The review seem pretty balanced and interesting, however the bit about Bailey struck me as really misguided.
I’ll try to explain why, I apologise if at some times I might come off as angry but the whole issue about autogynephilia annoys me both at a personal level as a trans person and at a professional level as a graduated in psychologist and scientist. Alice Dreger seems to have massively botched this part of her work.
In 2006, Dreger decided to investigate the controversy around J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would be Queen. The book is a popularized account of research on transgenderism, including a typology of transsexualism developed by Ray Blanchard. This typology differentiates between homosexual transsexuals, who are very feminine boys who grow up into gay men or straight trans women, and autogynephiles, men who are sexually aroused by imagining themselves as women and become transvestites or lesbian trans women.
Bailey’s position is that all transgender people deserve love and respect, and that sexual desire is as good a reason as any to transition. This position is so progressive that it could only cause outrage from self-proclaimed progressives.
Bailey’s position caused outrage in nearly every trans woman who read the book or heard the theory, and in a lot others trans persons who felt delegitimised and misrepresented by the implications.
If you are transgender, you are suffering from gender dysphoria and you aren’t transitioning for sexual reasons at all, though your sexual health would often improve. You are doing what science shows to be the one thing that solves your symptoms that are ruining your life and making you miserable.
But then, someone who’s not trans comes along and says “no, it’s really a sex thing” based on a single paper that presented no evidence whatsoever.
This person, rather than very rigorously trying to test the theory with careful research, which is what everyone, especially someone who’s not feeling what trans women are feeling and thus is extremely clueless about the subject because it’s really easy to misunderstand a sensation your brain isn’t capable of feeling, should do, bases one of the two clusters of the book mostly on a single case study of a trans woman, who has a sex life which isn’t representative of the average trans woman at all, but who makes for a very vivid, very peculiar account of sexual practices, and the rest of the “evidence” are just unstructured observations and interviews.
The book doesn’t talk at all about how most trans person, men and women and non-binary, discover they are trans, and doesn’t describes accurately their internal experience at all. It instead presents all trans women as being motivated by sex, and half of them by sexual tendencies that psychology depicts as pathological.
And then, somehow, this completely unfounded theory becomes one of the most known theories about trans women.
So, if you are a trans woman, best case is, your extremely progressive friends and family come to you and say “oh, we didn’t knew it was just a sex thing, you could have told us you had this very weird sexual tendencies rather than make up all of that stuff about how your body and how society’s way of treating you like a man makes you feel horribly, it’s fine, we understand and love you anyway”.
Worst and more common case, your friend, family, work associates and whatever, aren’t extremely progressive. They still believe Blanchard’s and Bailey’s theory about you, though.
And then, when the trans community starts yelling more or less in unison “what the hell?!” at what Bailey wrote in his book, the best response he can come up is saying that the trans women attacking him are in a narcissistic rage because they are narcissists whose pride has been wounded by the truths he wrote, and that they are autogynephiles in denial.
Bailey attracted the ire of three prominent transgender activists who proceeded to falsely accuse him of a whole slew of crimes and research ethics violations. The three also threatened and harassed anyone who would defend Bailey; this group included mostly a lot of trans women who were grateful for Bailey’s work, and Alice Dreger.
I’m not aware if some transgender women tried to defend the book, but “a lot of transgender women” seem to be a more accurate description for the books detractors than its supporters.
I’m aware of the fact that the three activists mentioned went way too far to be justified in any way. But presenting those as the only critics he received is completely wrong, because there was a huge number of wounded people who saw their lives get worse because of the book.
Autogynephilia was made popular as a theory mostly by Bailey’s book, and trans exclusionary radical feminist groups, which are currently doing huge damages to trans rights and healthcare, are using it as one of their main arguments to delegitimate trans women and routinely attack trans women with it. Even if Bailey’s intentions were good, he failed miserably and produced far more harm than anything else.
The review seem pretty balanced and interesting, however the bit about Bailey struck me as really misguided.
I’ll try to explain why, I apologise if at some times I might come off as angry but the whole issue about autogynephilia annoys me both at a personal level as a trans person and at a professional level as a graduated in psychologist and scientist. Alice Dreger seems to have massively botched this part of her work.
Bailey’s position caused outrage in nearly every trans woman who read the book or heard the theory, and in a lot others trans persons who felt delegitimised and misrepresented by the implications.
If you are transgender, you are suffering from gender dysphoria and you aren’t transitioning for sexual reasons at all, though your sexual health would often improve. You are doing what science shows to be the one thing that solves your symptoms that are ruining your life and making you miserable.
But then, someone who’s not trans comes along and says “no, it’s really a sex thing” based on a single paper that presented no evidence whatsoever.
This person, rather than very rigorously trying to test the theory with careful research, which is what everyone, especially someone who’s not feeling what trans women are feeling and thus is extremely clueless about the subject because it’s really easy to misunderstand a sensation your brain isn’t capable of feeling, should do, bases one of the two clusters of the book mostly on a single case study of a trans woman, who has a sex life which isn’t representative of the average trans woman at all, but who makes for a very vivid, very peculiar account of sexual practices, and the rest of the “evidence” are just unstructured observations and interviews.
The book doesn’t talk at all about how most trans person, men and women and non-binary, discover they are trans, and doesn’t describes accurately their internal experience at all. It instead presents all trans women as being motivated by sex, and half of them by sexual tendencies that psychology depicts as pathological.
And then, somehow, this completely unfounded theory becomes one of the most known theories about trans women.
So, if you are a trans woman, best case is, your extremely progressive friends and family come to you and say “oh, we didn’t knew it was just a sex thing, you could have told us you had this very weird sexual tendencies rather than make up all of that stuff about how your body and how society’s way of treating you like a man makes you feel horribly, it’s fine, we understand and love you anyway”.
Worst and more common case, your friend, family, work associates and whatever, aren’t extremely progressive. They still believe Blanchard’s and Bailey’s theory about you, though.
And then, when the trans community starts yelling more or less in unison “what the hell?!” at what Bailey wrote in his book, the best response he can come up is saying that the trans women attacking him are in a narcissistic rage because they are narcissists whose pride has been wounded by the truths he wrote, and that they are autogynephiles in denial.
I’m not aware if some transgender women tried to defend the book, but “a lot of transgender women” seem to be a more accurate description for the books detractors than its supporters.
I’m aware of the fact that the three activists mentioned went way too far to be justified in any way. But presenting those as the only critics he received is completely wrong, because there was a huge number of wounded people who saw their lives get worse because of the book.
Autogynephilia was made popular as a theory mostly by Bailey’s book, and trans exclusionary radical feminist groups, which are currently doing huge damages to trans rights and healthcare, are using it as one of their main arguments to delegitimate trans women and routinely attack trans women with it. Even if Bailey’s intentions were good, he failed miserably and produced far more harm than anything else.