Galileo's Middle Finger (36 page)

Bo had also been born with ambiguous genitalia
:
See Weil, “What If . . .”

marshaled her lesbian feminist political consciousness
:
See Chase, “Affronting Reason,” and Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude.”

took on a new name
:
See “Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent),” www.isna.org/about/chase.

latest medical books
:
For documentation and analyses of the homophobia behind the modern medical management of intersex, see Alice Domurat Dreger, “‘Ambiguous Sex’—or Ambivalent Medicine? Ethical Problems in the Treatment of Intersexuality,”
Hastings Center Report
28, no. 3 (1998): 24–35; Suzanne J. Kessler,
Lessons from the Intersexed
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Anne Fausto-Sterling,
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
(New York: Basic Books, 2000).

name in the snow
:
Adrienne Carmack, Lauren Notini, and Brian D. Earp, “Should Elective Surgery for Hypospadias Be Performed before an Age of Consent?,” forthcoming, includes this typical medical construction of the problem: “It is the inalienable right of every boy to be a pointer instead of a sitter by the time he starts school and to write his name legibly in the snow”; from O. S. Culp and J. W. McRoberts, “Hypospadias,” in C. E. Alken, V. Dix, and W. E. Goodwin, eds.,
Encyclopedia of Urology
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1969): 11307–44.

Martha Coventry
:
See Martha Coventry, “Finding the Words,” in Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics
, 71–76.

David Cameron Strachan
:
See David Cameron, “Caught Between: An Essay on Intersexuality,” in Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics
, 91–96; David Cameron, “Being Different and Fitting In,” http://oiiinternational.com/2538/fitting; Anonymous, “2008 LGBT Heroes: David Cameron Strachan, Intersex Community Volunteer Activist,” http://www.kqed.org/community/heritage/lgbt/heroes/2008.jsp.

gazing upon her in the book
:
For more on the medical display of intersex people, see Sarah Creighton et al., “Medical Photography: Ethics, Consent and the Intersex Patient,”
BJU International
89, no. 1 (2002): 67–71; and see Alice Domurat Dreger, “Jarring Bodies: Thoughts on the Display of Unusual Anatomies,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
43, no. 2 (2000): 161–72.

daughter’s noticeably long clitoris
:
Bo and I interviewed this mother and daughter on the record in “A Mother’s Care: An Interview with ‘Sue’ and ‘Margaret,’” in Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics,
83–89.

her clitoris was bigger than most
:
This woman provided a short essay for an anthology I collected; see Kim, “As Is,” in Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics,
99–100.

she had testes inside
:
We alluded to this story in Dreger et al., “Changing the Nomenclature.”

a uterus inside of him
:
This man was a genetic female with an extreme form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

now she was going to die
:
Bo and I often showed people a surgical training video that explained that sometimes “for social reasons” surgeons “needed” to shorten clitorises on very young babies, before it was really medically advisable to attempt anesthesia; see Richard Hurwitz et al., “Surgical Reconstruction of Ambiguous Genitalia in Female Children,” (Woodbury, CT: Cine-Med, 1990).

Bruce Wilson
:
See Bruce E. Wilson and William G. Reiner, “Management of Intersex: A Shifting Paradigm,” in Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics
, 119–35.

“phall-o-meters”
:
The phall-o-meters were inspired by an article by Suzanne Kessler, “Meanings of Genital Variability,”
Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Identities
2 (1997): 33–38.

fit social norms
:
For more on medical interpretations of “correct” phallus size, see Dreger,
Hermaphrodites
, 183.

extensive ethical critique
:
See Dreger, “‘Ambiguous Sex.’”

next book I published
:
See Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics
; this was based on a special journal issue on intersex,
Journal of Clinical Ethics
9, no. 4 (Winter 1998).

I paid a university photographer
:
I explained the logic behind this act in Dreger, “Jarring Bodies.”

As Nature Made Him
:
John Colapinto,
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

Reimer also failed to prove Money’s theory
:
This story first broke in 1997, startling the medical establishment, but did not garner widespread public attention until Colapinto’s treatment. See Natalie Angier, “Sexual Identity Not Pliable After All, Report Says,”
New York Times,
Mar. 14, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/us/sexual-identity-not-pliable-after-all-report-says.html; this was a front-page story on an academic journal report from critics of Money; Milton Diamond and H. Keith Sigmundson, “Sex Reassignment at Birth: Long-Term Review and Clinical Implications,”
Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine
151, no. 3 (1997): 298–304.

most intersex people kept the gender assignments
:
Gender outcomes are reviewed in Lee et al., “Consensus Statement.”

Bo said it as plainly as she could
:
See Cheryl Chase, “What Is the Agenda of the Intersex Patient Advocacy Movement?”
Endocrinologist
13, no. 3 (2003): 240–42. See also Lee et al., “Consensus Statement,” for evidence that the clinical establishment was by 2006 recognizing Bo’s and ISNA’s formulation of the problem: “Although clinical practice may focus on gender and genital appearance as key outcomes, stigma and experiences associated with having a DSD [disorder of sexual development] (both within and outside the medical environment) are more salient issues for many affected people” (p. e496).

Bill Reiner
:
For Reiner’s challenges to John Money’s established paradigm, see Wilson and Reiner, “Management of Intersex,” and see William G. Reiner and John P. Gearhart, “Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth,”
New England Journal of Medicine
350, no. 4 (2004): 333–41.

maximin strategy
:
Howard Brody and James R. Thompson, “The Maximin Strategy in Modern Obstetrics,”
Journal of Family Practice
12, no. 6 (1981): 977–86.

resulted in
more
net harm
:
For a synopsis of this ongoing problem in obstetrics, see Aron C. Sousa and Alice Dreger, “The Difference between Science and Technology in Birth,”
JAMA Virtual Mentor
15, no. 9 (2013): 786–90.

the founder of pediatric endocrinology
:
See Eder,
The Birth of Gender.

Money had
known
:
See Colapinto,
As Nature Made Him.

Articles and op-eds
:
See, for example, Creighton and Minto, “Managing Intersex”; Wilson and Reiner, “Management of Intersex” (originally published in
Journal of Clinical Ethics
9, no. 4 [1998]: 360–69); Kenneth Kipnis and Milton Diamond, “Pediatric Ethics and the Surgical Assignment of Sex,”
Journal of Clinical Ethics
9, no. 4 (1998): 398–410 (republished in Dreger,
Intersex in the Age of Ethics
, 173–193).

conjoined twins
:
This is explained in Alice Dreger,
One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Alice Dreger, “The Sex Lives of Conjoined Twins,”
The
Atlantic
(Oct. 25, 2012), www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/the-sex-lives-of-conjoined-twins/264095.

UCLA surgeon
:
See Dreger,
One of Us,
62.

more impairment and shorter life spans
:
See Dreger,
One of Us
. See also Alice Domurat Dreger, “The Limits of Individuality: Ritual and Sacrifice in the Lives and Medical Treatment of Conjoined Twins,”
Studies in History and Philosophy
of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
29c, no. 1 (Mar. 1998): 1–29. See also Alice D. Dreger and Geoffrey Miller, “Conjoined Twins” in
Pediatric Bioethics
, ed. Geoffrey Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 203–18.

Ladan and Laleh Bijani
:
see Dreger,
One of Us
, 41–43 and 66–67.

“achieve their dream of separation”
:
Keith Goh quoted in Anonymous, “Nation in Shock over Death of Iranian Twins,”
Belfast News Letter
(Northern Ireland), July 9, 2003, 14.

political consciousness about LGBT
:
See Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude.”

discrimination against a sexual minority
:
On this point, see Alice D. Dreger and April M. Herndon, “Progress and Politics in the Intersex Rights Movement: Feminist Theory in Action,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
15, no. 2 (2009): 199–224.

penetrated by men
:
For a review of the evidence of homophobia in the medical literature on intersex, see Dreger, “‘Ambiguous Sex’”; Kessler,
Lessons from the Intersexed
; Fausto-Sterling,
Sexing the Body
.

“I’m not a doctor”
:
I wrote about this technique of relationship-building in Alice Dreger, “Sleeping with the Enmity,”
Atrium
, no. 3 (2006): 12.

Oprah
:
See “Growing Up Intersex,”
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
July 19, 2008, www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Growing-Up-Intersex.

Richard Rink
:
The press release I wrote for ISNA on this was published as Alice Dreger, “Urologists: Agonize over Whether to Cut, Then Cut the Way I’m Telling You,” Intersex Society of North America, Oct. 14, 2004, www.isna.org/articles/aap_urology_2004.

San Francisco Human Rights Commission
:
For the report that emerged, see Marcus de María Arana, ed.,
A Human Rights Investigation into
the Medical “Normalization” of Intersex People,
a Report of a Public Hearing by the Human Rights Commission (City and County of San Francisco, 2005).

wrote something like this
:
See Weil, “What If . . .”

simply to be treated as human
:
See Alice Dreger, “Intersex and Human Rights: The Long View,”
Ethics and Intersex
, ed. Sharon E. Sytsma (Doetinchem, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 73–86.

CHAPTER 2: RABBIT HOLES

two handbooks
:
These were compiled in their first form by Sallie Foley and Christine Feick, and ultimately published in 2006 as
Clinical Guidelines for the Management of Disorders of Sex Development in Childhood
and
Handbook for Parents
(now available through Accord Alliance, www.accordalliance.org/dsd-guidelines/).

list of talking points
:
I wrote about this strategy in Alice Dreger, “Footnote to a Footnote: On Roving Medicine,” in
Bioethics Forum,
Oct. 9, 2008, www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=2484.

international medical consensus
:
See Peter A. Lee et al., “Consensus Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders” (also known as the Chicago Consensus),
Pediatrics
118 (2006): e488–e500

real problem in intersex care
:
See for example, Richard S. Hurwitz, “Long-Term Outcomes in Male Patients with Sex Development Disorders—How Are We Doing and How Can We Improve?,”
Journal of Urology
184, no. 3 (2010): 821–32.

study of “fag hags”
:
Nancy H. Bartlett, H. M. Patterson, Douglas P. VanderLaan, and Paul L. Vasey, “The Relation Between Women’s Body Esteem and Friendships with Gay Men,”
Body Image
6, no. 3 (2009): 235–41.

Bailey transsexualism controversy
:
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
27, no. 3 (2008): 366–421, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-007-9301-1.

popular, comforting narrative
:
For an example of this kind of narrative of transgender, see Randi Ettner,
Confessions of a Gender Defender: A Psychologist’s Reflections on Life Among the Transgendered
(Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1996).