For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article.
Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing board, and infamously posting photos online of Bailey's children suggesting that Bailey had raped them and asking whether his young daughter was "a cock-starved exhibitionist".
Much of this material is still on Conway's University of Michigan-hosted webpage.
As far as I know the example you mention was the work of Andrea James, and not Conway, but Conway's continued collaboration with someone that cruel and unhinged is, I think, an aspect of her life that shouldn't be ignored.
(Does it cancel out her many unambiguously positive and praiseworthy achievements? No. People are complicated.)
I highly encourage not falling into Dreger's article or engage in what is generally dismissed and discredited theory(ies) that surrounded all this. The article reference ends up less about the evidence and scientific rigor and more about the underlying drama. It is problematic, and if you want what I would consider a better take on it (and the subsequent book), I would read this: https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/04/alice-dreger-and-ma...
Serrano can’t accept that Andrea James went too far in posting online pictures of Bailey’s children with sexualised captions added (quoted from your first link):
> 3) points to instances where some trans activists have supposedly “gone too far” (in her mind, at least) in order to paint us as unreasonable and/or extremist
Given that, I can’t possible agree with your assertion that Serrano presents a “better take” than Dreger’s. At least in this (very important!) respect it is absolutely a worse one. Dreger is right to condemn James’s inexcusable behaviour, and Serrano is wrong not to
Worth nothing that J. Michael Bailey was eventually fired from his post at Northwestern for organising a spectacularly inappropriate sexual demonstration, put on in front of his students [1].
Bailey has, it must be said, worked extraordinarily hard to earn his negative reputation. Even beyond the sheer inappropriateness of this episode, I can’t say I disagree with Conway’s assessment of him.
You are misreading that article from 2011 (13 years ago). It doesn’t say he was fired, it says he was “under fire” - which is journalistese for “being publicly criticised”. The article also mentions the university administration was investigating the incident - I don’t know what the outcome of that investigation was, but obviously it didn’t result in him being fired, because he’s still there.
> Some saw the book as especially dangerous because it claimed to be based on rigorous science, was published by an imprint of the National Academy of Sciences, and argued that MTF sex changes are motivated primarily by erotic interests and not by the problem of having the gender identity common to one sex in the body of the other.
Yeah, because at the age of 6 when I wanted to be more like mom, it was motivated by erotic interest /s. When my family refers to me as she/her, and I feel an immense amount of joy (as many trans women feel in similar circumstances) it's because of erotic interest /s. When I lose every advantage I have from looking like a good looking cis passing, white passing, straight passing "man" to something society thinks is a freakish abomination, I'm doing so for erotic interests /s.
There are no uncomfortable truths here, just a transphobic agenda being pushed by someone who seems to have never really tried to understand a trans woman in their life. I love the lengths people will go to to listen to anyone except the people that are actually going through it.
