Fack Checking: T.S. Wiley on Homosexuality
A comment from a reader earlier today prompted me to look into the claims about homosexuality in Sex, Lies, and Menopause. What I found was the sort of appalling scholarship I've come to expect from T.S. Wiley.
This particular assertion caught my eye: “The first tier of stress on a population can turn baby boys into very unlikely reproducers and extremely creative individuals. We know this phenomenon as male homosexuality. These men could reproduce, but they probably won't. This is often the aftermath of war, when women are left during pregnancy to guard themselves in a vulnerable time. That's why we have had a population bulge of homosexuality after World War II. [68-71]“
References:
68. U.S. Census, 2000. Reported Same Sex Couples.
69. Kirby, David. The next generation: open-minded and well-adjusted, children with gay parents say their families are a gift. The Advocate 1999 June 22.
70. Lorde, Audre. How gay was the Harlem Renaissance? www.women in the life.com, 2000.
71. Committee makes recommendations for California schools. San Francisco Chronicle 2001 April 13.
That is certainly a curious selection of references.
I wasn't sure how the 2000 census was intended to support the claim of a "bulge" in homosexuality half a century earlier. According to By the Numbers - Census 2000, this was the first census that “made a real effort to enumerate gay and lesbian households”. The census did not gather direct data about individual sexual orientation -- individuals were not counted, only couples. And it was the first census to do so. The 1950 census didn't ask about sexual orientation. The 1960 census didn't ask. Etc. until 2000. And until 2010, it will remain just one snapshot in time, and only of reported gay couples, not the gay population in general.
This source contains no data about T.S. Wiley's argued trend fifty years ago, much less its purported causes. As a citation it scores "Mickey Mouse" on the credibility gauge.
The David Kirby article can be found here: The next generation: open-minded and well-adjusted, children with gay parents say their families are a gift. It is a short article about modern-day gay parenting and the differences that the children experience. It says nothing to T.S. Wiley's points. It is a human-interest article offering no relevance whatsoever to T.S. Wiley's claims.
Yet she cites it.
By my searching, the article on the Harlem Renaissance used to be here: http://www.womeninthelife.com/gayharlem.asp, but is now gone. This is a shame, as I was intrigued to discover how an article on a cultural phenomenon centered in Harlem from 1920-1935 might verify claims about a professed surge in homosexuality in the general population during the years after 1945.
I wasn't able to find anywhere online the newspaper article, "Committee makes recommendations for California schools". So it remains a mystery to me what this California committee's research contributed to the claim of a fifty-year-old phenomenon regarding homosexuality or its presumed significance for the 2002 school year and as reported by a newspaper.
That is the totality of sources Susie Wiley offers to support her assertions. Irrelevance, layered four-thick.
What I find ironic is that I had no difficulty finding sources -- scholarly sources -- that do in fact support the proposition that stress during early pregnancy may be one factor in sexual orientation. They're out there in the scientific record and easily found. (It seems to stand as an open question warranting further study.)
If it's that easy to find reliable, relevant sources then I find myself wondering, did she perhaps simply categorize an accumulated mishmash of references under "alternative medicine", "homosexuality", etc., and then every paragraph or so pinch a few, as if seasoning a dish?
One thing is clear: Those are her claims, and those are the references she has chosen to support them.
Given her assertions about herself and her subject, and then the nature of the citations offered in defense, how can T.S. Wiley blame anyone but herself for the suspicion and criticism she engenders (even disregarding the false credentials)?
The next time you hear T.S. Wiley cite the hundreds of footnotes that supposedly validate her ideas, you might take a few minutes to check a couple of them.
If you do, please write in with what you find.
More fake footnotes appear
More fake footnotes appear on page 41 where, in an antifeminist passage longing for the good old days, Wiley claims that 45 years ago "97% of 21 year-old women were married."
This seemed unlikely so I checked. The 1950 Census cites 34% of all women were unmarried, so the others, married, divorced or widowed(66%), make the figure Wiley cites for twenty-one year olds wildly incorrect.
Maybe Wiley thought if she hid the footnote lies in plain sight nobody would find them. Maybe why that's why the book is buried with so many footnotes. Or maybe Wiley didn't do the footnotes herself and whoever did them was trying to show anybody who checked sources that the book was totally made up.
It is staggering how
It is staggering how fantastically wrong T.S. Wiley is. Thank you, JD, for raising this one.
Here's the full statement: "Only forty-five years ago, or about as long ago as we are old, 97 percent of twenty-one-year-old women were married. That figure rests at less than 50 percent today."
Repeating for emphasis: "97 percent of twenty-one-year-old women". So in 1958 -- forty-five years before Sex, Lies, and Menopause -- only three out of one hundred 21-year-old women were unmarried. So says T.S. Wiley, as approved by her editor and published by Harper Collins.
Pure mind-boggling rubbish. And once again, easily verified.
See: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/ms2.pdf (U.S. Census Bureau)
In fact, in 1958 the median age of first marriage for women was 20.2. So half of women had been married by their twentieth year (plus a couple months) and half had not. The number of women married by their twenty-first birthday was somewhere around 50 percent.
Wiley's off the mark by about 40 million women in the U.S., or nearly half the female population at that time. Further, the median age when Sex, Lies, and Menopause was published in 2003 was 25.3 -- hardly the sea change that T.S. Wiley claims. And 1956 was the low point in this data set at 20.1. In 1890 the median age was 22.0!
97 percent? Not in 1958. Not ever. Not even close.
One might be flabbergasted that a scientist could make such a duck-soup colossal blunder. I'm reminded of Dr. Formby: "I was very surprised to discover how illiterate [T.S. Wiley] was in science and math. She knew absolutely nothing. She did not even know the difference between hydrogen and oxygen or the square root of a number."
I don't know if she thinks "median" means 97%, but I know one thing: I wouldn't trust T.S. Wiley with my health, my life, or the future happiness of my loved ones.
And I'm beginning to think her editor, Claire Wachtel, should be severely reprimanded, if not fired, over this book. Harper Collins should be ashamed.
Did the editor at Harper
Did the editor at Harper Collins check one single footnote? Isn't there an expectation of due dilligence by the publisher when a book proposing a radical medical regimen is advocated?
When so many footnotes are fabricated, does the book demonstrate a pattern of misrepresentation that might be construed as fraud?
This would be a good question for a lawyer specializing in publishing matters.
I don't know, but
I don't know, but considering the stories that have come out of the Wiley Protocol and that many, if not most of these women were initially lured in by Sex, Lies, and Menopause, I can see an argument to be made against Harper Collins.
You'd be even more
You'd be even more flabbergasted if you knew that Dr. Formby was responsible for all of the footnotes. That was his job in the production of the book.
We'll see. I don't accept
We'll see. I don't accept the claims of T.S. Wiley and her husband on faith, but we seem to agree on the value of the references.
An admission finally comes
An admission finally comes from the Wiley camp.
Wiley's husband finally admits Wiley never verified her own research or footnotes? So in effect, she NEVER READ HER OWN BOOK or she would know the footnotes don't support her claims?
Did she expect Dr. Formby to find footnotes for information that was completely inaccurate? He was supposed to make a silk purse from a sow's ear?
Thank you, Dr. Formby, for demonstrating Wiley's claims could not be documented.
To elaborate, as my
To elaborate, as my "statistical analysis" was admittedly rushed:
The question at hand is how many twenty-one-year-olds were married in 1958.
So assume for the sake of argument that the median age of first marriage has always been precisely 21.0. (This is not an unreasonable simplification, considering that the median age was within a year of 21, plus or minus, from the beginning of these records in 1890 all the way up to 1979. And keep in mind that it was higher than 21 in the years 1940 and back.)
Given this hypothetical, all women in any given year fall into one of three groups: A) those who married before age 21, B) those who married after, and C) those who were unmarried or otherwise unaccounted for.
By definition of "median", groups A and B were equal in size. For every woman married before 21 there was at least one woman who didn't get married until after (if at all). We can't say what the average number of married twenty-one-year-olds was from this, but we can put an upper limit on it. Without even counting group C, it is not possible for the average number of married twenty-one-year-olds to have exceeded 50%. Not so long as the median age of first-marriage was 21 or higher.
The actual variance in the median over those 90 years means that this 50% "barrier" has moved up and down but within a fairly narrow range.
So given these statistics, undoubtedly the number of married twenty-one-year-olds in the 1950s was higher than it is today. But the percentage was also lower in years before 1940, when it couldn't possibly have consistently exceeded 50%.
The idea that, in halcyon days, the near-totality of women were married by adulthood is just another false claim by T.S. Wiley.
Rushed indeed. When the
Rushed indeed.
When the median age for marriage is 20.3, you can extrapolate absolutely nothing beyond that. The other 50% could have been married within 6 months of that in either direction of. That may be unlikely, but the point is, it's possible. You can draw no conclusions from that one statisitc. In fact, the distribution of age-at-first-marriage is highly kurtotic (meaning, basically, it clumps around the mean with very little variance). So all of your explanations aside, you can't, without other statistics, refute Wiley's contention.
I think it's likely that the % of women married in their early 20's in 1950 was actually very high. I think you tortured this statistic and your "scrutiny" crossed the line into proselytizing.
As for the comments about Wiley's publisher, the US Constitution and subsequent judgments are pretty clear on this issue. Publishers are not obligated to publish only what you approve of. It's the same protection that keep this site open.
(The above comment was
(The above comment was posted by T.S. Wiley's husband.)
We're not talking about a list of numbers in a vacuum, as if no context were allowed, only mathematics may speak. Sorry, this is about life and history and what we know about it.
You insist it's possible, mathematically speaking, that in 1958, half of women were getting married during approximately the second half of their twentieth year -- a six- to nine-month period in their lives. Half of women. No earlier and no later. This is a necessity for reconciling T.S. Wiley's 97% with the U.S. Census Bureau's account.
Let's put it this way: If you weren't married on your twentieth birthday, you would be among half of women, perhaps somewhat more. Nothing at all unusual about that. To make T.S. Wiley's number work, if you weren't then married twelve months later, by your twenty-first birthday, you would have to be among only 3%.
What a mad and arbitrary rush that twentieth year must have been. That's what the math mandates, assuming T.S. Wiley's claim. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If the only thing you're willing to consider is mathematics, then explain the fact that T.S. Wiley's 97% wasn't even a delirious probability prior to 1940.
And who decides on the
And who decides on the context? You say mathematics like it's a dirty word, but you tried to use it when it was convenient. There is no data there to support you or Wiley.
Enough of your sophistry, Deb, you made a mistake with the statisitc, just move on. Let's get back to the point of THIS discussion. It wasn't to prove 97% of women were married, it was to discuss whether or not you had the data to refute her. You don't. You've leapt to unfounded conclusions. My goal was just to expose the lengths you will go to find fault and how thin your arguments can be.
You've been mute about Formby and his contribution, too.
This is about your wife's
This is about your wife's claim that 97% of women were married. She made it and I'm arguing against it. And the only case you've made is that the 97% number is mathematically possible. I've granted that it's mathematically possible (at least so far, given only what I was able to dig up in a few minutes with Google). The argument here is that it seems extraordinarily improbable.
After all, it's mathematically possible to win the lottery on one bet, or to be struck down by a meteor while snagging the mail.
Now maybe I'm wrong, but you've made no argument that I am. If I may offer a suggestion, what sources led T.S. Wiley to make this claim in the first place? What evidence is there to support this 97% figure? How does she know what she claims?
Regarding Dr. Formby, I'm not sure what your point is.
Dr. Formby was responsible
Dr. Formby was responsible for the footnotes in BOTH books, not only to verify them, but to actually TYPE them in the manuscript. So I find it interesting that you use the footnotes to disparage Wiley, while you continue to revere Dr. Formby.
And one more time, about the median, I did not intend to back up Wiley's contention about the 97%, I would have no way of doing that. I merely wanted to point out that you used a faulty interpretation of the median to attempt to prove she was wrong, which you cannot do. By saying that it is improbable, even that makes a leap that you cannot make from the information you have. You can believe what you like, but you haven't refuted anything. What I believe is irrelevant - I didn't write the books nor I'm not trying to discredit the author(s).
"There is no data there to
"There is no data there to support you or Wiley."
You're half right. With just a few minutes' effort, I've managed to dig up data substantiating that your wife's assertions are, in the most generous interpretation, extraordinary claims, demanding extraordinary evidence to sustain their credibility.
You are correct on the other half, as far as I've seen, that she offers no data in her support. Neither do you:
"...I did not intend to back up Wiley's contention about the 97%, I would have no way of doing that."
You again try to pin the blame for the slipshod scholarship on Dr. Formby:
"Dr. Formby was responsible for the footnotes in BOTH books, not only to verify them, but to actually TYPE them in the manuscript."
Dr. Formby is responsible for all 1756 of the references in SLM? Is that what you mean? I would like a direct answer to this question.
I asked Dr. Formby about your claims. His response disputes your account:
"When it comes to the two books I tried to get the best science into the text. But as I have mentioned before Wiley is so illiterate that I had to explain the various concepts over and over again. She very often misunderstood and 'I gave up'. I selected the best peer-reviewed scientific publications to reference the text. Wiley used articles from Women's Health magazines and news papers. Many references came from such sources. She did not know how to do a Medline search. She cannot write and both books were cancelled by the editors several times."
Wiley didn't write her own
Wiley didn't write her own book? Is that what Neil is saying? Or that she didn't get her information from the footnotes? Or both?
You mean she put her name on a book promoting an extreme, untested hormone regimen and is now saying, she's not responsible for the contents?
"Extraordinarily
"Extraordinarily improbable?" -- by the way, so was the creation of this universe with all of its harmonious laws.....perhaps you should actually do some real SCIENTIFIC reasearch, instead of relying on a ten-minute google search for your information. Just a thought. ;-)