Alice Dreger Quotes
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The safety argument against steroids may be a good one, but let's be honest. It isn't the one that motivates most officials and fans to frown on steroids. Steroid use does not just seem risky or unnatural, it seems to disrupt the level playing field.
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After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law.
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I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.
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Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous.
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The funny thing is, when I ask people with dark skin if they would change their color, they tell me no, and when I ask women if they would rather be men, they tell me no, and I get the same response when I ask people with unusual anatomies if they would take a magic pill to erase their unusual features.
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I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.
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When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.
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You can't go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can't stop you from trying.
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Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
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I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.'s and by M.D.'s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally.
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Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents.
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We say, 'You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.' Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn't care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.
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I think it is fine to have sports divided into men's and women's, just as it is fine to say a fifteen-year-old is incapable of consenting to sex. But we should recognize these are social distinctions based on biology, and not categories foisted upon us by nature.
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You want a child who never makes you anything but proud? Please. Don't bother taking on parenthood if you can't handle the fact that sometimes your child's identity won't be what you would have chosen. And if you want to prevent a child from ever suffering? Well, then don't have a child. No one is born into the world never to suffer.
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As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic.
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I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.
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We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.
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So many times I've heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won't really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It's a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.
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To be perfectly honest, I follow football the way I follow television. I read about it.
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Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long - especially when you don't know where it's all going to go - it's hard stuff. I'm not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?
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I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
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Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation.
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Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.
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According to my mother, there pretty much wasn't anything I wouldn't eat as a child. Not just try, but eat. I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust - lobster and other shellfish, and cheap Chinese food with pepper so hot it made your gums feel like a medieval dentist had been at them.