Words matter. These are the best Alice Dreger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Instead of constantly enhancing the norm – forever upping the ante of the ‘normal’ with new technologies – we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation.
After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law. I probably would have made a lot more money and died of boredom by now.
Fact-checking doesn’t exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.
We say, ‘You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.’ Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn’t care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.
Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents.
The funny thing is, when I ask people with dark skin if they would change their color, they tell me no, and when I ask women if they would rather be men, they tell me no, and I get the same response when I ask people with unusual anatomies if they would take a magic pill to erase their unusual features.
Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long – especially when you don’t know where it’s all going to go – it’s hard stuff. I’m not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?
You know what Oprah taught me? Unless you count as changing your life having a neighborhood dad say to you every morning at the school bus stop, ‘You sure don’t look as good as you did on ‘Oprah!’, being on ‘Oprah’ doesn’t change your life.
I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.
Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we’d probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.
You can’t go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can’t stop you from trying.
Ironically, when I’ve asked my straight friends to join me in hanging a rainbow flag, they answer, ‘But someone might think we’re gay,’ not realizing that is exactly the point. To be mistaken for the oppressed is to momentarily become the oppressed.
If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students’ sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We’re not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence.
Perhaps it is because I’m a writer trained in history that I’ve always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.
I am led by what I find to be true, not what I find to be popular.
Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous.
When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus.
We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn’t draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.
So many times I’ve heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won’t really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It’s a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.
My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as a toddler, I would demand raw onions and eat them like apples, I think that, at this juncture, it is a story that just has to be believed.
I don’t have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.
Having a child is not like taking a spouse; there is no mutual agreement entered into. It is up the parent to make the commitment.
Purposefully exposing young people to increased risks of major brain problems – even death – for sport is surely even more ethically complicated than sending young people into this same neurological danger zone as soldiers.
I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.
To be perfectly honest, I follow football the way I follow television. I read about it.
When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.
A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.
When I talk about intersex, people ask me, ‘But what about the locker room?’ Yes, what about the locker room? If so many people feel trepidation around it, why don’t we fix the locker room? There are ways to signal to children that they are not the problem, and normalization technologies are not the way.
Conjoined twins simply may not need sex-romance partners as much as the rest of us do. Throughout time and space, they have described their condition as something like being attached to a soul mate.
We don’t really know where human sexual orientations come from yet. What we do know is that the evidence we have that sexual orientation includes an innate component doesn’t seem to point to the existence of simple ‘gay genes’ and ‘straight genes.’
What we should care about is health – reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is ‘normal.’ A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.
No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one’s social and political rights, surely we can’t pretend biology doesn’t matter in sports. Surely there’s a reason we don’t let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.
I think it is fine to have sports divided into men’s and women’s, just as it is fine to say a fifteen-year-old is incapable of consenting to sex. But we should recognize these are social distinctions based on biology, and not categories foisted upon us by nature.
I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
A democratic medical establishment does not alter people’s bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.
Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) Bury the money.
Regardless of the cultural system, social pressure to appear straight seems to be fairly intense cross-culturally. Indeed, one is inclined to wonder, if being straight is just natural, why does it require quite so much policing?
Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them – and they might hurt us – a lot less.
