Men writing on gender issues: Beware!

Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2007-08-21 13:44

Story here. Excerpt:

'Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.

The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women.
...
The hostilities began in the spring of 2003, when Dr. Bailey published a book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” intended to explain the biology of sexual orientation and gender to a general audience.

...
Dr. Dreger is the latest to arrive at the battlefront. She is a longtime advocate for people born with ambiguous sexuality and has been strongly critical of sex researchers in the past. She said she had presumed that Dr. Bailey was guilty and, after meeting him through a mutual friend, had decided to investigate for herself.

...she concluded that the accusations against the psychologist were essentially groundless.
...
“The bottom line is that they tried to ruin this guy, and they almost succeeded,” Dr. Dreger said.
...
“That was the worst blow of all, that we didn’t get much support” from Northwestern, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate student of Dr. Bailey’s at the time, and now a lecturer at Northwestern. “They were quite scared and not very professional, I thought.”

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Comments

The topic could have been anything really having to do with "the sexes" or the concept of gender. It could have been research on ordinary heterosexuals, homosexuals of either sex, people into BDSM, whatever. In this case it was on transgendered male-to-females. But anything about gender/sexuality a man writes (in particular a heterosexual one) that is not touting a certain exclusive POV will result in a full-court press on the author. That's the point here.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2007-08-21 13:47

The transgender community can be divided into two camps, tranvestites and transexuals, with a large number of people who are confused about which they are. Transexuals generally consider themselves to be women trapped in men's bodies while most transvestites wouldn't be too uncomfortable with "an erotic fascination with themselves as women". The two groups are capable of working together but there is also a certain amount of antagonism between them, particularly on the part of transexuals who view transvestites as being frivolous.

It sounds to me like this researcher has made the mistake of lumping the two groups together and ascribing similar motivations to them. I can't think of anything that would piss off a transexual more. The furor was probably caused by some angry transexuals who were on the warpath. Other than that I wouldn't read too much into it.

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Submitted by Eviltwin on Tue, 2007-08-21 17:42

The general public's perception of the university campus as a tranquil, laid-back sanctuary for the tenured elites should be thoroughly dispelled by this account of academic warfare among the brahmin classes.

There has always been passionate disputes among academics, who are, at their finest seeking to expand human knowledge through scientific and (even) social scientific inquiry that adheres to a code of logic, discourse, and validity.

Along came feminism, with its "women's ways of knowing" -- P.C.-speak for the dismissal of the Evil Patriarchal adherence to logic and objectivity... i.e. 700 years of academic and scientific history.

Now, as we are all too familiar (recall Pres. Summers, pilloried at Harvard and replaced by an arch-feminist?), there is an ideological P.C. gestapo on every campus, and while they wave the flag of respecting diversity, they do anything but that in their quest to outlaw alternative modes of thought and speech.

Interesting to read that government funding agencies are advising graduate student scholars to "keep their distance" from a social scientist asking uncomfortable, un-P.C. questions!

The real curriculum?

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Submitted by Roy on Tue, 2007-08-21 21:27