I watched some of this Flash art. I especially liked Scene3.

Kaiping Peng, a friend of mine who is a professor at Berkeley, recently said to me that professors have an unusual place in our society: They are expected to tell the truth. Hardly anyone else is, he said. But what happens when they do?

The most impressive professorial truth-telling in my lifetime has been The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003) by Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern. It’s mainly about male homosexuals but it also discusses male-to-female transsexuals, not all of whom are homosexual. The “controversy” — actually a defamation campaign — after its publication is described in an excellent new article by Alice Dreger, another Northwestern faculty member.

The serious truth-telling in the book is in the chapters about transsexuals, in which Bailey brought into public view the ideas of Ray Blanchard, a Toronto researcher. Blanchard had proposed that there are two types of transsexuals: homosexual and autogynephilic — in other words, that all or almost all transsexuals fall into one of these two categories. I’m going to call them Type 1 (homosexual) and Type 2 (autogynephilic). Both are men who become women or who want to become women; but they are otherwise quite different. There are many surface differences — so many that it is no surprise that, as Bailey says, the two types almost never mix socially. Type 1 appear far more like other women than Type 2, who sometimes resemble men wearing dresses. As children, Type 1 acted feminine; Type 2 did not. Type 1 often work in occupations full of women, such as beautician and hairstylist; Type 2 usually work in male-dominated professions, such as policeman, truck driver, scientist, engineer, and computer programmer. Type 1 usually start living as a female before age 25; Type 2 usually start much later, after age 40. Type 2 have usually been married (to a woman); Type 1 have not.

Blanchard proposed that these surface differences derive from a difference in motivation. Type 1 transsexuals are sexually attracted to men; changing their sex will help them attract men. (They prefer straight men to homosexual men.) Type 2 transsexuals are sexually aroused by thinking of themselves as a woman; this is why they seek sex-change surgery.

Blanchard’s typology, well-known to sex researchers, had not reached the public when Bailey’s book was published. “When I have tried to educate journalists who have called me as an expert on transsexualism, they have reacted uncomfortably,” wrote Bailey. “One said: “We can’t put that in a family newspaper.”

From a review in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review:

His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives.

“He” is Clarence Thomas. “Yet”, huh? There should be a rhetorical term for this: self-destructive.

From The Theory of the Leisure Class:

As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found . . . is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.

Much of my first year in college I spent reading Veblen. It seemed fresh and smart then; it seems fresh and smart now.