Galileo's Middle Finger (11 page)

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.

T
HE
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
.

As he worked on his book manuscript, Bailey’s generally warm and appreciative attitude toward all the trans women in his book must have led Kieltyka and Juanita to believe—and no doubt Bailey must have also believed—that his book would help advance the full acceptance of these women. Although he knew of the hatred some other transgender women had expressed online for Blanchard’s articulation of autogynephilia, it simply never occurred to him that any of the anti-Blanchard crowd could turn his friends Kieltyka and Juanita into weapons to be used against him. Nothing in their mutual history indicated that that possibility lay ahead.

 • • • 

W
HEN
The Man
Who Would Be Queen
finally came out, in the spring of 2003, the initial media buzz was positive, and many of the trans women whose stories Bailey had relayed actively helped him promote the book, as they had helped him in his writing. Within a couple of weeks of publication, the
Chronicle of Higher Education
sent its staff reporter Robin Wilson to Illinois to do a feature on Bailey and his book. Wilson, Bailey, and a group of trans women—including Anjelica Kieltyka and Juanita—all went out together to the Circuit nightclub. The resulting article, entitled “Dr. Sex,” indicated that Kieltyka had told the reporter Wilson she was not thrilled with Bailey’s labeling of her as autogynephilic: “Ms. Kieltyka says the professor twisted her story to suit his theory. ‘I was a male with a sexual-identity disorder,’ not someone who is living out
a sexual fantasy, she says
.” But the rest of the trans women seemed explicitly and unequivocally supportive of Bailey and his book. Wilson told her readers, “They count Mr. Bailey as their savior.” She explained:

As a psychologist, he has written letters they needed to get sex-reassignment surgery, and he has paid attention to them in ways most people don’t. “Not too many people talk about this, but he’s bringing it into the light,” says Veronica, a 31-year-old transsexual woman from Ecuador who just got married and
doesn’t want her last name used
.

So for the transkids at the outing, including Veronica and Juanita, everything seemed rosy. But for Kieltyka the scene had already started to turn dark. By the time of the get-together with the
Chronicle
reporter at Circuit, Andrea James and others unhappy with Bailey’s book had reached Kieltyka to register their displeasure with her “star” turn as proof of autogynephilia. Indeed, it appears that, within days of the book’s appearance, Bailey’s detractors had figured out who “Cher” was. And they wanted a word.

Now, to the average reader of the
Chronicle
, Wilson’s article made it sound as though Kieltyka had been mad at Bailey all along, that perhaps she had been duped into being the autogynephilic subject of his book. But what had changed between the book’s publication and the Circuit gathering was not Kieltyka’s knowledge of what Bailey thought of her or had written about her. What had changed was that Kieltyka found out she was quickly coming to be considered a pariah by certain transgender activists—the ones who detested any mention of autogynephilia. Kieltyka had found out that

AJ [Andrea James] and the rest of them wanted to lynch me, as they did Joan Linsenmeier [a colleague and friend of Bailey’s who had helped him with the manuscript] and anyone else connected with the book. They were about to hang me. I was told this by people that had frequented the Internet, and that’s why they gave me the link to contact Andrea James and Lynn Conway, because I was going to be
hanged by them
.

Yet in spite of this reasonable fear—that she was going to be “lynched”—Bailey and Kieltyka continued to speak with some warmth, each trying to mount defenses against a growing onslaught of criticism. Two weeks after she had read the published book, and one week before the gathering at Circuit with the
Chronicle
’s reporter, Kieltyka had written an e-mail to Bailey using the wry subject line “Cher’s Guide to Auto . . . Repair.” There she wrote, with her characteristic humor and liberal use of ellipses:

Dear Mike, . . . I followed up on the links to your difficulties with some hysterical women [an apparent reference to Conway and James] when you wrote . . . “I understand that [trans woman scientist Joan] Roughgarden is slated to review my book for Nature Medicine, and I am certain that this review will be as fair and accurate as her review of my Stanford talk.” . . . I really appreciated the sarcasm . . . just wear a bike [athletic] support to your next book signing or lecture. . . . you can borrow mine, I don’t use it nor need it anymore. . . . Your friend, in spite of spite,
Anjelica, aka Cher

Until things got really hot—until at least a few weeks later—Kieltyka seemed likely to continue her affiliation with Bailey.

As it happened, however, Conway showed up. And not just online, but in person. She started making what she called “
field trips” to Chicago
. The purpose? “To meet and begin
interviewing Bailey’s research subjects
.” Via these field trips and interviews and Conway’s and James’s Web sites, the public image of the scene quickly changed into “Bailey versus all LGBT folk,” such that most people (like me) casually watching the kerfuffle soon thought all the trans women in Bailey’s book felt surprised, abused, and angry about the book’s contents.

Casual observers thus remained oblivious to something critical: even months into the mess, plenty of gay and transgender people who had read
The Man Who Would Be Queen
actually saw the book not only as an accurate accounting of various forms of “feminine males”—from femme boys to gay men to transkids to drag queens to cross-dressers to fully transitioned autogynephilic trans women—but also as wonderfully supportive of LGBT people. The reason for that would have been obvious,
if you bothered to read the book:
In it Bailey unequivocally supports the right of all people to be gender-variant, to enjoy whatever sexual orientations they have (so long as they’re not using anyone who can’t consent or hasn’t consented), to be recognized by the gender labels they choose for themselves, and to get whatever medical interventions they wish. But most people didn’t read the book; they read only the reports of Bailey’s alleged abuse. And so they understood this book to be a LGBT-bashing bible—specifically to be to the transgender community what
Birth of a Nation
had been to African Americans.