Advocate.com – By Joanne Herman
Why the Bailey controversy won’t die soon
To refresh: Transsexuals are those who live or seek to live as the gender opposite the one assigned at birth, sometimes utilizing hormones and surgery to help do so, and as such they represent only part of the large and diverse transgender community. I am a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual. And J. Michael Bailey, the psychologist who authored the controversial 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, is not.
Bailey concluded, based largely on interviews of transsexuals in a gay bar, that MTF transsexuals transition solely to satisfy their sex drive. Bailey claimed that some of us are really gay men believing that being a woman will normalize our attraction to men; that some of us are men sexually aroused by the idea of having a female body; and the rest of us are lying when we say we don?t fit those two categories. Noticeably absent is a discussion of female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals.