Empathy Radio: Galileo's Middle Finger Speaking Truth to Power and Power Talks Back

A scientist has not been burned at the stake in over 350 years - and even then it was Giordano Bruno, not Galileo. Find out how Professor Alice Dreger (PhD) become an advocate for survivors of intersex sexual reassignment surgery and she becomes a strong candidate to be burned in effigy by those for whom she was advocating.

Dreger starts out as a graduate student exploring the condition known as “hermaphroditism,” people born with sex organs that are ambiguous as to male or female, now called “intersex.” In reading the text books studied by her medical student husband, she discovers the interventions performed to “normalize” people sexually into the two canonical categories of male or female. The parents usually follow the recommendations of the physician-surgeon who are articulating a supposed community standard that one’s genitals should unambiguously be either male or female. Dreger discovers that many of the people whose genitals were surgically transformed were subsequently lied to about their natal [birth] sex by well-intentioned doctors and well-intentioned parents following the well-intentioned doctor’s guidance. Thus, the road to hell. Find out what happens when Dreger's research surfaces evidence that does not align perfectly with the interpretation of a social justice agenda.

This is a powerful and disturbing work. Alice Dreger, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, delivers a compelling narrative. A penis smaller than a person’s adult thumb or clitorises larger than one little finger, according to (some) conventional wisdom, have got to go. I am not making this up. The standard procedure was to surgically “delete” the offending member and surgically construct [some version of] the female genitals. This will, of course, resonate with Freudians everywhere as something motivated at the deepest levels of the unconscious. Not so Freudian is the proposition that if sex assignment from male to female and the raising of the infant as one rather than the other sex is the consequence, so be it. (Dreger is not interested in Freud in this text – that is my hobby.) Be prepared to get your mind blown!
(c) Lou Agosta and the Chicago Empathy Project