Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger Read Free Book Online Page B

behind everywhere, between the pages of in-flight magazines, in the stalls of women’s bathrooms on campuses I was visiting, and in the hands of all the surgeons I ran into. The male surgeons just loved them.
    Bo had taught me this blitzkrieg method. We simply took every opportunity that came along and sought out any others we thought might work. She encouraged me to keep working the academic angle, and I did, doing scholarship in support of the movement. The last chapter of the book based on my dissertation provided an extensive ethical critique of the modern-day management of intersex. That it had Harvard University Press’s name attached definitely helped. I spun off that last chapter as an article for the
Hastings Center Report
, the journal of the leading independent medical ethics institute. The next book I published was an edited anthology called
Intersex in the Age of Ethics.
    For that collection, Bo and I wanted a front cover that showed the contrast between the monstrous medical image of intersex and the real lives of intersex people—to make the point that you never know who around you is intersex and the point that the medical approach is what makes someone a monster. We had realized how powerful images were in getting people to change their thinking. So we took photos that all the contributors—intersex and non-intersex—gave us of themselves, and put those, all mixed up, on the front cover. A few were bare-chested men; most were fully clothed. You couldn’t tell who was intersex and who wasn’t. For the center of the montage, we wanted a classic medical image—naked, eyes blacked out, against the grid—but I didn’t dare use a real image and reexploit someone. I can’t remember if Bo or the publisher suggested it, but one of them said to me, “Why don’t we do a picture of you, Alice?”
    So I paid a university photographer whom I’d come to know fifty bucks to meet me at his apartment and photograph me naked standing in the “medical pose” with a band of paper meant to look like a hospital ID bracelet taped around my right wrist. He then used Photoshop to put a grid behind me and a black band over my eyes. He also blurred out my naughty bits. (I didn’t have tenure.) When my friends and students saw the book, they immediately recognized me. So much for the idea that the black band makes any difference! I just told them I do nudity only if the plot requires it.
    The plot required so much. Time, money, and lots of personal effort to keep the activists from infighting due to jealousy, philosophical differences, and pent-up fury. And so much effort to keep Bo from falling into another black abyss of posttraumatic depression. Because I could write and speak well, I did one television show after another, quickly learning what to wear (no white and no small prints; lots of powder and bright lipstick; a serious look with a kind smile) and how to wrap a clear message around a killer story. I wrote newsletter material, teaching materials, and fund-raising appeals. I learned how to ask people, point-blank, for money to support us. Money was always short; Aron and I regularly dumped in infusions of cash, trying to keep enough in the till to keep Bo from having to do other work, so she could stay focused on ISNA. A sizable percentage of the donor list was made up of our personal friends and family members. Bo spent down her life’s savings as we pressed on.
    Now and again, we caught a break. Someone would invite us to speak at a place where there was a doc with enough doubts that she or he would then sign on to help us. Someone with power would have an adult child who was gay or lesbian, enabling that powerful person to appreciate at the gut level the way that discrimination against sexual minorities manifests in every bit of life.
    A big break came in 2000 when John Colapinto published the “John/Joan” story in his blockbuster book As Nature Made Him
: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl.
Colapinto’s