The last two weeks have supported dribbly bench work. Oh, I was able to harvest some arabidopsis seeds and to sub-culture the BY-2 cells. I advised my two undergraduate students, Laura and Ellen, about their projects, and I even managed to dry down a set of method-test samples from Joseph. But mostly my days were spent working on my Plant Physiology class and on committee work for College Personnel, Plant Biology Graduate Admissions, and Health Council, all of which I chair. Adding to the fun – I had, still have, a cold. Poor me.
With no tales of broken test-tubes, I will instead write about an interesting book I finished: Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, by Alice Dreger. Myths are powerful. I remain amazed to have learned that, contrary to my mom’s strident warning, swimming right after you eat won’t give you a cramp and make you drown. There is no actual evidence to back up that particular piece of unruly child suppression. We all know that smoking causes cancer and that eating vegetables is good for you. But how do we know these things? Did you go read the original studies? We have to take it on trust that “everyone” has it right. Often they do, but not always. For example, the idea margarine is better for you than butter turned out to be little more than a guess. Dreger’s book shows what happens when people are unwilling to find out what it is, really, that we know.
The book is written as a memoir, telling at first hand the author’s participation in controversies. Noisy and intense controversies, relating to intersex, transgender, and studies of Amazon natives. The narrative is historical, with events and responses thereto unfolding chronologically. This is fitting because Dreger is, above all, a historian. It must be a curious for a historian to write history in which they themself were a participant. Hewing to chronology is a survival mechanism; a philosopher would write about these controversies differently. More than once, I got antsy reading about flying to this airport to meet X when I wanted ideas and arguments. Still, it is a long and varied journey; Dreger’s account of the day-by-day action invigorates the text and probably results in the ideas getting lodged in my head more deeply than would have happened with a purely abstract account.
It starts with Victorian hermaphrodites, these being the subject of Dreger’s doctorate. She investigated how doctors handled them, detailing the circumlocutions invented to categorize them unmistakably as being one sex or the other. Dreger might still be living quietly on the tenth floor of an ivory tower had not her scholarly articles (in the 1990’s) come to the attention of Bo Laurent, a leader in the nascent intersex-rights movement, who reached out to Dreger and drew her in.
The first section of Galileo’s Middle Finger describes the author’s involvement in helping to establish rights for intersex children. She describes learning about how babies born with mixtures of male and female characters were altered surgically and chemically. She immediately saw that there was no medical evidence to show that these interventions helped the patients lead better lives, and indeed considerable evidence about often severe complications from the surgery. Instead, there was simply the assertion that sex comes in but two flavors and anyone born in the middle would be destined to a life of misery and therefore must be cured. We can see how this assertion follows from those Victorian categorizers but it is sobering to note that the shame heaped on intersex is a twentieth century elaboration.
In Dreger’s text, the doctors involved were not villains, crusading for their repressive view of human sexuality; instead, they were subject to a myth. Everyone knows that there only two sexes and so everyone knows that the intersex can experience no fulfillment only shame. By the second half of the 20th century, this myth was so ingrained that it sanctioned damaging and dangerous surgery on babies, a group notable for being unable to give informed consent. Here we make our first substantial encounter with Galileo as we recognize the parallel between churchmen unwilling to accept evidence against what they thought was obvious about the sky (though nowhere written in scripture) and doctors unwilling to grasp the absence of evidence about what they thought was obvious about intersex.
In this part of the book, we can smirk a little over the narrow-mindedness of the doctors. These days, we get it that sex is not so binary and people born intersex can lead happy and fulfilled lives, provided society will let them. Fortunately by the way, thanks in no small measure to Dreger and intersex activists, doctors are now getting this too, and surgical intersex “cures” are far less frequent than even a few decades ago.
Nevertheless, any smugness evaporates as the book continues. The next section is about a scientist named Michael J. Bailey, who researches sexuality and published a book about why some men become women, as adults. Here Dreger moves from intersex, which typically describes conditions at birth considered wholly biological, to transgender, which occurs later in life and involves the mind as well as the body. One of the ironies here is that so-called reassignment surgery was practiced willy-nilly (pun intended, sorry) on babies and children, often without telling them (ever), but it is withheld rather comprehensively from adults. Bailey wrote about two different kinds of transgender situations. For one set of people born as males, they enjoy behaving as females and are attracted sexually to men. For the other group, they are aroused powerfully by the idea of being female, a syndrome psychologists have termed ‘autogynephilia’.
It happened that Bailey’s ideas run counter to a doctrine of many transgender activists, namely the claim that transgender is based on one sex being born in the body of the other. Their response was to attack him, but not only attack his ideas but also the man himself. In this internet age, it did not take a savvy group of activists long to turn Bailey into the jerk who said unspeakable things about transgender people and committed horrible ethical violations in his research to boot.
This smear campaign had been so successful that Dreger writes when she started looking into his case she was expecting to find a Dr Frankenstein. Instead, she finds essentially zero evidence for any of the bad things he was accused of doing and much to suggest that he supported transgender people and their rights effectively (both in the pages of his book and otherwise). It seems that Bailey fell victim to people beholden to a fixed idea and were not interested in reading let alone rebutting evidence to the contrary. In their actions these transgender activists come off rather exactly like the cardinals in Galileo’s day.
Dreger treats several other controversies in her book, with long sections about an anthropologist named Napoleon Chagnon who was accused of bad behavior in the Amazon and one about a doctor in New York who has been for decades dosing pregnant moms with a steroid hormone, going against what you and I would call obvious ethical norms. Inter alia, we learn that the recent widely credited allegations that the anthropologist Margaret Mead was a phony are themselves phony. These cases all involve one group or the other believing what they want to believe and refusing to confront evidence to the contrary. Academics and activists alike come in for criticism for being far too easily willing to accept the comfortable status quo.
In the second paragraph, when reminding us of many supposed truths whose origins we don’t check, I wrote “take it on trust”. I might have written “take it on faith”. There’s the crux. Some might be inclined to trust the word of scientists, others inclined to trust activists. Such trust is needed to get on with our lives but both groups can mislead. If we are going to escape derision from that vaunted middle digit, we had better recognize this and be willing, if not happy, to look when someone proposes an alternative view. We should be particularly vigilant when we hear that someone being vilified, personally, for their ideas. Be careful whom you would send to the inquisition. The most important lesson from Alice Dreger’s book is that it teaches us to keep our minds open.
By the way, Dreger’s web-page is here and a review of Galileo’s Middle Finger here ++++++++++++++++.