On August 22, 2007, San Francisco’s public radio station KQED was kind enough to dedicate a full hour of their Forum talk show to my article on the Bailey book controversy. (You can listen to an archive of the program or look at a transcript.)
The following is a summary of the many inaccuracies in Stanford University Professor Joan Roughgarden’s statements on the program. I consider it critical to provide an account of Prof. Roughgarden’s misrepresentations because they amount, essentially, to a misrepresentation of my own scholarship on this matter. I do not bother here to note where Prof. Roughgarden simply misquoted Prof. Bailey’s book outright; it takes absolutely no background in this matter to compare Prof. Roughgarden’s “readings” from the book to what the book actually says.
- On the program, Prof. Roughgarden repeatedly charged Prof. J. Michael Bailey as being guilty of “fraud” for using the term “science” in the subtitle of his book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, when the book was actually a popularization. By this logic, the publishers of Science Times of the New York Times, the magazine Science News, and thousands of popularizations of science are also guilty of fraud. For my criticism of how Prof. Bailey used claims of “science” in the book to his advantage, see pp. 40-41 of my documented history of the book controversy.
- Prof. Roughgarden claimed “there is no science in the book” and then tried to claim that, if there is science in Prof. Bailey’s book, then the people whose stories Prof. Bailey used for illustrations of Blanchard’s theory must have been research subjects. This is a false dichotomy construction whereby the whole book must either be a research study or else it contains absolutely no science. In fact, the book makes references to many studies and theories produced by Prof. Bailey and others. This does not mean that the people whose stories were used to illustrate various theories were research subjects. For an explanation of the difference between scientific research and illustrations of theories, see my article, pp. 39-41.
- Prof. Roughgarden misrepresented the six transwomen whose stories appear in the book as having been used by Prof. Bailey to test and confirm Blanchard’s theory; she said, “based on a sample size of six, he’s tried to draw the conclusions that he’s just mentioned,” i.e., Blanchard’s theory. It is obvious from reading the book that, in his discussion of the six transwomen whose stories he told, Prof. Bailey was doing nothing like a scientific test of Blanchard’s theory, but was using these stories as illustrations, a common technique in scientific popularizations (see my article, pp. 39-41). Prof. Roughgarden misrepresented and ignored the actual scientific studies done to support Blanchard’s theory and acted as if Prof. Bailey’s only “proof” of the theory comes from the six women whose stories provided illustrations. She misrepresented the extent, nature, and quality of Blanchard’s work (see my article, pp. 53-55) and inaccurately called it “really an exercise in pure imagination.”
- Prof. Roughgarden said on the program “there are these additional charges of absence of consent by the women.” Two and only two transwomen (Anjelica Kieltyka and the woman identified as “Juanita”) whose stories appeared in Prof. Bailey’s book complained of this to Northwestern University. Written evidence from these women themselves show they both knew Bailey was writing about them in a book and that they gave their permission to him to do so. See my article, pp. 39-49.
- Prof. Roughgarden said “Some of the women claim to have had sex with him as well.” In 2003, after meetings with Conway, one and only one woman, “Juanita,” a woman with a long history of professional sex work, claimed that in 1998 (five years earlier) she had “sexual relations” of an unspecified sort with Prof. Bailey (for details, see my article, pp. 41-46). Her friend Kieltyka has speculated Juanita was paid by Conway to produce this charge (see p. 28 of my article). Prof. Bailey has provided evidence that he could not have been where Juanita claims he was when they had sex (see my article, pp. 43-44). Juanita is now refusing to discuss this with the press.
- Prof. Roughgarden claimed the “Danny narrative” in the book “is apparently completely fabricated.” One person, the same Anjelica Kieltyka who, against evidence, charged Prof. Bailey with many other offenses, claimed that Prof. Bailey told her he made up the very end of the Danny story, not that he fabricated the entire thing as Prof. Roughgarden told the listeners of KQED. Prof. Bailey denies manufacturing any of the Danny story (though he admits to masking key details, as is common in such anecdotes) and Prof. Bailey notes Kieltyka has absolutely no proof of what she claims to remember he said (see my article, p. 50). When the host of the KQED program pushed Prof. Roughgarden to explain why she claims the Danny story was “completely fabricated,” she noted simply “it’s been reported not to be true.”
People, listen up: Real scholars don’t put politics before evidence.
Note: This shows the date this page was recreated at my new website, not the original publication date.