Alice Dreger

Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we'd probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.

You can't go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can't stop you from trying.

Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.

My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as a toddler, I would demand raw onions and eat them like apples, I think that, at this juncture, it is a story that just has to be believed.

Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) Bury the money.

So many times I've heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won't really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It's a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.

Doctors and scientists, being part of that two-sex culture, have done everything they can to try to force people who are in-between into one of the two clear types. Intersex people themselves have also generally wanted to fit into one of the two clear categories; most are not interested in being in a 'third' type.

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.

Ok, here goes: I'm going to see how many people I can offend by suggesting that maybe many little gay boys, like many little girls, are made up of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents.

Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long - especially when you don't know where it's all going to go - it's hard stuff. I'm not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?