Galileo's Middle Finger (35 page)

INTRODUCTION: THE TALISMAN

Ruth Hubbard
:
See Ruth Hubbard,
The Politics of Women’s Biology
(Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Londa Schiebinger and Cynthia Eagle Russett
:
Londa Schiebinger,
The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Cynthia Eagle Russett,
Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Stephen Jay Gould
:
Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). Gould’s treatment of the work of Samuel George Morton’s craniometry in that book has since come under significant criticism; see Jason E. Lewis et al., “The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould Versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias,”
PLoS Biology
9 (2011): e1001071.

This article mapped out
:
Alice Domurat Dreger, “Doubtful Sex: The Fate of the Hermaphrodite in Victorian Medicine,”
Victorian Studies
38, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 335–70. I later published my first book based on this work: Alice Domurat Dreger,
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Bo got my work
:
On our early meeting and collaboration, see Alice Dreger, “Cultural History and Social Activism: Scholarship, Identities, and the Intersex Rights Movement,” in
Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings
, ed. Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 390–409.

someday experience orgasm
:
I later documented and criticized this system in Alice Domurat Dreger, “‘Ambiguous Sex’—or Ambivalent Medicine? Ethical Problems in the Treatment of Intersexuality,”
Hastings Center Report
28, no. 3 (1998): 24–35.

clitoris had been amputated
:
See Cheryl Chase, “Affronting Reason,” in
Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities
, ed. Dawn Atkins (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1998): 205–20; Elizabeth Weil, “What If It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?”
New York Times
, Sept. 24, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24intersexkids.html.

Bailey had suggested
:
J. Michael Bailey,
The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism
(Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003).

account of the controversy
:
My article appeared as Alice Dreger, “The Controversy Surrounding
The Man Who Would Be Queen:
A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
37, no. 3 (June 2008): 366–421, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-007-9301-1.

New York Times
:
This was covered in Benedict Carey, “Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege,”
New York Times
, Aug. 21, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/health/psychology/21gender.html.

Galileo actively argued
:
This account of Galileo is based largely on the excellent biography by David Wootton,
Galileo: Watcher of the Skies
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

“cause of the eggs hardening”
:
Ibid., 164.

“making human beings seem insignificant”
:
Ibid., 169.

Founding Fathers were science geeks
:
See Jonathan Lyons,
The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

Galileo’s middle finger
:
See Rachel Donadio, “A Museum Display of Galileo Has a Saintly Feel,”
The New York Times
, July 22, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/world/europe/23galileo.html.

“Tiphaeus ever reached”
:
Translation from anonymous, “The Right Kinds of Relics,” http://friendsofdarwin.com/2007/04/20070415/.

CHAPTER ONE: FUNNY LOOKING

genital appearance upsets or worries some adult
:
The somewhat shocking and non-evidence-based clinical pediatric approaches as they existed in the 1990s were documented in an important critical analysis by two gynecologists: Sarah Creighton and Catherine Minto, “Managing Intersex,”
BMJ [British Medical Journal]
323, no. 7324 (2001): 1264–65.

Winston Churchill
:
Speaking of Chamberlain, Churchill said, “Poor Neville, he will come badly out of history. . . . I know, because I will write the history.” Quoted on p. 11 of Robert J. Caputi,
Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement
(London, England: Associated University Presses, 2000).

about one in two thousand babies
:
The medical literature contains no good study of the frequency of “ambiguous genitalia” (again, presumably because one would have to simply decide what would count). In order to get at an estimate, Bo Laurent (Cheryl Chase) and I asked specialists to tell us how often their teams were called to a birth because a baby’s genitals were too unclear to assign a sex, and the figure consistently came to about one in fifteen hundred to one in two thousand.

About one in three hundred babies
:
This would include, for example, when a girl is born with a larger than expected clitoris or when a boy is born with hypospadias, i.e., when the urinary opening is not at the tip of the penis. The frequency of hypospadias is given in one current textbook as ranging from “between 0.4 to 8.2 cases per 1000 newborn boys”; see Bernardita Troncoso and Pedro-Jose Lopez, “Hypospadias,” in
Pediatric Urology Book
, ed. Duncan Wilcox, Prasad Godbole, and Christopher Cooper, http://www.pediatricurologybook.com/hypospadias.html.

one in a hundred
:
Melanie Blackless et al., “How Sexually Dimorphic Are We? Review and Synthesis,”
American Journal of Human Biology
12, no. 2 (2000): 151–66.

twenty-five and in graduate school
:
In 2003, at the request of two historians of medicine editing a book on our profession, I wrote about why I became an activist-historian; see Alice Dreger, “Cultural History and Social Activism: Scholarship, Identities, and the Intersex Rights Movement,” in
Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings
, ed. Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 390–409.

one of my dissertation directors
:
Because it bridged the history of medicine and science, my dissertation was codirected by Fred Churchill (historian of science) and Ann Carmichael (historian of medicine); see Alice Domurat Dreger,
Doubtful Sex, Doubtful Status: Cases and Concepts of Hermaphroditism in France and Britain, 1868–1915
(PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1995).

my three hundred primary sources
:
I discuss this methodology and subject more fully in the book based on my dissertation: Alice Domurat Dreger,
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

nineteenth-century Frenchwoman
:
See the story of Louise-Julia-Anna in Ibid., 110–13, 138.

feminine breasts with a penis
:
We now know that mixed external sex anatomy can arise from a large number of conditions, including congenital adrenal hyperplasia in genetic females, partial androgen insensitivity syndrome in genetic males, various tumors, and polycystic ovary syndrome, just to name a few. Not all of the causes of mixed external sex anatomy are congenital (inborn).

the other sex’s organs inside
:
We now understand that complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (cAIS) can cause a person to develop externally and behaviorally like a typical female, although internally she will have testes and will lack female reproductive organs (except for the vagina and vulva). It is not uncommon for this condition to go undiagnosed until late adolescence. We also now know that extreme forms of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) can cause a genetic female to develop as a fairly typical male in terms of external genitalia, so that the child would ordinarily be assumed to be male at birth, even though internally the child will have ovaries and a uterus.

manly at puberty
:
These would represent cases of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, which causes a child to be born looking much like a typical female but to undergo a male-typical puberty. The protagonist of the novel
Middlesex
has this condition, as probably did Herculine Barbin. See Jeffrey Eugenides,
Middlesex: A Novel
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002) and Michel Foucault,
Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite,
trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon: 1980).

the doctors’ eyebrows rise
:
These cases are traced in Dreger,
Hermaphrodites.

Age of Gonads
:
This history is spelled out more fully in chapter 5 of Dreger,
Hermaphrodites
, and in Alice Dreger, “Hermaphrodites in Love: The Truth of the Gonads,” in
Science and Homosexualities
, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997): 46–66.

Together Wilkins and Money
:
This is best described in Sandra Eder,
The Birth of Gender: Clinical Encounters with Hermaphroditic Children at Johns Hopkins, 1940–1956
(PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2011). See also Sandra Eder, “From ‘Following the Push of Nature’ to ‘Restoring One’s Proper Sex’: Cortisone and Sex at Johns Hopkins’s Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic,”
Endeavour
36, no. 2 (2012): 69–76.

sometimes lies
:
For a collection of first-person accounts of this treatment system from people born intersex, see Alice Domurat Dreger, ed.,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics
(Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 1999).

core group
:
For raw footage of intersex adults talking in the mid-1990s about what happened to them, see the videotape made by Bo Laurent/Cheryl Chase,
Hermaphrodites Speak!
(San Francisco: Intersex Society of North America, 1997), 30 minutes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSOngdR7kM.

Intersex Society of North America
:
Bo Laurent (ISNA’s founder) has written extensively on the motivations and origins of the intersex rights movement, often under her activist name, Cheryl Chase. See, for example, Cheryl Chase, “Affronting Reason,” in
Looking Queer: Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities
, ed. Dawn Atkins (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1998): 205–20; and Cheryl Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
4, no. 2 (1998): 189–211.

a few people did
:
In the late nineteenth century, thanks to advances in anesthesia and infection control, surgery became safer and less painful, and at this point, a small number of hermaphroditic patients inquired about surgical options. I track this in Dreger,
Hermaphrodites.

while most seemed fairly unconcerned
:
This variation is traced in Dreger,
Hermaphrodites,
but was first hinted at in the article that caused Bo to contact me: Alice Domurat Dreger, “Doubtful Sex: The Fate of the Hermaphrodite in Victorian Medicine,”
Victorian Studies
38, no. 3 (1995): 335–70.

Bo was to be counted
:
Bo’s personal history was recounted in various documentaries as well as in Elizabeth Weil, “
What If It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?”
New York Times,
Sept. 24, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24intersexkids.html.

Bo and I later successfully worked to get rid of it
:
The article where we argued for the change in nomenclature is: Alice D. Dreger, Cheryl Chase, Aron Sousa, Philip A. Gruppuso, and Joel Frader, “Changing the Nomenclature/Taxonomy for Intersex: A Scientific and Clinical Rationale,”
Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism
18, no. 8 (2005): 729–33. Shortly thereafter, the medical establishment officially dropped all diagnoses based on the term “hermaphrodite” and adopted the umbrella term “disorders of sex development” for all intersex conditions; see Peter A. Lee et al., “Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders” (also known as the Chicago Consensus),
Pediatrics
118 (2006): e488–e500. This shift was controversial among activists; see Ellen K. Feder, “Imperatives of Normality: From ‘Intersex’ to ‘Disorders of Sex Development,’”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
15, no. 2 (2009): 225–47; Georgiann Davis,
The Dubious Diagnosis: How Intersex Became a Disorder of Sex Development
(New York: New York University Press, 2015).