Dear editor:
You bet. Professor Bailey’s “lots of similar cases” were a half dozen Hispanics he met in bars in Chicago. That’s it. He threw out of the “sample” the one woman who was working as a real estate broker rather than in the sex trades. Don’t let facts get in the way of the ST (remember: Silly Theory) that such people are motivated by sex, sex, sex. The “commonalities” are derived from biased samples, ignoring most of the evidence, the evidence for instance of personal testimony or common sense or accurate accounting. The “aggregates” with which Bailey’s Canadian guru works are a few dozen people required to believe the ST to be allowed to change genders: that’s how the Clarke Institute in Toronto works: vee have vays of making you believe. It’s how Bailey works too. (He is accused of having sex with a member of his “sample,” by the way, something Rodkin knew but did not report; the Chronicle of Higher Education reported it last Friday.) Bailey got the women in his “sample” to spill their guts by promising to write them a letter for their surgery. Vee have vays of making you testify. I can tell you it is not science.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Bailey defends himself from the charge of being a homo- and transphobe by noting that his sex research has attracted unfavorable notice from some conservatives–who don’t like any government-funded research into who gets horny from what. He doesn’t mention (Rodkin does) that the right wing loves his opinions about homosexual men. And Bailey claims that he explicitly says in the book that he favors transsexuals. Uh-huh. It would be as though he spoke of heterosexual women thus: “They are driven by sex, sex, sex. But I favor them. They are inclined to enter prostitution. But I favor them. They need professional supervision. But I favor them. They are crazy fetishists. But I favor them.” In the article Bailey’s MO is well illustrated by the way he defends keeping gender crossing close to pedophilia in the manual of mental “disorders.” Heh, there’s nothing “immoral or harmful” about gender crossing at an advanced age, but there are “scientific reasons” for speaking of pedophilia in the same breath. Sure.
Deirdre McCloskey
