Occasionally, I'll be reading a book and come across a passage that makes me think "are we twins separated at birth?" because it sounds a bit like me. eee, but I do like a list, preferably alphabetical. So I took a frisson of recognition with "Adam's apples, beards, behaviours, breasts, clitorises, erotic orientations, gonads, hair, interests, labia, menstrual signs, penises, prostates, scrotums, skeletal proportions, uteruses, voices, vaginas, and vulvas". Jakers? Wot's 'e reading now?
Well, seeing as you asked, I ordered Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (2015) from the library. Probably because I'd listened to an interview [as prev] by the author Alice Dreger. In case the title is ringing a bell, that disembodied finger pointing to high heaven, was one organ covered by Suzie Dent's 2024 Vital Organs: A History of The World's Most Famous Body Parts [whc prev]. Dreger's book hasn't much to do with The Digit, which features more as a talisman because Galileo is an inspiration as an early advocate of evidence over authority. She reckons that Galileo had a feisty sense of humour, which is always an asset in a hero. She is not without a wry quip or two herself: "Some sex variations occur at the level of sex chromosomes, some at the level of hormones, some at the level of hard-to-detect internal structures and some at the level of anatomical parts that you can see with the naked eye (assuming your eye isn't the only thing that's naked)"; indeed and ho ho.
Dreger has spent a lifetime hoping [we're not there yet] to establish common ground between activists and evidence. Her experience is that activists bond in an echo-chamber of like-minded advocates for a cherished cause . . . and are less open to contrary evidence than people who really don't have skin in the game. Pity, because, in an ideal world, truth / evidence would be the touchstone which informs all our actions even if it requires admitting we have been wrong. Dreger has saddled up to rescue biomedical researchers who have published evidence-based findings which run contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist.
She started off her career as a historian researching 19thC attitudes to, and outcomes for, those born with ambiguous sex or gender. That led her to meet many living people who didn't really fit in the binary M or F ideal. And that got her involved with Mike Bailey and his Trans Wars. Bailey promoted the ideas of Ray Blanchard that some transgender women have gotten there through autogynephilia - getting off on the idea of being a woman. The standard dogma was that sex had nothing to do with transgender. Dreger was indignant at coordinated ad hominem attacks on Bailey and his family rather than on the evidence he marshaled in support of his hypothesis. In defending Bailey against the misinformed hue and cry, Dreger herself was targeted by The Opposition in ways that were wearing and distressing.
Later, Dreger put the hue-and-cry boot on the other foot to pursue Prof Maria New for pushing prenatal dexamethasone on pregnant women who might be carrying an XX fetus with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia CAH [whc prev]. Dreger could find no evidence [it's that data again!] that prenatal dex had ever been properly trialed or evaluated before being pushed as safe and effective for both mother and child. The Feds (FDA, and the OHRP Office for Human Research Protections) investigated and concluded nothing to see here. Dreger begs to differ on that, but does concede that Maria New believed (she died last year) that she was giving the best available treatment to the problem of ambiguous presentation of gender at birth. Galileo's Middle Finger would read like a real life thriller in the vein of National Treasure if it just covered racing though the corridors of gender power. But there's more . . .
- Napoleon Chagnon (1938 - 2019) was a US anthropologist who spent years living with, and gathering data about, the Yanomamö [two of whom R] in the jungles of Venezuela. He concluded from his data that [this tribe of] hunter-gatherers were not so much noble savage as savage savage and wrote it all up in Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968). Like Bailey, Chagnon [rather than his science] was attacked by journalist Patrick Tierney in his 2000 book Darkness in El Dorado. Cudgels were taken up by the AAA American Anthropological Association who castigated Chagnon for his
genetic determinism and sociobiologyresearch ethics. Dreger spent a year working to help rehabilitate Chagnon and expose the bias and tendentiousness of Tierney's thesis . . . and the US anthropological establishment. Chagnon's last book was Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (2013). - In 1998, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman concluded
"A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse
Using College Samples", and it was published, after peer review, in the
Psychological Bulletin. They found that not all victims of childhood
sexual abuse (a very broad spectrum of adverse activity) were
irredeemably traumatized by the experience. Ask me how I [N = 1] know
this to be true.The Press and Politicians distilled this modest
discovery as a "license for pedophiles" and made hay about degenerate
scientists - rather than, like, reading the paper and criticizing the
sample size [N = 36,000 as you ask] or the stats.
- In 2000, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill published A Natural History of Rape. Their thesis was that there was a sexual element to sexual assault. That ran counter to the belief of some feminists that rape was all about [unequal] power and violence against women. Palmer and Thornhill also concluded that there was variation is the experience of, and recovery from, the trauma of coercive sex. Dreger interviewed Palmer some years after the event and they compared notes about how to deal with, and recover from, an ad hominem social media shit-storm.
Sorry, not sorry, that's as far as I go. There's no point in editorializing any more than I have because I'll either be preaching to the choir or being flung across the room [I hope your phone lands on the sofa not !ploosh! in the kitchen sink]. Wikipedia will fill in the details, if you don't have time to read Galileo's Middle Finger. But Dreger's bottom line is carpe datum before you sound off with your certainties. It was easier to read the book detached [insofar as that is possible when we're getting one side of the argument] from, and skeptical of, the righteous certainties of the author.
