Joelle Ruby Ryan: Has Alice Dreger Gone Neo-Con?
http://endablog.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/joelle-ruby-ryan-has-alice-dreger-gone-neo-con/[NOTE: The following is a guest post by Joelle Ruby Ryan, who has been a target of not-so-veiled threats by Alice 'J. Michael Bailey's Greek Chorus' Dreger]
The Blanchard, Bailey, Zucker, Cantor, Dreger controversy continues! In 2008, I moderated at a panel at the National Women's Studies Association entitled "The Bailey Brouhaha." The panelists were Andrea James, Elise Hendrick and Katrina Rose. In the panel, we critiqued Alice Dreger's "scholarly history" of the Bailey controversy and exposed the multiple ways in which she was complicit with cultural transphobia by defending J. Michael Bailey and presenting trans community advocates as witch-like ideologues intent on "ruining" a heroic man of science. In my introduction, I discussed how Dreger was part of a long history of transsexual imperialists, cissexual persons who have appropriated trans identity to control the flow of discourses that determine our lives. These gate-keepers have been severely challenged by trans and allied advocates for the past 15 years. Many have retired, died off or finally changed some of their oppressive ways. But there is an old guard of non-trans "scientists" (and their tiny band of trans devotees) who have resisted the paradigm shift and white-knuckled it to hold onto their little turf of colonized space (see the above list of names, and add trans devotees like Anne Lawrence, Hontas Farmer, and other deluded trans people with internalized oppression issues.) The panel was a great success, and none of us cared one bit that Ms. Dreger decided to attempt to intimidate us by sitting front and center to listen to our righteous voices of concern about her role in the oppression of our community.
