Those who haven’t read the New York Times profile of Prof. Michael Bailey should really do so.

A psychologist, Bailey wrote a monograph postulating a theory of why some men behave behave as women, a theory that diverged from the conventional wisdom on transgenderism. (The CW is that it results from an assigned sex that is mismatched to a person’s “felt” gender; Bailey argued that “some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women.”)

Bailey’s view was anathema to the special-interest community that speaks in the name of transgendered persons, and the reprisals against him soon began: accusations of ethical violations of the human-subject research standards and even allegations of sexual impropriety–both unfounded–as well as a general campaign of ostracism in his department.

The piece delivers a frightening portrait of how few defenders a researcher merely doing his job can have when his research points the wrong way.