I used to write regularly for the Hastings Center’s online commentary site. (I decided to stop a few months after I found myself subject to a dex-specific gag order–something I found extremely troubling.)
Posts are shown newest first:
- Australia’s Passport to Gender Confusion. Why a new system that seeks to be gender progressive is actually kinda nutty. (September 28, 2011)
- On Naming Names. A philosophical analysis of what makes me an historian. (May 24, 2011)
- Blotto, Not Beautiful, Medicine. Struggling to uphold the distinction between doctors and bartenders. (May 16, 2011)
- Freedom’s Just Another Word for . . . Restriction? The University of Minnesota tries something new to shut up a persistent critic on the faculty. (April 27, 2011)
- Dr. Oz Can’t Afford Me. Why you won’t see me hawking conjoined twins on daytime TV. (April 22, 2011)
- Dying for Some Standards: Broken Medical Systems as Revealed by a New FDA Warning. About a frightening new development in the use of recombinant human growth hormone to make children taller. (March 21, 2011)
- Time for the American Anthropological Association to Apologize. A follow-up to my Human Nature article on the Darkness in El Dorado debacle. (March 1, 2011)
- The Tale of Tea with Jim the Third. The story of a man who might have been sex changed at birth, but wasn’t. (February 14, 2011)
- Pink Boys with Puppy Dog Tails. A third way to think about little boys in pretty dresses. (December 6, 2010)
- Attenuated Thoughts. Reflections on the Seattle Working Group’s report on growth attenuation for severely disabled children like “Ashley X.” (November 19, 2010)
- Nationalizing IRBs for Biomedical Research–and for Justice. Why not use a kind of circuit court system for biomedical IRBs? (October 22, 2010)
- Legal but Unethical: Who Works on That? When the focus on the legal squishes out attention to the (un)ethical. (September 17, 2010)
- The Other July Effect: Tribalism in Medicine. A favorite student struggles with becoming a real doctor, and I struggle watching. (August 19, 2010)
- Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women?) in the Womb? Perhaps the first organized attempt to prevent homosexuality in the womb. With Ellen K. Feder and Anne Tamar-Mattis (June 29, 2010)
- Bad Vibrations, with Ellen K. Feder. Why is a Cornell doc shortening little girls’ clitorises and then later asking these young girls if they can still feel him touching them? (June 16, 2010
- Prenatal Dex: Update and Omnibus Reply, with Ellen Feder and Hilde Lindemann. An update on the problems surrounding prenatal dex for CAH. (March 18, 2010)
- Of Kinks, Crimes, and Kinds: The Paraphilias Proposal for the DSM-5. Good news: being kinky won’t make you sick anymore (February 19, 2010
- Fetal Cosmetology, with Hilde Lindemann and Ellen Feder. On the problematic use of fetal dexamethasone for CAH (February 8, 2010
- Intersex and Sports: Back to the Same Old Game. More muddled thinking around sex-testing in sports. (January 22, 2010)
- Attention Shoppers: LBGT Rights Apparently Not Worth $6.67 to the American Psychological Association. The APA puts a price on something priceless. (December 29, 2009)
- Does the NFL Need PETA? Is it time for PETA to tell the NFL that men are animals, too? (October 1, 2009)
- Medicine Needs a Declaration of Independence from Cosmetic Procedures. Why “cosmetic medicine” is an anti-democratic contradiction in terms (July 6, 2009)
- How and Why to Take “Gender Identity Disorder” out of the DSM. A proposal for how to depathologize transgender while still supporting transgender people clinically (June 22, 2009)
- Womb Gay. On Mormons, Proposition 8, and the best kept secret in the nature-nurture debate (December 4, 2008)
- When Medicine Is the Opposition Party. Why professional societies should avoid partisan stances (November 7, 2008)
- Footnote to a Footnote: On Roving Medicine. How small groups of committed citizens change medicine (October 9, 2008)
- The Vulnerable Researcher and the IRB. Remaining “unprotected” by one’s Institutional Review Board helps one achieve what IRBs were supposed to (October 3, 2008)
- Sex Is Good. Why sex research is worth funding with public money (August 21, 2008)
- Olympic Problems with Sex Testing. Problems with instigating a “sex test” for Olympic athletes (July 31, 2008)
- The AMA’s Apology: What’s the Benefit? How the AMA (and similar organizations) might use historians and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model to prevent harm (July 17, 2008)
- Lavish Dwarf Entertainment. Resignification, or dehumanization? Why I hired a dwarf entertainer for my fortieth birthday (March 25, 2008). Chosen for Norton’s “Best Creative Non-Fiction” volume of 2009)
- Selective Parenting. A response to Hilde Lindemann’s “Shotgun Weddings,” about the selective abortion of fetuses likely to have disabilities, with Joseph Stramondo (October 23, 2007)
- When HIPAA Hurts. How clinicians’ understandable confusion over medical privacy laws can hurt patients (September 5, 2007)
- Liberty and Solidarity: May We Choose Children for Sexual Orientation? How offering a choice for or against a theoretic “gay gene” in offspring might impact queer rights (June 19, 2007)
- Products of Conception. I give a little help to a woman who gave birth to stillborn conjoined twins she was never allowed to see, and she works magic. (April 9, 2007)
- Ashley and the Dangerous Myth of the Selfless Parent. The real problem with what happened to Ashley X. is dishonesty about motives (January 18, 2007)
- Really Changing Sex, about New York City’s plan to let people decide what gender they are, and why it doesn’t go far enough (November 8, 2006)
- Explaining More, Doing Less. Why aggressively using evidence-based medicine and informed consent could lead to less healthcare waste (October 13, 2006)
- So You’re a Scholar Who Wants to Make Things Happen. My Top Ten Tips for doing activism from an academic base (September 13, 2006)
- The Federal Marriage Amendment and the New One Drop of Blood Rule. Intersex people are to the “same-sex” marriage prohibitions what interracial people were to anti-miscegenation laws (June 8, 2006)
- The Secret Life of the Lunesta Butterfly. A little proposal for how to more accurately animate direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs (May 3, 2006)
- Something Is Actually Happening: Are Bioethicists Doing the Right Stuff? Questioning the practice of bioethicists who come across a bioethical dilemma only to stare, think, speak, and move on (April 12, 2006)
- Proof that I Like Penises. A cheeky anti-circumcision piece that has gotten me a whole lot a mail (March 10, 2006)