Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Ho! The SPLC's Maxxie the Moocher
Heidi Beirich, an often-cited expert on my Bad Guyness, may be at the center of the SPLC's financial scandal involving her neo-Nazi boyfriend.
One of the weirder things about having spent a quarter of a century in public life as a Designated Bad Guy, according to quasi-official authorities on morality such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, is that the people most often approvingly cited for directing name-calling at me — such as splenetic nepo-baby John Podhoretz and that Wagnerian soprano of the SPLC, Heidi Beirich — wouldn’t strike most objective observers as moral paragons themselves.
Now, Heidi, or Maxxie the Moocher as I shall call her from now on, is at the center of a pecuniary scandal involving her and her neo-Nazi boyfriend.
Of course, Heidi’s outrage directed at me, much of it weirdly obsessed with my publicly wondering whether lady golfer Annika Sorenstam’s sudden change in physique from slender in 2001 to Schwarzeneggerish in 2002 may have involved performance-enhancing drugs, was never terribly persuasive on its own merits.
Instead, you just had to know that anybody working for the Southern Poverty Law Center was (despite recurrent scandals unearthed by investigative reporters), automatically a Good Guy and that therefore anybody hated by anybody at the SPLC was indubitably a hate-filled Bad Guy.
Some things, like the Good Guyness of the SPLC, are so sacred they just must be taken on faith.
In reality, junk mail genius Morris Dees, co-founder of the SPLC, intuited in 2003 that transgenderism would someday be a lucrative national mania. (Morris turned out to be a decade too early, but that’s a risk inherent in being so brilliant at hucksterism: you can get too far out ahead of your marks.)
One PR problem was that the most famous M to F transgenderists, such as adventure writer and war correspondent James→Jan Morris, had typically put forward as their explanation an obvious lie — that they had always felt like a girl on the inside — when most of them had always been notoriously masculine.
A few scientific researchers, most notably Ray Blanchard of the U. of Toronto and J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern U., had uncovered the truth: men who had achieved prominence before announcing they were women typically had an extreme version of the transvestite sex fetish: autogynephilia.
There was a lot of money to potentially be made in shutting down this truth.
Heidi wrote for the SPLC:
Dismantling White Supremacy
Northwestern University Psychology Professor J. Michael Bailey Looks into Queer Science
December 31, 2003
Heidi Beirich, Bob Moser
A group of scientists and journalists tries to turn back the clock on sex, gender and race using eugenics and controversial genetic theories.
On a book tour last spring and summer, Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey gave his audiences a sampling of recent scientific thinking about sexual and gender identity.
After playing audio recordings of four men’s voices, Bailey asked: Which is gay? The crowds inevitably picked out the voice with exact articulation and lispy “S” sounds.
As did Mel Brooks in The Producers:
The lisp of Carmen Ghia, Broadway director Roger DeBris’s common-law assistant, hisses for ten seconds.
In case you are wondering, there are two types of lisps: the hissy lisssssssp that is the bane of conductors of Gay Men’s Choruses everywhere versus the Daffy Duck lithp:
While Daffy is also an actor by avocation, he’s less from the East Coast Broadway musical tradition than from the West Coast masculine movie star tradition.
Precisely! Bailey cheered.
His point: Determining somebody’s sexual orientation is just that easy, just that obvious.
Needless to say, Bailey’s brand of “queer science” has not met with cheers from GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) activists — nor from many fellow scholars, who see his studies as attempts to lend scientific credence to age-old stereotypes.
But Bailey does have company. Many of those who praised his recent book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, belong to a private cyber-discussion group of a neo-eugenics outfit, the Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI).
This exclusive group of academics, race scientists and right-wing journalists — along with a reported handful of liberals — exchanges thoughts about “differences in race, sex and sexual orientation” for a chilling purpose: promoting and studying “artificial [genetic] selection.”
The Man Who Would Be Queen is only the latest in a series of controversial studies and articles by HBI members, many of whom are bent on overturning the most widely held psychological and scientific views of gender, sexual identity and race.
But Bailey’s book has brought negative publicity to this “anti-PC” movement, both because of Bailey’s controversial conclusions and because most of the transgendered women profiled in his book say they never knew they were going to be written about.
In November, Northwestern launched a full-scale investigation of Bailey, who chairs the prestigious university’s psychology department, to probe his handling of transgendered women he was supposed to be counseling — but was allegedly using as unwitting research subjects.
Anjelica Kieltyka, a Chicago artist whose personal history is a prominent part of The Man Who Would Be Queen, filed the first complaint with the university last spring. Like other subjects in the book, she says she was never informed that Bailey was going to write about her.
In fact, she sent several others of the book’s subjects to Bailey — friends who needed his help in obtaining mandatory approval for sex-reassignment surgery.
Kieltyka likens Bailey’s “science” to the infamous syphilis experiments performed on unwitting black men at the Tuskegee Institute. “At the beginning of the last century, blacks were expendable human beings to be experimented on without their knowledge,” she says.
“For Bailey and his allies, we transsexuals are just their guinea pigs.”
Equally disturbing, to Kieltyka and others, are the conclusions Bailey reached. Based on his allegedly unauthorized interviews and on discussions with a few other people he met in bars, Bailey determined that transsexuals (the term for transgendered people who surgically change their gender) are “especially motivated” to shoplift, “especially well-suited to prostitution,” and “not very successful at finding men willing to commit to them.”
Uh, yeah.
My wife’s friend A lived in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood between Broadway and Halsted because it was safe for a young woman. The streets were crowded all night with men, none of whom wanted to pester a woman.
But there was, it turned out one exception: a 6’4” black drag queen streetwalker in huge high heels who was one of the local landmarks. Once A had to catch a bus down to the Loop on a Sunday morning at 4:30 AM, just when the bars were closing. She was standing on her corner waiting for her bus, when she got shoved violently from behind. The giant transvestite hooker glowered down at her: “This is my corner, beyatch!”
The transgender community is especially galled by Bailey’s diagnosis of their “condition.” The American Psychiatric Association and the vast majority of scholars agree on “gender identity disorder,” a medical term for people convinced they were born the wrong gender.
Bailey signs on with his reported fellow HBI member, sex researcher Ray Blanchard, who contends that transgendered people are actually either homosexual or autogynephilic, a term for men aroused by the idea of themselves as women. Bailey says autogynephilics suffer from paraphilia, a set of “unusual sexual preferences” that includes necrophilia, pedophilia and bestiality.
The upshot, says University of Michigan professor emeritus Lynn Conway, is clear: “Bailey has stereotyped us and portrayed us as alien creatures, just as racist scientists did to blacks in earlier eras.”
Conway’s expertise was not in the human sciences. Instead, he was a major pioneer in the male-dominated field of computer chip design in the tradition of Carver Mead. Here’s a photo of Conway towering over George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft at some Deep State outing:
What little girl on the inside never dreamed of growing up to go flying with Brent Scowcroft?
And here’s Dr. Conway living out every girly girl’s fantasy of leading a motocross race:
And here’s yet another feminine hobby of Robert/Lynn Conway:
Back to Heidi:
… The most prominent cheerleader for Bailey and the other HBI researchers is the man who started the HBI: Steve Sailer, a United Press International reporter and frequent contributor to the anti-immigration Web site, VDARE.com.
Like Bailey, Sailer refused to respond to questions, telling the Intelligence Report “tough noogies.” Also like Bailey, he has pushed the idea that there’s a genetic basis for homosexuality — making it a “disease” that could eventually be eradicated.
“It’s radically unfashionable to call homosexuality a disease,” Sailer noted this August on VDARE.com (see Keeping America White). But that doesn’t stop Sailer, who fashions himself a bold thinker willing to confront taboo subjects.
The personal Web site maintained by the man behind the Human Biodiversity Institute, www.isteve.com, provides a different window into Sailer’s way of thinking.
The site is dominated by crude racial and gender stereotypes as Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for her muscles,
I wrote just before Annika competed in the men’s 2003 Colonial Invitational:
We can use the course ratings to compare Sorenstam to the short-hitting Pavin. He was once a near-superstar, winning Colonial twice, and defeating Greg Norman to take the 1995 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. He hasn’t won since the 1996 Colonial, though, and at age 43, however, Pavin is well past his prime. Yet, he continues to earn a pleasant living grinding it out on the Tour. So far this year, he has raked in $227,000 to rank 110th on the PGA money list.
Pavin is listed at 5’-9” and 155 pounds. The 32-year-old Sorenstam is 5’-6”. She used to be listed at 130 pounds, but has clearly added a lot of muscle mass over the last two years. Now, she has that distinctive characteristic of a bodybuilder: her forearms no longer hang down along her sides because her upper arms are so muscular. Think of how Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey and Kevin Nelon held their arms away from their sides while playing Hans and Franz, their Schwarzenegger-type “Ve vill pump you up!” muscle heads. (No doubt some male pros think she’s been augmenting her weightlifting with steroids or human growth hormone, but there’s no specific evidence for that.)
Sorenstam has added well over 20 yards to her average driving distance since 2000. She now averages 275 yards off the tee (2nd on the LPGA tour this season) compared to 267 for Pavin (187th on the PGA).
… So, I predict that if Sorenstam plays this week the way she’s played in the rest of 2003, she’ll miss the cut by four strokes. …
And that’s exactly what she did.
Still, if she doesn’t choke and just plays her average game, she’s likely to beat more than a few men this week. Almost all of them would do better than her in the long run, but any golfer’s performance in any single tournament is highly erratic. Even the pros have bad weeks. If Sorenstam misses the cut by four strokes, for example, she’s going to beat about 20 men.
Counting male pros who withdrew or did not start, she came in ahead of 19 men and tied four.
And, that, I suspect, is what all the resentment of Sorenstam is about. Men aren’t supposed to admit it these days, but they still hate even the thought of losing to a woman.
I was hardly the only sportswriter to notice that during Annika Sorenstam’s quasi-amazing peak during the Barry Bonds Era (when lots of athletes did things that had previously been impossible), she had suddenly developed a bodybuilder’s physique. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
SHANNON RYAN, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
May 20, 2003 Updated Jan. 5, 2011, 9:03 p.m. ET
Intense gym workouts transform Sorenstam
Her polo shirt sleeves are snugger these days. Her golf shots are longer.
In a quest to become a powerful golfer as well as a successful one, Annika Sorenstam has resculpted her body into a mass of lean muscles and buffed up her game with intensive weightlifting workouts.
Back to Heidi:
claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look “less masculine” than other men.
Salier [sic] also invokes the spirit of his friend Bailey when he claims to have found the real reason Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election. He chalks it all up to a lisp that makes the former vice president “sound prim, even homosexual.”
From my October 11, 2000 article “Does Al Gore Lisp?” about Gore’s unfortunate performance in the first Presidential debate that derailed a VP running on peace and prosperity:
Even speech experts disagreed during interviews over whether the Vice President lisps. Linguistics professor Angela Della-Volpe, says, “He does occasionally seem to have a slight lisp.” In contrast, MIT cognitive scientist Steve Pinker, author of the bestseller The Language Instinct, responds, “I never heard a lisp, but I do hear a speech style that people in my business call ‘motherese:’ the register one uses in the presence of a small or not-too-bright child. (Listen for Gore’s pauses before the big words.)”
Splitting the difference, speech pathologist Richard K. Adler of Seattle observes, “I don’t think Gore has a lisp. But sometimes he places his tongue too far forward for making an ‘s’ sound and it sounds like a lisp.”
As this last statement suggests, there are technical disputes among speech scholars over how broadly to define “lisping.” The narrow definition focuses merely on replacing ‘s’ with ‘th.’ The broader conception of lisping extends to also cover other problems with pronouncing ‘s.’
Comedian Harry Shearer, who provides the voices for such Simpsons characters as the evil billionaire Mr. Burns and his devoted male secretary Smithers, emailed a precise description of Gore’s speaking style. “It’s not a lisp--as in ‘lithp.’ Rather, it’s a sibilant problem, in which the sibilants are pronounced in a thinner, more ‘hissy’ fashion than is normal among American males.”
But was the SPLC really saintly enough to be assigned the job of America’s Moral Arbiter by the mainstream media?
For example, in 2019, the SPLC was convulsed by a massive internal housecleaning in which legendary co-founder Morris Dees was fired, and Heidi soon followed him out the door.
How come?
Paywall here.
