Galileo's Middle Finger (13 page)

It sure didn’t look to me as though Bailey would have needed to mine those letter-interviews to tell Juanita’s story in his book, what with all her cooperation and steady openness about her life history. From everything I could find, before Conway showed up, Juanita seemed downright
excited
about having her life story out there year after year in the public realm. She was like Kieltyka that way. In fact, the only time Juanita had ever had a pseudonym attached to her story was when Bailey had decided, late in his book project, to assign her one.

The record was clear: Of the four trans women personally known to Bailey who filed complaints to Northwestern about Bailey’s book, only two were in the book—Kieltyka and Juanita. These two had known Bailey was writing about them and had helped him. They had also known for years that he was writing about one as an autogynephilic transsexual and the other as a homosexual transsexual. Additional evidence came from a “sealed” complaint Juanita sent to Northwestern, posted on Conway’s Web site. There, Juanita said, “an early draft was not objectionable, but
absolutely nothing like
the spurious and insulting description he wrote about my life that did become part of that
most hurtful book of his
.” But in fact the only real changes from the “early draft” to the published version were mentions of Juanita’s marriage and
subsequent divorce
. Juanita knew Bailey was writing about her in his book as an example of homosexual transsexualism, and she raised no objections until Conway appeared with her own objections to Bailey’s promotion of Blanchard’s two-part taxonomy that saw Juanita as a kind of trans woman fundamentally different from Conway.

What about the claim that Bailey was practicing psychology without a license? This complaint was formally filed by Conway, James, and McCloskey with the
Illinois Department of Professional Regulation
. The trio’s claim found its basis in an assumption that Bailey would have needed a license as a clinical psychologist in order to provide letters of recommendation for the young trans women seeking sex reassignment surgery. As with just about every other cleverly packaged complaint, anyone watching casually from the outside would think this complaint was right on: Bailey, a psychologist, had written letters supporting requests for surgery, but didn’t have a license to practice as a clinical psychologist. Guilty! Right?

In fact, as the complainants surely would have seen by looking at the letters they used as evidence, Bailey never pretended to have done therapy with the trans women for whom he wrote letters of recommendation. Not only were these letters obviously based on a few short conversations, they specifically explained Bailey’s credentials, and therefore indicated the limits of those credentials. If it wasn’t clear to a surgeon from the letter that Bailey wasn’t a therapist engaged in deep identity analysis with these transitioning women or anyone else, the curriculum vitae Bailey attached to each letter would have
driven home the point
. Most important, the
relevant Illinois regulations
state that if an individual doesn’t get paid for services offered or rendered, that person is not required to have a license
even if
he or she is offering what looks like “clinical psychological services.” Bailey never took a cent from these women. Presumably all this was why the Illinois department never bothered to pursue the charge, although you’d never know that from reading the press accounts, which mentioned only the complaints, not that they had petered out.

Considering what had really happened, I had to conclude that this claim about practicing without a license wasn’t just false.
It was appalling.
Conway, James, and McCloskey had tried to use Bailey’s letters of support for trans women to string him up, whereas in providing those letters without great delay and without extracting thousands of dollars in therapy charges, Bailey had been trying to help lower barriers to wanted interventions for these women,
exactly
as many trans activists had sought for their community for years! The letters should have been cause for trans advocates to praise Bailey, not bury him.

Conway and company had also accused Bailey of violating federal regulations. They
broadcast the claim
that in “researching” trans women for his book, he had been conducting human-subjects research of the sort that requires approval and oversight from a university’s institutional review board, or IRB. They said he hadn’t got the required IRB approval. Again, to people outside academia, this sounded like a slam dunk. He’d written up these women’s stories in a book about “the science of gender-bending and transsexualism” (as the subtitle said), so surely they were “human subjects of research,” right?

No, actually not—and what really troubled me is that at least McCloskey (a wizard of language and categories) surely should have known this.
IRB regulations
, which were originally designed for invasive biomedical research, count as human subjects only those individuals who are enrolled in research that constitutes “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” For the purposes of his book, Bailey wasn’t engaging in novel scientific research of this type; he was just picking and choosing stories from real-life people he met to illustrate scientific theories he believed were already firmly established. One might try to claim (as complaints against him hinted) that in choosing whom to write about in his book, Bailey was engaging in psychological research to test Blanchard’s theory. But that would attribute to Bailey a more open mind than he in fact had about male-to-female transsexualism. The truth was that he had become a convert to Blanchard’s taxonomy long before he wrote about it. To say Bailey had been doing novel science in his book would be like saying that if you were on a walk with an evolutionary biologist and she chose to point out to you an evolutionarily interesting behavior of some nearby birds, she was doing research to test the theory of evolution. The personal stories in Bailey’s book were really just window dressing for a store Bailey had long since bought.

Now, Bailey
had
in fact enrolled some of the trans women he’d met in
formalized scientific studies
. This occurred, for example, when his lab was studying sexual arousal patterns in adult humans. The lab measured genital blood flow (something sex researchers believe indicates arousal) in natal men, natal women, and trans women while they were shown various kinds of pornography. But was Bailey studying the arousal patterns of these trans women in his lab without IRB approval? Nah. He had full approval for those laboratory studies. And of course he would have, because he understood that that was science, but telling stories about people to bring to life various theories is not.

What about the sex charge made by Juanita? When we got to discussing this, Bailey insisted, in his usual sexual-libertarian style, on discussing the principle at stake. He pointed out that there are plenty of instances where we might not find it unethical for someone to have sex with a person who happened to be a subject in his or her research project, particularly if the research subject were a competent adult, if the sex were unlikely to compromise the research, and if the research subject otherwise had no complicating relation to the researcher (e.g., was not also a patient of the researcher). I found his argument initially startling but ultimately convincing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there could be instances where the subject, the researcher, and the research would stand no particular risk if sexual relations occurred. Consider, for example, a five-year study of cholesterol levels in which an involved researcher and subject end up in their private lives having sex with each other a few times. Or imagine an anthropologist who, after living with a study group for years, ends up marrying and having sex with someone in the study group and continues the research for several years more.

Now, if a researcher were also a clinician treating a subject as a patient, that would make sex verboten. But a research relationship is not (and should not be) anything like a therapeutic relationship. Often research relationships are brief, impersonal, and unlikely to be compromised by sex. It seems silly to treat all research subjects (or all research projects) as so fragile that they will necessarily be put at risk by sexual relations. Grown adults in a research relationship—capable of having the consenting, mutually respectful relationship required by research—could in some cases legitimately decide that sexual relationships would not entail harm to them or the research.

Still, I wanted to know,
did Bailey and Juanita have sex,
as she said?

When I looked into this charge, I was surprised to discover that the
notarized affidavit
making this claim—posted on Conway’s site—consisted of only two sentences: “On March 22, 1998, Northwestern University Professor J. Michael Bailey had sexual relations with the undersigned transsexual research subject. I am coming forward after I learned he divulged his research findings about me in
The Man Who Would Be Queen.
”

This affidavit would have us believe that Juanita decided to come forward with this charge
after
(i.e., as a result of) finding out what Bailey had written about her. But the timing simply could not be true. The affidavit was dated July 21, 2003—
months after
Juanita had gone to Circuit to help promote the book,
months after
she had seen a draft, and
four years after
the student newspaper article describing Juanita’s role in Bailey’s book. These facts clearly contradicted the affidavit’s claim about order of events, a claim no doubt made to explain why Juanita waited five years to make the complaint. In addition, in spite of what the affidavit said, Juanita was not a research subject of Bailey by any normal definition on March 22, 1998. This claim would have been true only if the definition of “research subject” had been so broad as to include everyone you ever write about.

That said, I admit I was still dying to know whether they had had sex. Looking at photos and videos of Juanita, including an
erotic seminude photo
of Juanita that Conway posted on her site, I could well imagine that a straight guy who is not transphobic would be interested. (She’s gorgeous.) Alas, Bailey managed to ruin even that possibility. Knowing he had said previously in a
rare public statement
that he could prove they hadn’t done what she said if he needed to prove it, I pressed him for the proof. He promptly showed me
documentary evidence
that he was home with his kids in Evanston the night Juanita had claimed that she and Bailey had been getting it on in Chicago. His ex-wife had been away on her annual spring break, and by their usual agreement, Bailey had been at her home taking care of the kids and, based on the e-mail reminders from his ex-wife that Bailey showed me as his proof, also taking care of the children’s fish, hamster, and cat. When I asked Mike’s ex-wife,
Deb Bailey
, to confirm the dates and arrangement for me, she did. Tellingly, she was happy to help. Contrary to Andrea James’s portrayal of the family as pathological and dysfunctional, the Baileys remained close friends post-divorce, sharing parenting duties, as well as meals at holidays—and also sharing a unified defense against Andrea James.

The more I looked into the sex charge, the more it looked like a setup. Not only had the affidavit been witnessed by Andrea James and Lynn Conway, but the letter accompanying it to Northwestern specifically credited “Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, who have acted on our behalf to make Dr. Bailey
accountable for his actions
.” Nevertheless, I pressed Bailey. Might Juanita just have gotten the date wrong? Was he using a Clintonian definition of the phrase
sexual relations
?
He was adamant
, saying that although he had flirted with Juanita once or twice when they were socializing, there had never been anything that could be construed as sexual relations.

Unable to reach Juanita with an interview request through other channels, I asked Kieltyka to put me in touch with her. Kieltyka responded that
Juanita wasn’t interested in talking to me
. But Kieltyka herself was willing to elaborate on the sex charge:

[Juanita] told me the day after Bailey drove her home from the Shelter nightclub that Bailey had tried to do something. . . . That they had “messed around”—She was being slightly evasive and uneasy so I left it alone. [Five years later, in the summer of 2003] when Lynn Conway [was] over my house, Juanita was there, and that’s when she told the two of us that Bailey in fact had had sex with her. This was the first time that I found out it wasn’t that he had ‘tried something’—it was that he had tried to have sex with her. But that
he couldn’t get it up
.

Wait, Bailey had tried something but
failed
? I pressed on.

DREGER
:
So you’re saying she said he tried but he didn’t get it up?

KIELTYKA
:
Right.

DREGER
:
And she told that to Conway and McCloskey.

KIELTYKA
:
Right.

DREGER:
And then [in the formal charge] to Northwestern she said that they had had sex.

KIELTYKA:
I’m not sure what the letter says. . . . I think it says “sexual relations”—just like El Presidente Clinton. . . . It all is a matter of a definition of what sexual relations is. Because there was fingering, that she was giving him a hand job, I don’t recall exactly.

Kieltyka seemed to explain it all when she ended the conversation this way: “Anyway . . . from the moment that Andrea James and Conway wanted to use the sex with a research subject as a way of getting Bailey,
I wasn’t enthusiastic
.”

 • • • 

A
FTER NEARLY A
YEAR
of research, I could come to only one conclusion: The whole thing was a sham. Bailey’s sworn enemies had used every clever trick in the book—juxtaposing events in misleading ways, ignoring contrary evidence, working the rhetoric, and using anonymity whenever convenient, to make it look as though virtually every trans woman represented in Bailey’s book had felt abused by him and had filed a charge.