Alice Dreger
| Alice Dreger | |
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Alice Dreger giving 2015 address at the International Society for Intelligence Research
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| Born | Alice Domurat Dreger United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Bioethics, humanities |
| Institutions | Northwestern University |
| Alma mater | Indiana University Bloomington, PhD, History and Philosophy of Science, 1995 |
| Known for | Conjoined twinning, intersex or disorders of sex development, social justice |
| Notable awards | Fellowship recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2015 Holden Award |
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 “Episode 205: Sex and Gender: What We Know and Don't Know”, Chemical Heritage Foundation
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| Video | |
 “Is anatomy destiny”, Alice Dreger, TED Talk
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“ISIR 2015 Holden Awards Address“, Alice Dreger |
Alice Domurat Dreger is a historian, bioethicist, author, and former professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Dreger has been a featured speaker at TED Talks.
Dreger is widely known for her academic work and activism in support of individuals born with atypical sex characteristics (intersex or disorders of sex development) and individuals born as conjoined twins. She challenges the perception that those with physical differences are somehow "broken" and need to be "fixed". She has opposed the use of "corrective" surgery on babies whose genitalia are considered "ambiguous". She has criticized the failure to follow such patients in later life, and reported longer-term medical and psychological difficulties experienced by some of the people whose sex is arbitrarily assigned.
She is also known for her support of J. Michael Bailey in the face of controversy over his book The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003). In an article in 2008 and in her 2015 book Galileo’s Middle Finger, Dreger argued that the controversy had gone far beyond addressing the scientific theories presented in Bailey's book to become an attack upon the author, creating an out-of-control spiral of identity politics.
Dreger received her Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1995.
Dreger has taught at both Michigan State University, where she received a Teacher-Scholar Award in 2000, and at Northwestern University (2005-2015).
During her doctoral work, Dreger became interested in "how and why it is that scientists and medical doctors work to mediate the relationships between our bodies and our selves" and "why it is we often look to scientists and medical doctors to read or even alter our bodies." In 1995 she published a paper in Victorian Studies examining 19th-century British medical attitudes towards intersex people. In 1998 she published Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and in 1999, Intersex in the age of ethics. Increasingly, she became engaged in intersex activism as well as scholarship, advocating that doctors accept a wide variety of genital structure rather than "correcting" babies' genitalia to conform to artificially gendered standards. More recently, she has criticized the prenatal use of dexamethasone to normalize female genitalia in cases of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and charged that its safety has not been sufficiently tested by pediatrician Maria New.
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