I have two intertwined professional lives: I do humanities-based investigative scholarship aimed mostly at achieving social justice in science and medicine. and I work as a non-fiction writer.

Many people know me from my efforts to improve the social and medical treatment of people with unusual body types (especially atypical sex), the work that got me on Oprah and has been featured all over the place, including the New York Times. Some people think of me as the cheeky writer of Proof that I Like Penises (my fans’ all-time favorite) and Lavish Dwarf Entertainment (selected for Norton’s annual “Best Creative Non-Fiction” volume), or as the compassionate and clear (so I’m told) commentator on complex stories like those of Caster Semenya’s and the Bijani conjoined twins’.

In other fields (like anthropology and gender studies), many people know me as the “alligator-skinned” investigative historian who tracked The Controversy Surrounding “The Man Who Would Be Queen” (my Guggenheim Fellowship-winning work, also covered in the New York Times) and the craziness in anthropology over the not-really-nonfiction book, Darkness in El Dorado (as covered in Science). And some people know me as the Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who does whatever it’ll take to improve clinical care, including compiling clinical guidelines and handbooks for parents and organizing colleagues to call in the Feds when pregnant women may be the subject of experimentation without being told.

Some of the people who have been most important in my life know me as the person who privately helped them recover or understand their own medical histories. (That has probably been the most intensely meaningful work of my life.)

Whether you’re here via my advice to Dan Savage’s readers, or here via my new Psychology Today blog, Fetishes I Don’t Get, or my columns for Bioethics Forum, or because you’ve realized I’m your most famous cousin (which isn’t saying much), I hope you enjoy wandering around. If you want to know more about me, you can go to my “about” page. Thanks for visiting.