Galileo's Middle Finger

Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Domurat Dreger, Penguin Press, 2015. 

Intersex

The author is a sociologist involved in the movement to protect intersex children, that is, children born with ambiguous genitalia, from being surgically transformed, without their consent, into either male or female.

Transexuals

The author became involved in a related issue, namely transsexuals. Transsexuals are adults who want to change their bodies to the other sex. 

Gender Dysphoria

The transsexual political movement asserted that the only motivation for wanting to change ones sex is gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is when a man feels that he is a woman trapped inside a man’s body, or when a woman feels that she is a man trapped inside a woman’s body. The brain and genitalia are not in sync.

Autogynephilia

Autogynephilia is a man being “sexually aroused by the idea of being or becoming women”. The term was introduced by sexologist Ray Blanchard. 

Identity, Not Desire

The transexual political movement people became angry with psychiatrists who claimed that transexuals sometimes had motivations other than gender dysphoria, such as autogynephilia. The activists saw these explanations as being insulting to transexuals. The activists wanted to discount the important of sexual desire and avoid accusations of paraphilia or sexual pathology, and instead frame transsexualism in terms of gender identity.

Intolerance

Dreger describes the paranoid intolerance of the transexual political activists and their persecution of the politically incorrect scientist, Ray Blanchard. 

Dreger also discusses a similar example of another politically incorrect scientist, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who was persecuted for his publications regarding an indigenous tribe in Venezuela.