The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey, about male homosexuality, is easily the best book about psychology ever written. It is emotional, persuasive, non-obvious, important, and well-written. Few books manage three of these adjectives. One sign of its emotion, persuasiveness, importance, and non-obviousness is the vilification Bailey underwent for writing it — led by people as smart as Deirdre McCloskey and Lynn Conway. Their campaign against it risked drawing more attention to it, of course. Now you can read it for free.
Can professors say the truth?. My correspondence with Deirdre McCloskey: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. Alice Dreger’s article about the controversy, including a short version of my correspondence with McCloskey.
The (c) is that the violently negative reaction on the part of parents or children, while deplorable, while to my knowledge by no means universal – though I have no idea of its frequency in such cases – is entirely predictable and almost inevitable – at least in a non-violent, repressed, perhaps never mentioned way.
And while the naive young person who thinks that her mother was changed by Bailey’s book may be naive, surely McCloskey is enough of a grown-up to realize that her children might well react that way – not to forgive them, not to wish that they didn’t – but on some level to understand that they would have such a reaction.
The sheer unfeelingness on the part of someone like McCloskey in refusing to acknowledge that Bailey, his opinions, your opinions, etc., have nothing to do with the private tragedy that is being enacted within the McCloskey family (according to her own account) and many others. It’s ironic: from the accounts of the transgendered that one reads, and even in McCloskey’s emails, it is clear that transgendered people experience more than their share of misunderstanding at the hands of others. It’s a pity that they can’t pity and at least inwardly forgive others – their parents or children particularly – for feeling the same way. And it’s a particular kind of blindness to blame one poor shnook for the very human kind of fallibility and unintentional cruelty that they experience at the hands of people who, wrongly, feel themselves betrayed. Bailey, if wrong, surely has something to teach them about how others might feel – if they cared to. Instead, McCloskey and that other, much more dreadful woman, tried to turn what they might have seen as an intellectual sin into a family romance. Refuting him would not be enough – they immediately embarked on the enterprise of trying to get “the authorities” to turn Bailey out of an imagined family.
People don’t need to read Bailey or to find him persuasive to be loathsome. They do quite well on their own, as the amazing behavior of McCloskey demonstrates.