PENGUIN PRESS, MARCH 2015It wasn’t long before I had lots of good company for my misery. As soon as word got around that I had a Guggenheim Fellowship to study conflicts between scientists and activists over issues of human identity, academics from all over started contacting me, suggesting I work on this controversy or that. I heard from one physician colleague about a clinician-researcher who dared to question the reality of chronic Lyme disease and was now chronically plagued by people who insisted they had it. I heard from another about the physician-researcher who had helped to define the condition known as fibromyalgia only to later doubt that it really is a distinct disease. (There’s a way to make yourself researcher non grata.) I started to wonder if this was just a guy thing. Are men much more likely to get into trouble because they’re taught and allowed to be aggressive? Then Mike Bailey told me about another woman who’d been in this kind of trouble, a clinical psychologist who had researched and revealed the disappointing reality behind a poster-child case of “recovered memory” of alleged childhood sexual abuse. Then I learned from an editor at Harvard University Press about another woman psychologist, one who had experienced some significant unpleasantness following a book in which she expressed scientific skepticism about alleged alien abductions. The abductees wanted a word with her.
I had accidentally stumbled onto something much more surreal—a whole fraternity of beleaguered and bandaged academics who had produced scholarship offensive to one identity group or another and who had consequently been the subject of various forms of shout-downs. Only these academics hadn’t yet formed a proper society in which they could keep each other company. Most of these people had been too specialized or too geeky (or too convinced they were the only ones who didn’t deserve it) to realize there were others like them out there. As I started collections of notes on each of these folks, I kept thinking about how Bo Laurent must have felt in the early 1990s, during the early intersex patients’ rights movement, when she realized that there ...
