J. Michael Bailey



John Michael Bailey is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. He is best known for his research on sexual orientation and for writing the pop science book The Man Who Would Be Queen in 2003, promoting Ray Blanchard's taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism. He was also the subject of a controversy in 2011 after he allowed a guest speaker to penetrate a naked woman with a mechanical sex toy in front of his class, for which the university cancelled his human sexuality course.

The Man Who Would Be Queen
Bailey's magnum opus is divided into three sections, the first of which deals with gender dysphoria in children and the second of which discusses effeminacy in cross-dressers and homosexual men. The third section details Bailey's conclusions about male-to-female transsexual individuals and generated a great deal of controversy.

Though he later distanced himself from Bailey's scientific certainty, Ray Blanchard sees his 1980s-era studies of male-to-female transsexuals reiterated in the book. Specifically, Bailey asserts that there are two types of natal males who seek sex reassignment:


 * 1) Extremely effeminate individuals, who are really very gay men who transition for the purpose of being more sexually appealing to men; and
 * 2) Older, less effeminate autogynephiles, who transition because they have an overpowering fetish for having a female body.

The book generated considerable controversy, receiving a complaint from a transgender student. Some professors complained that Bailey's work was unscientific, defamatory and dangerous to the social progress of the trans community. Several of Bailey's research subjects filed complaints of misconduct, and an investigation took place that did not find anything so egregious that the university felt compelled to remove him from his post.

The ferocity and extent of the criticism caused Bailey and his defenders to cry persecution and that academic freedom was at risk, despite the fact that no censorship was ever attempted and the book was published by a major academic press. In defense of his writing, Bailey cited the fact that he was an ally of the LGBT community in an elaborate friend argument. However, a small number of people, especially Andrea James but also Lynn Conway, Deidre McCloskey, and a few others, unambiguously went way too far and engaged in outright harassment of both Bailey and anyone who they believed (whether or not it was actually true) had some positive association with him at any point in the past. James' response was to create a page on her website with sexually explicit captions on photos of his school-aged children, as if they had anything to do with it. These captions literally employed the same descriptions he used in his book for gender-nonconforming children, such as "cock-starved exhibitionist", in order to demonstrate their utterly offensive and dehumanizing nature and reflect them back to him. In turn, as James points out, colleague and ally Alice Dreger, in publishing a book with the title Galileo's Middle Finger, resorted to the tired old Galileo gambit to defend Bailey, even though he does not suffer any noticeable academic repercussions, and despite troubling open questions, especially about the Danny Ryan case.

In 2018, Natalie Wynn, better known as Contrapoints, discussed and criticized the concept of autogynephilia in a lengthly YouTube video.

Indeed, the majority of ethical researchers and trans individuals consider autogynephilia to be pseudoscience and even a form of transphobic character assassination which relies almost exclusively on the assumption that the vast majority of trans individuals lie about their feelings and experiences. Indeed, Moser found that by Blanchard's criteria, 93% of cis women were also 'autogynephilic fetishists'

Sexual orientation
Bailey is best known among scientists for his work on the cause of sexual orientation, with an early focus on twins, from which he concluded that homosexuality is substantially inherited. Bailey further believes social environmental factors as a cause for homosexuality are generally weak in magnitude and distorted by numerous confounding factors. Prompted by Uganda's proposed death penalty for homosexuality, Bailey authored a large academic review with five other scientists about the current evidence on the cause of non-heterosexuality in 2016.

Bisexual men
In 2005, Bailey co-authored a study measuring arousal responses of bisexual men which found the vast majority had a homosexual arousal pattern, leading Bailey to conclude that male bisexuality is rare and that most are gay men in denial. This study was met with criticism. Later in 2005, Bailey was approached by John Sylla, President of the American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB) who was critical of Bailey's original study. Sylla encouraged Bailey to test other bisexual males which led Bailey's lab to eventually find bisexual arousal responses in 2013-14. In 2020, Bailey co-authored a large study which found "robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men". Bailey's views on male bisexuality have been criticized namely for perpetuating stigma about bisexuals as liars or to insinuate that they require a laboratory test to prove their sexuality. Bailey has defended his doubts about the existence of true male bisexuality because many gay men initially come out as bisexual and will later admit they are really gay, and argues that he tries "to do good science".

Bisexual women
Bailey inaccurately claimed that “bisexuality in women was relatively uncontroversial” despite it being proven that bisexual women face prejudice and stigma equalling or greater that levelled at bisexual men. When challenged, Bailey said “We tried to find equivalent controversy but were unable to. What did we miss?” - he and his cohort apparently missed the majority of academic study, Governmental surveys activism and charity work related to double stigma prejudice against bisexuals, fetishisation of bisexual women, and that bisexual women face higher rates of domestic violence than gay or straight women - all well documented over the last fifty years.