One last comment on the “research” of J Michael Bailey ( @profjmb).

When I was 11 or 12, my mom took me to see a psychologist. My mom had caught me wearing my sisters clothes (literally was hiding in my sisters closet), and my pediatrician recommended this shrink to her.

He was supposed to be an expert on gender. It would have been 2004 or 5, shortly after the release of Bailey’s book that started it al for him: the man who would be queen. In this book, Bailey argues that transsexual women are men.

Specifically, he cites the “research” of Ray Blanchard to claim that trans women are either homosexual men that try to become women to trick men into sleeping w them or that trans women are autogynephillic men who transition to fulfill a sexual urge to be a women.

These claims are not true and have been discredited eloquently by many others elsewhere so I won’t waste time on them here.

I mention them to say that the therapist I went to spent the session telling me that I didn’t need to worry bc some heterosexual men have a crossdressing fetish too and that I just needed to figure out if I was a straight or gay male fetishist.

I spent the session tearing at the skin on my left thumb and today have a scar there between my knuckles.

I don’t know where I first heard of autogynephillia. I don’t know if this was the first time or not. But after the session, I believed this man. He was an expert and my mom promised me it was ok, that he /was/ a gender expert.

Afterwards, my mom offered to buy me my own clothes. I panicked and refused. I didn’t want to be a pervert and that’s what I thought I was. I ran ashamed back to the closet and just got better at hiding.

It took years of work to undo the internalized transphobia and hateful feelings I have towards myself and body that occurred as a result of this therapy session and the way society code(s/d) trans women, and to be honest, sometimes it’s still an active process.

The shackles of belief that I was an autogynephile were the hardest to break and one the last steps I had to take before I could transition. This internalized self hate kept me from seeking transition or approaching other trans ppl for over a decade.

Even just typing that sentence is incredibly difficult bc I still carry so much internalized shame over what being autogynephillic would mean, despite the fact that autogynephillia occurs in equal rates in cis + trans women + despite the fact that I know I don’t experience AG.

Anyways, why share this? Why expose this vulnerability? Because society failed us. Because society still fails us.

Because I want my cis colleagues to know what I mean when I say biomedical science is inherently transphobic, inherently queerphobic. Inherently pathologizes experience beyond white cisheterosexual male experience. It’s built into the epistemological foundations of the field.

It’s an intersectional struggle to push back against the structure of the academy that classifies such experiences as abnormal or unnatural. This structure impedes our ability to accurately use the scientific method. This structure has left physical scars on your colleagues.