Alice Dreger

What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

Purposefully exposing young people to increased risks of major brain problems - even death - for sport is surely even more ethically complicated than sending young people into this same neurological danger zone as soldiers.

Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation.

When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.

No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one's social and political rights, surely we can't pretend biology doesn't matter in sports. Surely there's a reason we don't let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.

A democratic medical establishment does not alter people's bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.