief, he replied with interest. Carey had previously written about Bailey’s work on bisexuality and had taken crap from none other than Conway for it. (She went after Bailey on everything.) This prior history made me nervous about appearances: Didn’t Conway’s previous attack on Carey give him an apparent conflict of interest, I asked? He explained to me that if people were allowed to use any criticism to neutralize reporters, the free press would die, and his editors understood that. I felt a glimmer of hope for the Fourth Estate.

  With a copy of my paper in hand, Carey did his homework, calling all the major characters, checking my claims against theirs. Conway refused to talk again, but it was now obvious that they all knew what I had found and that they were worried, because they started to really come after me online. As I waited after the release of my article, wondering if the Times would ever report on it, I watched my Google rankings being taken over, almost in an instant, by James and Conway’s claims about me. I was being reconstructed as an enemy of intersex people and an enemy of all LGBT people. And how did they portray my exit from Michigan State? Predictably, my choice to give up tenure was simply reconstituted as my having been driven out for bad behavior.

  Finally, Carey’s piece was published in the Times, and he amazed me by his ability to sum up the salient points in a couple thousand words. More important, Carey’s report turned around the public story of what had really happened. Mike was elated. Mike’s family was elated. Ray Blanchard was elated. Scientists all over the world were elated.

  Me—well, it’s not as though I didn’t know what was coming, as though I didn’t know that it would just get worse after the positive press coverage of my work, first in the Times, then in the International Herald Tribune, then even in the Advocate, the national magazine dedicated to LGBT politics. But somehow it felt shocking anyway—page upon page on the Web, “exposing” me as a right-winger, a fake, a eugenicist.

  For her part, McCloskey wrote to the New York Times to say that “the Bailey group” had paid for my work, and she put a copy of her letter to the editor on her Web site. The truth was that I had paid for the whole thing out of my own puny part-time income, and that I had felt the need to try to hide the project from Northwestern as much and as long as possible, worried that they’d fire me for stirring up more trouble from this crowd. It would have been very easy for them to do so; I was on a one-year, part-time job with no contract. Several of my colleagues had made perfectly clear that this one “wasn’t worth it.” I wasn’t sure Northwestern would now feel I was worth it. I tried to remind myself I’d been looking for a way out of academia. But I also tried to get Northwestern’s general counsel to tell McCloskey to stop defaming me by saying Bailey had paid for my work. They told me they didn’t work for faculty; I’d have to get my own lawyer.

  Honestly, I have forgotten a lot of what happened during the worst of the storm. I remember debating Joan Roughgarden of Stanford (the trans woman scientist) live on public radio in the Bay Area, and getting really upset at listening to her not just repeat the false charges against Bailey, but also inflate them. I remember having to
put my friends under strict rules not to tell me what they were finding on the Web about me. I remember being afraid to open my e-mail, even though so much of it came from trans women thanking me for “telling the truth.” I remember trying really hard to focus on the fact that I had a PhD and that no matter what they did, no one could take that from me. I remember hosts of my invited academic lectures calling to tell me they were getting angry mail about my having been invited to speak and asking me if they needed to call campus security. I remember one morning, sitting on the kitchen floor and crying into my hands as quietly as I possibly could, while my son sat in the next room waiting for his breakfast.

  I think the lowest point was one Saturday night when I opened my mail near midnight and found out that a trans woman named Robin Mathy was filing ethics charges against me with my dean. Mathy considered me unethical for publishing the work in Archives (because it was the journal of the sexologists, including Bailey, Blanchard, and Lawrence), and unethical for concluding, in my article, that sex with a research subject is not always problematic. In that bit of my article, I’d gotten personal, saying that if everyone we write about is a research subject, and sex with research subjects is always wrong, then I had violated that rule because I often write about my husband. I mean, once you understood what Mathy was really charging me with, her claim was ridiculous—especially given that she also made the complaint to the American Psychological Association, and I’m a historian. (I felt like suggesting she also send her complaint to the American Dental Association and the greengrocers of America.) But she had professional mental health credentials and a trans identity card, and she was good at making things sound official, and I knew perfectly well that now they would all use this to say, “Dreger has been charged with ethics violations involving a question of sex with research subjects.” And people wouldn’t look up the details. They never look up the details.

  Perhaps most disorienting of all was now being held up as a hero by all these guys whose work I had criticized. Even Steven Pinker from Harvard—who had gotten swept in years ago by blurbing Bailey’s book—wrote to say how impressed he was with my article. He offered me an introduction to his agent. In reply, I asked him to support an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I needed to feel that I was still a scholar, no matter what they said about me.

  In my application, I proposed to look at conflicts involving scientists and activists over matters of human identity as they play out in the Internet Age. What’s that the Brits say? “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  CHAPTER 4

  A SHOW-ME STATE OF MIND

  IT WASN’T LONG before I had lots of good company for my misery. As soon as word got around that I had a Guggenheim Fellowship to study conflicts between scientists and activists over issues of human identity, academics from all over started contacting me, suggesting I work on this controversy or that. I heard from one physician colleague about a clinician-researcher who dared to question the reality of chronic Lyme disease and was now chronically plagued by people who insisted they had it. I heard from another about the physician-researcher who had helped to define the condition known as fibromyalgia only to later doubt that it really is a distinct disease. (There’s a way to make yourself researcher non grata.) I started to wonder if this was just a guy thing. Are men much more likely to get into trouble because they’re taught and allowed to be aggressive? Then Mike Bailey told me about another woman who’d been in this kind of trouble, a clinical psychologist who had researched and revealed the disappointing reality behind a poster-child case of “recovered memory” of alleged childhood sexual abuse. Then I learned from an editor at Harvard University Press about another woman psychologist, one who had experienced some significant unpleasantness following a book in which she expressed scientific skepticism about alleged alien abductions. The abductees wanted a word with her.

  I had accidentally stumbled onto something much more surreal—a whole fraternity of beleaguered and bandaged academics who had produced scholarship offensive to one identity group or another and who had consequently been the subject of various forms of shout-downs. Only these academics hadn’t yet formed a proper society in which they could keep each other company. Most of these people had been too specialized or too geeky (or too convinced they were the only ones who didn’t deserve it) to realize there were others like them out there. As I started collections of notes on each of these folks, I kept thinking about how Bo must have felt in the early 1990s, when she realized that there were others like her out there, others who had been born with ambiguous sex, who had been cut, changed, and lied to. “My people” were out there. I just had to put it—put them—all together.

  But where to start? Mike Bailey’s son, Drew, insisted the place was the University of Missouri in Columbia. Drew was there earning his PhD in evolutionary psychology, a field I had long held in contempt as I knew feminist science-studies scholars like me were supposed to. Drew assured me I could get plenty of material from a single trip to the University of Missouri, because the place was littered with CV’s torn asunder in various controversies. There was Craig Palmer, the anthropologist who had dared to cowrite A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. There was Ken Sher, the psychologist who had been the action editor for an infamous paper purporting to show that children are not, on average, as universally devastated by sexual abuse as the angriest survivors might lead us to believe. There was Dave Geary, a psychologist who dabbled dangerously into the study of sex differences in mathematical abilities (even after Larry Summers). And there was Mark Flinn, a scientist whose career had been wrapped up with Napoleon Chagnon, the famous sociobiology-loving anthropologist who had been tried for high crimes and misdemeanors by the American Anthropology Association in 2001.

  I wrote to all these people and set up interviews for the two days I would spend in Columbia in late October 2008. Then I crammed, studying these various people’s experiences, and got on a plane from Michigan to Memphis, because (as I had learned) Memphis was the only way to fly to Columbia. Turns out Columbia sports a tiny airport with a total of three flights in and three out each day, except on Saturdays when they drop down to two each.

  As we approached the landing strip in the midst of green rolling hills dotted with brightly colored trees, I suddenly wondered something. If in a place as small as Columbia, I could quickly find people with intimate connections to at least four major controversies involving scientific claims about human identity, how many of us must there be?

  • • •

  OBAMA SIGNS WERE EVERYWHERE as I pulled my rental car into Columbia and found a place to park. It was five days before the presidential election of 2008, and Missouri had become a swing state. I knew that unless the polls suddenly shifted, Obama would be in Columbia the next night for a rally. Everyone seemed downright giddy, like the mood of the home-team fans as the clock ticks down on a national championship, the scoreboard shining with a point lead clearly too great for the visitors to overcome. The academics in Missouri were as academics everywhere that year—gaga over Obama not just because he could really think and reason and write and speak, but also because the Bush administration had been so profoundly antiscience and so very untruthful. Such liars. We just wanted reality back.

  With all this going on and not really knowing if I was at the beginning or near the end of this shape-shifting project, it was impossible not to feel disoriented. I was glad when Ken Sher, my first interviewee, suggested we talk in a bar. It was hard to find a place to perch my computer for note taking, but I didn’t really care. The controversy he’d been involved with had already been exceedingly well documented, including by people like Ken. I mostly wanted to hear what Ken thought I needed to really appreciate about how these things play out.

  I knew from my background reading that in 1998 Nancy Eisenberg (of Arizona State) and Ken had been the editors at Psychological Bulletin responsible for publishing a paper that came to be known as “the Ri
nd paper.” Psychological Bulletin is one of the publications of the American Psychological Association, and at the time, Eisenberg served as editor in chief. As was typical for manuscripts submitted to the journal, Eisenberg assigned the submitted Rind paper to one of her two associate editors to shepherd it through peer review and revision. The associate editor assigned the task of managing the manuscript was Ken Sher.

  Sher and Eisenberg had decided that the Rind paper—after it passed the usual peer-review process—would certainly be worth publishing. Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman had performed a meta-analysis of studies of childhood sexual abuse, or CSA. They took a series of existing studies—on college students who as children had been targets of sexual advances by adults—and looked to see what patterns they could find.

  What had seemed particularly important to Sher and Eisenberg about the Rind paper was its parsing of which factors in cases of CSA were associated with long-term psychological harm. For example, the Rind paper’s analysis suggested that girls were more likely to be psychologically harmed by CSA than boys and that an incestuous family environment that also involved other forms of physical and emotional abuse was more likely to result in harm than nonincestuous CSA in less abusive environments. The paper also suggested that it did not make a lot of sense to lump together under the term childhood sexual abuse both (a) molestation of a five-year-old by a sixty-year-old, and (b) consensual sex that happens between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old. Yet the scientific literature sometimes did that. The paper therefore tried to bring a more scientific approach to a very heated topic.