Galileo's Middle Finger

by Alice Dreger

  Most maddening, one of the panelists actually had a few interesting critiques of my work. For example, she took me to task for not adequately exploring the ways in which Bailey deployed the socially powerful term science even while putting forth sometimes oversimplified accounts of identity. She complained that, in my write-up of the Bailey history, I did not accord transgender people the kind of humanizing narrative attention I had accorded intersex people in my earlier work. I found myself going crazy with frustration that I could not, in this audience, engage or even acknowledge interesting criticism, because of the taping by James and Conway, because of all the stupid politicking being allowed to happen in the name of feminism. And what kind of feminism?

  During all this, one young woman seated next to me remarked to her friend that this Dreger woman sure is terrible. I leaned over and whispered to her that I am that Dreger woman and that I did not recognize the person the panelists were describing. She turned away as though she had just met an armed skinhead wanted for murder. I just sighed.

  At the end, there was a little time left for Q&A. I turned around to see the first person called upon: a tall trans woman, sitting near the back of the room. Here we go, I thought, more piling on. I braced myself for the next blow. Instead, the woman stood up and said this:

  [I am] Rosa Lee Klaneski, [from] Trinity College. I cite Alice Dreger’s academically rigorous work all the time in my own work. She doesn’t know who I am, but I know who she is. And I am just wondering—and I’m a transgender person myself—what gives any transgender person the right to abrogate someone else’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech just because they hold an unpopular minority view? In my opinion [regarding] the person that you are arguing against [meaning Bailey], I completely agree with you. Bunk. Ridiculous science. And should be classified as such. I got that. What gives us the right to censor it just because we don’t like it?

  Stunned, I turned back to see how the panel would respond. Predictably, they argued that the panel didn’t constitute censorship. How was this panel censoring people like Bailey or me? But I thought, come on. The note on the door, the Web pages, the video camera, and what so many sex researchers had said to me: that no one in sex research will touch male-to-female transsexualism with a ten-foot pole anymore. Which must have been just what Conway meant to do. And there was Conway, “mentoring” Ryan and taking it all in.

  Then suddenly the session was out of time, and it seemed pretty much over. I went to the back of the room to Rosa Lee Klaneski, and shook her hand.

  “You’re right,” I said, holding back tears, “I don’t know who you are, but I would like to know you. Can I buy you a drink in the bar downstairs?” She answered with a smile that I could certainly buy her a cranberry juice with soda water and lime. At that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Andrea James go up to my friend April Herndon, my former graduate student who had also worked on ISNA’s staff during my last year. James had clearly been doing her research; she seemed to know just who April was and to know of her relationships to me. I’d been so careful not to sit with April, lest she get in their sights, but my decoy had not worked. James seemed to be trying to corner her into saying something politically incorrect. The camera must have surely been pointed our way. I pulled on April’s sleeve and told her to just walk away. Otherwise we’d all be on YouTube by evening, positioned as oppressors to all trans women.

  Rosa, April, and I left the conference room and started to walk down toward the hotel bar with a fourth woman whom we knew from intersex work and who had insisted on coming with us. But as we made our way, James suddenly came up to me.

  “Alice, honey,” she said to me, towering over me, “I’m not done with you. In fact, I haven’t even started with you.” She said she was still going to prove Bailey had lied in his book. “I’m going to ruin your career.”

  In a split second, Rosa stepped between us, and calmly spoke as if to me, though clearly actually speaking to James. “Alice,” she said, “the legal definition of assault does not require that a person touch you. You can call the police right now and report assault.”

  At that, James hastily stepped away.

  We went down to the hotel bar. It was the middle of the day, and yet after arranging nonalcoholic drinks for the other three, I ordered a gin and tonic for myself, and then another. As the sedative washed over my brain, Rosa told us about herself, mentioning that she had a degree in women’s studies but was tired of the bullshit of the field. She was finishing her master’s degree in public policy now, writing about her own experience of trying to change the sex on her driver’s license without being forced into medical procedures she didn’t want. She had some radical ideas about how to harness capitalism to push for transgender rights. Enough of the liberal feminist and queer rights rhetoric; it was time to use the existing economic system and work through for-profit institutions to make the world safe for trans people. In the meantime, while she finished her master’s, Rosa was working in the pawn industry in Connecticut. I got the sense that the guys in the business had had to accept her as a transgender woman because they had enough business smarts to know they needed her.

  Rosa told me that she was also an up-and-coming poker player and was working on a nutritional supplement designed to help players concentrate better. She slipped me a sample packet of her product across the table, and I put it in my bag, wondering if I should pop it now. I wanted to be able to focus—to remember this. For there Rosa sat, rattling on, just so funny and calm and kind and independent-minded and smart and brave.

  When it came time to leave, Rosa said a warm good-bye and added, “Seriously, you let me know if you need anything.” With her positive reputation in the pawn business, she had, you know, good connections with guys who know how to handle little problems. “You just let me know if you need anything. A sympathetic ear. A little protection.” She paused. “A slightly used big-screen TV?” Her mischievous smile made me wonder if she was serious.

  • • •

  AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, after talking for hours with Craig Palmer, I went on to talk to the other interviewees I’d arranged to meet, but I found it hard to concentrate. I kept doing a really weird math: What’s worse, having your work denounced by an act of Congress or trying to help prevent rape only to be accused of fomenting it? What’s more terrifying, being charged with having sex with a research subject or getting a lesson in how to check for bombs wired to your car? And who is the real feminist, the one who reflexively sides with people who’ve been historically downtrodden or the one who does so only after checking the facts?

  And then a reactionary calculus question emerged: Is there anything too dangerous to study? Should there be any limits? What if, in order to prove how important truth seeking is, we made a point of studying the most dangerous ideas imaginable? What if we even really studied race and IQ?

  Yeah, apparently I was now getting drunk on the idea of absolute intellectual freedom. I mean, I could see that no good and much harm could come out of certain scientific pursuits. (Oh, like studying race and IQ.) And yet, I kept thinking: What if we became unafraid of all questions? Unbridled in our support of the investigation of “dangerous” ideas? What if we came together in the ivory towers, barricaded the doors, and looked at the skies?

  Never before that trip to Columbia had I felt a burning sense of being an academic. Never before had the profession felt to me holy in the way it was beginning to feel now. I found myself becoming bizarrely sentimental about donning my PhD robe and hood, those leftover symbols of the monasteries from which universities had emerged. Those monks had been about a supernatural truth. We must be all about earthly truth. And our pursuit of the truth would be our pursuit of justice, our defense of democracy. We would not allow the DeLays of the world to stop us. We would not put up with the American Psychological Association and the National Women’s Studies Association kowtowing to identity politics. The identity that mattere
d to us would be our identity as academics, as truth seekers.

  And of course we would not naively believe that any of us could find the truth alone. We must honestly assess each other’s work. This, I had long taught my students in history-of-science classes, was the genius of science: the ideal of peer review. The light of many minds. Not coincidentally, this was also the genius of modern democracy, I suddenly realized in Missouri—the Show Me State. The Enlightenment brought us both science and democracy. The Founding Fathers had understood the usefulness of the scientific review model. The three-branched system of government, with its checks and balances, the jury system, a Supreme Court with multiple justices approved by multiple representatives—these institutions were meant to do just what the review process of a good journal is meant to do: Weed out the bad, leaving the good.

  But could we do it? Could we manage it in an era of moneyed interests—defense contractors and drug companies and oil monopolies (and Conways) financially manipulating the systems in ways we couldn’t even see? Could we do it in an era when the Internet allowed people like James to create “truth” through clever marketing strategies? Could we take back an academy that had allowed itself to become so beholden to external funding, identity politics, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and conniving legislators?

  As we had talked in his office, Craig Palmer had said of his experiences: “From all this, I’ve learned more about the human species and how it can do things like lynch mobs and genocide and stuff. I’m not sure I’m glad to have that knowledge. One of my colleagues asked if the experience had lowered my view of the media. And I said no, it’s lowered my view of the species.”

  Yet as I sat in the Columbia airport in the predawn dark of Halloween 2008, waiting for my early morning flight home, I felt strangely hopeful. I meditated on the actions of one woman long ago, a woman whose name I didn’t even know: the woman who had been Craig Palmer’s dean in Colorado when all hell broke loose. Craig had been in a nontenure line, utterly vulnerable. With all that bad publicity, all the trouble with the threats of violence, it would have been easy for his university administrators to cut their losses by cutting Craig loose. It was not as if they weren’t getting letters calling for him to resign or be fired. And what had his dean done? She had defended his academic freedom.

  They called for the passengers on our flight. I went through the metal detector and out the door that led to the tarmac where our plane waited. In the earliest light of the day, I looked up to see a great big plane right next to our little one, and I stopped in stunned surprise. It was Obama’s campaign plane, Change We Can Believe In.

  “Can I take a picture for my son?” I asked the Secret Service agent standing there.

  “If you hurry,” he said, taking my suitcase and smiling broadly.

  In four more days, I thought to myself, the people will peer-review. And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make people understand the difference between a self-serving personal narrative and an empirical study that had undergone rigorous peer review. Teach people why they all should want to be like academics saying “show me” at every step of the way.

  I stuck my camera phone in my pocket and took back my bag from the Secret Service agent. And I stepped onto that little prop plane positively high.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ROT FROM WITHIN

  THE STORY I HAD BEEN TOLD about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight. They came from old dogma about human nature; we came from progress and social justice, and so we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about knowing what was true.

  That didn’t mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn’t mean their work wasn’t shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn’t first and only political. They believed that good science couldn’t be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.

  In Missouri, I realized that there’s a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn’t be achieved if we didn’t know what’s true about the world. (You can’t effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don’t understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first: it was who we scholars were supposed to be. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that of us, to maintain—by our example, by our very existence—a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.

  Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers. We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.

  Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: “Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting ‘truth’ be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts. Science—the quest for evidence—is not ‘just another way of knowing.’ It’s a methodical process of checking each other, checking theory against experiment, checking claim against fact, and fact against fact. It isn’t perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars—hell, the plane we’re flying in now.”

  Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he had succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo’s evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that—plays. I longed for the real world, longed to get away from discussions about “representations” of reality. I longed to pick apart each history to know what’s true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right or wrong.

  As we flew on, political loyalties that had once felt grounding to me now felt like heavy weights I longed to drop away. There seemed a promise, with this lifting, of being able to see much further, much clearer. Surely Galileo must have felt something like this combination of longing, doubt, and hope when he looked up and realized fully that there were no crystalline spheres of the kind the ancients had sa
id affixed and turned the planets and stars around the Earth. No longer any rigid spheres in his world, just infinite soft space, infinite potential for discovery, for wonder, and for trouble. We are not standing on a still and special earth created by God in the very middle of a perfectly round universe, but on a lumpy twirling planet, a planet bright from reflecting sunshine just like the other planets, circling around a pimpled sun, spinning along in the middle of a comet-littered nowhere, somewhere in a vast and messy universe—a world that might now become known as never before.

  No wonder Galileo learned what he needed to learn in order to construct good telescopes. No wonder he spent so many of his days struggling to make those visual portals better and better. Religiously speaking, the pope had the power to stop Galileo from achieving salvation; he could excommunicate him, mark him as a bad soul forevermore. But I suspect that, in his heart and through his telescopes, Galileo had already achieved the kind of salvation that matters to the seeker. He had achieved a philosophy that truly liberated him, and then also us, his enlightened descendants. The pope might claim to gatekeep for God, but in truth, even the pope couldn’t stop Galileo from climbing into the heavens to pull down facts and bring them back to Earth. And Galileo knew that he had achieved not only a physical truth, but a metaphysical liberation of sorts. And so he daringly composed his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, pushing Copernicanism and openly mocking those who resisted the new science of searching for facts. One middle finger, liberated, pointed to the stars.

  • • •

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS after my trip to Missouri, in January 2009, I drove three hours northwest from my home in East Lansing into the snow-covered woods near Traverse City, and knocked on the door of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. By then I had talked to enough scientists attacked by various progressive activists that I could guess how I would find the septuagenarian Chagnon—engaged in a sort of self-imposed house arrest, treated by his peers as cancerous and contagious, portrayed by his friends as a martyr and by his enemies as a Nazi, disoriented, ineffectively angry, and essentially stuck at the moment his controversy had fully broken. I guessed about right. One might just add to the image a blue and gold University of Michigan baseball cap, an affinity for rambunctious dogs and children, a taste for bawdy jokes, and a seemingly endless thirst for coffee or beer, depending on the time of the day.