Another Very Heimische Zalman Bernstein TGIF (4): Who is Pedophile- and Rape-enabler J. Michael Bailey? Bari Weiss Will Explain! (7/14)
David Shasha
https://www.transgendermap.com/politics/psychology/j-michael-bailey/
My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored. But I Won’t Be.
By: J Michael Bailey
I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns.
My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth.
But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.
On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.
Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.
The retracted article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).
ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.
I believed that ROGD was a promising explanation of the explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls because these young people do not have gender dysphoria as usually understood. Until recently, females treated for gender dysphoria were masculine-presenting girls who had hated being female since early childhood. By contrast, girls with ROGD are often conventionally feminine, but tend to have other social and emotional issues. The theory behind ROGD is that through social contagion from friends, social media, and even school, vulnerable girls are exposed to the idea that their normal adolescent angst is the result of an underlying transgender identity. These girls then suddenly declare that they are transgender. That is the rapid onset. After the declaration, the girls may desire—and receive—drastic medical interventions including mastectomies and testosterone injections.
There is ample evidence that in progressive communities, multiple girls from the same peer group are announcing they are trans almost simultaneously. There has been a sharp increase in this phenomenon across the industrialized West. A recent review from the UK, which keeps better records than America, showed a greater than tenfold increase in referrals of adolescent girls during just the past decade.
But there have been virtually no scientific data or studies on the subject.
In part that is because researchers who have touched this topic have been punished for their curiosity. Just ask Lisa Littman. Ultimately, her paper on the subject resulted in an unnecessary “correction” by the journal that published it, and the loss of Littman’s academic affiliation with Brown University, which prioritized activist outrage over Littman’s academic freedom.
This explains why my coauthor, “Suzanna Diaz,” doesn’t go by her real name. I don’t even know it, despite having met her in person once and spoken with her many times. She uses a pseudonym to protect her family, especially her daughter, whom Suzanna believes has ROGD. Suzanna isn’t an academic. She is a mother who has become an activist to raise awareness about this phenomenon, including by creating an online survey for parents who believed their children had ROGD. The survey was hosted by the website ParentsOfROGDKids.com. I was impressed with her findings and we decided to collaborate.
Although it is unusual for an academic to collaborate with someone who is anonymous, I decided to do so for two reasons. First, I understood why Suzanna felt she needed to keep her identity private. Second, at all stages of our collaboration, I was able to confirm that the work she had done was well-informed, careful, and reliable.
It’s not entirely unusual that a parent like Suzanna would take on this kind of role. Increasing awareness about ROGD is largely attributable to parents with daughters claiming to be sons. Desperate for sound medical advice, they find themselves confronted with a medical establishment that has come to prioritize surgical and hormonal intervention over traditional psychotherapy that seeks to resolve the feelings of distress.
Our article was based on parent reports of 1,655 adolescent and young adult children. Three-fourths of them were female. Emotional problems were common among this group, especially anxiety and depression, which many parents said preceded gender issues by years. Most of these young people had taken steps to socially transition, including changing their pronouns, dress, and identity to the other sex (or in some cases, to neither sex). Parents observed that after their children socially transitioned, their mental health deteriorated. A small number—seven percent of those whose parents answered Suzanna’s survey—had received medical transition treatment, including drugs to block puberty, or cross-sex hormones.
Disturbingly, those young people with more emotional problems were especially likely to have socially and medically transitioned. The best predictor of both social and medical transition was a referral to a gender specialist. Some 52 percent of parents in our study who had received a referral said they felt pressured by the gender specialist to facilitate some sort of transition for their child.
Our study had two obvious limitations: the way we recruited parents guaranteed that only those who believed their children had ROGD would participate, and we had only the parents’ perspectives. We clearly acknowledged and discussed these in our paper, beginning with the words “At least two related issues potentially limit this research” followed by three paragraphs laying out the limitations.
But when parents are worried about their adolescent children, there is usually a good reason. And these were not parents with a political ax to grind: with few exceptions, all of the parents we surveyed were progressive.
Our article was published to a fair amount of attention. It was covered positively by the conservative press and also was retweeted widely both by families and others concerned about ROGD. But from the start, it got negative attention from trans activists and their political allies.
Almost immediately these activists began to lobby both the publisher of Archives of Sexual Behavior (Springer Nature Group) and the organization affiliated with the journal (International Academy of Sex Research, or IASR) to retract the article and to punish the editor of Archives, psychologist Kenneth Zucker, because he had published our work.
On May 5, a group of 100 academic activists and gender clinicians published an online Open Letter expressing “ethical” and “editorial concerns” about the journal and “serious concerns over research ethics and intellectual integrity” of our article. This was a pretext for their real complaint: dislike of certain ideas and the people responsible for them. That is clear from the open letter, which focuses less on our article and more on Ken Zucker.
Zucker is a giant figure in academic sex research, and especially the science of gender dysphoria. He helped found the Family Gender Identity Clinic in Toronto, one of the first international centers for the study and treatment of childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria. He was chosen by the American Psychiatric Association to chair the working group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders for the 2012 revision of its diagnostic manual, known as the DSM. Since 2002, he has edited Archives of Sexual Behavior, the most important academic journal covering research on sexuality, sex differences, and gender dysphoria.
But Zucker has also become a target of activist ire. That’s because he believes that gender dysphoria is a problem that should be treated, if possible, with psychotherapy to prevent transition rather than drugs and surgery to facilitate transition. Zucker’s most zealous critics accuse him of promoting “conversion therapy,” but this is incorrect. Conversion therapy is a religiously motivated attempt to change sexual orientation; it doesn’t work. Gender dysphoria, unlike sexual orientation, can change.
Zucker—like many others—wants to help youth avoid the psychosocial upheaval associated with gender transition and a lifetime of potentially unnecessary medical treatment. His position was almost universal until the past few years. The fact that it has become verboten is the result of a powerful activist movement that has been astonishing both in its effectiveness and its lack of scientific evidence.
Debate is essential to good science, but that is not what these activists want. They seek surrender. And that is what they got.
On May 23, we received an email from Springer informing us that they were retracting our article. The ostensible reason:
The Publisher and the Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article due to noncompliance with our editorial policies around consent. The participants of the survey have not provided written informed consent to participate in scholarly research or to have their responses published in a peer reviewed article. Additionally, they have not provided consent to publish to have their data included in this article. Table 1 and the Supplementary material have therefore been removed to protect the participants’ privacy.
We appealed after consulting a lawyer, but Springer retracted our paper on June 14.
Springer’s reasoning was preposterous and simply an excuse to retract an article they wanted to go away in order to stop the controversy. Springer accused us of not obtaining informed consent from the parents in our study. There are two aspects to informed consent in research: you should understand what you’re being asked to do, including any substantial risks and benefits, and you should be able to opt out. All parents completing Suzanna’s survey knew they were being asked questions about their children’s ROGD, and they decided to answer. Parents were promised privacy of personal information, and they got it.
Springer’s additional complaint was that we did not have consent to publish survey results. This is plain wrong. We did inform participants that we would publish their data. At the end of the survey participants were told: “We will publish our data on our website when we have a large enough sample. . . ”
We are outraged and disappointed that our article was retracted. But the belief that activists have won and science has lost is mostly wrong. Our article’s retraction has inadvertently resulted in a triumph for truth and reason.
Start with the support we’ve received from FAIR, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, and others. Unless you have ever been cancelled, you have no idea how important this is.
The campaign against our article, from the open letter to the final retraction, has generated immense publicity by academic standards, so far largely favorable. Our academic article has been viewed online more than 100,000 times in not quite three months, an astonishing number for an article of this nature. This reflects a thirst for knowledge about this important subject.
Speaking for myself, this episode has guaranteed that I will study ROGD until we understand it.
That’s why I am about to launch a large, long-term survey of adolescent gender dysphoria, in collaboration with Lisa Littman and Ken Zucker. We will survey both gender-dysphoric adolescents and their parents, following them for at least five years. Among other things, we’ll have better information about adolescents’ early gender dysphoria, mental health, and sexuality; about parents’ attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs; and about the correspondence between adolescents’ and parents’ accounts of the same phenomena.
I guarantee two things. First, it will be a huge, important study with the potential to establish the validity of ROGD. (And if ROGD is an incorrect idea, we will show and publish this.) Second, between the three of us—Littman, Zucker, and me, three previously cancelled scientists who are among the world’s foremost experts in what we are studying—we don’t have a chance in hell of receiving government funding for this project.
We’ll do it anyway. (You can help if you want.)
Censors have tried to stop scientific progress before. Now, as then, the pursuit of truth requires scientists and researchers who refuse to cow to puritans, ideologues and activists.
If you want to read more about the threat to scientific inquiry, we recommend this important paper by Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja.
From The “Free” Press, July 10, 2023
J. Michael Bailey - Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege
By: Benedict Carey
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/health/psychology/21gender.html
In academic feuds, as in war, there is no telling how far people will go once the shooting starts.
Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.
The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women. In the past few years, several prominent academics who are transgender have made a series of accusations against the psychologist, including that he committed ethics violations. A transgender woman he wrote about has accused him of a sexual impropriety, and Dr. Bailey has become a reviled figure for some in the gay and transgender communities.
To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.
“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” said Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar and patients’ rights advocate at Northwestern who, after conducting a lengthy investigation of Dr. Bailey’s actions, has concluded that he is essentially blameless. “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.”
To Dr. Bailey’s critics, his story is a different kind of morality tale.
“Nothing we have done, I believe, and certainly nothing I have done, overstepped any boundaries of fair comment on a book and an author who stepped into the public arena with enthusiasm to deliver a false and unscientific and politically damaging opinion,” Deirdre McCloskey, a professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of Dr. Bailey’s principal critics, said in an e-mail message.
The hostilities began in the spring of 2003, when Dr. Bailey published a book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” intended to explain the biology of sexual orientation and gender to a general audience.
“The next two years,” Dr. Bailey said in an interview, “were the hardest of my life.”
Many sex researchers who have worked with Dr. Bailey say that he is a solid scientist and collaborator, who by his own admission enjoys violating intellectual taboos.
In his book, he argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies. Dr. Bailey described the alternate theory, which is based on Canadian studies done in the 1980s and 1990s, in part by telling the stories of several transgender women he met through a mutual acquaintance. In the book, he gave them pseudonyms, like “Alma” and “Juanita.”
Other scientists praised the book as a compelling explanation of the science. The Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that promotes gay, bisexual and transgender literature, nominated the book for an award.
But days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination.
Dr. Conway did not respond to requests for an interview.
Dr. Ben Barres, a neurobiologist at Stanford, said in reference to Dr. Bailey’s thesis in the book, “Bailey seems to make a living by claiming that the things people hold most deeply true are not true.”
At a public meeting of sex researchers shortly after the book’s publication, Dr. John Bancroft, then director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, said to Dr. Bailey, “Michael, I have read your book, and I do not think it is science,” according to accounts of the meeting. Dr. Bancroft confirmed the comment.
The backlash soon turned from the book to its author.
After consulting with Dr. Conway, four of the transgender women who spoke to Dr. Bailey during his reporting for the book wrote letters to Northwestern, complaining that they had been used as research subjects without having given, or been asked to sign, written consent.
One wrote a letter making another accusation against Dr. Bailey: she claimed he had had sex with her.
Dr. Conway and Dr. McCloskey also wrote letters to Northwestern, accusing Dr. Bailey of grossly violating scientific standards “by conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of the study.”
They also wrote to the Illinois state regulators, requesting that they investigate Dr. Bailey for practicing psychology without a license. Dr. Bailey, who was not licensed to practice clinical psychology in Illinois, had provided some of those who helped him with the book with brief case evaluation letters, suggesting that they were good candidates for sex-reassignment surgery. A spokesman for the state said that regulators took no action on the complaints.
In an interview, Dr. Bailey said that nothing he did was wrong or unethical. “I interviewed people for a book,” he said. “This is a free society, and that should be allowed.”
But by the end of 2003, the controversy had a life of its own on the Internet. Dr. Conway, the computer scientist, kept a running chronicle of the accusations against Dr. Bailey on her Web site. Any Google search of Dr. Bailey’s name brought up Dr. Conway’s site near the top of the list.
The site also included a link to the Web page of another critic of Dr. Bailey’s book, Andrea James, a Los Angeles-based transgender advocate and consultant. Ms. James downloaded images from Dr. Bailey’s Web site of his children, taken when they were in middle and elementary school, and posted them on her own site, with sexually explicit captions that she provided. (Dr. Bailey is a divorced father of two.) Ms. James said in an e-mail message that Dr. Bailey’s work exploited vulnerable people, especially children, and that her response echoed his disrespect.
Dr. Dreger is the latest to arrive at the battlefront. She is a longtime advocate for people born with ambiguous sexuality and has been strongly critical of sex researchers in the past. She said she had presumed that Dr. Bailey was guilty and, after meeting him through a mutual friend, had decided to investigate for herself.
But in her just-completed account, due to be published next year in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, the field’s premier journal, she concluded that the accusations against the psychologist were essentially groundless.
For example, Dr. Dreger found that two of the four women who complained to Northwestern of research violations were not portrayed in the book at all. The two others did know their stories would be used, as they themselves said in their letters to Northwestern.
The accusation of sexual misconduct came five years after the fact, and was not possible to refute or confirm, Dr. Dreger said. It specified a date in 1998 when Dr. Bailey was at his ex-wife’s house, looking after their children, according to dated e-mail messages between the psychologist and his ex-wife, Dr. Dreger found.
The transgender woman who made the complaint said through a friend that she stood by the accusation but did not want to talk about it.
Moreover, based on her own reading of federal regulations, Dr. Dreger, whose report can be viewed at www.bioethics.northwestern.edu, argued that the book did not qualify as scientific research. The federal definition describes “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation.”
Dr. Bailey used the people in his book as anecdotes, not as the subjects of a systematic investigation, she reported.
“The bottom line is that they tried to ruin this guy, and they almost succeeded,” Dr. Dreger said.
Dr. Dreger’s report began to circulate online last week, and Dr. Bailey’s critics already have attacked it as being biased.
For their part, Northwestern University administrators began an investigation of Dr. Bailey’s research in later 2003 (there is no evidence that they investigated the sex complaint).
The inquiry, which lasted almost a year, brought research to a near standstill in Dr. Bailey’s laboratory, and clouded his name among some other researchers, according to people who worked with the psychologist.
“That was the worst blow of all, that we didn’t get much support” from Northwestern, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate student of Dr. Bailey’s at the time, and now a lecturer at Northwestern. “They were quite scared and not very professional, I thought.”
A spokesman for the university declined to comment on the investigation, which concluded in 2004.
One collaborator broke with Dr. Bailey over the controversy, Dr. Bailey said. Others who remained loyal said doing so had a cost: two researchers said they were advised by a government grant officer that they should distance themselves from Dr. Bailey to improve their chances of receiving financing.
“He told me it would be better if I played down any association with Bailey,” said Khytam Dawood, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Bailey said that the first weeks of the backlash were the worst. He tried not to think about the accusations, he said, but would wake up in the middle of the night unable to think of anything else. He took anti-anxiety pills for a while. He began to worry about losing his job. He said that friends and family supported him but that some colleagues were afraid to speak up in his defense.
“They saw what I was going through, I think, and wanted no part of it,” he said.
The fog of war, which can overwhelm the senses of real soldiers, can also descend on academic feuds, and it seems to have done so on this one.
In October 2004, Dr. Bailey stepped down as chairman of the psychology department. He declined to say why, and a spokesman for Northwestern would say only that the change in status had nothing to do with the book.
These unknowns seem if anything to have extended the life of the controversy, which still simmers online.
“I think for me, for the work I do, honestly, I don’t really care what his theories are,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, of Dr. Bailey. “But I do want to feel like any theories that affect the lives of so many people are based in good science, and that they’re presented responsibly.”
But that, say supporters of Dr. Bailey, is precisely the problem: Who defines responsible? And at what cost is that definition violated?
It is perhaps fitting that the history of this conflict, which caught fire online, is being written and revised continually in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is compiled and corrected by users. The reference site provides a lengthy entry on Dr. Bailey, but a section titled “Research Misconduct,” which posts some of the accusations Dr. Dreger reviewed, includes a prominent warning.
It reads: “The neutrality of this section is disputed.”
From The New York Times, August 21, 2007
A Quiet Victory Begins to Emerge: J. Michael Bailey resigns as Chair of Psychology at Northwestern University
By: Lynn Conway
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/NU/Quiet%20Victory.htm
Introduction
In the Spring of 2003, J. Michael Bailey, then Chairman of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University, threw the socially endangered community of transsexual women into serious distress, by authoring a book that pseudo-scientifically ridiculed and defamed their lives and identities. The situation was made all the worse in that his book was published by the National Academies Press, the publishing arm of the eminent U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
Containing no specific references to other scientific work, the The Man Who Would Be Queen simply pronounced as scientific fact that transsexual women are either (i) effeminate gay men who undergo "sex changes" in order to have sex with lots of men, or, if not that, then they are (ii) sexual paraphilic males who "change sex" for bizarre autosexual reasons. The book dismissed as irrelevant the current scientific understandings that humans develop gendered identities that can in some cases be in conflict with their physical sex, but provided no scientific explanation whatsoever for making such dismissive counter-pronouncements.
The book set off a firestorm of complaints from the trans community. The National Academies began receiving large numbers of well thought-out, sincere complaints about the credibility of Mr. Bailey’s scientific pronouncements, and about the dangers those pronouncements presented to transsexual women. The complaints quickly escalated into a major trans community investigation into scientific and ethical misconduct on Mr. Bailey's part, leading to filings of many complaints of research misconduct against him at Northwestern University (NU).
In November 2003, NU officials announced a formal internal investigation would be conducted into the complaints. The NU investigation committee hearings finally began in March of 2004, and concluded in late June of 2004. Many months later we began to get glimpses into the emerging impact of the investigation within Northwestern, when on November 22, 2004 several of the complainants were mailed letters informing them that:
"I have now received the formal report of the committee charged to investigate the matter; and I have taken action that I believe is appropriate in this situation."
- Lawrence B. Dumas, Provost, Northwestern University
Later, on December 1, 2004, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Mr. Bailey had resigned as Chairman of the Psychology Department back in October 2004.
What does this all mean? What has happened at Northwestern as a result of the Bailey investigation so far? Why does so much secrecy surround the actions taken against Mr. Bailey by NU?
Noticing what Mr. Bailey "did not do"
A powerful method of investigation is to carefully take note of not only what people “do,” but also of what they “do not do”. For example, here are some revealing things Mr. Bailey "did not do" in his work at Northwestern:
Mr. Bailey did not get IRB approval to interview the trans women in his "study" as research subjects, and they were blindsided by his publication of their case histories in his book (more). He did not (and refused to) interview any trans women outside his small carefully selected "study group" of six to eight trans women. He did not include any scientific references in his book (listing instead recent movies and pop-culture characterizations of trans women to prop up his ideas). He was not a member of the American Psychological Association. Worse yet, he was exposed in July 2003 as not even being a member of HBIGDA. When complaints were made about his book, Bailey did not defend his scientific work back into the scientific community, but instead publicly attacked his critics as being "mentally-ill sexual paraphilics".
It was by uncovering such "did not do's" that investigators became aware of Mr. Bailey's misconduct to begin with, and it was things such as these that in the end exposed him to the trans community (and at Northwestern) for who and what he was.
Noticing things Northwestern "did not do"
When pondering what has happened inside Northwestern regarding Mr. Bailey's resignation, we similarly learn from what "they did not do":
Northwestern University did not announce Bailey’s resignation when it occurred in October. The Psychology Department did not announce the resignation (except of course, very quietly inside), but only very quietly acknowledged it via an update of the Psychology Department's faculty-profile webpage sometime in November 2004. Mr. Bailey did not announce his resignation, nor did he acknowledge it on his faculty website, other than to remove "Chair" from beside his name. The Daily Northwestern, which had followed the story of the investigation all along, did not even report on Bailey’s resignation.
No one at Northwestern explained why Bailey had resigned, other than Northwestern's PR person being reported to have claimed “it had nothing to do with the investigation”. Furthermore, there was no announcement about a new person taking over as Chair of the Psychology Department, even though Alice Eagly did take over as Chair. Ms. Eagly's elevation as Department Chair was simply acknowledged via the inclusion of the word "Chair" after her name on the Psych Dept's faculty profile website sometime in November.
Even though there was growing outside interest in the results of the investigation, especially as months dragged on and there were interminable delays in the case, none of this leaked out until the Provost's letters in late November led to the Chronicle article in December, which finally revealed that Mr. Bailey had resigned as Chairman.
Inferring what has happened at NU
Changing the leadership of a major academic department in a large research university isn't something that is done overnight. Of course in emergencies such as illnesses, etc., a temporary "acting chairman" may be named until a permanent chair can be identified. But in most other cases it takes a lot of time to identify, gain the necessary approvals for, and make the arrangements for someone new to take over a major university department.
It especially takes time to plan ahead, negotiate and make all the logistical arrangements regarding research, teaching and committee assignments for both the incoming and outgoing chairpersons. Department chairs do not have to teach many courses and do not need to maintain a highly active research program as do regular faculty members. Thus time is needed to shift courses away from the incoming department chair and to the outgoing chair, and time is needed for the incoming chair to wind down or put on hold their research and for the outgoing chair to initiate more research.
These aren't things that can be easily done right in the midst of an ongoing semester with almost no lead time. Instead these are things that need to be worked out well in advance of the semester in which the transition in leadership takes place, often way in advance, so that everyone concerned can make the requisite adjustments in course schedules, research activities and other responsibilities.
Reflecting on the timeline of events at Northwestern, it seems very likely that NU officials (and Mr. Bailey and key Psychology Department members) realized way back last summer that Mr. Bailey was going to have to step down on account of the investigation committee's findings, which were known inside NU in late June 2004. Thus they must have begun making plans last summer for a transition in Psychology Department leadership this fall, having realized way back then the he "was going to have to go".
This need for time to prepare for and implement an orderly transition in leadership also explains the interminable delays in the announcement of the NU investigation findings, delays that went of for month after month, long after the conclusion of the investigation itself (way back in July, 2004). Even so, there apparently was not enough time to elevate or recruit a new permanent Department Chair, as we later learned in comments by Ms. Eagly regarding the fact that she was elevated as interim Chair following Bailey's "sudden abdication".
Meantime, the long delays in announcing that "actions had been taken" also likely gave Northwestern hope of being better able to "non-event" the final announcement, and to more easily avoid criticisms regarding the absence of information about what "actions" had been taken. By delaying the announcement until well after Mr. Bailey had actually resigned and had been replaced, NU officials perhaps also thought that the resignation might appear to be unrelated to any actions taken against Mr. Bailey.
In many ways large institutions are just like individuals when it comes to admitting that they did wrong. It is difficult, even impossible, for them to do that. Just as with individuals, we sense when large institutions are having extreme difficulties in such things and are evading making admissions of wrongdoing. We especially see it in "what they do not do".
Thus it is in the Bailey affair. There is no other plausible explanation for what has happened, except that J. Michael Bailey was forced resign for cause, on account of research misconduct, as Chairman of the Psychology Department at Northwestern. The "tells" are all there, and what else could it be? Especially when Ms. Eagly is reported as saying that Northwestern University's administration may have seen her stepping in as a "good antidote" to Bailey!
Reflecting on Mr. Bailey's future
As a result of these recent actions, Mr. Bailey has lost his bully-pulpit as a department chairman. By being forced to resign as Department Chairman under a dark cloud of misconduct charges, he's also forever lost his chances at being promoted to higher academic leadership positions, such as becoming a Dean of Arts and Sciences somewhere. It is also likely that he has just lost an offset of as much as 10% in his salary (a common inducement and reward for faculty members who take on department chairmanships).
Instead, Mr. Bailey is going to have to work for a living now as a regular faculty member. He's only 48 years old now and has roughly 15 to 20 years to go in his academic career. He'll have to write research proposals, bring in research funding, recruit graduate students, recruit research subjects, do "scientific research" and publish results - and continue to do this for the next 15 to 20 years.
In doing this, he'll be facing ongoing and expanding GLBT community pushback (against his funding, his recruitment of graduate students, his recruitment of research subjects, his publications, etc.). How he thinks he'll get gay male subjects for his research on homosexuality (which has been his only career activity) is beyond us, since he has been widely exposed as being into homosexual eugenics. Perhaps he'll do this by quietly hiding his research participation as a non-principal investigator under other faculty members' primary research proposals, and maybe get some support that way?
Also, just imagine how Mr. Bailey will look to coming generations of university students who attend his "sex courses", and who learn about his rampant defamations and ridiculing of trans women, and of his personal attacks on any women who dared criticize his scientific positions. Do you think that this is going to make him seem "really cool" to those coming generations of students?
Visualizing how this is all likely to play out, it wouldn't be surprising to see Mr. Bailey fade into academic ignominy as a "teaching professor" over the coming years, as his research career sinks into decline and he's forced to take on more teaching duties and departmental service work. Of course he can still make pronouncements about transsexualism and homosexuality even as a teaching professor, but we and all his academic colleagues will know that these are mere ideological statements of a fading academic, and not the result of current "scientific research".
Furthermore, Mr. Bailey is likely to increasingly come under pressure as "that weird old transphobe" amongst the more savvy coming generations of students at NU, many of whom will wonder what mind-problems triggered Bailey to go on his anti-transsexual quest in the first place. In the end, he may find it best to take a teaching position at some southern, religiously-conservative college where his thinking will find better resonance with coming generations of students.
In this Mr. Bailey can take some comfort, and find some support, amongst his little clique of ideologically like-minded colleagues, i.e., Anne Lawrence, Ray Blanchard, Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, W. Arune, John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, etc. However, Mr. Bailey's projected rise to scientific fame is over, as he is now forced to resign from his leadership position, doing so in total silence, with no explanation and in obvious disgrace.
The dark cloud still hanging over Northwestern's Psychology Department
The Psychology Department at NU must now live with the legacy of having spawned some of the most hate-filled, unethically-generated junk science to come out of any U.S. university in recent memory. As a result of Mr. Bailey's tenure as Department Chairman, a very dark cloud now hangs over NU's psychology department, and it is one that will not easily be dispelled.
We know of no faculty member or graduate student in Psychology at NU who did other than support Mr. Bailey's attacks on trans women. No one there made any criticisms of Mr. Bailey's "scientific" positions. The psychology faculty members circled the wagons around Mr. Bailey during the investigation of his misconduct, and the department's graduate students even made arrogantly dismissive and ad-hominem attacks on trans women who had dared to criticize Mr. Bailey or file complaints against his misconduct.
We sense that something is terribly wrong with the culture of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University. It appears to be a culture where an elite "priesthood" of science can make pronouncements based not on evidence but only on inner speculations, and then by assertion proclaim these ideological positions to be scientific facts. It is a culture where no one outside the "priesthood" dare criticize the "priests" lest they be declared mentally ill. These cultural characteristics are not just local to Northwestern University, but are endemic across much of modern academic psychology, and are well characterized by Prof. Joan Roughgarden in her essay "Psychology Perverted".
The new department chair, Alice Eagly, has quite a job on her hands because of the legacy left by Mr. Bailey. Does Ms. Eagly recognize the incredibly dark cloud that now overhangs her department? And if so, can she figure out how to dispel it? We really do hope so.
One thing we suggest is that Northwestern's Psychology Department faculty members would be well-advised to read Joan Roughgarden's essay and then read the response by a group of UK academic psychologists who go on to recommend ways in which research involving gender minorities can be more humanely and respectfully conducted.
A Quiet Victory against our tormentors
The events surrounding this resignation must be causing acute embarrassment to Mr. Bailey's home institution (Northwestern), his funding agency (NIH) and his publisher (NAS/NAP) right now. Their embarrassment, their concerns over loss of institutional credibility, and their collective inability to admit any wrongdoing is seen in their silence and their cover-up of the investigation results. Moreover, the collective silence of these elite institutions speaks volumes about what has happened. Their circling of the wagons and dashing into the closet of silence is ever so telling of their feelings of guilt, shame and denial about it all.
When the investigation began, many trans women were closeted in stealth out of shame, fear and embarrassment over how society viewed them. However, as the investigation unfolded, more and more of these women came out of hiding and joined in to help the investigation - sensing that the tables were finally about to be turned on the academics who've tormented us for decades in some cases (McHugh, Blanchard, Bailey, Lawrence, Zucker, LeVay, et al).
And that is exactly what has happened: The tables have been turned.
The cloud of shame, fear and embarrassment has been moved out from over the trans community, and has been placed instead over the heads of our tormentors and their supporting institutions, who must now learn to live under such a cloud.
Where initially Mr. Bailey claimed that we were trying to "silence him" or "censor him" by censuring and criticizing his book, he now hides under a cloud of self-imposed censorship, ashamed and afraid of revealing any details of the actions NU has taken against him. We have always been against such censorship, and this applies not only to Mr. Bailey's book but also to the results of the investigation into his research misconduct. In the end, Mr. Bailey has been forced into silence and it is the results of the investigation that have been "censored" - not by us, but by his own hand and by the institution that houses him.
As a result of these recent events, Mr. Bailey now stands as an object lesson to all academics who might be tempted to ridicule and pathologize the lives and identities of transsexual women, whether in the service of some ideological position, or out of a need to "write a paper or a book about something". The best advice is "Don't go there". There is no percentage in ridiculing and defaming large emergent minority groups, especially ones that are rapidly finding their voice and honing their capabilities to collectively fight back against bigotry and defamation.
Mr. Bailey's forced resignation as Chairman of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University thus signals a quiet but very major victory in trans women's struggle against ideological defamations by biased, bigoted academics.
As Andrea James has said, the Bailey investigation was "a defining moment in our history". This unprecedented victory by the trans community will have an impact far into the future.
This page is part of Lynn Conway's "Investigation into the publication of J. Michael Bailey's book on transsexualism by the National Academies"
From University of Michigan website, no date listed
Northwestern University Psychology Professor J. Michael Bailey Looks into Queer Science
By: Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser
On a book tour last spring and summer, Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey gave his audiences a sampling of recent scientific thinking about sexual and gender identity.
After playing audio recordings of four men's voices, Bailey asked: Which is gay? The crowds inevitably picked out the voice with exact articulation and lispy "S" sounds. Precisely! Bailey cheered.
His point: Determining somebody's sexual orientation is just that easy, just that obvious.
Needless to say, Bailey's brand of "queer science" has not met with cheers from GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) activists — nor from many fellow scholars, who see his studies as attempts to lend scientific credence to age-old stereotypes.
But Bailey does have company. Many of those who praised his recent book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, belong to a private cyber-discussion group of a neo-eugenics outfit, the Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI).
This exclusive group of academics, race scientists and right-wing journalists — along with a reported handful of liberals — exchanges thoughts about "differences in race, sex and sexual orientation" for a chilling purpose: promoting and studying "artificial [genetic] selection."
The Man Who Would Be Queen is only the latest in a series of controversial studies and articles by HBI members, many of whom are bent on overturning the most widely held psychological and scientific views of gender, sexual identity and race.
But Bailey's book has brought negative publicity to this "anti-PC" movement, both because of Bailey's controversial conclusions and because most of the transgendered women profiled in his book say they never knew they were going to be written about.
In November, Northwestern launched a full-scale investigation of Bailey, who chairs the prestigious university's psychology department, to probe his handling of transgendered women he was supposed to be counseling — but was allegedly using as unwitting research subjects.
Anjelica Kieltyka, a Chicago artist whose personal history is a prominent part of The Man Who Would Be Queen, filed the first complaint with the university last spring. Like other subjects in the book, she says she was never informed that Bailey was going to write about her.
In fact, she sent several others of the book's subjects to Bailey — friends who needed his help in obtaining mandatory approval for sex-reassignment surgery.
Kieltyka likens Bailey's "science" to the infamous syphilis experiments performed on unwitting black men at the Tuskegee Institute. "At the beginning of the last century, blacks were expendable human beings to be experimented on without their knowledge," she says.
"For Bailey and his allies, we transsexuals are just their guinea pigs."
Equally disturbing, to Kieltyka and others, are the conclusions Bailey reached. Based on his allegedly unauthorized interviews and on discussions with a few other people he met in bars, Bailey determined that transsexuals (the term for transgendered people who surgically change their gender) are "especially motivated" to shoplift, "especially well-suited to prostitution," and "not very successful at finding men willing to commit to them."
The transgender community is especially galled by Bailey's diagnosis of their "condition." The American Psychiatric Association and the vast majority of scholars agree on "gender identity disorder," a medical term for people convinced they were born the wrong gender.
Bailey signs on with his reported fellow HBI member, sex researcher Ray Blanchard, who contends that transgendered people are actually either homosexual or autogynephilic, a term for men aroused by the idea of themselves as women. Bailey says autogynephilics suffer from paraphilia, a set of "unusual sexual preferences" that includes necrophilia, pedophilia and bestiality.
The upshot, says University of Michigan professor emeritus Lynn Conway, is clear: "Bailey has stereotyped us and portrayed us as alien creatures, just as racist scientists did to blacks in earlier eras."
Among some of Bailey's reported HBI cohorts, that racist science of old is still just as alive and well as their current sex research. The Institute's main activity appears to be an "invitation-only" online discussion list for "a small, elite and eclectic mix of experts."
According to a list posted on HBI's Web site until last summer, this "elite" includes:
· Jean-Phillippe Rushton, a prominent researcher on black genetic inferiority who is president of a pro-eugenics hate group, the Pioneer Fund;
· Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, which purported to show black and Latino intellectual inferiority;
· Kevin MacDonald, a professor at California State University at Long Beach who has written several books about supposed Jewish strategies to subvert "Euro-American" culture; and
· Gregory Cochrane, a physicist who has suggested the existence of a genetic "gay germ."
These ideas about race and sex have not been limited to the world of academia. The HBI also includes several right-wing journalists who help popularize their theories — and promote their books.
The most prominent cheerleader for Bailey and the other HBI researchers is the man who started the HBI: Steve Sailer, a United Press International reporter and frequent contributor to the anti-immigration Web site, VDARE.com.
Like Bailey, Sailer refused to respond to questions, telling the Intelligence Report "tough noogies." Also like Bailey, he has pushed the idea that there's a genetic basis for homosexuality — making it a "disease" that could eventually be eradicated.
"It's radically unfashionable to call homosexuality a disease," Sailer noted this August on VDARE.com (see Keeping America White). But that doesn't stop Sailer, who fashions himself a bold thinker willing to confront taboo subjects.
The personal Web site maintained by the man behind the Human Biodiversity Institute, www.isteve.com, provides a different window into Sailer's way of thinking.
The site is dominated by crude racial and gender stereotypes as Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for her muscles, claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look "less masculine" than other men.
Salier also invokes the spirit of his friend Bailey when he claims to have found the real reason Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election. He chalks it all up to a lisp that makes the former vice president "sound prim, even homosexual."
From the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, Winter 2003 issue, December 31, 2003