(by Alice Domurat Dreger, in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, edited by Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004], pp. 390-409.)

This essay has a scary title (I don’t know what I was thinking), but it’s quite readable. For the book in which it appears, I was asked to write an autobiographical piece about being the resident historian to the intersex rights movement.

People who think all academics live in ivory towers should read this essay. Ask your local librarian to help you get a copy.

Here’s a bit of the opening:

“A couple of years ago, I found myself whining in an email message to my friend and colleague Tod Chambers (a bioethicist at Northwestern University) that I was running so many fundraisers for the Intersex Society that I didn’t have time to do much new historical scholarship. ‘Ah, yes,’ Tod wrote back, ‘those who remember history are condemned to fundraise.’ I caught the reference to George Santayana’s famous admonition that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Yet, much as Tod’s response made me laugh—and feel chagrined to realize that all in all I had very little to be complaining about, the work of the Intersex Society being so important—I did find myself wondering why I seemed to be a latter-day anomaly, a humanist whose scholarship had led to a life of activism wrapped around that scholarship….”

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