Category: Uncategorized

A couple of times now I’ve been asked about certain online misrepresentations of my activist colleague Kiira Triea by academic colleagues who, in their classes, use Kiira’s excellent essay, “Power, Orgasm, and the Psychohormonal Research Unit,” an essay which I had the privilege to reprint in the anthology Intersex in the Age of Ethics. My academic colleagues…

My friend and intersex activist colleague Max Beck died a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what to say about him here, because his widow Tamara said it would be OK for me to write about Max on my personal site. Actually, she didn’t just say it was OK. What she wrote…

So, I’m just back from the annual conference of the American Historical Association, and here’s a blog I never thought I would write…in defense of scholars reading papers at academic conferences. Something I never do anymore. My colleagues in the sciences and in medicine probably have no idea what I’m even talking about, because this is…

I’m just back from the gigantic annual conference of the American Historical Association, where all the men wear brown corduroy and all the women wear navy and/or black polyester. (I must at least question the “and.”) Even beyond that, it has to be the least sexy conference there is. That must be because of the sheer…

Sometimes I do private, pro-bono, individualized medical histories for people who have had some kind of medical trauma. In Products of Conception, I wrote about the extraordinary outcome of one such encounter. After I helped her figure out what her stillborn conjoined twins (born almost three decades earlier) had looked like, Minnesota-based artist Deb Costandine took…

I just gave a talk at the Kinsey Institute about the history and politics of the term “intersex” and alternative terms for intersex, including “disorders of sex development,” and since a number of people who couldn’t make the talk have asked me for a summary, here it is. (Some of this material is covered in an article I have…

There are a lot of c.v.’s being updated today! The two thousand scientists who make up the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the Nobel Peace Prize! (Oh, and some layman named Al Gore has won it with them.) This is such great news, and not only because it focuses international attention on global…

Before Powerpoint became ubiquitously doable, I traveled with slides. (You remember 35 mm slides?) And I had a little ritual that centered on slides: The night before I had to leave on a speaking trip, I would drive my mate crazy by rushing all around the house demanding, “Have you seen my slides? Where are…

I just finished reviewing a bioethics anthology for the New England Journal of Medicine. All in all, the volume had a lot of interesting stuff in it—stuff that clinicians engaged in the practices examined ought to know about. But most clinicians are never going to read it. That’s because of what some bioethicists have called “the…

Transcript of KQED Forum program on “Transgender Theories,” aired August 22, 2007 On August 22, 2007, San Francisco’s public radio station KQED was kind enough to dedicate a full hour of their Forum talk show to my article on the Bailey book controversy. The following is a transcript of the program. You can also listen to an archive of…