Alice Dreger

Alice Dreger
Born Alice Domurat Dreger
United States
Nationality American
Fields Bioethics, humanities
Institutions Northwestern University
Known for conjoined twinning, intersex or disorders of sex development, social justice
Notable awards Fellowship recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Alice Domurat Dreger is an American bioethicist, author, and professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.[1]

She is widely known for her academic work and activism in support of individuals born with atypical sex characteristics (intersex or disorders of sex development) and individuals born as conjoint twins. Dreger has been a featured speaker at TED Talks.[2] She is also known for her analyses and subsequent support of J. Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003).[3]

In 2015, Dreger published Galileo's Middle Finger, which covered her observations and experiences with controversies in academic medicine, especially those surrounding human sexuality.[4] The book received positive reviews from the Chronicle of Higher Education,[3] Salon,[5] and activist and author Dan Savage.[6]

Galileo's Middle Finger (2015)

The first part of Dreger's book covers her activism against surgical "correction" of intersex individuals' genitalia.[7] She advocated that genital surgery for intersex children be postponed until the individual is old enough to make an informed decision, in the absence of any evidence that the benefits of such surgery outweighed its already reported risks.

The second section provides her analysis of the controversy surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen, by sex researcher and psychologist J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University. In that book, Bailey summarized research on Blanchard's transsexualism typology in a way that Dreger says is scientifically accurate, well-intended, and sympathetic, but insensitive to its political implications. "Bailey made the mistake of thinking that openly accepting and promoting the truth about people's identities would be understood as the same as accepting them and helping them, as he felt he was".[8] Instead, many activists in the trans community objected to the contention that their transition was sexually motivated.

Bailey's book was based on the academic publications of psychologist Ray Blanchard, which Bailey interpreted for a lay audience. The larger audience and potential to influence public beliefs about transgenderism led a prominent transgender activist, Lynn Conway, to campaign against Bailey. Dreger concludes that the accusations levied against Bailey by Conway and others did not hold up to scrutiny. "Conway developed what became an enormous Web site hosted by the University of Michigan for the purpose of taking down Bailey and his ideas [and] that largely enabled me to figure out what she had really done and how Bailey had essentially been set up in an effort to shut him up about autogynephilia".[8] Dreger wrote that some activists had turned their horror at Bailey's findings into a very public vendetta against him and his family, including thinly veiled allegations that he sexually abused his children.[3] After researching them, she concluded that all the allegations against Bailey were false. Moreover, Dreger observed that "the most interesting mail, from my perspective, came from trans women who wrote to tell me that, though they weren't thrilled with Bailey's oversimplifications of their lives, they also had been harassed and intimidated by Andrea James for daring to speak anything other than the politically popular 'I was always just a woman trapped in a man's body' story. They thanked me for standing up to a bully."[9]

Dreger also investigates the controversy surrounding biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig T. Palmer's A Natural History of Rape (2000), as well as accusations that anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon seriously abused the Yanomamo.

Selected bibliography

Books

Journal articles

References

  1. ↑ "Alice Dreger Bio". Northwestern University. Retrieved Apr 28, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Speakers Alice Dreger: Historian". TED. Retrieved Feb 22, 2013.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Bartlett, Tom (March 10, 2015). "Reluctant Crusader: Why Alice Dreger’s writing on sex and science makes liberals so angry". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
  4. ↑ Dreger, Alice Domurat (2015). Galileo's middle finger: heretics, activists, and the search for justice in science. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN 9781594206085.
  5. ↑ Miller, Laura (March 7, 2015). "“Galileo’s Middle Finger”: When scholars and activists clash over controversial research, we all lose. A feminist historian investigates the high price paid by scholars whose research is politically unpopular.". Salon.
  6. ↑ "Galileo's Middle Finger: Editorial Reviews". Amazon.com. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
  7. ↑ Lerner, Barron (March 13, 2015). "Science, Activism And Truth: 'Galileo's Middle Finger' by Alice Dreger". Forbes.com. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Dreger, Alice Domurat (2015). Galileo's middle finger: heretics, activists, and the search for justice in science. New York: Penguin Press. p. 65. ISBN 9781594206085.
  9. ↑ Dreger, Alice Domurat (2015). Galileo's middle finger: heretics, activists, and the search for justice in science. New York: Penguin Press. p. 73. ISBN 9781594206085.

External links