Galileo's Middle Finger

by Alice Dreger

  In 2003, three years before I came to the story, a group of transgender activists had kicked up a storm over a book by a Northwestern sex researcher, J. Michael Bailey, because in that book, Bailey had pushed a theory these activists didn’t like: Bailey had suggested that, in cases of men who become women, transgender isn’t just about gender identity, but also about sexual orientation—about eroticism. This, I already knew, was a no-no among certain groups of transgender activists who insisted that virtually all transgender people are born with the brain of one sex and the body of the other—that transgender identity is just about core inborn gender, not about erotic feelings. To opine about sexual orientation in conjunction with transgender the way Bailey did was to skip into a minefield created by four decades of intense social and medical battles over the nature of transgender identity.

  Still, I thought I knew from my background in science studies and a decade of intersex work how to navigate an identity politics minefield, so I wasn’t that worried when in 2006 I set out to investigate the history of what had really happened with Bailey and his critics. My investigation ballooned into a year of intensive research and a fifty-thousand-word peer-reviewed scholarly account of the controversy. And the results shocked me. Letting the data lead me, I uncovered a story that upended the simple narrative of power and oppression to which we leftist science studies scholars had become accustomed.

  I found that, in the Bailey case, a small group had tried to bury a politically challenging scientific theory by killing the messenger. In the process of doing so, these critics, rather than restrict themselves to the argument over the ideas, had charged Bailey with a whole host of serious crimes, including abusing the rights of subjects, having sex with a transsexual research subject, and making up data. The individuals making these charges—a trio of powerful transgender women, two of them situated in the safe house of liberal academia—had nearly ruined Bailey’s reputation and his life. To do so, they had used some of the tactics we had used in the intersex rights movement: blanketing the Web to make sure they set the terms of debate, reaching out to politically sympathetic reporters to get the story into the press, doling out fresh information and new characters at a steady pace to keep the story in the media and to keep the pressure on, and rhetorically tapping into parallel left-leaning stories to make casual bystanders “get it” and care. Tracking their chosen techniques was occasionally like reading a how-to activist manual that I could have written, but there was one crucial difference: What they claimed about Bailey simply wasn’t true.

  You can probably guess what happens when you expose the unseemly deeds of people who fight dirty, particularly when you publish a meticulously documented journal article detailing exactly what they did, and especially when the New York Times covers what you found. Certainly I should have known what was coming—after all, I had literally written what amounted to a book on what this small group of activists had done to Bailey. But it was still pretty uncomfortable when I became the new target of their precise and unrelenting attacks. The online story soon morphed into “Alice Dreger versus the rights of sexual minorities,” and no matter how hard I tried to point people back to documentation of the truth, facts just didn’t seem to matter.

  Troubled and confused by this ordeal, in 2008 I purposefully set out on a journey—or rather a series of journeys—that ended up lasting six years. During this time, I moved back and forth between camps of activists and camps of scientists, to try to understand what happens—and to figure out what should happen—when activists and scholars find themselves in conflict over critical matters of human identity. This book is the result.

  I understand that some people on an exploration like this might have tried to just clinically observe it all and to write an “objective” third-person account of scientific controversies over human identity in the Internet age. But already by the time I set out, I knew way too much about individual human bias to kid myself into thinking I could work simply as a stateless reporter above all the frays. I also felt too strongly the need to honor both good science and good activism to remain uninvolved when I saw crazy stuff happening on one side or the other. I believed—and still believe—too much in the importance of facts to sit idly by when I saw someone, be it a scientist or an activist, actively misrepresenting what is really known. As a consequence, as I traveled through scientist-activist wars over human identity—first in psychology, then anthropology, then prenatal pharmacology—rather than being merely embedded, I kept getting uncomfortably embroiled.

  In spite of how difficult some of it has been, this journey of discovery proves something really important: Science and social justice require each other to be healthy, and both are critically important to human freedom. Without a just system, you cannot be free to do science, including science designed to better understand human identity; without science, and especially scientific understandings of human behaviors, you cannot know how to create a sustainably just system. As a consequence of this trip, I have come to understand that the pursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time. All of our work as scholars, activists, and citizens of democracy depends on it. Yet it seems that, especially where questions of human identity are concerned, we’ve built up a system in which scientists and social justice advocates are fighting in ways that poison the soil on which both depend. It’s high time we think about this mess we’ve created, about what we’re doing to each other and to democracy itself.

  • • •

  VERY OFTEN DURING this long, strange trip, while stuck in some airport on a layover, I found myself meditating on the image of Galileo’s middle finger. I accidentally came upon that mummified digit two decades ago on a trip in graduate school, just at the start of my scholarly work on the history of hermaphrodites. In May 1993, I had gone to Italy to accompany my mother, at her request, on a tour of Roman Catholic religious sites. As we had planned, when the tour ended, my mother flew back to America while I set off to continue around Europe by train to supplement my studies. For my first stop, I took the train from Rome to Florence to visit the history of science museum attached to the Uffizi art galleries. I had planned this short stop in Florence because of the opportunity to see the museum’s collection of eighteenth-century wax obstetrical models, life-size teaching instruments I had already read much about. But I was also very excited at the prospect of seeing a set of artifacts that are to a historian of science what Jesus’s cross would be to a Christian: Galileo’s telescopes.

  When Galileo Galilei was born, in 1564, the world had just started changing in the direction that would ultimately lead to modern science, modern technology, and democracy. The old way—accepting authorities without much question—had just started to develop serious cracks. Not long before Galileo’s birth, European anatomists like Andreas Vesalius had begun to dissect human bodies and to show that the innards didn’t always match what the ancient authorities like Galen described. A Polish scholar named Nicolaus Copernicus had crunched the astronomical numbers and in 1543 suggested a model contrary to the ancient astronomer Ptolemy’s, a new model wherein the Sun, not the Earth, formed the center of our world.

  But Galileo went much further than these men before him. Philosophically paving the way for the world as we now know it, Galileo actively argued for a bold new way of knowing, openly insisting that what mattered was not what the authorities—ancient or otherwise—said was true but what anyone with the right tools could show was true. As no one before him had, he made the case for modern science—for finding truth together through the quest for facts.

  Galileo’s radical new way of thinking (along with his sense of humor) finds perfect display in one particular argument he had with a colleague over a vital and timeless question from the physical sciences: whether you could cook a bird’s egg by whirling it around your head in a sling. This hypothetical problem represented a larger physics question about whether flying objects heat up or cool down, but Galileo turned
it into the even bigger question: How do we know if something is true?

  Galileo’s contemporary debate partner on this topic was a Jesuit scientist named Orazio Grassi. Like most people of his time, Grassi usually accepted the word of the ancient authorities, and because ancient authorities reported that the Babylonians had managed to cook eggs by twirling them about in a sling, Grassi figured it must be true. But Galileo mocked this silly claim and in so doing explained how one could personally test ideas about cause and effect by controlling for variables, a brilliant and remarkably modern idea. Weighing in on the problem, Galileo wrote:

  If we do not achieve an effect [like cooking an egg by whirling it] which others formerly achieved, it must be that in our operations we lack something which was the cause of this effect succeeding [for our predecessors], and if we lack but one single thing, then this alone can be the cause. Now we do not lack eggs, or slings, or sturdy fellows to whirl them; and still they do not cook, but rather they cool down faster if hot. And since nothing is lacking to us except being Babylonians, then being Babylonians [must be] the cause of the eggs hardening.

  Of course what Galileo really meant was not that Babylonians had magical culinary skills, but this: Stop thinking that the authorities know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about natural causes and effects. Focus your mind on discoverable evidence.

  Treating discernable facts as the ultimate authority, Galileo took to doing real experiments, dropping heavy balls down inclined planes to study relative rates of fall, using careful quantification to find predictable, natural patterns in the world. When learned people around Galileo doubted Copernicus’s idea that the earth is spinning and racing about the sun—because surely, if we were on a moving, turning planet, everything not tied down would be flying about—Galileo encouraged them to think harder. What happens, he asked them, when you drop a solid object while you are on a moving ship? The object falls straight down relative to you and the ship. He encouraged people to see this as real-life analogical evidence that could explain why a table not tied down moves with the earth’s movement and does not fly off. He encouraged them to think beyond the taught or the “obvious,” to see for themselves what was true.

  In the spring of 1609, while living the life of a frustrated, underpaid university professor, Galileo heard about a brand-new optical device, the telescope. Ever the self-starter, he soon constructed one—and then a better one, and a better one. Others saw in this device military and commercial uses. (Ascertaining which trading ships were arriving when could provide advance knowledge of the markets.) But Galileo, engaging his radical epistemology of nature, turned his telescopes to the sky. And what did he see? Not at all the perfect geocentric heavens as they were described by the ancients and taught at the universities. No, indeed. The earth’s moon had mountains. (A sign of imperfection in the heavens.) Jupiter had its own moons. (A sign that not everything orbited around the earth.) Venus had phases. (A sign of heliocentrism.) Throughout the sky, Galileo saw evidence of Copernicus’s radical new astronomical model.

  Unafraid of these new facts and ever confident in his own genius, Galileo didn’t even try to reconcile his findings with what the ancients had said. Instead he boldly reported his discoveries in a book he called The Starry Messenger. In it, he made a point of including careful drawings to show what the reader could verify with his own eyes if he could get his hands on a decent telescope.

  Tempting as it is to see Galileo as supernatural, his surviving writings and the writings of those who knew him personally confirm his humanity for us; they paint him as alternately politically savvy and politically foolish, rash, self-destructive, funny, determined, and devoted to those he loved. And he was deeply human in one other important way: His science was almost certainly motivated, at least in part, by his personal beliefs. The mythical tales of Galileo told by artists like Bertolt Brecht hold him up as a scientific saint, someone who could see completely beyond himself. But as the biographer David Wootton has argued convincingly, Galileo was driven to defend Copernicanism in part because it satisfied his personal psychology: “If Galileo stuck with Copernicanism as the key topic he wanted to write about, it was because he was attracted by the idea of making human beings seem insignificant.”

  In the hands of Galileo, the telescope became a tool to investigate not only the stars, but also the human condition. He described a messy universe in which we humans are on just another whizzing planet—not a special, still place made for us by an attentive biblical God—and thus strayed dangerously close to the sorts of heretical ideas that had gotten his contemporary Giordano Bruno convicted of heresy. Bruno ended up burned at the stake for putting forth bold new visions of the universe. But Galileo—in spite of repeatedly attracting the attentions of the Inquisition, in spite of being legitimately scared of being subjected to imprisonment and torture and more—could not seem to stop himself from pursuing Copernicanism, from pursuing what he saw must be true about our vast universe, and especially about the rather negligible place of us humans in it. Moreover, he couldn’t stop himself from promoting scientific truth in risky ways, even by making the pope look foolish.

  This period is often considered the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, but you can see why that term doesn’t really capture what Vesalius, Copernicus, Bruno, and especially Galileo were doing. What they were doing was much more radical: This was a revolution in human identity. This was not only a shift in ideas about what we can know about the universe, but fundamentally a shift in what we can know about ourselves. This was a journey toward what finally became the Enlightenment. When Galileo rejected the Vatican’s astronomical dogma, he wasn’t rejecting only their “facts” about our planet and our sun; he was also rejecting the Church’s right to tell us who we are. There’s no doubt: The inquisitors were spot-on to see Galileo as extremely dangerous.

  Nevertheless, although the Inquisition could arrest Galileo, it could not arrest human progress. The Scientific Revolution that swept through Europe was soon followed by democratic revolution. And all of these massive changes in science and in politics depended on a single central idea, one that Galileo held dear, the central idea of the Enlightenment: that we get to know for ourselves who we are, by seeking evidence, using reason, and coming to thoughtful consensus on truth. Science and democracy grew up together in Europe and North America, as twins; it is no coincidence that so many of America’s Founding Fathers were science geeks. The “American” freedoms to think, to know, to learn, to speak—these were the freedoms that the radical Galileo had seized, long before they were finally written into our laws. As much as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and George Washington, Galileo Galilei ultimately made our democracy possible.

  • • •

  THEREFORE IN MAY 1993, I expected that what Saint Peter’s Basilica would have been to my mother on our trip to Italy, the Florence museum room now containing Galileo’s telescopes would be to me. As it turned out, however, I was lucky to get in to see the collection at all. A couple of days before I arrived, mafiosi had bombed the Uffizi, killing six people. In response, the entire city had gone on strike. When I alighted from the train, everything was still closed. Not sure what to do until my train left for Paris the next evening, I wandered over to the Basilica of Santa Croce—churches always stay open, of course—and spent some time admiring Galileo’s magnificent tomb, the tomb they’d built him about a hundred years after his death, when people had come to realize he had been right.

  The next day, a few hours before I had to leave Florence, the part of the Uffizi that held the history of science collection opened. The docent handed me an English-language self-guided tour brochure, and I moved slowly from item to item, pausing especially to appreciate the evolution the telescope had enjoyed in Galileo’s own hands. Eventually I came upon a strange object—a relic, like the religious relics my mother and I had just visited all over Italy, perched on an alabaster pillar, protected under a beautiful dom
e of glass. This, the guidebook explained, was Galileo’s middle finger.

  It seems that when Galileo’s body was moved, a century after his death, from a too ordinary grave (the grave of a heretic) to the grand tomb in the basilica (the grave of a hero), a devotee chopped off Galileo’s middle finger and arranged this little shrine. A fellow named Tommaso Perelli had provided a Latin inscription for the marble: “This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand that ran through the skies, pointing at the immense spaces, and singling out new stars, offering to the senses a marvelous apparatus of crafted glass, and with wise daring they could reach where neither Enceladus nor Tiphaeus ever reached.” (In Greek mythology, Enceladus and Tiphaeus, aka Typhoeus or Typhon, were giants who stormed heaven and led a revolt against the Olympian gods, only to be thunderbolted and crushed under Mount Etna by Zeus.)

  Now, I knew that in Italy sticking your middle finger up doesn’t mean what it means in the United States. But the more I thought about it—about Galileo’s contentious nature, his belief in the righteousness of science, his ego, his burning knowledge that he and Copernicus were right, and especially about what the Church had put him through—the more amusing the middle finger thrust skyward seemed. I mean, of all the remnants, how perfect is it that with his remaining relic, the old man is eternally flipping the universe the bird?