The safety argument against steroids may be a good one, but let’s be honest. It isn’t the one that motivates most officials and fans to frown on steroids. Steroid use does not just seem risky or unnatural, it seems to disrupt the level playing field. Alice Dreger Read Quote
Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous. Alice Dreger Read Quote
I don’t have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered. Alice Dreger Read Quote
If we have a situation where a man is particularly graceful in a sport that rewards grace – say, for example, figure skating – why is it that we don’t say to the man, ‘Well, you’re too feminine to compete?’… I don’t understand why we don’t find it offensive also to say to a women who’s very strong, ‘You’re too masculine to compete.’ Alice Dreger Read Quote
We say, ‘You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.’ Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn’t care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety. Alice Dreger Read Quote
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. Alice Dreger Read Quote
I think it is fine to have sports divided into men’s and women’s, just as it is fine to say a fifteen-year-old is incapable of consenting to sex. But we should recognize these are social distinctions based on biology, and not categories foisted upon us by nature. Alice Dreger Read Quote
When I talk about intersex, people ask me, ‘But what about the locker room?’ Yes, what about the locker room? If so many people feel trepidation around it, why don’t we fix the locker room? There are ways to signal to children that they are not the problem, and normalization technologies are not the way. Alice Dreger Read Quote
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. Alice Dreger Read Quote
