Top 47 Quotes by Alice Dreger

I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.

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.

I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.'s and by M.D.'s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally.

We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.

So many times I've heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won't really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It's a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.

You want a child who never makes you anything but proud? Please. Don't bother taking on parenthood if you can't handle the fact that sometimes your child's identity won't be what you would have chosen. And if you want to prevent a child from ever suffering? Well, then don't have a child. No one is born into the world never to suffer.

Regardless of the cultural system, social pressure to appear straight seems to be fairly intense cross-culturally. Indeed, one is inclined to wonder, if being straight is just natural, why does it require quite so much policing?

Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.