I think it is fair to say, given the historical evidence noted above, that the firestorm against The Man Who Would Be Queen was initially motivated by a few powerful transsexual women’s strong public rejection of Blanchard’s theory of MTF transsexualism. But as we have also seen above, that firestorm quickly came to be fueled by allegations that J. Michael Bailey had behaved in all sorts of unethical, illegal, and immoral ways in the production of his book. This move on the part of Bailey’s detractors—from questioning the message to questioning the messenger—effectively directed public attention away from the book itself and Blanchard’s theory towards TMWWBQ’s author. What then of the merit of the charges that Bailey behaved unethically, illegally, and even immorally in producing TMWWBQ?

In providing this history, it would be convenient to be able to simply report the merit of the charges made against Bailey as determined by some reliable investigatory body. But I am unable to do so. Besides the rather odd and brief inquiry made by the SPLC and those “investigations” of Bailey made by Conway, James, and their cohort—“investigations” which, as noted above and below, appear factually and ethically flawed in key respects—apparently the only formal, institutional investigation made of Bailey was that conducted by the Provost’s office of Northwestern University. No other group—including the National Academies, various professional organizations like HBIGDA and IASR, and the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation—seems to have found reason to proceed with any deep inquiry into Bailey’s work, in spite of many calls to do so from Conway, James, Kieltyka, McCloskey, and others. And, as noted in the last section, neither Northwestern nor Bailey has publicly revealed the results of the university’s lengthy investigation, except insofar as: (1) Northwestern’s Vice President for Research has said that “the allegations of scientific misconduct made against Professor J. Michael Bailey do not fall under the federal definition of scientific misconduct”; and (2) Northwestern’s Provost has said that the university “has established a protocol to help ensure that Professor Bailey’s research activities involving human subjects are conducted in accordance with the expectations of the University, the regulations and guidelines established by the federal government and with generally accepted research standards” (C. Bradley Moore to Alice Dreger, p.e.c., August 1, 2006). It seems that if Bailey were completely happy with the outcome of the investigation, he would release the results, but the apparent lack of change in Bailey’s university status following the December 2004 conclusion of the investigation suggests the university found nothing too damning. Still, I think it unscholarly to rely on such ambiguous evidence to deduce anything meaningful about Bailey’s conduct. Consequently, I consider here the allegations of misconduct made against Bailey with regard to the production of his book, and examine what the sources tell us about the merit of those charges.

Of the myriad charges organized and broadcast against Bailey by Conway, James, and McCloskey, arguably the two most serious have been (1) that Bailey conducted human subjects research that required Northwestern University’s IRB approval and oversight without seeking or obtaining that approval and oversight, and (2) that he had sex with the woman called Juanita in the book at a time when she was his research subject. These two charges turn out to be interrelated, so I’ll deal with them first, one right after the other.

Did Bailey conduct IRB-qualified human subjects research without IRB oversight? According to reproductions posted on Lynn Conway’s “Bailey investigation” Website, in their 2003 complaints about Bailey made to Northwestern, Anjelica Kieltyka, Juanita, and two other transsexual women whose stories did not appear in TMWWBQ all claimed that they were “participant[s] in a research study without being informed of that status” (Kieltyka to C. Bradley Moore, July 3, 2003, available at Kieltyka, 2003b; see also Conway, 2003c, 2003d, 2003f). Kieltyka’s complaint of July 3, 2003, went further, stating that she expected Bailey to be “found […] in violation of University and federal policies” because, she implied, he had been conducting IRB-qualified human subjects research on her and her friends without IRB approval and oversight (Kieltyka to C. Bradley Moore, July 3, 2003, available at Kieltyka, 2003b). Indeed, by his own admission, Bailey did not seek or obtain approval from Northwestern’s IRB to talk with Kieltyka, Juanita, and other transsexual women about their lives for purposes of his writing about them (Bailey, 2005). But did Bailey need IRB approval and oversight in this case?

Answering this question requires both general consideration of the IRB regulations and specific consideration of Bailey’s relations with the people whose stories he recounted in his book. First the general: In the U.S., universities that receive federal funding are required to maintain oversight boards to ensure that qualified human subjects research is conducted in an ethical manner. To quote from Northwestern’s Office for the Protection of Research Subjects:

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is designated by Northwestern University (NU) to review, to approve the initiation of, and to conduct periodic review of research involving human subjects or materials obtained from human subjects. Federal law and/or NU policy mandates prior written and dated IRB approval of such research regardless of the funding source. (Office for the Protection of Research Subjects, n.d.)

As Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education noted in her July 25, 2003 news report of the first two charges made against Bailey, “According to federal regulations, a human subject is someone from whom a researcher obtains data through ‘interaction,’ which includes ‘communication or interpersonal contact between investigator and subject’” (Wilson, 2003b).

There’s no question Bailey obtained information about their lives from observing and talking with Kieltyka, Juanita, and the other transsexual women who did and did not appear in TMWWBQ. In that sense, they would seem to count as “human subjects,” presuming the information he gathered from them could be called “data.”

But, as Wilson and many other writers on the Bailey controversy have failed to note, the kind of research that is subject to IRB oversight is significantly more limited than the regulatory definition of “human subject” implies. What is critical to understand here is that, in the federal regulations regarding human subjects research, research is defined very specifically as “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge” (United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2005, Sect. 46.102, def. “b”). In other words, only research that is truly scientific in nature—that which is systematic and generalizable—is meant to be overseen by IRBs. Thus, a person might fit the U.S. federal definition of “human subject” in being a person from whom a researcher gains knowledge through interpersonal interaction, but if the way that the researcher gains the knowledge is not systematic and the knowledge she or he intends to gain is unlikely to be generalizable in the scientific sense, the research does not fall under the purview of the researcher’s IRB.

It is worth noting here, for purposes of illustration of what does and doesn’t count as IRB-qualified work, that I consulted with the Northwestern IRB to confirm that the interviews I have conducted for this particular project do not fall under the purview of Northwestern’s IRB. Although I have intentionally obtained data through interpersonal interaction, the interview work I have conducted for this historical project has been neither scientifically systematic nor generalizable. That is, I have not asked each subject a list of standardized questions—indeed, I typically enjoyed highly interactive conversations during interviews; I have not interviewed all of my subjects in the same way; I have negotiated with some of them to what extent I would protect their identities. This is a scholarly study, but not a systematic one in the scientific sense. Nor will the knowledge produced from this scholarly history be generalizable in the scientific sense. No one will be able to use this work to reasonably make any broad claims about transsexual women, sex researchers, or any other group.

When I put my methodology to the Northwestern IRB, the IRB agreed with me that my work on this project is not IRB-qualified (Eileen Yates to Dreger, p.e.c., July 31, 2006), i.e., that, although I have obtained data from living persons via interactions with them, what I am doing here is neither systematic nor generalizable in the scientific sense. Had the IRB disagreed with me on this point—which, knowing the regulations, they did not—I would have pointed them specifically to the 2003 clarification by the U.S. Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP) that “oral history interviewing projects in general do not involve the type of research defined by [Department of Health and Human Services] regulations and are therefore excluded from IRB oversight” (Ritchie & Shopes, 2003). The Oral History Association sought this clarification in response to what many scholars have come to call “mission creep” on the part of IRBs, i.e., the move on the part of many IRBs to claim regulatory rights to work that was never intended by the federal government to count as human subjects research (Center for Advanced Study, 2005; see also American Association of University Professors, 2006). The Oral History Association and the American Historical Association have gotten fed up enough with IRB mission creep that they recommend historians like me not even consult with their IRBs when planning to take oral histories; they advise scholars instead to simply inform their Chairs and Deans of the 2003 clarification (Ritchie & Shopes, 2003). I went against their recommendation in this case and actively sought confirmation of exception from my own IRB partly out of project-relevant curiosity as to how the Northwestern IRB views these kinds of interviews, and partly out of fear of being charged with IRB violation in retaliation for producing this history.

In terms of how this all applies to the claim that Bailey was violating IRB regulations, one could argue that the 2003 clarification of the OHRP about oral histories came after he wrote TMWWBQ—that the clarification postdates his work. That is true, but the clarification about taking and relaying individual stories was not a new ruling. It was simply a clarification that oral histories were never meant to be overseen by IRBs. Moreover, I’m not sure we can even reasonably use the term “oral histories” to describe what Bailey did with Kieltyka, Juanita, and the other people whose stories were relayed in the book—that is, I’m not sure it counted as any kind of serious scholarship (which real oral-history taking is). The information about individuals that Bailey gathered for the book from Kieltyka, Juanita, Braverman, and others he obtained haphazardly—without any developed plan of research—from their occasional presentations to his classes, from their joint social outings, and from one-on-one discussions that occurred on an irregular basis. Bailey did conduct a few fill-in-the-blank discussions with Kieltyka, Juanita, and others (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., August 22, 2006)—discussions during which, as I show below, they knew he was writing about them in his book, and with which they cooperated. But these fill-in-the-blank discussions can again hardly be called systematic or productive of generalizable knowledge. When I pressed him to consult or perhaps even turn over to me the notes he took from these conversations, Bailey admitted he had no organized notes that he had bothered to keep. Obviously, he never really thought of these discussions as research—systematic work meant to be productive of generalizable knowledge—any more than he ever imagined that the women who seemed eager to tell their stories and have him write about them might later charge him with abuse. Otherwise, he surely would have protected himself and his work by being significantly more organized. By comparison, for the systematic and generalizable psychological and sociological studies of transsexual women and others to which he occasionally refers in the book (e.g., Barlow, 1996), Bailey and his lab did seek and obtain IRB approval from Northwestern.

Historically speaking, the confusion over whether Bailey violated human subjects research regulations is somewhat understandable, both because many people are unfamiliar with the regulations and because of TMWWBQ’s style. In the book, the way in which Bailey refers offhandedly and irregularly to his methodology could lead some to believe that all of the information he relays therein is the result of scientific study. The total lack of citation and documentation makes it very difficult to determine to what extent Bailey’s claims are based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence. It is true that TMWWBQ’s jacket boasts that it is “based on his original research” and “grounded firmly in the scientific method.” And indeed, in some places, Bailey does refer to some of his own actual scientific research. For example, at the opening of the chapter called “In Search of Womanhood and Men,” Bailey speaks of “my own recent research [that] has focused on the homosexual type” of transsexual (Bailey, 2003, p. 177). A couple of pages later, he similarly remarks that “In our study, we found that drag queens ranked between gay men and transsexuals on a number of traits related to femininity” (pp. 179–180). But, compared to the organized (and IRB-approved) studies to which he is referring in these two sentences, one would be hard-pressed to call what Bailey did to obtain and present the stories of Kieltyka, Juanita, and the other individuals about whom he wrote “science”—or even “research” in any scholarly sense. Indeed, both Conway and McCloskey have complained about just that—that what he was doing with these women’s stories wasn’t science—and I think they are absolutely right (McCloskey & Conway, 2003).

Clearly, what Bailey did in terms of learning and relaying the stories of Kieltyka, Juanita, and other transsexual women was neither systematic nor generalizable. Never did Bailey organize a series of specific questions to ask these women, questions that might have been used, for example, to scientifically test Blanchard’s taxonomy. Never did he seek a statistically representative sample of transsexual women in deciding whose stories to tell; again, his critics have complained about just this (see, e.g., Sauer, 2003). He simply picked people who came with good stories—people such as Kieltyka and Juanita—to put human faces on Blanchard’s theory. He had no interest in scientifically investigating Blanchard’s theory; at this point, he already believed it to be true because of what he had learned from the scientific literature, from colleagues, and from his prior experiences. Using stories in this way is not science—it doesn’t even rise to the level of bad science, because it doesn’t even pretend to test or develop a theory—and I think it is clear it does not rise to the level of IRB-qualified research by the U.S. federal definition.

Although TMWWBQ occasionally seems to brag about its scientific rigor—especially on its jacket—in the text Bailey frequently acts more like a science journalist than a scientist. He mixes up references to scientific studies he led and stories of individuals he met along the way—stories, remember, not just of transsexual women and crossdressing men, but also of the men on the annual “gay guys” panel of his human sexuality class, of “Princess Danny,” and of Edwin, the effeminate man at the cosmetics counter of Bailey’s local department store. Bailey didn’t get IRB approval to gather or write about any of these stories, because they were all anecdotes and not scientific studies. Given that he consistently obtained IRB approval for work he did that was IRB-qualified, there can be no doubt Bailey knew perfectly well the difference between the anecdotes he used to liven up his book and real systematic and generalizable science. If his readers do not know it, that has certainly been to his and his argument’s advantage, but it does not mean he violated federal policy.

Given all this, we have to conclude that, in his interaction with the people whose personal stories appear in TMWWBQ—of whom apparently only two (Kieltyka and Juanita) have complained to Northwestern University—J. Michael Bailey did not conduct IRB-qualified human subjects research without IRB oversight.

What about the second seemingly damning claim, the sexual relations allegation? Did J. Michael Bailey have sexual relations with a woman who was his research subject at the time?

Although the answer to this question turns out to be relatively simple, this story bears careful unpacking. In a notarized affidavit reproduced on Conway’s site, dated July 21, 2003, Juanita claimed:

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. (Available at Conway, 2003e)

Let’s take the second sentence first: Juanita claimed she was coming forward after she learned Bailey “divulged his research findings” about her. This presumably was meant to explain why she had waited a full 5 years to make an issue of the alleged sexual relations: because she was so disturbed in July 2003 by learning that Bailey had written about her in the book, she decided to charge him with improper sexual relations that allegedly occurred one night in March 1998.

The facts say otherwise. Learning that he divulged his “research findings” about her in the book could not have been the impetus for Juanita’s deciding in July, 2003, to charge him with improper sexual relations 5 years earlier. In fact, Juanita knew for many years what Bailey was generally writing about her in his book manuscript—indeed, she gave him permission to write about her—and she likely knew for months before the affidavit specifically what he had said about her in the published book.

First, what is the evidence that Juanita gave Bailey permission to write about her—and thus that she knew (for years) that he was writing about her in a book manuscript? Kieltyka—a witness extremely hostile to Bailey nowadays—told me in our interviews that the Northwestern investigatory committee convened in response to their complaints asked both her and Juanita “did you know Bailey was writing a book and did you give him permission?” According to Kieltyka, “Juanita said yes to both, she knew and she gave him permission” (Kieltyka, 2006f). In fact, this giving of permission is confirmed by Juanita’s own “sealed” letter (now reproduced on Conway’s site) to Northwestern alleging the sexual affair. There Juanita says:

after infrequent “social” meetings with Anjelica and I, Dr. Bailey informed us that he was writing a book about transexuals and would like to include both of our “stories.” Believing it to be similar to Dr. Randi Ettner’s book, Confessions of a Gender Defender, Anjelica and I gave our verbal consent once Dr. Bailey assured us he would show us what he was writing about us. (Available at Conway, 2003e)

In her “sealed” letter, Juanita goes on to say that what Bailey wrote about her “in 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” (from Conway, 2003e; emphasis added). Kieltyka tells me Juanita was specifically referring to her hurt feelings about what Bailey said about Juanita’s wedding and divorce (Kieltyka, 2006c), material that did not appear in the early draft Juanita saw before publication, since Juanita’s wedding and divorce post-dated the early draft.

Actually, given how little of Bailey’s draft changed from what Juanita saw to what he ultimately published—given that the only substantive changes were about her wedding and divorce—the vast majority of what Bailey wrote about her could not have come as a painful surprise. And most assuredly, she could not have been fundamentally unaware that he was writing about her in his book, as the second sentence of her affidavit suggests. Additionally, and in critical contradiction to the way her complaints to Northwestern read (see Conway, 2003e), Juanita must have known for years that he was writing about her as an example of “homosexual transsexualism.” Not only was that claim consistently in early drafts—that, after all, was the whole point of Bailey’s writing about her—but in February 1999, in the Daily Northwestern article, student reporter Maegan Gibson reported that in Bailey’s book manuscript (the relevant sections of which Gibson also saw), “He classifies [Juanita] as a homosexual transsexual and Anjelica [Kieltyka] as an autogynephilic transsexual” (Gibson, 1999, p. 5). Surely Juanita would have read this feature story about herself; she had been enthusiastic enough about the feature to provide Gibson with her own before-and-after-reassignment photographic portraits, her real before-and-after-reassignment names, and her life story—and so surely in February 1999, from Gibson’s article she would have learned, if she really didn’t already know it, that Bailey was classifying her as a homosexual transsexual.

Remember also, as noted in Part 4, that on May 22, 2003, several weeks after the book had come out, Juanita joined Bailey, Kieltyka, and others for the social excursion to the Circuit nightclub with Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In other words, fully 2 months before her affidavit, a document which, in its rhetoric, positions her as newly aggrieved by virtue of just discovering Bailey had written about her, Juanita actively helped Bailey promote his published book by going out and talking with Wilson about what Bailey wrote about her in the book.

To quote one last time the second sentence of Juanita’s July 21, 2003, affidavit: “I am coming forward [to charge him with improper sexual relations of 5 years earlier] after I learned [Bailey] divulged his research findings about me in The Man Who Would Be Queen” (emphasis added). Given how many historical documents (including Juanita’s own letter to Northwestern) contradict its premise, this second sentence of Juanita’s affidavit seems to explain considerably less than the fact that said affidavit was witnessed by none other than Andrea James and Lynn Conway, and the fact that the letter presented to Northwestern along with the affidavit credited “Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, who have acted on our behalf to make Dr. Bailey accountable for his actions.” I think the historical progression here is clear. Juanita knew for years that Bailey was writing about her in his book; she gave him permission and indeed actively helped him; she even helped him promote the book after it came out. And then Conway, James, and McCloskey showed up in June and July 2003 to play what appears to have been a significant role in convincing and helping Juanita to charge Bailey with several forms of misconduct—significant enough roles for Kieltyka also to have bothered specifically naming Conway and McCloskey as key witnesses to Juanita’s claims in Kieltyka’s own July 2003 affidavit about the matter (Kieltyka affidavit, July 23, 2003; available at Conway, 2003e). For the record, I asked McCloskey, “What exactly was your role in preparing the formal, written charges made by the woman known as Juanita that Bailey had had sexual relations with her when she was his research subject?” She answered only “Not much” (p.e.c., January 22, 2007). She declined my request to elaborate (p.e.c., February 4, 2007).

Even if Juanita was not in July 2003 the shocked and disillusioned party that the second sentence of her affidavit suggests, what of the core claim as reported in the first sentence of the affidavit: “On March 22, 1998, Northwestern University Professor J. Michael Bailey had sexual relations with the undersigned transsexual research subject.” In her July 23, 2003 letter to Northwestern University’s C. Bradley Moore, charging Bailey with having had sex with her, Juanita recounted more precisely the alleged circumstances:

Dr. Bailey met Anjelica Kieltyka and myself earlier that same evening [March 22, 1998] into morning at “Shelter”, one of the night clubs frequented by female transexuals. The date is well remembered because it was “Shelter’s” final night before closing for good. I arrived at the club with Ms. Kieltyka, but left with Dr. Bailey. Ms. Kieltyka can confirm this. Dr. Bailey then drove me back to my place, where the sexual relations occurred. […] I have told no one about the sexual relations other then [sic] you, Dr. Moore, my best friend and confidante, Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka, and Professors’ [sic] Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey, who have acted on our behalf to make Dr. Bailey accountable for his actions. They will provide sworn affidavits supporting my claims. (available at Conway, 2003e)

Juanita is thus quite specific: She and Bailey had sexual relations on the night of March 22, 1998. What of Bailey’s response to this claim?

In his online self-defense piece, “Academic McCarthyism,” published in October 2005, Bailey countered with this: “her ‘complaint’ is not true. The alleged event never happened. If I ever needed to do so, I could prove this, but there is no reason why I should” (Bailey, 2005). Bailey’s reasoning for why he should not have to prove he didn’t have sex with Juanita was twofold: first, he “insist[ed] that Juanita was not a research subject” when she claimed they had sex; second, “there is nothing intrinsically wrong or forbidden about having sex with a research subject[….] Some of my colleagues have had sex with their research subjects, because it is not unusual to ask one’s romantic partner to be a subject” (Bailey, 2005).

Temporarily putting aside the question of that twofold defense (Juanita wasn’t a research subject and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong about having sex with a research subject), I told Bailey I thought the reason he should prove he didn’t have the sexual relations Juanita claimed is because many people found the claim to be the nail in the supposed coffin of his professional reputation. I pressed Bailey to answer two questions for me: Did he in fact have sex with Juanita? And if not, why had he for several years—until his 2005 “Academic McCarthyism” self-defense—refused to publicly answer her charge?

He explained simply the delay in denying the charge: About the time Juanita’s sexual relations allegation appeared, Bailey’s lawyer had advised him to stop publicly answering any questions about the controversy. Indeed, the record confirms that the sexual relations allegation is not the only thing to which Bailey refused to respond starting in the summer of 2003; he did not defend himself publicly on any of the charges made against him until “Academic McCarthyism” in October, 2005 (Bailey, 2005). Bailey also explained to me that he understood that there was no way to answer Juanita’s claim without at some level legitimizing her claim; he believed (correctly I think) that acting as if what she claimed mattered by protesting repeatedly against it would only backfire and work against him in the court of public opinion (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., July 18, 2006). Could he really, in 2003, say “I did not have sex with that woman” and hope to have his public reputation thus exonerated?

Nevertheless, given that he had come around in 2005 to denying Juanita’s claim, I pressed him on what his denial (“The alleged event never happened” [Bailey, 2005]) really meant: Was he using a Clintonian definition of sex, or evading the central question in some other way? Did they have sexual relations on some other day, or perhaps have some kind of non-intercourse physical contact that a reasonable person could define as “having had sexual relations”? No, he said, he had never engaged in anything with Juanita that could reasonably be called sexual relations. He did admit to me that he had flirted with Juanita once or twice when they were out socializing, but he insisted that was the limit; he had never had or even attempted any sexual relations with Juanita (p.e.c.’s, July 19, 2006). I then pressed him for the proof that it never happened—the proof he alludes to in “Academic McCarthyism” (Bailey, 2005). And he produced it (p.e.c., July 20, 2006). When I read it, it struck me ironically as about the least sexy proof one could provide.

Bailey explained to me that, when Juanita made the sexual-relations charge to Northwestern in 2003, in order to defend himself, knowing it never happened, he immediately looked up his computer records to see whether he could prove his claim. He quickly discovered that, on March 22, 1998, his ex-wife Deb Bailey had been out of town on her spring break and he was, by their annual arrangement, staying at her house taking care of their children, who were then aged 11 and 13. He provided me what he had offered Northwestern: records of back-and-forth conversations between him and Deb Bailey that week, covering all the mundanities of taking care of house and children (provided in p.e.c., Bailey to Dreger, July 20, 2006). In these, Deb Bailey reminded Michael Bailey to feed the fish, the hamster, and the cat, to clean out the litter box, to bring in the newspaper and the mail, to take the kids to their after-school activities, and so on. These documents evince at least that on March 22, 1998, Michael Bailey was single-parenting his two children (and their many pets) in Evanston. I asked him if he might have left the children in Evanston, perhaps with a sitter, and gone out with Kieltyka and Juanita to the Shelter nightclub into the small hours of the morning, but he was adamant that he would never have left his children to go out to bars while his ex-wife was across the country and it was his turn to parent (p.e.c.’s, July 19, 2006).

For confirmation, I put Michael Bailey’s claims to Deb Bailey, and she checked her records and confirmed that on March 22, 1998, Michael Bailey was single-parenting in Evanston while she was away. She also (with some embarrassment) confirmed the elaborate household instructions she gave him for that period, independently providing me a copy of some of the same correspondence Michael Bailey had provided me. When I asked her if she thought it possible that Michael Bailey would have gone out to a Chicago bar when he was supposed to be taking care of their children in Evanston while she was away, Deb Bailey said she found it unfathomable given his record as a devoted and attentive father. She made it politely clear that she has no illusions that Michael Bailey is a saint, but she also finds it impossible to believe that he would have been out with Juanita on the night she claimed, especially given that there were plenty of other weeks of the year in which he could have done just that (Deb Bailey, 2006; Deb Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c. January 7, 2007).

If Michael Bailey is telling the truth—that he and Juanita never had sex—why does Juanita’s account so clearly say otherwise? I asked Kieltyka to tell me what she knew about the alleged relations and the charge, since she supposedly had been with Bailey and Juanita on the night in question and she had been present for at least some of the sessions in which Conway and McCloskey apparently helped to arrange the charge (Conway, 2003e; McCloskey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 22, 2007). According to Kieltyka,

[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 at 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. (Kieltyka, 2006c; ellipses in original)

This came as surprising and important news to me—that what Juanita had apparently meant in her affidavit and her sealed letter to Northwestern by “sexual relations” was “he had tried to have sex with her but that he couldn’t get it up.” The story about what even happened seemed to keep changing. So I pressed Kieltyka further:

Dreger: Why did she say [in the affidavit and the letter] they had sex, if he couldn’t get it up?

Kieltyka: What are you—his lawyer? What’s your definition of sex?

Dreger: The fact that he tried? That’s the definition of having had sex?

Kieltyka: What did Clinton have?

Dreger: Clinton got it up. […] 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. 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[.] (Kieltyka, 2006c; ellipses in original unless bracketed)

Nevertheless, the national press was enthusiastic about this part of the Bailey controversy. Conway handed over the socially and professionally damning charge of “sexual relations with a transsexual research subject” to any reporter who would take it. And, while Bailey’s accuser’s identity remained protected almost as if she were a rape victim, while his accuser apparently remained privately inconsistent about what even happened, while Bailey felt unable to defend himself publicly because of his lawyer’s gag order and the realities of post-Lewinsky sexual politics, many reporters broadcast the charge along with Bailey’s refusal to respond (e.g., Barlow 2003; Wilson 2003c) to the serious detriment of Bailey’s personal and professional reputation. By the time I came to this work in 2006, when I asked people what they knew about what Bailey had supposedly done wrong, the majority told me that he had had sex with a research subject.

Yet, given the facts, we must conclude that Bailey was right when, in 2005, he made the rather dull (and thus generally ignored) legalistic point that, all other questions aside, Juanita was simply not his research subject in March 1998, at least not in any meaningful sense of research. Even if Bailey had started thinking by March 1998 that he might eventually write something about her (which documents suggest was not the case until the summer of 1998 when she agreed to meet him over coffee to talk about her story for the book), I don’t think this made her a “research subject.” I don’t think we can call everyone from whom a scholar may learn a story she or he eventually may recount a “research subject.” Otherwise, given how often we scholars write about conversations we’ve had and observations of people we’ve met along the way, we’re going to have to count nearly everyone we know and meet as an actual or potential research subject. (And in that case I confess I’ve repeatedly had sex with a research subject, namely my husband, about whom I’ve written quite often, and generally without first asking his permission—for instance, right now.)

I have come to conclude Bailey was also right when, in 2005, he made the point that no one—not even his friends and defenders—wanted to hear, i.e., that there’s nothing necessarily wrong about sex with a research subject. Although I had the initial knee-jerk reaction shared by many—“sex with a research subject is verboten”—I’ve come to realize people’s revulsion to sex-with-a-research-subject represents a more general (and irrational) revulsion to non-standard sexual relations. If a researcher abused a position of power to coerce a research subject into sex, that would be wrong, but sexual coercion is wrong regardless of the relationship, and it is certainly not the case that all researchers hold all subjects in disempowered (and thus potentially coercive) positions. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a situation where the reverse could be true, i.e., where a subject would hold real power over the researcher rather than the other way around. I have heard the claim that sexual relations will necessarily interfere with data collection because of the problem of dual relationships, but again, this isn’t necessarily the case with all research. It’s hard to imagine, for example, how data collection would be compromised if a researcher studying the effects of a particular drug on cholesterol levels had sex with one of the subjects whose cholesterol levels she was tracking.

In the specific case of Bailey and Juanita, I believe we have to conclude that, even if one does believe that sex with a research subject is always unethical (which seems seriously wrongheaded), and even if one believes Bailey and Juanita had sex on March 22, 1998 (which seems unlikely), the salient point here is that Juanita was not Bailey’s research subject in March 1998, when she claims they had sex. In other words, even if any sexual relations occurred between Bailey and Juanita on March 22, 1998, they were not improper relations by any reading of ethics-of-sex-with-research-subjects, because Juanita was not Bailey’s research subject in March 1998, when she claims the relations happened.

Even after this conclusion, the curious may still wish I could tell them for sure whether the alleged sexual relations happened. I must leave it to readers to make what they will of what I have uncovered regarding the nature and timing of Juanita’s story (or stories), and to also decide what to make of the roles of Conway, James, and McCloskey in the formal production and broadcasting of the injurious claim. From the vantage point of this inquirer, it certainly looks as if the allegation—particularly the choice of the conveniently vague phrasing “sexual relations” combined with otherwise highly specific details about the when, the where, and the who of the supposed event—amounted to a trumped-up attempt on the part of a small circle of Bailey’s transwomen critics to damage his professional reputation. To some extent, it worked, in large part because it cleverly took advantage of the sex-negative attitude that pervades American culture, including the particular cultural phobias that surround transwomen such as Juanita. As Bailey remarked to me, “it was deeply ironic that Conway et al. were trying to sensationalize sex with transsexuals,” but it seemed they would do even that to try to get back at Bailey for the claims he made in his book (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., July 19, 2006).

When Kieltyka told me she “wasn’t enthusiastic” about the sexual relations charge, it was to emphasize that what she found truly unethical was what she called Bailey’s “bait and switch” tactics:

he was using friendship as a context for what he wanted, there was a duplicity, there was a deception. It was a misuse of our friendship and relationship. […] And not only that, […] saying that he was writing a book, and us agreeing [to that] on one set of values and terms, and for him to switch it, and to present it to us, and for us to understand we were misused, it was too late for us to do anything about it because he intended all along from the get-go to use that information. (Kieltyka, 2006c)

On another occasion, Kieltyka put the same sort of complaint to me this way: “It now seems Bailey ingratiated himself to me and the transwomen I brought to him: Entering our favor in order to take advantage of us……gaining our friendship and confidence—playing a conjob on us……using and abusing our vulnerability” (Kieltyka, 2006a; ellipses in original).

What then of this claim of unethical behavior? Did Bailey abuse the trust he established with the transsexual women about whom he wrote in TMWWBQ, essentially tricking them into revealing otherwise private information about themselves, so that he could use them as “poster children” for Blanchard’s taxonomy in his book?

The first thing one has to understand in considering this question is that the two women who complained about Bailey’s account of them in TMWWBQ, namely Kieltyka and Juanita, could not seriously be said to be deeply private and “living in stealth” as McCloskey and Conway insisted in their complaints to Northwestern’s Vice President for Research (McCloskey & Conway, 2003). At the risk of beating a dead horse, let me note again that, by the time TMWWBQ was published, Kieltyka and Juanita had presented themselves, their life histories, and their takes on transsexualism to a total of thousands of students at Northwestern University. Kieltyka had even concluded twice by stripping naked (she says to make the point that transsexual women can be extremely attractive even in the nude [Kieltyka, 2006a]). Juanita was apparently also not shy about appearing nude; after all, from at least June, 2003, to December, 2004, Conway’s site featured the semi-nude erotic photo of Juanita taken by Kieltyka (Kieltyka, 2003a). Remember also that, in 1998, Kieltyka and Juanita had given Maegan Gibson their true, pre- and post-reassignment first and last names, their pre- and post-reassignment photos, and their life histories to broadcast in the Daily Northwestern (Gibson, 1999). Before this, Kieltyka had revealed parts of her transsexual story to a local paper, Berwyn Life, and on a local cable channel (Kieltyka, 2006a). Then in 2002, in response to a request from Bailey, Kieltyka and Juanita again teamed up to talk openly about themselves, their bodies, and their sex lives for a video made to accompany a human sexuality textbook. In that video recording, besides both of them again allowing a publisher to use their true first names and unobscured faces, Kieltyka showed off her pre-transition, crossdressing, erotic-play props, and Juanita talked about making a living as a sex worker both pre-op (as a “she-male”) and post-op. In the video work, each of these women also openly recounted significant portions of what Bailey’s book would say about them a year later (edited version at Allyn & Bacon, 2004; uncut interview footage provided from Bailey’s personal files). Then, shortly after meeting Conway in the summer of 2003, Juanita let Conway put up five close-up photos of her along with her story—again matching much of what Bailey said about her in the book—on Conway’s Transsexual Women’s Successes page (Maria, 2004).

In short, Kieltyka and Juanita were not “stealth” shrinking violets whose stories were sneakily gathered and then first broadcast in 2003 by Bailey. Given how many times Kieltyka and Juanita willingly revealed themselves again and again, Bailey concludes “I believe the claim is absolutely false—the claim that they didn’t want any of this public” (Bailey, 2006a). Trying to explain away the repeated classroom presentations (for which, remember, Kieltyka and Juanita were paid), McCloskey and Conway claimed to Northwestern that “Professor Bailey enticed the women into his classrooms under the pretense of listening open-mindedly to their views” (McCloskey & Conway, 2003). But even if Bailey really had been faking open-mindedness throughout their relationships, he surely wasn’t forcing Kieltyka and Juanita to talk about their lives and show themselves off again and again. To suggest, as McCloskey and Conway do, that these women had no agency in their work with Bailey, no ability to decline him, is to treat them as children. They were not.

Might there be some other sort of way in which Bailey abused the trust of the transsexual women about whom he eventually wrote in TMWWBQ? Kieltyka told me that Bailey had violated both trust and confidentiality by using what the transwomen she brought to him had told him in the interviews he conducted for purposes of writing letters in support of their SRS requests (Kieltyka, 2006c). Out of the four women who filed charges with Northwestern claiming Bailey used them as research subjects without their knowledge and approval, three had obtained letters from Bailey supporting their requests for SRS (Conway, 2003c, 2003d, 2003f). (Kieltyka was the fourth complainant; she was post-transition when she met Bailey.) The three women in question all claim in their complaints that Bailey used what he learned during their SRS-letter interviews for his “research.” What about this?

Bailey denies it. He points out that two of the women in question are not even mentioned in TMWWBQ; thus, it is unclear how they think he used their SRS-letter interviews for his so-called “research”. As for the third woman, namely Juanita, Bailey says he did not use her SRS-letter interviews for the book; he says he used what he learned from her outside the context of those interviews (Bailey, 2006a, 2006c). It is impossible to confirm whether this is the case. But what we do know is that, according to Kieltyka, Juanita acknowledged to the Northwestern investigation committee that Juanita knew Bailey was writing about her and that she had given her permission for him to do so (Kieltyka, 2006f), and that, according to Juanita, both Kieltyka and Juanita knew Bailey was writing about them and gave them permission to do so (see “confidential addendum to item 2, submitted in sealed envelope,” at Conway, 2003e). It is also clear that Bailey had plenty of contact with Juanita outside the SRS interviews—in her class presentations, in a book-related coffee appointment in August 1998, in their social outings, and in her participation in the 2002 video. Maybe he did use in the book what Juanita told him during the SRS interviews, but it doesn’t look as if he would have needed that material as a source. She seemed perfectly willing to be open about herself with him and others on many other occasions.

What then about Kieltyka’s claim that Bailey pulled a “bait and switch” by leading her and her friends to believe he would write about them favorably only to turn around and—to her mind pejoratively—label them either autogynephilic or homosexual transsexuals? Being used by Bailey as someone who “openly and floridly exemplifies the essential features of […] autogynephilia” (Bailey, 2003, p. 156) is clearly the source of much pain for Kieltyka, understandably so since she was taken to task by some transwomen for “allowing” Bailey to “use” her as an example of a theory they find wrong, harmful, and even disgusting. Kieltyka told me several times that she believes Bailey’s portrayal of her as an “autogynephile” constitutes “subreption,” i.e., a misrepresentation of her identity so absolutely gross as to constitute a virtual theft of her true identity (Kieltyka, 2006a, 2006b). It was Bailey’s identification of her in this way, she suggested, that led to the change of her reputation in trans circles, from a devoted friend and advocate of transwomen to a source of potential or actual harm to those same women.

As I have already shown, Kieltyka and Juanita knew many years in advance of 2003 that Bailey was writing about their lives in a manuscript and also that he classified Kieltyka as an autogynephilic transsexual and Juanita as a homosexual transsexual. Kieltyka even admitted to me that “these terms ‘homosexual’ transsexual and ‘nonhomosexual’ transsexual […] Bailey used [them] on the SRS letters” for Juanita and the other women, though, according to Kieltyka, “none of us noticed, let alone understood the implications of those classifications” (Kieltyka, 2006a). But at least Kieltyka had to have noticed and understood the implications by the time of Gibson’s 1999 article, because there Gibson wrote, “Bailey believes Anjelica is an autogynephile, but Anjelica adamantly disagrees with the way he categorizes her. While she does believe autogynephiles exist, she doesn’t consider herself one” (Gibson, 1999, p. 5).

Indeed, evidence shows that Kieltyka noticed and was bothered by her labeling as autogynephilic even sooner, in late 1998. In an email message Bailey wrote to Blanchard in early December 1998, Bailey told his colleague, “I showed the [relevant manuscript] section to Anjelica (the autogynephilic transsexual who is most in the book), and she is upset. Not that the facts were wrong, but she doesn’t like my interpretation and the intimation that she is not a woman trapped in a man’s body. I talk to her tomorrow; not looking forward” (Bailey to Blanchard, p.e.c., December 2, 1998). In fact, both Bailey and Kieltyka recall Kieltyka’s being upset during that conversation—not about Bailey writing about intimate details of her life, but about his labeling her masculine and autogynephilic (Bailey, 2005; Kieltyka, 2006b). Then just a couple of months later, Gibson aired Bailey’s classification of Kieltyka (Gibson, 1999). That couldn’t have made Kieltyka any happier, and it surely couldn’t have caused Kieltyka to think Bailey was budging on his claim about her identity.

Why, then, did Kieltyka keep associating with Bailey, year after year, even though he seemed to keep labeling her autogynephilic, a diagnosis of which she knew and to which she objected? I put this to Kieltyka—why did she keep going to his classes, socializing with him, introducing him to other transwomen, helping in response to his request regarding the human sexuality textbook video, and so forth, if she was upset with his labeling her an autogynephile?

Kieltyka had two parts to her explanation. First, to put it simply, she valued her relationship with Bailey and didn’t want to abandon it. She explained the same was true for many of the other transwomen she introduced him to: “all those years, all these women that volunteered to lecture [for pay in his classes] did it because they were still friends with me and also because they respected Mike Bailey and trusted him, [they trusted] that Bailey saw them the way they saw themselves” (Kieltyka, 2006b). Kieltyka in particular believed Bailey saw her as an intellectual and professional collaborator. In fact, as noted in Part 2, for some time she believed she would be something like a co-author on the book he was writing (Kieltyka, 2006b). She came to see “Bailey as a mentor or almost like the relationship between a grad student and a professor, or even like a daughter and a father” (Kieltyka, 2006b). She recalls “I was getting validation [from Bailey] as a researcher, as a field operator, as someone who had large contacts within the community. I felt I was working as a consultant and a collaborator” (Kieltyka, 2006b). Apparently, it didn’t seem worth giving all that up over what she saw as his misdiagnosis of her.

The second reason Kieltyka says she kept working with Bailey, even after she knew he had labeled her an autogynephile in his manuscript and in Gibson’s article, was this: After she expressed her distress over his diagnosis of her, he told her he remained open to any evidence she could present that he was wrong. And she believed that, if she stuck with the relationship, she could convince him he was wrong about her. She recalled to me that after she saw his manuscript where he wrote about her as an autogynephile, “he said this is a first draft, we can use any information to support your theory if you have support for your theory. If you can change my mind, that’s all part of our relationship[….] What I saw was a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation, [and] I wanted the opportunity to change his mind” (Kieltyka, 2006b). Kieltyka tells me she eventually came to believe that the opportunity to change Bailey’s mind came in the form of a sexual arousability study Bailey’s lab was conducting, and so she helped recruit transwomen subjects for that study. The study sought to explore whether sexual arousal is category-specific in females as it is in males. Bailey and his colleagues specifically wanted to know whether homosexual and heterosexual natal men, homosexual and heterosexual natal women, and MTF transsexuals demonstrated genital arousal to male sexual stimuli (i.e., erotic images of men), to female sexual stimuli, or to both.

Kieltyka told me she was convinced that the study would show Bailey what she believed to be true: that transsexual women such as herself (i.e., those primarily attracted to women) would show genital arousal to other women. In other words, she believed the study would show Bailey that women like her are gynephilic, and not autogynephilic (Kieltyka, 2006a, 2006b). And indeed she believes the results did demonstrate just that, because the women like her showed clear category-specific genital arousal patterns to the female stimuli (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004).

I asked Bailey about Kieltyka’s interpretation of this study, and he explained that the study was never designed to be a critical test of Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia, because the study included no clear assessment of whether “nonhomosexual” transsexual women are or are not erotically aroused by the idea of being or becoming women; to his mind, the study simply showed that nonhomosexual transsexual women are aroused by erotic pictures of women—not why they are, nor whether other women are the primary source of their arousal, nor what is the motivation for their transitions. More importantly, Bailey said Kieltyka never gave him any sense that her recruitment of transwomen to the study was motivated by her desire to disprove Blanchard. His understanding was that she was simply interested (as he was) in having his lab study the arousability of transwomen like her (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 17, 2007).

All in all, given the substantial historical record of their collegial associations, it makes sense that Kieltyka got a lot out of her relationship with Bailey and that consequently she wanted to try to make it work in spite of their continuing disagreement over her identity. It also makes sense that she would try to talk him out of labeling her an autogynephile, and that she would choose to believe that, as she says he claimed, he remained open to contrary evidence—although it is also clear he would have required truly extraordinary evidence to seriously doubt Blanchard’s theory and the peer-reviewed scientific evidence for it, especially when virtually everything Kieltyka and her friends told him about themselves seemed to him only to back up Blanchard’s theory.

One has to suspect that, had the intervention of Conway and her fellow “investigators” never happened, Kieltyka and Bailey might well have continued to have a relatively congenial relationship even while Bailey continued to label Kieltyka an autogynephile, against her sense of self. I say this because of the friendly emails that continued after Kieltyka had seen a copy of Bailey’s book. For example, recall that on May 16, 2003, several weeks after she received the book and just after the backlash had started, Kieltyka jokingly offered to lend Bailey her old athletic support for his next book signing or lecture, and signed the email “Your friend, in spite of spite” (Kieltyka to Bailey, p.e.c., May 16, 2003). But the intervention of Conway and company did indeed happen, and once it did, Kieltyka painfully came to see how, via Bailey’s portrayal of her as an autogynephile and the ensuing backlash against TMWWBQ, her personal identity was fast being reconstructed by people like Conway and James. She was being actively transformed from a well-liked local trans advocate to a national pariah in the realm of trans rights. And so she came to believe she had been used and abused by Bailey; and she came to believe he had been pulling a con job on her and her friends all along. For his part, he was stunned and then angry at how, after years of a friendly relationship in which he often helped her and her friends, she turned so viciously on him (Bailey, 2006a).

So, to return to the question posed at the outset of this discussion: Did Bailey abuse the trust he established with the transsexual women about whom he ultimately wrote in TMWWBQ, essentially tricking them into revealing otherwise private information about themselves, so that he could use them as “poster children” for Blanchard’s taxonomy in his book? A total of two women—Kieltyka and Juanita—have complained personally of this sort of treatment. I think it is clear that, in fact, both opted to reveal intimate details about themselves publicly again and again, and both of them knew, or surely should have known, that Bailey was very likely if not certain to write about them as examples of Blanchard’s taxonomic types. It is also clear Kieltyka repeatedly objected to the characterization of her as an autogynephile, and it seems likely that, through his words and actions, Bailey let Kieltyka wishfully believe she might change his mind about that when, in fact, there was little chance of her doing so. If Bailey falsely put forth an image of being likely to be swayed by Kieltyka’s critiques as a way of drawing more intimate information from Kieltyka and her friends about their sexualities and their lives, that would be wrong. But I can’t find any evidence that this is how he came to know the intimate details of Kieltyka’s life or the lives of her friends; rather, he seems to have obtained those because Kieltyka, Juanita, and indeed several other transwomen in their circle were generally forthright and unashamed about themselves in their presentations and their conversations with Bailey.

A subsidiary question to consider in the context of this discussion is this: Did Bailey write about Juanita and Kieltyka without their permission, as they claimed in their complaints, and if so, was that wrong? As noted above, it appears that, at least early on, both Juanita and Kieltyka gave Bailey permission to write about them—gave permission explicitly (according to what Kieltyka said about their testimonies to Northwestern and what Juanita said in her “sealed” letter to Northwestern) and implicitly (judging by the fact they helped Bailey by answering questions when he told them he was writing about them in the manuscript). Notably, although he did obtain their permission, according to commonly accepted ethical standards, Bailey was not required to obtain or even seek Juanita’s and Kieltyka’s permission to write about them; it is not uncommon for scholars to relay stories without asking permission of subjects, particularly when their identities are protected. Now, was it obnoxious of Bailey to write of Juanita and “Cher” as examples of Blanchard’s two types without obtaining their permission to do that specifically? One can see why the subjects themselves might feel that way. But I think one must also appreciate that scholarship (like journalism) would come to a screeching halt if scholars were only ever able to write about people exactly according to how they wish to be portrayed.

I said above that it is not uncommon for scholars and journalists to relay stories without ever asking permission of subjects, particularly when their identities are protected. But one of Kieltyka’s complaints is just that—that Bailey failed to adequately protect her identity, leaving her personally open to criticism and profound misunderstanding. What about this? Did Bailey fail to adequately protect his subjects’ true identities?

No person aside from Kieltyka has alleged that his or her identity was inadequately protected in TMWWBQ, so I focus here on Kieltyka. In his self-defense piece “Academic McCarthyism,” Bailey claims “It was [Kieltyka] who compromised her own anonymity, in her [May 4, 2003] email to Conway,” an email Conway quickly put up on her Website (Bailey, 2005). But after I listened to Kieltyka’s version of the story, I told Bailey that Kieltyka said that by the time she contacted Conway in early May 2003, Conway already knew she was Cher. Kieltyka told me, “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” (Kieltyka, 2006f).

How did James and Conway figure out who Cher was? In the preface to TMWWBQ, Bailey thanks Anjelica Kieltyka for “introduc[ing him] to the Chicago transsexual community” (Bailey, 2003, p. xii), and then much later says that “most of the homosexual transsexuals I have met, I met through Cher” (Bailey, 2003, p. 177). Even given this mirroring of acknowledgements, I think it is safe to say the average reader, unfamiliar with the trans scene, would have been unlikely to figure out from Bailey’s book that “Cher” was Kieltyka, especially given that in the preface he separately thanks Kieltyka and Cher as if they were two different people (pp. xii–xiii). But Conway and her co-“investigators” were not average readers. Kieltyka notes that Bailey revealed that Cher plays the hammered dulcimer in an Irish folk group (Kieltyka, 2006c; see Bailey 2003, p. 155). A number of people in Kieltyka’s local communities, including presumably neighbors and various associates in Chicago transwomen circles, knew about Kieltyka’s transsexuality as well as her musical life. Given the hammered dulcimer reference as well as the extent to which Bailey’s description of Cher matches Kieltyka’s personality and personal life—about which she had been very public—it would not have been too hard for Conway to ask around and find out who this “Cher” was (Kieltyka, 2006c). It is also possible—even likely—that Conway or a member of her cohort was Web-savvy enough to find archives of the portion of Bailey’s Northwestern site where in 1998 he had put up the part of the manuscript where he described Kieltyka, identifying her at that time by her real name. (Bailey states he had put this material up for his human sexuality students to read. It never occurred to him that it could or would later be found by others [Bailey, 2006a].)

When I asked Bailey about whether he thought he had failed to protect Kieltyka’s identity, and whether he regretted that, he explained,

I had originally asked her to help me pick a pseudonym for her, and she asked me to use her real name. I still remember her saying: “I am not ashamed of anything I’ve ever done.” I admired that. It was only after she read the initial draft, and especially my interpretation of her behavior as autogynephilic, that she changed her mind on this. (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 17, 2007)

He continued, “Because Anjelica Kieltyka had so publicly given her story to so many people (including not only my class but to transgender groups in Chicago), I felt no legal or ethical obligation to mask her. I changed her name because I liked her at that time and because she requested it.” According to Bailey, “She only requested that I change her name, and not that I mask her” by changing other details that might identify her (Bailey to Dreger, p.e.c., January 17, 2007).

It is entirely possible, given her personality and especially her persistent interest in being public about herself, that Kieltyka might have decided to out herself as the woman who was Cher sometime after the book came out if Conway’s “investigation” had never begun. But Kieltyka never had the option of deciding that, since Conway and James quickly flushed her out. I do not believe Bailey intentionally outed Kieltyka as Cher, so I don’t think we can call his behavior in this case unethical in any simple fashion, though he might have thought more carefully about changing more of her personal identifying information, especially given that he knew she didn’t want to be called an autogynephile. I understand why Kieltyka is so angry that she came to be seen, based on Bailey’s portrayal of her and the backlash-reading of that portrayal, to be a cause of harm to the very women for whom she saw herself as an advocate. It must have been—and still must be—truly painful to feel that her core identity has been misrepresented over and over again.

Four final charges made against Bailey must be considered before we close this inquiry into the merit of the claims that Bailey behaved unethically, illegally, or immorally in the production of his book. I believe all four can be dispensed with rather quickly.

First, did Bailey fabricate the ending to the “Danny” story to show that Danny (and most boys like him) would end up gay instead of transsexual (Bailey, 2003, pp. 213–214)? Conway claims this on her site and bases the claim solely on a report from Kieltyka that Bailey admitted this to Kieltyka (Conway, 2003l). When I asked Bailey about the matter, he responded: “I changed things [in the ending story about Danny] to prevent identification. In fact I’m not sure that, if Danny read the book, that he would say ‘oh, that’s me.’ But the essential story at the end of the book is true. To tell you more about what that means would compromise the anonymity that I’m trying to maintain” (Bailey, 2006a). He added, “Lynn Conway says that, by the way, [solely] on the basis of what Anjelica told her, and I’d like to know if Lynn Conway thinks everything Anjelica says is true” (Bailey, 2006a). In fact, I can find no evidence that Bailey fabricated anything meaningful in Danny’s story or in the story of anyone else in the book. It is worth noting again that even Kieltyka has never disputed any of the facts Bailey related about her and her life; she disputes only his interpretations.

Second, was Bailey illegally practicing clinical psychology without a license when he provided letters in support of a few local transwomen’s requests for SRS? This may not really be a point germane to an inquiry into the production of TMWWBQ since Bailey says he did not use the SRS interviews as the basis for the stories in his book, but let’s assume for the moment that he did, and answer the question anyway. After all, Conway, James, and McCloskey each filed formal complaints with the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation and Northwestern University accusing Bailey of illegally practicing psychology without a license by providing the SRS-support letters (Conway, 2004d).

A quick check of the laws of the state of Illinois reveals that, in fact, Bailey was not practicing illegally, because he never asked for or received money (or anything else) in exchange for producing the SRS-support letters, and the relevant Illinois state regulations indicate that if a person does not seek or obtain “remuneration” for services offered or rendered, that person is not required to have a license, even if the person otherwise appears to be offering what counts as “clinical psychological services” (225 ILCS 15/1 [from Chap. 111, para 5351]). Bailey also never offered or represented a therapeutic relationship with any of the women in question. Presumably this is why the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation never seems to have bothered pursuing the charges made against Bailey.

As a side point, let me just note the irony in Conway’s, James’s, and McCloskey’s trying to use Bailey’s SRS-support letters against him. It certainly appears from this vantage that, in answering Kieltyka’s call for help for her marginalized transwomen friends by providing letters in support of their requests for SRS—free of charge and without any requirement of a lengthy and costly “therapeutic” relationship—Bailey was helping to reduce the barriers to transition for a small number of transwomen, the very barriers about which people such as Conway, James, and McCloskey have complained (see, e.g., Conway, 2006b; James, n.d.-g; McCloskey 1999, pp. 71–72). One can imagine, in a different situation—say, one in which the psychology professor in question didn’t believe in Blanchard’s taxonomy—the likes of Conway, McCloskey, and James holding up Bailey as a model for his support of these women’s pursuit of SRS.

Third, was Bailey undermining the rights of sexual minorities, including transsexual women, by producing the book he did? As I’ve noted, this claim has been made again and again by Conway, McCloskey, Kieltyka, and others, including to the press, on the Web, and in letters and emails to Bailey’s colleagues in the Northwestern Psychology Department. But it isn’t clear that Bailey’s book does undermine the rights of sexual minorities, any more than it is clear that it supports them. Yes, he points to the relative femininity of many gay men, and that reiterates a classic stereotype, but he also makes clear he believes there’s nothing wrong with being a relatively feminine man or a gay man. Yes, he labels some transwomen as having a paraphilia—namely autogynephilia—but he also clearly says it is not harmful and that the only real consideration with regard to SRS decision-making is the happiness of individual transwomen. If it makes them happier (and he says it does), then they should be able to get it. As I think I showed clearly in Part 3 of this essay, Bailey’s book is complicated and often atypical in its claims, and this is probably why different readers have read TMWWBQ quite differently. Public critiques as well as correspondence Bailey has received (like correspondence I myself have received) suggest that some queer people find his book part of the problem of social oppression of queer people, while others see in it personal liberation through his finally giving voice to politically incorrect truths about their queer identities.

Notably, because it is often scientifically and politically atypical in its claims, Bailey’s work seems particularly inclined to create critics and allies on all sides; so, for example, we’ve seen how he was criticized and praised in both the left-wing and right-wing media. And we find the anti-gay National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) trying, largely through highly selective quotation, to use Bailey’s words on homosexuality to defend their homophobic policies (see, e.g., Byrd, 2006) even while Bailey has been reasonably positioned to debate against NARTH representatives on a Catholic radio program and in academic conferences on homosexuality. So I think it is a serious intellectual challenge to make the claim that Bailey is simply anti-queer or even anti-trans in his book. I see no evidence the book is, as Kieltyka has suggested, part of a widespread, undercover agenda to eliminate queer people through eugenics and other biotechnological means. And, after my exegesis of TMWWBQ as presented in Part 3, I find it impossible to analogize the book to Mein Kampf, as McCloskey has done (McCloskey to Marks, p.e.c., February 3, 2004, available at Conway, 2005a).

Finally, did Bailey ignore critical data against Blanchard’s theory, so that he was essentially engaged in the suppression of legitimate data in his book? Bailey’s response to this is a resounding no—that he did not, during the production of his book, see legitimate evidence of transwomen whose lives and histories flew in the face of Blanchard’s taxonomy and what he saw as the substantial scientific evidence for it (Bailey, 2006a). Of course, McCloskey, Conway, and others have claimed otherwise. I think this one ends up as a problem that has stumped philosophers of science for ages, namely the problem of how scientists (or scholars more generally) are to discern what data count as legitimate and relevant. Given the evidence for Blanchard’s theory and the lack of peer-reviewed evidence or argumentation refuting it, Bailey is about as convinced of the theory as he is of the theory of evolution by natural selection—though, when I jokingly asked him, he did say he thinks Blanchard’s theory is more likely to eventually fall than Darwin’s (p.e.c., January 3, 2007). Bailey considers claims made against Blanchard’s theory extraordinary, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Thus, what seems to some trans critics obvious proof against Blanchard strikes Bailey as very weak indeed (Bailey, 2006a). No matter how many transwomen bombard Bailey with claims of being a “third type” unexplained by Blanchard’s theory, I don’t think Bailey can be called unethical for sticking stubbornly to a theory he believes to be, all in all, well-evidenced not only in his own experience but in the scientific literature (e.g., Blanchard 1989, 1993; Smith, van Goozen, Kuiper, & Cohen-Kettenis, 2005).

So in conclusion, what did Bailey do wrong legally, ethically, and morally? It seems J. Michael Bailey should have been more proactive in protecting the identity of Anjelica Kieltyka. It also seems he should perhaps have worked harder to be as clear as humanly possible with Kieltyka just how unlikely she was to ever convince him that Blanchard’s theory was wrong, so that she was not at risk of continuing to relate with him under an umbrella of wishful thinking.

That’s it? After months of investigation evinced by the foregoing, I must conclude: that’s it.

How could there possibly have been so much smoke and so little fire? One answer is that, if you look as closely as I have done here, there were in fact far fewer accusers of Bailey than all the noise in the press and on the Internet would have you believe. And of the accusations made, almost none appear to have been legitimate. But all of the noise of the accusations did what I suspect Conway, James, and McCloskey hoped: It distracted attention from the book’s message—that Blanchard’s theory of MTF transsexualism was right—by apparently killing the messenger. Indeed, much as Bailey would prefer not to admit it, in their leadership of the backlash against TMWWBQ, Lynn Conway, Andrea James, and Deirdre McCloskey came remarkably close to effectively destroying J. Michael Bailey’s reputation and life.