The end (I hope) to the international fascination over Caster Semenya came this week, and so the New York Times’ “Lede” blog threw off a quick notice of the conclusion.
The Lede blog included a long excerpt from one of my three essays in the New York Times related to this story (click for one, two, and three). It also included a quote from the ISNA site about the frequency of intersex. It quotes a line I’m 99% sure I wrote when I was working on a major update of the FAQ’s for ISNA.
It was a little weird to see myself, in the Lede, as my own back-up batter. I squirmed a bit. It was a little too reminiscent of the way big pharma and Ward Churchill have used ghost-writing to make their points look more convincing than they are. Except I realized, upon thinking about this, that I have always been clear about writing for ISNA and would have been perfectly happy to be credited with bylines. Plus, what I was writing was accurate and honest, which would distinguish my work, unfortunately, from some of pharma’s and some of Churchill’s….
Also I’m admitting it here and now so it’s all upfront.
Anyway, all this reminded me of a previous experience with creating conventional wisdom via multiple mostly-uncredited citations. The timing of this week’s accidental double was funny, since I was just this week finishing a paper evidencing how Patrick Tierney used this technique (crediting someone else with his own work) to try to take down anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. I’ll be giving that paper on Tierney’s work at the American Anthropological Association on December 2, in Philadelphia. There I will try hard to avoid accidental doubles with the media that will inevitably result.