Another post on Galileo’s Middle Finger, having finally finished the book. (Previous posts: Maria New and prenatal dex, also various posts in the tag #michael bailey cw?)
Galileo’s Middle Finger (hereafter GMF) is a strange book. On one level, the book’s content is pretty easy to make sense of: Alice Dreger has been involved in a number of dramatic academic controversies over the course of her career, and she figured (sensibly enough) that people might enjoy reading a book that retells these stories. To some extent, she just presents the book as “a memoir of the controversies I’ve been involved in.”
However, she also claims that these stories are connected by an overarching theme, which is something like this:
“Scientists and activists often find themselves at odds, on opposite sides of angry battles. But everyone should recognize that truth and justice are intimately connected: you can’t help the victims of injustice if you don’t care about the facts of the situation, and if you’re in a unique position to explore facts (such as an academic job), you ought to steer your investigations toward the social good – not by sacrificing the truth, but by looking for the truths that can help. Activists need to be more concerned with truth, and scientists need to be more concerned with justice. And if both sides followed this advice, they would be at odds far less often.”
All of this sounds very agreeable to me; I think I already more-or-less agreed with it before I read Dreger’s book. But do Dreger’s accounts of various controversies actually serve as useful examples of this stuff? Not always. And Dreger’s attempts to link everything back to her theme produce some awkward results.
Besides a few minor subplots, there are three controversies narrated in GMF. First, she narrates the controversy over Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Second, the controversy over Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, which accused anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of genocide as well as various other wrongdoings. Third, Dreger’s investigations into Maria New and her struggles to get her criticisms recognized by government bodies and the public.
Of these three, it’s the Tierney/Chagnon case that most directly fits Dreger’s theme. Tierney’s book was a work of shoddy hack journalism which made spectacular allegations that have been uniformly refuted by later investigators. (N.B. Tierney made many allegations, and some of the more minor ones have been less clearly refuted, but those weren’t the ones that made headlines.) Nonetheless, shortly after the book came out, the American Anthropological Association quickly endorsed Tierney’s book – the academic equivalent of reflexively believing a callout post without checking the sources.
Reading this in terms of Dreger’s theme seems straightforward: in its concern for justice, the AAA neglected the value of truth, and thus failed to even serve justice.
Even here, though, the theme strains a bit. The Tierney debacle was not exactly a conflict between “activists” and “academics”; the people under-valuing truth in the service of justice were the academics of the AAA. (Tierney could arguably be called an “activist,” but Dreger treats him – rightly, it seems to me – as a hack journalist from whom more concern for the truth cannot be expected.)
The Maria New story also lacks a clear instance of an activist failing to sufficiently value truth. In that story, Dreger is the activist, raising ethical concerns from the outside about an established academic, and her activism is directly grounded in science that she believes that academic is ignoring. She may intend this as an example of “activism done right” (about which more later), and/or as a case of an academic caring too little about justice. But it’s not as though New is ignoring justice because truth is her only value; as Dreger notes, her prenatal dex work has produced little in the way of academic knowledge. So again, it’s hard to see this as an illustration of the theme.
So far, it looks like Dreger has failed to exhibit an example of activists behaving badly, although this is crucial to her theme. The third story (well, first as presented in the book), about Michael Bailey, is her main (and only) example of this. But of the three stories, it’s that one that fits the theme least well.
Dreger’s account of the Bailey controversy shares a quality with her account of the Chagnon controversy: both are told as stories of lovable and humane, if out-of-touch, researchers being persecuted by ignorant people who don’t understand them. Dreger spends a great deal of text talking about how much she personally likes Bailey and Chagnon – Bailey is a personal friend, Chagnon she met while investigating that controversy. As “characters” in the book, they downright glow. They’re funny, they’re good company, they both have cute and harmonious marriages.
It makes sense to write stuff like this in order to humanize people who have been demonized by others. But one has to note here that none of this bears on the “truth” side of the things. It’s certainly possible for someone to have committed genocide and still be a warm and sparkling conversationalist at the dinner table; it’s possible for Michael Bailey to be a great guy if you know him personally, and nonetheless to have been wrong about trans women.
With Chagnon, this tension never becomes relevant, because as a matter of simple fact, Chagnon was exonerated by multiple serious investigators. With Bailey, the tension is glaringly relevant, because the issue of whether Bailey is actually right never gets fully addressed in Dreger’s treatment. Indeed, she treats it almost as an irrelevant side issue. Where is the value of truth here?
To be fair, Dreger does put her beliefs on the table about the issue. But these beliefs seem to reveal little serious interest in the questions involved. She seems to have uncritically bought the Blanchard-Bailey line – possibly because she only cares about these issues insofar as they affect her good friend Michael Bailey? – and to have done little investigation into academic work on transgender beyond this.
Astonishingly, for instance, the phrase “gender dysphoria” never appears in GMF at all. (A word-search for “dysphoria” turns up only one result, in the title of a Blanchard paper cited in the endnotes.) When Dreger presents her account of trans women, she talks about (for instance) transitioning as a choice made by feminine gay men in order to better fit into homophobic social environments, stressing that these people might not have transitioned if feminine gay identities were more accepted in their local environments. I’m willing to believe this happens sometimes – but Dreger seems to actually not know that gender dysphoria is a thing. This is in a book published in 2015. One wonders if she’s ever even looked up the condition in the DSM (which changed the name from “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in the 2013 DSM-V, but even before that had included dysphoria as one of the two major diagnostic criteria).
Dreger has a page on her website, written after GMF was published, in which she responds to questions about “autogynephilia” and states her current positions. Again, she never mentions gender dysphoria. Of Blanchard’s androphilic/autogynephilic typology, she says that “I think what I’ve seen from the scientific clinical literature and socioculturally suggests this division makes sense.” She does not provide any citations, and does not address critiques (see here) that the data show a continuum which does not separate well into two clusters.
I belabor all of this because Dreger’s indifference to the truth here simply makes GMF fundamentally incoherent. I agree with Dreger’s theme; I have no clue how she thinks the Bailey story illustrates it.
But wait – Dreger’s claim is that activists value truth too little in their quests for justice. Does this hold true for the activists who attacked Michael Bailey?
Again, Dreger seems to not much care. She devotes a lot of space to the claims made by these activists, but mostly to express confusion over them. Noting that some of them display what look to her like signs of autogynephilia, she scratches her head: why are they angry at a book for talking about autogynephilia? One would think that someone in Dreger’s position – someone interested in getting to the bottom of situations where truth and justice appear to conflict – ought to answer a question like this. Dreger doesn’t. Her attitude is basically: “who are these weird people attacking my friend Michael? What do they want? They’re so confusing! Michael is a scientist, so maybe they don’t like science? Jeez, who knows!!!”
What she substitutes for consideration of these issues – and let me be clear, this is not nothing – is a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the nasty, dishonest ways in which the activists tried to ruin Michael Bailey’s reputation. They were, in fact, really nasty. But people don’t just do things like that for no reason. What about the larger questions of truth and justice here? Why do these activists believe Michael Bailey is so harmful? Could it be the case that Bailey is harmful, to the point that defaming him is a net good?
Dreger never mentions this sort of idea, but it hangs uncomfortably over her whole book. She bemoans the fact that her work on Maria New – which is generally polite and non-nasty, if very harsh on New – has failed to make appreciable waves in the world, beyond loading the first page of Google results with dex-critical pages. On the other hand, Bailey’s book is now solely known as the subject of a stormy controversy, which received huge amounts of media discussion. What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done? What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough? And, putting it the other way around, how can Dreger assume that the anti-Bailey crowd didn’t have truth and justice on its side, just because they were nasty and vicious to her friend?
In Dreger’s telling, Andrea James is a scary asshole who sends her possibly-physical threats via email, and Michael Bailey and Napoleon Chagnon are precious cinnamon rolls. But fighting for truth-and-justice is not the same as identifying the Nice People and the Mean People. These may in fact be (I hate to say it) largely unrelated endeavors.
A serious book about activism, science, truth and justice would begin with these disquieting possibilities, and then explore from there. (One example that book might look at: Dreger’s earlier non-nasty activism for intersex people has gotten stuff done.) Dreger’s book instead stays in an overly cozy universe, where “fighting for good” and “defending her lovable buddies against the bad meanies” can never be conflicting goals.
“What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done? What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?”
I really want more serious treatment of this question from someone sensible. Obviously I really hope the answer is no, and I am tired of discourse from people who seem like they would actively prefer the answer to be yes (although maybe it’s only my bias making them seem that way.) But yeah, doe anyone know of any decent book-length discussions of the issue which look at real-life situations?
