Quotes from Alice Dreger

I am led by what I find to be true, not what I find to be popular.

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.

Ok, here goes: I'm going to see how many people I can offend by suggesting that maybe many little gay boys, like many little girls, are made up of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we'd probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.

No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one's social and political rights, surely we can't pretend biology doesn't matter in sports. Surely there's a reason we don't let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.

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.

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.

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.

understood the world as much as possible through description rather than judgment,

the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.

Science and democracy grew up together in Europe and North America, as twins; it is no coincidence that so many of America's Founding Fathers were science geeks.

How It Works: The Human Body, by Kate Barnes and Steve Weston. It's a children's "atlas of the human body

Doing this in the context of this very descriptive book about the human body conveyed the message "This is just a natural part of your body.

And people wouldn't look up the details. They never look up the details.

But as I grew up, I felt the tension one surely must feel when being simultaneously taught the importance of a specific dogma and the importance of freedom from dogma.

Masturbation is common, sex is a normal part of adult life, and we can talk about it without fear. By

And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make

conveying the message that sexual touching requires consent, you're obviously conveying values and judgments. And

All of these people were simply asking to be given basic rights that were automatically accorded to all other humans:

I couldn't help but think hard about what you're supposed to do when the facts seem to be leading you into danger.

People who judge you all the time are not people you go to with real questions and problems. Starting

I had accidentally stumbled onto something much more surreal—a whole fraternity of beleaguered and bandaged academics who had produced scholarship offensive to one identity group or another and who had consequently been the subject of various forms of shout-downs.

The teacher didn't make people with disabilities out to be heroes or sad stories. It was just a description of the world in which people with disabilities were real and present.

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?