Etiologies of Transness and Empiricisms of Sexuality (or, what is the deal with J. Michael Bailey?)

Some of you may already know who J. Michael Bailey is. For the uninitiated, he is a professor of psychology at Northwestern most (in)famous for the claims made in a text entitled The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (2003) regarding gayness as congenital and MTF transness as either a variant of male homosexuality or the manifestation of a psycho-sexual orientation he terms ‘autogynephilia’ – that is, a sexual interest in having a female body of one’s own. This text spawned a veritable torrent of argument within and across sexological, trans, and more generalized academic communities, with some of the most vociferous opponents of Bailey’s work being well-known trans academics Deirdre McCloskey and Lynn Conway (who provides a large compendium of sources documenting the various debates here). Bioethicist, intersex activist, and medical historian Alice Dreger wrote a long account of the entire controversy that’s definitely worth taking a look at (note: it’s a defense of Bailey, primarily on the grounds of academic freedom).

You might know of J. Michael Bailey on account of another, more recent scandal: on February 21, 2011, as part of his regularly scheduled post-class, not-for-credit roundtables/discussions/labs related to the material taught in his 600-seat Human Sexuality course, he allowed two guest presenters to perform a sex act involving a phallus attached to a chainsaw engine (a device called, colloquially, a “f**k-saw”). A gentleman presenter wielded the device, a lady (self-identified exhibitionist) was brought to orgasm in front of the 100+ students who had decided to stay for the discussion. Apparently, the demonstration was impromptu, a response to student inquiry about the supposed fallacy of female orgasm (edit: female ejaculation, rather. Thanks, Scu!) – an empirical counter-proof, if you will. Here’s the NY Times article on the event.

I’m definitively not interested in defending or chastising Bailey’s actions (on moral grounds, nor in the name of freedom of research). What I find striking about his work is the fact that – in the first instance – it’s considered news at all that one might derive pleasure from the transformations undergone by their body. Why is it that Bailey feels the need to establish a coherent and normative etiology for queer sexualities and embodiments in the first place? Why is it that no one – his detractors or defenders – seems to take issue with what seems to be his inability to think about pleasure, embodiment, and becoming in anything remotely approaching a singular manner? Similarly – why is it news that female ejaculation exists? Moving beyond the detail of Bailey’s research, and even beyond his motivations for embarking upon it, I suppose I take issue with the very epistemological grounding of it. The scandal of his research is predicated upon a deep erotic conservatism coupled with a perhaps more profound inability to approach sexuality as something other than a set of subjective properties, something one is or has. The methodology of Bailey’s sexology is thoroughly infected with that hoary virus of Baconian empiricism, thoroughly marked by the inability to form a networked, relational, or diffusive account of his (non!)object of study. The long debates about the moral rectitude of public sex all ignore the more fundamental issue: the notion that sexuality is only about discrete acts, objects, and objectified subjects, and that observation is the privileged mode of coming to understand the ways in which it works.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, alice dreger, Deirdre McCloskey, J. Michael Bailey, Lynn Conway, Northwestern Sex Scandal, queer, The Man Who Would Be Queen