Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Domurat Dreger

The second section provides her analysis of the controversy surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003), by sex researcher and psychologist J. Some surgeons called this 'total urogenital mobilization' which is '.ripping out everything that didn't seem right to the doctor and rebuilding a girl's genitals from scratch using Frankenstein stitches.' Based on her interactions with the intersex community as well as her own research, she advocated that genital surgery for intersex children be postponed until the individual is old enough to make an informed decision, in the absence of any evidence that the benefits of such surgery outweighed its already reported risks.

The first part of Galileo's Middle Finger recounts Dreger's activism against surgical 'correction' of intersex individuals' genitalia. These include the debates surrounding intersex genital surgery, autogynephilia, and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's work. Dreger explores the relationship between science and social justice by discussing a number of scientific controversies. More on her work is available at alicedreger.Galileo's Middle Finger is a 2015 book about the ethics of medical research by Alice Dreger, an American bioethicist and author. Dreger is widely known for her investigative scholarship and for live-tweeting her son's high school sex ed class, and also for having resigned in August 2015 from Northwestern University's medical school following censorship of her work by her dean, Eric Neilson. Her TED talk, 'Is Anatomy Destiny?' has been viewed almost one million times, and her work has been published in many venues, including The New York Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, The Atlantic, New Statesman, WIRED, Pacific Standard, the Guardian, and the Chicago Tribune. She is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship. Her latest book GALILEO'S MIDDLE FINGER (Penguin Press, 2015), has been named a New York Times Book Review editors' choice, and has also been reviewed in The New Yorker, Salon, Nature, and elsewhere. Alice Dreger is an American history of medicine and science, a mainstream writer, and an (im)patient advocate.

Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Domurat Dreger