Galileo's Middle Finger : : Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

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Call Number: 174.95 Dr, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / General / Dreger, Alice
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	174.95 Dr	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / General / Dreger, Alice	4-week checkout	Due 05-25-2024

Introduction : the talisman -- Funny looking -- Rabbit holes -- Tangled webs -- A show-me state of mind -- The rot from within -- Human natures -- Risky business -- Doctor, my eyes -- Doomed to repeat? -- Conclusion : truth, justice, and the American way -- Epilogue : postcards.
"An investigation of some of the most contentious debates of our time, Galileo's Middle Finger describes Alice Dreger's experiences on the front lines of scientific controversy, where for two decades she has worked as an advocate for victims of unethical research while also defending the right of scientists to pursue challenging research into human identities. Dreger's own attempts to reconcile academic freedom with the pursuit of justice grew out of her research into the treatment of people born intersex (formerly called hermaphrodites). The shocking history of surgical mutilation and ethical abuses conducted in the name of "normalizing" intersex children moved her to become a patient rights' activist. By bringing evidence to physicians and the public, she helped change the medical system. But even as she worked to correct these injustices, Dreger began to witness how some fellow liberal activists, motivated by identity politics, were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed inconvenient truths. Troubled, she traveled around the country digging up sources and interviewing the targets of these politically motivated campaigns. Among the subjects she covers in the book are the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, falsely accused in a bestselling book of committing genocide against a South American tribe; the psychologist Michael Bailey, accused of abusing transgender women; and the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, accused of fomenting rightwing ideas about human nature. Galileo's Middle Finger describes Dreger's long and harrowing journey back and forth between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice warriors and researchers determined to put truth before politics"-- Provided by publisher.

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An important but flawed book submitted by dwick on July 6, 2023, 10:03am “Academic disputes are often so vicious because so little is at stake.” So goes the adage, but only the first half is true. This book is about one-sidedly vicious disputes when much is at stake, including children’s lives.

The book begins with the story of how Dreger became an activist in the intersex rights movement (despite herself not having a Variation of Sex Development, sometimes known as Differences of Sex Development). Through this activism she becomes exposed to many clinicians who performed risky, unnecessary surgeries on infants in the name of “normalizing” them. She shows how this stemmed from parental fear and some thoroughly sexist and homophobic views of normality. Evidence that these procedures made the children better off was conspicuously absent.

This activism in turn brought Dreger in contact with another controversy: the monstering of academic Michael Bailey by three activist trans women. Bailey’s sin in their eyes was that he wrote a book that adopted and popularized sexologist Ray Blanchard’s theory that there are (at least) two distinct types of trans women. The first is the “homosexual transsexual” (Dreger calls them “transkids”), attracted to males, and highly feminine in behavior from a young age. The second type is mostly attracted to women, had more typical boyhoods and male-typical professions and adult lives, before transitioning at a much later age than the first type tended to. Blanchard termed this group “autogynephiles” – in love with idea of themselves as women. This is what the activists objected to: the suggestion that their identity had an erotic foundation, and that they were anything other than really a woman inside.

Dreger is very good at explaining both the complex theories and evidence base for both this issue and many others. That ability also allows her to make very clear, with painstaking research, just how egregious the attacks on Bailey were.

But this isn’t actually a book about trans activists behaving badly. The text continues with studies of numerous other cases where academic reputations were trashed by baseless accusations. These cases range from evolutionary scientists investigating causes of rape, several prominent anthropologists, and the psychologist who worked out that some “recovered” memories may actually be false.

The abuse spanned so many fields that you can’t blame it on postmodern truthiness in the humanities (though it has made things worse). Some cases go back decades, so neither can you blame the situation on the internet and social media (though, ditto).

A trained historian, Dreger manages the narrative well, but I’d have liked her to draw out some of these common threads a bit more, and even suggested some hypotheses about them. In particular I’d have liked to see a bit more analysis of what makes a person willing to flat-out lie about intellectual opponents. Not every academic does this, so what is driving the ones who do? Dreger noted the obstinate, “Galilean” personality of many of the accused, who willingly pursued topics they knew (or ought to have known) would be controversial. But what makes their accusers cross the line into bogus accusations and even threatening people’s families? Perhaps this is another book.

A few other things that made this a four-star book for me rather than a five-star. First, there were a few parts of the prose where the style became overly academic, with flabby, overpacked sentences. Even great writers need editors and academic ones especially so. (Actual investigative journalists know how to keep their prose crisp – see Costello and Cosgrove’s “Normal at Any Cost” for an example on a similar topic.)

Second, the American exceptionalism was unwarranted. Yes, democracy needs rational inquiry to function well and, yes, the Founding Fathers were big on science. But others might have noticed that there are a number of other western democracies, and some of them don’t seem to be the source of quite so many medical scandals. Dreger mentions the Swedish research showing issues with some of the anti-intersex treatments she opposes, but it doesn’t suggest to her that maybe the US institutions could ask what their counterparts in other countries are doing right.

Finally – and perhaps unfairly given the book was first published in 2015 before this issue blew up so much – I find it gobsmacking that someone so rightly sceptical of medical interventions in intersex youth is so blindly trusting of the research purporting to demonstrate positive outcomes of medical interventions for trans and gender non-conforming youth – when oftentimes these are the SAME clinicians. As with Costello and Cosgrove’s book, pay attention to appearances by John Money in Dreger’s.