Category: Uncategorized

A group of transgender activists has achieved a major victory—the shutting down of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Even better from their point of view, they got the head of it, psychologist Ken Zucker, fired. The activists didn’t like Zucker because he never…

Today, Donald Trump decided we should keep all Muslims out of our nation, and Inside Higher Ed reported that Erika Christakis will no longer be teaching at Yale University because she upset some people with an email about Halloween costumes. You probably already see where I’m going with this, but I’ll spell it out. Right-wing fascist Trump: “We don’t like…

Today, after the murder of three people in Colorado Springs yesterday, everyone stepping into a Planned Parenthood must do so with an extra level of fear. Planned Parenthood clinics operate primarily to provide patient care. But let’s face it. Every Planned Parenthood clinic also exists to further “dangerous” ideas: that women should have control over their reproduction; that…

The New York Times, this week: “Coca-Cola spent $1.5 million last year to support the group [‘Global Energy Balance Network’], including a $1 million grant to the University of Colorado medical school, where the nonprofit group’s president, James O. Hill, a prominent obesity researcher, is a professor.” Why do medical schools allow this kind of…

The following is a statement from Tiger Devore, PhD, reproduced with his permission. To my colleagues: As far as I am able to surmise,  I was the first person born with a genital difference to come out in a public way (on television) and call for awareness about Intersex identity and an end to medically unnecessary…

Note: Tiger Devore and I have decided to release joint statements; read his here. For twenty years now, I’ve been trying to help intersex people push for the rights of children born with intersex conditions. For twenty years, I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing—the same thing as most of them, the same thing Tiger…

I should have gone to a conference where most people could be trusted to be assholes. But I came to the History of Science Society (HSS) meeting in San Francisco specifically because the people in HSS can be trusted to be kind, thoughtful, gentle, supportive, devoted to science but also real humanists. It’s my home discipline; my…

This is an excerpt from a manuscript version of Galileo’s Middle Finger. A lot of this got cut when we shortened the book by about a third, so only a part of this appears in the published book. I’m putting it up now because a colleague of mine just attended a talk by Dr. Dix Poppas…

Just after Galileo’s Middle Finger came out, Chicago Tonight (WTTW) had me on to talk about the book. This was a live, nine-minute live interview with Eddie Arruza. He was a great interviewer–I didn’t realize just how great until I watched it later. Click here to watch it.

This right here is a story of longing, jealousy, and how maybe now is the time for me to give up on the Pollyanna routine. I’m sorry it’s rather long, because it would be good if toxicologists read all the way to the end. And I know they are busy people. About two weeks ago…