Historian Alice Dreger's new book, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, is a funny, surprising story of Dreger's career as an activist, researcher, and advocate for evidence-based activism. Dreger writes about her work advocating for changes in the medical treatment for intersex people, and her investigations into what she sees as smear campaigns against researchers with controversial ideas. Her book is both a story of her personal journey, and an examination of how institutions supposed to protect people and advocate for the truth have failed. She joins us.

Alice Dreger really should have known better.

A few years ago, Dreger was contacted by advocates for intersex people she knew from her work in the early intersex-rights movement. They were concerned about a drug doctors were giving to pregnant women with a condition that can cause their children to be born intersex. Dreger looked into the issue, came to agree that administering the drug was an unnecessary gamble, and agreed to get involved in a project she thought would take three months or so.

It took three years, and the result was far from what Dreger hoped. Looking back, she recognizes that as a longtime historian and activist, she might have seen the result coming. That story is one of several Dreger writes about in her new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science. The book is a call for a more evidence-based approach to all facets of life, particularly activism.

“We have to be willing to look at facts even when they make us uncomfortable,” Dreger said. “I had a great grad school professor who would say, ‘If you haven’t changed your mind lately, how do you know it’s working?’ That stayed with me.”

Dreger’s journey also leads her to investigate cases of researchers like Mike Bailey, who was attacked personally after he wrote a book dealing with a controversial theory about transgender women.

“A lot of scientists are smart people but are naïve politically,” Dreger said. “Many of them have stayed with the belief, which I think is right, that even if people will hate you for what you’re saying, you’ve got to go where the data take you. What happened to a lot of people are unpleasant personal attacks, assaults on their reputation, death threats, in some cases mockery of their children, and attacks on their romantic partners, too. Really, things that to my mind are completely out of line.”

Dreger’s book isn’t only an argument for the primacy of evidence, it’s also a lament that universities are too toothless and news organizations stretched too thin to counteract misguided activism and smears against scientists. She says to ensure the future of our democracy, researchers must be able to pursue the truth, even when the findings are unpopular.

“I think it’s important as we have political debates not to have opinions about what is true, but figure out what we know is true,” she said. “Science can tell us what is true, but not what to do about it. What we do about it is the second question, but we have to start with evidence.”

Read an excerpt from the book.

In 2008 I purposefully set out on a journey to try tounderstand what happens—and to figure out whatshould happen—when activists and scholars findthemselves wrestling over human identity. As aresult, I spent the next four years talking to peoplewho had gotten wrapped up in terrific messes—onethat involved an academic freedom dispute thatreached the California SupremeCourt, another in which a universitypresident received twenty thousande-mails calling for a professor’sfiring, a third that climaxed witha research article being formallydenounced by an act of Congress.There were even a few more thatfeatured death threats. My engagementwith this subject led me toone of the most well-known cases ofacademic libel in recent years, surroundingthe work of the anthropologistNapoleon Chagnon. I spenta year looking into what happenedto Chagnon after the AmericanAnthropological Association decided in 2000 to investigateactivist claims that Chagnon had been involvedin a genocidal eugenicist experiment in the Amazon.

After a few years of this, when people askedwhat I did for a living, my mate joked to them thatI was running an academic Innocence Project outof our kitchen—using investigatory historical techniquesto yank academics’ reputations off deathrow, in between making large pots of coffee.

Indeed,I had no trouble finding case studies or people whoneeded advice or help. As word got out about whatI was doing, academics sometimes sent me theirbeleaguered and disoriented colleagues, hoping Icould help. I was starting to have somany wrecks parking at my door,I developed a standard set of tips Icould give out to those who seemedto be living through a now all-too-familiarscenario. It turned out tobe a lot like the work I did early inmy intersex rights efforts—a lot oflistening to people who had beenunjustly traumatized. Just takingthem seriously, in private; tryingto determine if there was a littlehistorical work I could do to helpmake sense, to help the peopleinflicting the trauma try to understandthat they needed to thinkabout this more carefully. Trying to get people tolook at facts and to see each other as humans.

FromGalileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Scienceby Alice Dreger. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Alice Dreger, 2015.