Can Professors Say the Truth? (Michael Bailey and Alice Dreger respond to Joan Roughgarden)

Michael Bailey and Alice Dreger have responded to Joan Roughgarden’s KQED appearance and her blog post. The NY Times article. Dreger’s paper. Bailey’s book.

In her KQED appearance, Roughgarden said that Bailey’s book was “fraudulent” because it used the word science in its title. Here’s how she said it:

The bottom headline to the cover of Bailey’s book says “The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism.” But in point of fact, there is no science in the book, as they’re apparently now agreeing. And on the whole, the book, as a work of science, is fraudulent.

Dreger notes “by this logic, the publishers of Science Times of the New York Times, the magazine Science News, and thousands of popularizations of science are also guilty of fraud.”

In Pale Fire, the narrator quotes Erich Fromm’s claim that in Little Red Riding Hood, the red hat is a symbol of menstruation. Does Fromm actually believe this? the narrator wonders. Dreger raises a similar question: Does Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, believe that Science News and the Science Times section are “fraudulent”?

Bailey links to a page with the abstracts of twenty articles by Blanchard related to his typology of transsexuals, which I found very interesting.

4 thoughts on “Can Professors Say the Truth? (Michael Bailey and Alice Dreger respond to Joan Roughgarden)

  1. I still am puzzled given the fact that no one has bothered to try to duplicate Blanchard’s findings. Every single study there is his own, absolutely no peer reviews and most of the studies seem to have been done at the same clinic except for a few exceptions.

    If I were to conduct a study at an inner city clinic versus a suburban I think just about anything would show rather different results due to underlying population variance, yet he only has ONE clinic in his studies, and there is no control group.

    There is also a near complete lack of study by him of FTM’s. At all three colleges I attended, they outnumbered the MTF’s by 4-5times the number and there was far more than 1/56 of them that preferred men sexually. So it doesn’t seem to match my casual observation, hey if Bailey can do it so can I!

  2. I still am puzzled given the fact that no one has bothered to try to duplicate Blanchard’s findings.

    This is incorrect. From the Netherlands (University Medical Center Utrecht and Gender Clinic at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam):

    Transsexual subtypes: Clinical and theoretical significance

    “Within a large transsexual sample (n = 187), homosexual and nonhomosexual subjects were compared on a number of characteristics before the start of treatment… A distinction between subtypes of transsexuals on the basis of sexual orientation seems theoretically and clinically meaningful. The results support the notion that in the two groups different factors influence the decision to apply for sex reassignment.”

    PDF

  3. I’m sure duplication studies of Blanchard will be forthcoming any day now, given how safe the research is for one’s career and how congenial the environment.

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