The History of Science Society

Vol. 38, No. 4, October 2009
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In the Service of Galileo’s Ghost: A Short Guide to History, Assault, and Ideology

As part of her 2008-2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, Alice Dreger is writing a manuscript on science and identity politics in the Internet age. In this article, she discusses her experiences – good and bad, activist and academic – that led her to this project, and the threats to both history and science.

Galileo I had another one of those moments when I thought: “They just don’t prepare you for this in graduate school.” In June 2008, I found myself in Cincinnati for the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference, sitting in one of those interchangeable, soulless conference hotels, in the bar at midday, drinking a stiff gin and tonic, and calculating when I’d be sober enough to drive the hell away. A brave and tall and funny transgender woman named Rosa Lee Klaneski was telling me, in her remarkably soothing voice, about how she’d developed the independence of mind and the fortitude of gut to stand up against a panel of other transwomen who’d been assailing me and my work an hour earlier.

I’d had to sit quietly and listen to this panel, a panel that included a Hollywood-based trans-entrepreneur whom the editors insist I identify only as “Madam X” (for reasons that will soon become apparent). Since writing of my young son as my “precious womb turd” – a phrase now turned into a family joke – Madam X, had spent her time mounting Web pages mocking not only my work, but also my appearance. (Trés feminist, non?) At one point in the panel, I heard a young Women’s Studies student next to me say to her friend, “This Dreger woman is terrible!” I whispered to her, “Um, I’m that Dreger woman, and I don’t recognize the person they are describing.” She looked stunned and quietly moved away from me, as if she’d just run into an armed skinhead wanted for murder.

As I listened in the bar to Rosa’s wry and wise remarks about transgender politics and contemporary feminist theory, I realized that her unexpected appearance during the panel’s Q&A reminded me of that big angel who comes crashing through the ceiling in Angels in America. When I had turned to see who from the audience would speak first, and saw it was a tall transwoman, I had assumed I was in for more of the same in terms of utter misrepresentation of my work. So much for my stereotyping. Instead of ganging on, Rosa stood up and said:

Rosa Lee Klaneski, Trinity College. I cite Alice Dreger’s academically-rigorous work all the time in my own work. She doesn’t know who I am but I know who she is. And I am just wondering[...] – and I’m a transgender person myself – what gives any transgender person the right to abrogate someone else’s first amendment right to freedom of speech just because they hold an unpopular minority view? In my opinion [regarding] the person that you are arguing against [i.e., scientist Michael Bailey, my historical subject], I completely agree with you. Bunk. Ridiculous science. And should be classified as such. I got that. What gives us the right to censor [Dreger’s or Bailey’s work] just because we don’t like it?

The objection raised in return was that the panel didn’t constitute censorship. Technically this was true, but anyone with any background on this knew – as Rosa and I did – the intimidation tactics used to try to silence Bailey, me, and others.

The latest had arrived in the form of a note posted on the door of that very meeting room, stating that anyone entering automatically consented to being filmed by the aforementioned panelist, Madam X, and that she could use the film at will. I had the notice removed by a conference organizer before I entered, but I still made sure I said nothing in the session.

After the session dissolved, I went to Rosa and said, “You’re right, I don’t know you, but I want to know you. Can I buy you a drink?” Then, just after we walked out of the session room on our way to cranberry juice with soda water and lime for Rosa and something stronger for me, X came up and towered over me. She said something like, “Alice, honey, I am not done with you. In fact, I haven’t even started with you. I am going to ruin you.” She started naming how she would do it. I stayed upright, but uncontrollable tears ran down my face. And at that point, Rosa crashed through the ceiling again. She stepped between us, and told me (but actually X) that the legal definition of assault did not require physical touch, and that I could call the police right now. That made X go away.

No one tells you the legal definition of assault in graduate school.

Taking on controversial work has been my choice, and knowing full well X’s capabilities, I could have chosen to skip the trip to Cincinnati. But I had grown, by that time, to be consumed by the issues of academic freedom and standards of scholarship. I felt I had to make a stand not in my own name (which seemed, in that identity-politics-crazed environment, hopeless), but in the name of...well, Galileo.

If, during my Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, some had told me that, by the time I reached full professor, I would be rhetorically strung up at the National Women’s Studies Association and, the very next summer, treated as something of a heroine at the Human Behavior & Evolution Society – you know, the sociobiologists – I would have told them they’d been reading my tea leaves in a mirror.

After all, my dissertation and my first book were on the social construction of sex categories, specifically on the theoretic and clinical treatment of people labeled “hermaphrodites” in late 19th- and early 20th-century France and Britain. Through that work, I found myself embroiled in the intersex rights movement, and ended up being one of that movement’s leaders for about a decade. (Among other activities, I helped run the Intersex Society of North America, whose legal address was, for about seven years, my home.) That work made me a queer rights activist, and then a disability rights activist, too, and a steady critic of scientists and clinicians whose work, I argued, harmed people by treating them as pathological merely because they were atypical. My work was (and probably still is) commonly used in Women’s Studies and Queer Studies courses.

What happened?

I took on a new historical project in 2006, one that ultimately made me realize that my allegiance to truth, scholarship, and justice had, for years, been misunderstood as an allegiance to left-wing identity politics.

My research covered the Bailey book controversy. In 2003, J. Michael Bailey, a sex psychology researcher at Northwestern University, published a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. In the book, Bailey supported the work of the researcher-clinician Ray Blanchard who argues that male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism is not primarily about gender identity, as the mainstream media and transgender rights movements would have us believe, but rather about sexuality (eroticism).

Blanchard believes MtF transsexuals divide logically into: (1) “homosexual transsexuals,” meaning MtF people who are sexually attracted to men, and who transition in part to take straight male lovers; and (2) “non-homosexual transsexuals,” who Blanchard calls “autogynephilic,” because this latter group are sexually aroused by the idea of being of becoming women. “Autogynephiles” are gynephilic (attracted mostly to females), but their gynephilia is (at least in part) self-directed. According to Blanchard’s demographic research, virtually all prominent transwomen, particularly the academics would fall into the latter group. Blanchard’s theory is not popular among these women; most who (dare to) express an opinion believe it paints them as sexual perverts rather than people with gender-genital mismatches.

As I documented in my work on the subject, in 2003 three very visible transwomen decided to take it upon themselves to try to “kill” Bailey, the dangerously articulate messenger of Blanchard’s work. Andrea James, Lynn Conway, and Deirdre McCloskey mounted what became an international campaign, organizing formal charges against Bailey, accusing him of, among other things, doing IRB-qualified human subjects research without IRB oversight, writing about subjects without their consent, having sex with a transsexual research subject, and falsifying key parts of his book.

When I took on this project, I thought it would be a he-said/she-said history of communication disconnects involving an insensitive scientist and some mostly well-meaning activists. Instead, I found that Bailey had not committed the crimes attributed to him, and that Conway, James, and McCloskey had reason to know that. I showed that the attacks nearly ruined Bailey’s professional and personal lives, all for the sin of supporting an unpopular theory. It was an ugly history.

My fate since then: false charges lodged with my administration; threats made against my own colleagues; and a powerful take-over of my Internet identity. Just my luck to piss off a population so computer-savvy! Though it does come with occasional comic relief. My favorite moment so far: a transwoman filed a formal complaint with my husband’s dean essentially charging my husband with having had sex with me. (To explain the “logic” behind this would take another 1,000 words.)

Part of me has thought about returning to study dead people; there’s nothing like this kind of experience to turn an historian necrophilic. But first, I’m going to finish a Guggenheim-funded book about science and identity politics in the Internet age. I’m looking at several cases, including Bailey’s and my own twin experiences – my intersex identity activism, wherein I pushed against scientists, and my post-Bailey experience, wherein I’ve been constructed as a privileged academic (true) with an anti-trans-rights, even eugenical agenda (false).

As part of the book project, for the last nine months, I’ve looked at what happened after self-styled “journalist” Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. Tierney charges the late geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon with a host of crimes against the Yanomamö of South America. And I’ve looked at what happened to Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer following their book A Natural History of Rape (death threats); to Elizabeth Loftus when she challenged “recovered memory syndrome” (California Supreme Court case); to Bruce Rind when he co-authored a meta-analysis showing maybe people aren’t quite so harmed by childhood sexual abuse (denounced by an Act of Congress); and to Charles Roselli, who had the dubious honor of finding out what happens when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) teams up with LBGT activists. These odd bedfellows charged Roselli with developing an anti-gay eugenic program via his research on “gay rams.” Bizarrely, Roselli, a mild-mannered animal researcher in Oregon, found himself taken on by none other than Martina Navratilova. Oh, and 20,000 e-mails were sent to Roselli’s university president calling for his firing.

More than one person has suggested I title my book I Am Not Making This Up.

Lacking space for a complete report, let me say what I think is most important for my fellow historians of science to know. First and foremost, we academics are all in danger. Maybe you already know this, but if so, I want you to think about it some more: We live in a world where our work, our identities, and even our values can be reconstructed in utterly crazy ways at the speed of light. The “democratization” of knowledge, enabled by the Internet, has led to a widespread attitude that a peer-reviewed article is not that different from a well-turned blog. And blogs move faster than we possibly can. If you think what happened to me cannot happen to you or your colleagues, think again.

We must reassert the difference between scholarship and other, and do this not only with our students, the media, our elected representatives and our religious leaders, but also with each other. (Paging NWSA.) A disturbing amount of what I see at conferences and even in some journals is plain sloppy in terms of reasoning and language and weak in terms of evidence. We can no longer afford to politely allow those with whom we agree to get by with substandard work. Taking academic freedom seriously must include the responsibility to put solid reasoning and evidence before all else – before ideology, before allegiances, before our desire to seem or to not seem challenging. (Quick bottom line application: Ward Churchill must go; see the outstanding report by the Colorado faculty on what he actually did in his “scholarship.”)

And good news: as I’ve wandered from discipline to discipline, I feel that historians are way ahead in terms of protection of standards. I’ve become enormously proud of being an historian in the last two years. As I worked on the Neel and Chagnon history, I ran into previous work done by Susan Lindee, John Beatty, Diane Paul; to encounter fellow scholars so committed to evidence, clarity, and honesty is like finding water in the desert.

Historians have not, in my estimation, lost their way amid all the well-intentioned academic politics of the last half-century. As a class, even as we recognize the imperfection of the historical record, the subjectivity of the historian, the inevitable need to look at history in artificially bounded ways, we retain at our core a sense that a good argument is one with good support. To quote my colleague Joel Howell, who helped correct the public record on James Neel, we historians can agree that making shit up is simply not acceptable.

For this reason I believe that historians of science in particular now have an opportunity, perhaps even a duty, to take the lead as these controversies break, to ask the evidentiary questions of who really said, found, and did what, and what the historical context was. By providing this kind of accountability, we have an opportunity to become guardians of the environment in which good science can happen.

I do not suggest that we become handmaidens to science, but rather that we become standard-bearers of quality scholarship (regardless of discipline) – that we reassert often why universities are not corporations; why tenure is necessary for those doing hard inquiry; and why peer review is fundamentally different from the court of public opinion.

As the mainstream press collapses, this role will become ever more important. No longer can we count on good science reporters and excellent investigative journalists to sort out what’s happened. As I’ve worked on this book, I’ve met reporter after reporter who told me she or he wanted to pursue some of what I pursue, but were blocked for lack of time or funding.

I am not suggesting most of us turn to dealing with ongoing scientific controversies. I think it is critically important that most of us deal with the past, in part because it is from these histories of “finished” events that we gain insight about how human knowledge works. But I suggest that we go to the archives fully aware of what’s happening outside our climate-controlled mausoleums. Because, in the end, we can’t live in the archives as if they were bomb shelters outfitted with 50 years’ worth of supplies. We must make sure the world is kept safe for real scholarship – be it history or science.

I feel in the last year, as I never did in graduate school, a true vocation as an historian of science. I feel urgently aware of what is at stake, of what we can (and must) do for the world. Having now experienced the contemporary equivalent of house arrest, on many days I feel I can hear the ghost of Galileo. And he’s asking us to make damned sure we move.

Alice Dreger is Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

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In the Service of Galileo’s Ghost: A Short Guide to History, Assault, and Ideology

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