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Alice Dreger
Science historian Alice Dreger documents her journey through the stormy waters between science and activism, striving to emphasize that truth and justice are two sides of the same coin. Dreger's research brings together a motley cast of characters ranging from entomologist and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson to sex advice columnist Dan Savage, and touching on others like Wilson's colleague and critic Stephen Jay Gould and anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Dreger's story spans many years, from the early 90's to the early 2010's, starting with her PhD thesis on the handling of intersex individuals in Victorian times. Though there are some interesting highlights from that alone, it's probably a surprise to no one that in that era the emphasis was on sweeping any sort of biological complexity around sex differences under the rug-- keeping a nice tidy story of a male/female dichotomy was the order of the day, even though science kept throwing troublesome complications in the path of the doctors of the time.
As modern-day activists who sought her out after she published made clear to Dreger, the situation as of the early 1990's was not all that different from Victorian times, with the result that children were receiving "normalizing" surgeries with substantial risk and dubious goals. Dreger joins forces with a group of intersex activists to press for change. She makes a point not to demonize the doctors, psychiatrists, and researchers she and her group opposed, but to doggedly insist that they follow where the science leads-- to recognize when they may be doing real harm in their quest to ostensibly help their patients.
In subsequent chapters Dreger takes an apparent turn, investigating and defending scientists against unfounded charges from activists who oppose them and their work. The last major project of the book takes another turn, joining activists in taking on researchers who, in their zeal for an imagined panacea, may be putting patients at risk.
Through all of these controversies and struggles, while seemingly zig-zagging between being on the "side" of the activists to that of the scientists and back again, the common thread is first wanting to know what is true in order to determine what is right. As Dreger takes pains to emphasize, there are no sides, except inasmuch as there are those who understand that knowing what is true is the necessary first step, and those who have lost sight of that. The intellectually-toxic attitude of "I already know what's true, so I already know the right path forward" that can take root in activism has, as its counterpart among scientists, the equally toxic attitude of "I already know I'm right, now I just need to prove it."
Dreger at times faces scorn and vitriol with incredible magnanimity trying to see the human in everyone, and recognize that the vast majority of the time even the adversaries in these stories are motivated by the same desire to do what they think is right. The moments when she is closest to despair are when there seems to be no interest in knowing what's actually true, no demand for rigorous inquiry, and no consequences for sloppy scholarship.
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