I welcome the blog from Michael Bailey this morning, and thank him for contributing it. This is the first time I am aware of where an exchange can take place in an open forum. Bailey's passages help make clear where the disagreements exist, which might suggest that an armistice is someday possible. On the other hand, his passages illustrate why this acrimonious dispute has persisted for over four years, and will not find an easy reconciliation.

Bailey has still not been able to grasp that people may think he is wrong because they.... really, actually think he is wrong. They don't think he is wrong because they are covering up some deeply felt sense of shame, or proceeding from some other complicated motivation. No. One may really, truly think Bailey is wrong in his claim that all transsexuals are either gay men or straight fetishists because the data are not convincing and are almost surely counter factual.

I know too many people whose life simply does not coincide with the two templates that Bailey says comprise all transsexuals. And while Bailey may find the mixed responses to Blanchard's surveys compelling, this is his personal and subjective opinion. Bailey can't seem to deal with empirical skepticism, and therefore goes to great lengths to malign the motives of anyone who questions his conclusions.

Mr. Hank Campbell, founder of Scientific Blogging, requested that I respond to a recent posting by Seth Roberts, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Roberts attacks me as part of his continuing defense of another psychology professor, Michael Bailey of Northwestern University. In my judgment, Bailey’s work is bigoted and fraudulent.

Roberts quotes from an op-ed I wrote in 2003 for the Stanford student newspaper describing a talk Bailey presented to the Stanford psychology department. The talk included film clips, animated cartoons, pictures and voice recordings to train people’s “gaydar”, and it elicited back-slapping laughs from the audience. I stand by my description of that incident, including the quotation Roberts cites.

Also in 2003, Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would be Queen, appeared under an imprint of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. On National Academies’ letterhead, the publicity advertised, “Gay, Straight or Lying? Science Has The Answer”, and promised conclusions that “may not always be politically correct, but… are scientifically accurate, thoroughly researched and occasionally startling.” The book’s thesis is that all male-to-female transsexuals are either gay men or straight fetishists. In 2004 I wrote a review of the book and its surrounding context that has now been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian, courtesy of Lynn Conway, a computer scientist in Michigan. The situation has not changed materially since then.