Author: Alice_admin

Alice Domurat Dreger, “What to Expect When You Have the Child You Weren’t Expecting,” in Surgically Shaping Children: Technology, Ethics, and the Pursuit of Normality, ed. by Erik Parens [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006]: 253-266. This is meant to be a parents’ guide to the experience of considering “normalizing” surgeries for children born with things…

Alice D. Dreger and April Herndon, “Progress and Politics in the Intersex Rights Movement: Feminist Theory in Action,” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, in a special issue on “Intersex and After,” edited by Iain Morland, vol. 15, no. 2, March 2009: 199-224. Abstract: Since 1990, when Suzanne Kessler published her foundational feminist critique of…

Every year seems to bring another request by another bioethics textbook publisher to reprint my 1998 Hastings Center Report article on the medical (mis)treatment of people with atypical sex, “‘Ambiguous Sex’ or Ambivalent Medicine? Ethical Problems in the Treatment of Intersexuality.” That article represented the first sustained ethical critique in that field, and although it still holds…

This issue appears to be perennial, so here are some FAQs to help reporters get the basic facts right. (I wrote this a while ago, but it still is relevant and helpful.) Why shouldn’t you use the term “hermaphrodite”? The term “hermaphrodite” is stigmatizing and confusing. It usually suggests to people that someone has all…

Note: This shows the date this page was recreated at my new website, not the original publication date. Material not otherwise available: “What Have We Learned about East Lansing’s Situation since the BWL Outage? A Report to East Lansing’s City Council and Citizens,” from Alice Dreger, dated January 22, 2014: BWL Outage Report to East Lansing…

Part of what I did to help the intersex patients’ rights movement was to help lead the Intersex Society of North America and to do a lot of writing for ISNA. (And I mean a lot of writing.) Here are some of the things I wrote for ISNA’s printed and online materials. This list doesn’t include the…

This site is running on a WordPress platform modified for me by Morgan Lees with graphic design assistance from Cait Palmiter. It was created in Spring 2022. I manage my own content. This site originally ran on a Drupal platform and was later converted to an iWeb platform. When Apple stopped supporting iWeb, it became…

I spent the month of April, 2010, in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, as a Presidential Fellow at Cornell College, teaching an intensive interdisciplinary course on sexual orientation. Kinda like a whole semester crammed into 18 work days. Phew! Great experience. The fellowship at Cornell allowed me to finally fund my little dream writing shack in our backyard.…

My research, writing, and speaking on sex and gender issues started with my Ph.D. dissertation work on the history of what happened to people with intersex conditions in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (During that period, these people were labeled “hermaphrodites.”) The medical and  social systems that deal with intersex – the systems on which a…

After a week away from home during which I was forced to subsist mostly on bananas and Lara bars (due to my stupid food allergies), I came home dying for something fresh. So imagine my delight at discovering that, while we were gone, the cabbage patch had filled out with gorgeous dark green cabbage, and the…