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Dan Seligman on transsexualism
Dan Seligman is a Forbes columnist and member of the Human Biodiversity Institute started by Steve Sailer. As with other writer members, he's reviewed Bailey for his magazine. The 13 October 2003 edition carried Seligman's praise for his crony. His commentary revolves primarily around visibly gender variant transgender women, several of whom are at the very fringes of social acceptance, and some of whom may not even meet the standard clinical threshold of transsexual. Footnotes were added by me. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2003/1013/068.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2003/1013/068_2.html Companies, People, Ideas Transsexuals And the Law Dan Seligman, 10.13.03 Are people who change their gender entitled to the protection of antidiscrimination
laws? Thorny questions arise when judges deal with this topic. Remember Christine Jorgensen? [1] The former George Jorgensen
was the world's first transsexual, garnered endless tabloid headlines ("Ex-GI
Becomes Blonde Beauty"--New York Daily News, Dec. 1, 1952) and, reluctantly
or otherwise, made a career out of the publicity. Jorgensen died in 1989, and
today there are thousands of gender-crossers in the U.S., most of them male-to-female,
[2] and most living in obscurity. They tend to attract media
attention when a big name is involved, as when Ernest Hemingway's transsexual
son [3] collapsed and died while being held in a women's jail
in Miami two years ago. But they are also getting into the news in a more problematic context: when
there's a row about discrimination. These rows are proliferating furiously.
A Nexis search turns up 625 news stories worldwide over the past three years
that mention "discrimination" in proximity to "transsexual."
The cases tend to start out as exercises in employment law and end up in a metaphysical
never-never land. Are transsexuals a "protected class," as defined
in the sex-discrimination regulations issued under the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
Does a transgenderite take on, for legal purposes, the newly assigned gender?
If not, the courts create some awkward precedents in the even touchier area
of same-sex marriages. In 1998 a transsexual named Christie Lee Littleton sued
a Texas doctor for medical malpractice after her husband died. A Texas appeals
court threw out the case on the ground that Littleton was really a man and therefore
not the widow of the decedent--even though Kentucky had recognized the marriage.
[4] Which bathrooms should transsexuals use? This mundane question has stumped
the Minneapolis City Council ever since a sex-crimes investigator tried to interrogate
a female high school librarian [5] who had been using the ladies'
room but was discovered to have had a sex change. The British tabloids were
running wild this summer with the saga of the five self-proclaimed transsexuals
who were evicted from a pub after they descended en masse on the ladies' room.
They sued the pub owner for discrimination and were backed by Britain's Equal
Opportunities Commission, but they lost their case in court. It emerged that
only one of the five had progressed to the point of surgery. [6] Participation in sports presents several thorny issues, including which locker
room one changes in. But the main question is: Do male-to-female transitioners
have an unfair physical advantage in women's sports? The argument is now raging
in Britain, where the Blair government's sports minister queried the country's
600 governing sports bodies to determine whether they are in compliance with
European Union rules allowing ex-men to participate in women's sports. Americans got a strong whiff of this argument a quarter-century ago. Renée
Richards had been captain of the Yale tennis team when she was Richard Raskind.
In 1977, at age 43, a postsurgery Renée went on the women's tennis circuit
and qualified for the U.S. Open; efforts to keep her out failed after a New
York State Supreme Court ruling. (Richards dropped off the circuit in 1981 and
is now a Madison Avenue pediatric ophthalmologist.) Was her participation unfair
to the other players? Less than they might have thought. A male-to-female gender-crosser
takes heavy doses of female hormones, which reduce muscle mass. Yet there must
have been some residual advantage to her genetic maleness: There were, after
all, no other 43-year-olds competing among the women in the 1977 Open. [7] Still another legal question is whether gender-crossing surgery qualifies for
medical insurance. Earlier this year a Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
upheld P&C Food Markets when its medical plan refused to cover the costs
of a female-to-male transition. [8] The legal uncertainties reflect widespread puzzlement about the basic science.
What is transsexualism's connection to homosexuality? Does it signify mental
illness? The American Psychiatric Association long ago (1973) eliminated homosexuality
from its list of mental disorders, but its fourth edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) still lists "gender
identity disorder," also mystifying to many people. Why does it cause thousands
of Americans to powerfully desire membership in the opposite sex, leading some
subset of this population to undergo transformative genital surgery? A good recently published guide to all these questions is The Man Who Would
Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, by J. Michael Bailey,
46, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University who teaches an undergraduate
course in human sexuality. The book is mostly about effeminate boys and men
and how they got that way, but its concluding chapters zero in on the world
of transsexuals--not all of whom were effeminate. The book has ignited a firestorm
of protest from some transsexuals. This despite the fact that Bailey, himself a standard-model male heterosexual
[9], is warmly sympathetic to gays and transsexuals and argues
persuasively that for the great majority of individuals taking the male-to-female
route, the decision is rational. The size of the transsexual population is itself a matter of controversy, and their propagandists endlessly seek to inflate the numbers. DSM-IV estimates that 1 in 30,000 males (and 1 in 100,000 females) opts for the surgery. Bailey's estimate is 1 in 12,000 males, implying 8,000 gender-crossers now living in the country. Transsexual Lynn Conway--who has been a computer scientist at IBM and is a
professor emeritus at the University of Michigan--is now an activist for the
cause. She says the figure is 30,000 to 40,000. [10] But the transsexuals' attack on the Bailey book is not based on his population
estimates. The main point of the protests is Bailey's explanation of the roots
of gender-crossing. Relying heavily on the work of Ray Blanchard, [11]
who heads the clinical sexology program at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry
in Toronto, Bailey tells us that there are two different, quite distinct types
of male-to-female transsexuals. First is the "classic" homosexual type: the effeminate boy who, from
early childhood, is profoundly convinced that he was meant to be a woman. A
likely but still unproven interpretation of this feeling is that it traces back
to an inadequate dose of male hormones six or seven weeks after conception.
The result could be a young man sexually attracted to other men and gravitating
toward a transsexual solution. The second type bears the label "autogynephilia," a clunky term invented
by Blanchard, who coined it to describe that sizable fraction (perhaps half)
of male-to-female transsexuals that he found to have a different version of
gender identity disorder. They are erotically stimulated not by other men [12],
and not primarily by women, but by the image of themselves as women. Except
for their cross-dressing propensities, these transsexuals tend to lead rather
ordinary heterosexual lives. I spoke recently with an eminent transsexual who Bailey believes to be autogynephilic.
Deirdre McCloskey, 61, is distinguished professor of the liberal arts and sciences
at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a quantitatively oriented Chicago-school
economist, a huge fan of Milton Friedman, and a dazzling writer, who is also
a professor in the university's English and history departments. Until she underwent
the sex change in the mid-1990s, her name was Donald McCloskey, and she was
a cross-dresser with a wife and two grown kids. [13] It is Bailey's impression that the first type--the homosexual gender-crossers--are
relatively indifferent to his book and that the protest emanates mainly from
the autogynephiles. It is possible to understand their rage. The Blanchard diagnosis
is hard to live with: Cross-dressing strikes most Americans as ridiculous, and
its specified erotic role only makes matters worse. McCloskey, for one, is furious
about the book and told the Northwestern newspaper: "He's saying ‘Look,
they're driven by sex, sex, sex. They're men, men, men.'" [14] The Bailey book sheds some much-needed light on the topic of transsexualism. But it is not destined to end the debate, or the lawsuits. Expect this difficult topic to keep judges and equal-opportunity commissions busy for a long while to come. 1. http://www.planetout.com/pno/news/history/archive/jorgensen.html As always, the press feels it's necessary to include her old name. 2. See Lynn Conway's notes on prevalence 3. Dr. Gregory Hemingway appears not to be transsexual, as he continued to live as a male after undergoing feminizing procedures. He was more like a transgenderist with wealth and access to medical technology. There appears to be an interesting correlation with wealthy medical professionals who transition in midlife and have little interest or ability in adjusting to the social role, such as Renee Richards (see below) and Anne Lawrence. For more, please see The Strange Saga of Gregory Hemingway. 4. For details on the Texas Supreme Court's decisions, see: http://christielee.net/ 5. For details on the Debra Davis case, see: http://www.debradavis.org/ Note Seligman's use of the term "sex crimes investigator." 6. The
Publican 15 August 2003: Transsexuals lose discrimination case
7. Dr. Renee Richards has warned other late transitioners like her to avoid her path:
8. Marc Mario lost his case on Mario v. P&C Food Markets
9. All these questions, then an answer: J. Michael Bailey! This is part of Bailey's claim to fame: His are the objective observations of a "single heterosexual male" (p. 141). 10 . Far from propaganda, Professor Lynn Conway takes a compelling look at the issue of prevalence in "How Frequently Does Transsexualism Occur?"
11. Ray Blanchard wrote an obscure transsexual taxonomy favored by conservatives and those who identify as more than "just crossdressers," in which they are suffering from a sex-fueled mental illness Blanchard calls "autogynephilia." 12. Note "other men." Seligman clearly considers women like Deirdre McCloskey (diagnosed as an "autogynephile" later), to be men. 13. Note Seligman's use of Dr. McCloskey's male name again and second diagnosis of transvestic fetishism (crossdressing). 14. The old "quotation of a paraphrase" trick to make it look as if Dr. McCloskey is saying "sex sex sex" and "men men men." All in all, Seligman subtly showed his conservative roots in his 1300-word contribution to the Human Biodiversity cause. I'm sure Bailey and Blanchard are even more pleased than they were with fellow member and professional homophobe John Derbyshire's work for the National Review. From contributors in November 2003: >On to the article references. These all smack of "shoot the wounded"
to me:
Click here: October 1998: Bracey <http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kbra9810.htm>
---------------------------- It seems that political correctness has caught up with Fortune magazine, the
formerly hard-nosed American business publication. Daniel Seligman, outspoken
columnist on matters touching IQ and race, among others, has been axed as a
regular columnist. Seligman wrote the excellent A Question of Intelligence(1992). |
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