They wanted to kill the book
Alice Dreger has posted an open letter to Tony Valenzuela, ED of the Lambda Literary Foundation.
She thought a tweet telling her about the nomination was a joke at first, because this nominating for an award and then rescinding the nomination routine has happened before. Dreger wrote about it in her book.
In my book—as in the earlier article that led to the misery that led to me to doing that book—I had traced out what happened in 2003 to J. Michael Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, when it had been named a finalist for a “Lammy”: A group of transgender activists upset with Bailey for writing about autogynephilia—a sexual orientation that reasonably motivates some natal-male’s transition to women—had launched a campaign against the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Deirdre McCloskey objected to Bailey’s book, the then ED Jim Marks asked the committee to vote again and they voted to keep it on the finalist list.
McCloksey and her two chief collaborators in the smear campaign on Bailey, Lynn Conway and Andrea James, upped their efforts. As I and Dr. Anne Lawrence (a transgender woman) have explained, the real “problem” was that Bailey’s book put forth ideas about women like McCloskey, Conway, and James that they didn’t want disseminated. They wanted to kill the book to stifle the ideas and stories in it, presumably also to stop others from talking about autogynephilia.
At the time of this mess, writer Victoria Brownworth, who was on the committee, said she saw the withdrawal as akin to censorship. But facing increasing harassment, the committee voted a third time, one vote flipped, and Bailey’s book had its finalist status withdrawn.
Harassment works. Bullying works. People are harassing Alice on Twitter right now, such that she has stopped looking at notifications.
Naturally, given the shitstorms I’ve been in with Bailey’s detractors since I showed in excruciating detail what they did to try to shut him up with a host of patently false charges, I had been assuming my book would never be named a finalist for the same award. Why would the Lambda Literary Foundation take that risk, particularly given that Andrea James had relentlessly harassed Jim Marks online even long after it was all over?
But it was true: my book was named a finalist in the non-fiction category. Learning it was real, I felt enormously honored and happy. I thought this was a sign that perhaps the foundation had decided that there was no way to make everyone in the LGBT world happy, and I’d done good enough work that even if some were unhappy, my work—on the Bailey book controversy, on the abuse of intersex children, on attempts to medically prevent lesbianism with prenatal treatments—was well worth recognizing.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have reasonable disagreements? I’m not talking about unreasonable disagreements, I’m not talking about making common cause with people who think all Xs are scum – but reasonable disagreements.
When I wondered who might have advocated for the book to receive a Lammy, I am happy to say that so many people I respect came to mind: Jim Marks, Victoria Brownworth, Dan Savage, Anne Lawrence, and others. The more I thought about it, the more finalist status made sense to me. Why should the Foundation, thirteen years after it was harassed unjustly, do anything other than march on without cowardice?
So I joyfully answered the congratulatory email I received from Lambda and started making plans to attend the awards ceremony in New York. Not too surprisingly, Conway and James soon launched a campaign against my book’s finalist status, but I pretty much ignored this. I figured the Foundation knew this would happen and was prepared to weather the storm.
But no. You caved. And quickly—much more quickly than the Foundation did under Marks in 2003. In spite of all the LGBT people who have actively praised my book, who have thanked me for the work, you quickly caved to a small group of bullies who have proven time and time again that they will do anything they can to get attention and to force everyone to adhere to their singular account of transgenderism, even when it negates the reported childhoods of gay and lesbian people, even when it denies the reality of many transgender people and attempts to force them into closets because of their sexual orientations.
It’s tragic.
I wonder if Tony Valenzuela will even reply. I wonder what he can possibly say.
Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen?
In that case, maybe wiser to keep schtumm all along?
People will tell you that autogynephilia is a crap theory, that it’s bad science. (“RationalWiki” says so, so it must be true.)
I’ve no idea if there’s any merit to the theory or not (full disclosure: I tried to read Bailey’s book, and found it unreadable.)
But a crap theory doesn’t need underhanded tactics to be defeated.
I hope everybody reads Dreger’s book. And buys it, if they can afford to.
This stuff is hitting me hard because I’ve recently learned that my own life experience is apparently a transphobic stereotype. When I was probably 18-22, I genuinely thought I was transgender (but even when I was a little kid, I’d throw a punch at anyone who dared to point out that I was a girl). I hated having a female body. I went to support groups, saved money for surgery, the whole nine yards. I hit a point where I thought it wasn’t worth it and I just needed to learn to live with myself even if I hated it.
It wasn’t until five years later that I acknowledged to myself that I was a lesbian (another accusation I’d responded to violently many times in the past). Suddenly everything I’d hated about myself and my gender for my whole life made perfect sense. I thought that I was just so bad at being female that it was the wrong gender for me; it turned out that all those ideas about what women are and want and do were bullshit and the fact that I wasn’t a walking stereotype didn’t mean I’d been defined wrong. I was so deep in the closet and so against accepting it that my reasoning genuinely was, “I want to fuck women, and since I’m definitely not gay, I must be a man.”
It’s not transphobic to recognize that people can be confused in really unexpected ways. But I have a big problem with my existence apparently being classified as an anti-transgender lie.
The above isn’t meant to be me saying it IS a bad theory. I honestly don’t know. I don’t have the background to judge it. Obviously the way Bailey and Dreger have been treated is shameful, and that will remain true whether autogynephilia is eventually accepted as a recognised factor in trans-ness for some trans women, or rejected as a failed hypothesis.
Zug – my sympathy. I had similar problems, except I did not turn out to be lesbian, but heterosexual. I simply learned that being a female didn’t have to mean wearing pink frilly dresses and high heels, and it didn’t bar me from loving science and politics, and having a brain. Sounds like our stories are very similar, though everyone seemed to be trying to force me into lesbianism because I didn’t fit their stereotype, and while I never punched anyone out over it (or anything else), I did have a strange sense of not knowing who I was. I finally realized, years after my divorce, that the fact that I was not classically girly, and that my ex turned out to be gay, did not mean I was a lesbian (not that I would have a problem with that, but I think getting your sexual orientation right can be rather crucial for your happiness). I was able to learn who I was and figure it out, but the gender essentialist messages I was getting were messing with my head. I spent years undoing the damage of a lifetime of essentialist teaching, and discovered all the wonderful literature out there that was seeking to dismantle gender essentialism – and now…this. Fortunately, my head is screwed on more tightly now, and I don’t have to believe what people tell me just because they shout the loudest.