The Man Who Would be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism
by J. Michael Bailey
Joseph Henry Press. 233 pages, $24.95
MICHAEL BAILEY’S The Man Who Would Be Queen has sparked a firestorm of outrage. Bailey is chair of the Northwestern University Department of Psychology and has specialized in studying the inheritance patterns and behavioral traits of homosexuality. From the moment his new work hit the bookstands, e-mail postings circulated denouncing the book and Bailey’s public presentations. These sounded more like a circus sideshow of queens, queers, and trannies than academic lectures. Formal complaints have been lodged by his patient-informants who apparently were not advised that their life histories would be published in a popular book. (See Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/17/03.)
