Alice Dreger’s “slice it” joke riles intersex activists |
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Alice Dreger recently returned to her alma mater with her physician husband to deliver a lecture titled “No Matter How You Slice It: Parsing Intersex.”
Intersex activists quickly pointed out that the title’s pun made light of “normalizing” surgery many intersex people endure and suggests that intersex people are neither he nor she, but “it.”
In the lecture, Dreger defended her ongoing promotion of the term ”disorders of sex development” (DSD) over the objections of many intersex activists and bioethicists. They note that doctors are more likely to intervene and perform “normalizing” procedures on someone with a “disorder.” Dreger continues to reject non-pathologizing alternatives proposed by scholars and ethicists with more circumspect views.
Alice Dreger is also notorious for publishing as fact the fabricated medical history of self-identified “transkid” Denise Tree, aka Kiira Triea, author of the transkids.us hoax site. Dreger published Tree’s claims that she was operated on at Johns Hopkins in 1974 as a 14-year-old. Dreger did not bother to confirm any historical facts independently, and Tree’s alleged medical history has since been proven to be a fabrication. Tree is in fact a 56-year-old computer technician and scofflaw with a long history of making false and exaggerated claims about herself online. Under the alias Kiira Triea, Tree has also recently co-authored with J. Michael Bailey, the controversial psychologist Dreger has been busily defending on the radio and in print.
For more on this ongoing controversy, please visit:
* Alice Dreger, have you no shame? via Organisation Intersex International
