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notes Introduction 1. The issue of “incidence” of atypical sex has been a vexed one, as it concerns not only the frequency with which children are born with atypical sex anatomies but also what counts as atypical sex. early discussions of the varying estimates and questions they raise may be found in Dreger 1998b, 40–42, and in Fausto-Sterling 2000, 51–54. More conservative estimates of 1 in 2,000 (intersex Society of north america) or 1 in 4,500 (Hughes et al. 2006, 554) (an incidence comparable to cystic fibrosis) refer to cases where sex is unclear at birth. The estimate of 1.7 in 100 at which Fausto-Sterling’s team arrived—what she cautioned “should be taken as an order of magnitude estimate rather than a precise count” (2000, 51)—refers to overall incidence of birth in which sex anatomy differs from the norm. This number would include the high, and apparently increasing, incidence of hypospadias (where the urinary meatus that is typically located at the tip of the penis appears elsewhere in children who are usually regarded as unquestionably male) (Center for the Study and treatment of Hypospadias 2013). Questions of “rarity” can serve to justify extraordinary care in pediatric conditions, including those concerned with atypical sex or gender identity (see, e.g., Feder 2007, 55–56). 2. Like kessler’s article, eve kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1991 article “How to Bring Your kids Up gay” brought attention of the new diagnosis to those outside of psychology. as she points out, the inclusion of gender identity disorder coincided with the removal of the diagnosis of “homosexuality ” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 3. i would elaborate on this point in Family Bonds (Feder 2007, 60–67). 4. McCumber published the book by that same title in 2001. He notes that philosophers were disproportionately targeted by the House Un-american affairs Committee (HUaC), whose work began in 1949, and argues that the significant changes that occurred at this time shaped the discipline in ways that have gone unremarked upon in the field. “The McCarthy era,” McCumber contends, “imposed an important restriction on just what kind of goal philosophers can pursue. it limited them to the pursuit of true sentences (or propositions, or statements)” (2001, xvii–xix). 5. in his famous essay “How Medicine Saved Bioethics,” philosopher Stephen toulmin makes a similar point about the dominant nature of ethical inquiry at this time. However, he argues that bioethics greatly enriched ethical inquiry precisely by bringing “cases,” the individual “situation,” to the fore. He writes admiringly of the contribution made in the 1950s by Joseph Fletcher, who introduced the phrase “situation ethics.” But as toulmin points out, “Fletcher’s use of the term met with harsh criticism” (1982, 740). While toulmin argues for seeing the ways that bioethics enriched the field of ethical inquiry in philosophy, bioethics itself, as Hilde Lindemann (2006a) has provocatively put it, continues to occupy a “feminized”—that is to say, devalued—position within the discipline of philosophy. 6. Hannah arendt was one of the notable exceptions in this regard, but lest the rich contemporary engagement with her work lead us to forget, arendt was herself the target of scorn by american philosophers even in the late 1970s. McCumber recounts in his book how members of the aPa working on an accreditation committee for the state of new York described arendt as “an unproductive drone because her works were not cited in important journals such 211 212 | notes to Pages 7–16 as the Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Review. Of course, she published regularly in the New York Review of Books (no obscure venue), had been on the cover of Time magazine, and was one of the most famous political thinkers in the world” (McCumber 2001, 51–52). 7. See, e.g., the discussion of Henry Beecher’s article that was eventually published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in D. rothman (1991, 70ff). 8. President Clinton issued the first apology by the government in 1997, addressing the eight remaining survivors and the descendants of the subjects of the study. 9. The Belmont Report (1979) was commissioned by Congress to “identify the ethical principles which should underlie the conduct of biomedical and behavioral research with human subjects and develop guidelines that should be followed in such research.” The report was the product of the congressional commission formed after the passage of the national research act of 1974. The act was...

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