Continuing our voluminous correspondence (here, here, here, here, and here), Deirdre McCloskey wrote again:
Dear Professor Roberts:
Yup. [In answer to my question “In your last letter, by ‘self-experimentation’ did you mean dress as a woman?”] That should be obvious to you. That it’s not, and that you sneer at the idea, is indicative. No one who has not actually tried to pass in the other gender has any idea what it is like not to pass, how dangerous and embarrassing it is. No one who has not tried the experiment can have any idea how important it is to have nose jobs and the like. It’s exactly out of such non-self-experimentation, and the lack of real empathy it implies, that the God-wants-you-to-be-thus, Clarke Institute torturing comes.
I don’t remember our discussion about Crossing.
You think Bailey’s book will be a powerful force for toleration? I suppose you’ve actually looked at the evidence, right? You’ve consulting the blogs, and you’ve read the hate mail? And your conclusion is. . . what? That a wave of transphobic filth stimulated by your blog and Carey’s article will lead, somehow, to the promised land? You have here a questionable social theory, but let’s hope you’re right.
Disagreement, as you should well know from your own self-experimentation, is not the same as “harassment.” Nor is holding people to ethical standards in their scientific behavior. We didn’t “do” anything to Bailey. We exercised our rights as free citizens and as ethical scientists. That you were “appalled” shows that you got fired up by Carey’s article (just as he wished) and didn’t bother inquire—as you easily could have done (you keep making a point of our previous e-mail relationship) but most assuredly did not before shooting off your ill-considered blog—with the principals. You wanted the story to be Bailey = Galileo, and were not going to let such silly things as evidence stand in the way. You’ve stoutly defended it ever since, with no heed to the evidence.
I’m not impressed that you praise Holocaust deniers, or that you give standing to naive creationism. It just shows what is evident in your defense of Bailey, that you are willing to encourage the worst in our society in aid of a simpleton’s version of “fairness.” You would have been “fair” to Goebbels and the Inquisition, the Ku Klux Klan and the first Chinese emperor. Your position of “Let them have uncriticized speech to advocate idiotic and harmful proposals” depends on people like Lynn and me exercising our free speech to criticize such people. You would be the first person the Nazis you defend would come for. No, actually, on second thought, you would be the second, after me.
Sincerely,
Deirdre
I replied:
Dear Professor McCloskey:
I don’t “sneer” at the self-experimentation you propose. It has a long and admirable history.
I did not get “fired up by Carey’s article.” My blog posts on this topic appeared before his article.
I mentioned our correspondence about Crossing in my blog posts about this.
I didn’t “praise Holocaust deniers” — I just think they shouldn’t be harassed or silenced.
I don’t mind criticism of Bailey — of course not. I mind attempts to ruin him — which is what your and Conway’s absurd complaints to authorities were.
Sincerely,
Seth Roberts
She wrote again:
Dear Professor Roberts:
Let’s make this a convergent series, by undertaking to answer in half the space as the last one. Your only–only–argument against our complaints about Bailey’s behavior is to assert repeatedly, unadorned by evidence, that they were “absurd.” Northwestern University did not think them absurd. They fired Bailey from the chairmanship; they investigated him for a year. The lawyer we consulted did not think them absurd; nor did the state licensing bureau. Alas, the statute of limitation had run out.
We did nothing to “silence” anyone. Get this: we are not the government. We argued with Bailey. We complained about his behavior. None of that constitutes “silencing,” unless indeed poor, dear Bailey is too feeble for this world.
Regards,
Deirdre
I replied:
Dear Professor McCloskey:
Please see my earlier letter for a detailed explanation, including evidence, of why your complaints were absurd. No one has ever gone to a mugger and asked to be mugged. That’s my evidence for your State of Illinois complaint. And no one has ever been considered a research subject because they were in a story in a trade book. That’s my evidence for your Northwestern complaint.
When you say that Bailey left the chairmanship because of your complaints, you are wrong.
“We did nothing to ‘silence’ anyone.” If you don’t understand the term chilling effect, we are again at a curious point in intellectual history.
Sincerely,
Seth Roberts
She wrote again:
Dear Professor Roberts:
Anyone who is chilled by being challenged intellectually, I suppose you agree, doesn’t belong in intellectual life.
Anyone who is chilled by being investigated for wrongdoing when he’s done wrong is just a moral coward, as I reckon Bailey to be. You don’t understand The Letter if you don’t think the women were mugged. You’ve not walked in those shoes, or bothered to find out. You haven’t read Bailey’s book if you think the women were not “research subjects.” He called them that, and bragged about it. After the book came out he said, oh, it was “only a trade book. Not science.”
Regards,
Deirdre
I replied:
Dear Professor McCloskey,
If you believe that Bailey should be punished for helping those who came to him for help, you have a most unusual and unfortunate view of how people should treat each other.
If you can’t tell the difference between a trade book and a research monograph, we are again at a curious place in intellectual history.
Sincerely,
Seth Roberts
On her website, McCloskey includes almost all our correspondence. The omissions are trivial, with one exception: She doesn’t include this email from me, in spite of including her reply to it. Curious!
I wrote to her about the omission:
Dear Deirdre:
Thanks for posting our correspondence on your website. I too am glad we had it. A tiny flaw: You omit my email below (“If you believe…”).
Seth
No answer. One of the few letters from me she didn’t answer. She continued writing to me. I believe she omitted that email from her website because it makes things too clear.
“That a wave of transphobic filth stimulated by your blog and Carey’s article will lead, somehow, to the promised land? ” ??????
How interesting that she would suggest that transphobia would be stimulated by your blog rather than by HER OWN ACTIONS.
Prior to witnessing this exchange, I had within my own limited knowledge deep respect for two transgendered women within my own field.
I continue to hold this respect, however now irreparably paralleled with revulsion for a handful of transgendered women who have chosen to act with immature, vile contempt towards those to refuse to “walk in their shoes.”
One of the transgendered women for whom I continue my utmost esteem is Wendy Carlos, a woman who burgeoned her career unfettered by her sex change, and who I deeply respect for her contribution to classical music as a PERSON.
To be honest, McCloskey’s reasoning in the last paragraph starting with “I’m not impressed that you praise Holocaust deniers…” truly frightens me.
Could chilling effect be any more transparent?
There is an inherent inability to communicate our point, and this isn’t necessarily your fault, or anyone’s really.
We say that Bailey’s book offends and degrades us. That is our opinion, you say it does not and that he is ‘friendly’ to us, that is similarly your opinion. We do not share that opinion. You are not transsexual, you cannot know how his book makes us feel.
The book makes me feel depressed, it ruined my life, it made me homeless, it made my family turn against me. Have you ever had a book that did this to you? If not, then you can’t expect to understand how it makes us feel.
This book RUINED my life. I don’t know how I can make that any clearer, there aren’t any other words that I can use, except to say the same ones over and over again. Bailey’s book forced me on the street and I had to live out of my car for three or four weeks, I don’t even remember. I had to drop out of school, I had to bed for spare change until I could buy enough gas to get to a friend’s house states away. I don’t even really know how long I was homeless anymore, see the days blur by when you don’t have a bed anymore.
My mother is now in the hospital because of ovarian cancer and I cannot visit her, because they won’t let me near her because I’m a filthy disgusting hedonist, all of which they got from Bailey’s book. The only book that covered transsexuals they read, I was of course kicked out before I could offer something more uplifting and less degrading.
Knowledge and ideas don’t ruin peoples’ lives.
People ruin peoples’ lives.
It is amazing the damage that people will do to avoid confronting the truth in front of their faces. Rachel’s parents are blameless, Rachel is blameless, and there was never anything but love, trust and mother’s milk in the Owens’ home…but the book is Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds.
So Bailey must be ruined, because he…wrote a book.
Let me add two cents to this discussion:
1. One of my students, a lesbian, was kicked out of her house because she was a lesbian. No book was involved.
2. Someone in McCloskey’s family — I think her sister — wanted to have McCloskey committed to a mental institution. No book was involved. This was long before Bailey’s book.
I am certainly not blameless Tom, I could have been more tactful about my life’s decisions. My father was certainly not blameless, he wanted to kick me out at 16 over the matter, the only thing holding it back was mom. My mother believed me when I told her I should have been born a girl, especially when I was diagnosed with Klinefelter’s, but only until she read that book.
Bailey’s book completely changed my mother’s opinion of me, it was black and white for her, she rapidly grew more distant. So as soon as I was 18 and some change, I was kicked out, written out of the wills and I think they even tried to get restraining orders, but I have no intent of ever going back anyway after what they said.
Am I bitter? Yes, but I’m not going to weep tears when Bailey’s tenured professorship is rocked a little bit when I never even got the chance to defend myself, he at least has had that luxury. I am declared scum, I was molested, abused and beaten and the cops didn’t give a damn because of who I am.
Nothing he said was in the slightest ‘friendly’ to bettering my life to the uneducated masses. Maybe to college-educated folks, they can read the book like Professor Roberts does, but the unwashed masses that read it just looked at me with scorn and only remembered the comments that “some people might consider negative” as Seth put it.
As angry as I sound, it’s not so much WHAT Bailey says but HOW he says it that has many of us so angry.
I’m queer. I’ve known transgendered people. I’ve known people whose lives were ruined by the circumstances of their orientation. I worked for a GLBT newspaper, and I know from the battles our editor raged the power of words to heal or hurt. I understand what you are saying, Rachel, about Bailey: how something is said can create great gulfs in understanding what is said.
I was once told by my own editor that bisexuals are not really queer; that we sit on the fence and make a bad reputation for everyone else in the community, that we “just don’t count.” But those are just WORDS, Rachel. I chose to call him a bigot and call him out, but I never once tried to shut down his right to that opinion. Instead I set out to prove him wrong and a year later the newspaper was not publishing articles about the “gay community” but the “GLBT community.” I could have quit, but we agreed to disagree and eventually he realized he was wrong. We changed the language and thereby changed perception, but to be honest, his perception had to change first, and I did not accomplish that by setting out to destroy him.
You simply can NOT say that Baily ruined your life. That’s absurd. If your mother chose to read that book and that book ONLY and then believe that the worst of it which he presented was the truth about her own child’s life, then for ghod’s sake I have to say: You mother ruined your life.
I think your efforts would be better spent showing how powerful a person you are by standing up for your rights and creating a future of hope for the other “T”s of the world as a proud role model, rather than hurling your anger at tearing down Baily. His work will rise or fall of it’s own accord, so let go of that. If he’s really, really wrong, then your job is to prove that, and you will not do so by waging a campaign to silence him.
::::KBS, been there, done that.
I guess that, fortunately, unwashed masses aren’t much for reading books… especially books written by college professors. In any case, the unwashed masses have a tendency to dislike science and discovery in general. The unwashed masses tend to get angry when scientists write about evolution, but biologists are not about to buy into creationism and abandon the study of species evolution because it makes the unwashed masses angry. Gender science and research is no different.
As for Bailey’s research not making your life better, who said Bailey’s job was to make your life better? Researchers are interested in investigating, generating hypotheses and attempting to test hypotheses. Ideas and discoveries that come about along the way can be put to good use or bad use and often to no use at all. Researchers don’t subject the exploration process to some litmus test requiring that their investigations have some tangible benefit to some person who thinks they are entitled to such benefit.
As for your mother’s reaction to Queen, if in reading Bailey’s book she found some reason to throw you out of the house, I’d say that your mother must be both stupid and cruel. According to your report, you would more likely fit Blanchard’s transgendered homosexual type. If this is so, Bailey would speculate that it is probably due to biological (inborn) factors (this doesn’t mean Kleinfeldter’s isn’t a factor) and possibly to subsequent experience of adversity including early adversity and psychopathology in the family. Why would your mother think Kleinfelter’s makes it okay for you to be transgendered, but somehow Bailey’s (Blanchard’s) typology would change everything? The only thing added to the mix is the suggestion that, perhaps, your parents might have been lousy, disturbed parents. In that case maybe your mother should have thrown your father out of the house rather than you. Better yet, both parents should have started treating you with kindness, love and respect.
NOTHING Bailey has written would suggest that you should have been thrown out of your parents’ house. Frankly, your parents sound awful, but science is not going to adjust exploration down to a level digestible for your awful, worthless, stupid unwashed parents. The rest of us have rights in this life and those rights are not going to be defined by your ignoramous family.
It is terribly sad that you have had such a difficult life through no fault of your own. You shouldn’t blame yourself for how you expressed yourself. When we are kids facing adversity, it is the job of our parents to appreciate the difficult challenges we face. This isn’t something the unwashed masses seem to be very good at doing. Perhaps you would have expressed yourself better if your parents hadn’t been such asses. Again, that isn’t because of Bailey.
It is terrible that you’ve suffered what you’ve suffered but professor Bailey is not to blame. Your low-life parents decided to sever there relationship with their child because they are bigoted, narrow-minded and probably mentally disturbed people.