Books

An incredibly long time since I've posted anything here. Being back in the US makes it difficult to make internationally-themed observations, and I've been too damn busy for the past few months to make posts. But I'm back on, in the name of literature, because I started reading a new book that criticizes one of my favorite books, and this is naturally something that interests me enough to write about.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is quite possibly one of my favorite books ever. An intersexed protagonist, an adventurous journey, the stories of multiple generations in a family woven together, an immigration tale...I thought it was a masterpiece when I first read it, and I gave copies to several people before coming out to them, if I wasn't entirely sure how they would react. Middlesex is in many ways the book I want to write and the book I wish I'd written. Imagine my surprise, reading another gender-related book, to find that my esteem was not universal.

I've just started reading Intersex (for lack of a better word), which I had picked up months ago when Lambda Rising closed (depriving DC of its resident gay bookstore and leaving a hole in the pattern of my wanderings around Dupont Circle). The book is set up as a set of mini-stories and essays, and one of the first ones has to do with Middlesex.

She opens by saying:

"People keep asking me about Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel Middlesex because the main character is considered a hermaphrodite and so am I. But really, neither of us are. Outside of myth, there are no hermaphrodites. It is physiologically impossible to be both fully male and fully female."

I was a bit confused by this opening. Last I checked, "hermaphrodite" meant possessing the external sex characteristics of both genders, to a greater or lesser degree. I checked with the online dictionary, and found these definitions.

hermaphrodite her·maph·ro·dite (hər-māf'rə-dīt')
n.
An individual having the reproductive organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics of both sexes.


her·maph·ro·dite
   /hɜrˈmæfrəˌdaɪt/ Show Spelled[hur-maf-ruh-dahyt]–noun
1.an individual in which reproductive organs of both sexes are present. Compare pseudohermaphrodite.
2.Biology . an organism, as an earthworm or plant, having normally both the male and female organs of generation.
3.a person or thing in which two opposite qualities are combined.


Nothing in those definitions indicates that one would have to be "fully" both genders to fall into the category of "hermaphrodite." But this is a dictionary, and not even a medical one, and WebMD was remarkably silent on the subject. But clearly the word has non-dictionary revealed subtext, or the author wouldn't be so "fuming and hot with shame as [Eugenides] called me and people I love hermaphrodites."

I admit, I hadn't realized that the term was offensive until I read that. To me it had always been a medical term, distinguished from the term intersex as indicating morphology, rather than hormones or genetics. Creating further complication, there are people who actually do identify with the term hermaphrodite in its medical sense, as indicated by this short page on "Being a True Hermaphrodite."

The author of Intersex accuses Eugenides of having "never actually talked to an intersex person before he published that book," and I don't know if that's actually true or not. She further accuses him of "being yet one more person profiting off the selling of intersex people as freaks of nature." I would disagree with that statement. When I read Middlesex, I thought that Eugenides did an excellent job of making Cal the protagonist three-dimensional and human, not a freak at all. But then, I'm not intersexed, so what do I know? Maybe I'm just one more ignorant person projecting my views onto the world. Or maybe the real anger in the essay has less to do with Middlesex as a book, and more to do with the fact that the book that drew attention to the intersex population was written by a normal heterosexual male.

The main thing this essay teaches me is that I need to be careful. In my own writing, I'm working on a story with a transgendered protagonist. I don't want it to be said that I'm "exoticizing" gender variance. Truth be told, I don't find it that exotic. Interesting, yes. Exotic, no. I've had friends and acquaintances all over the gender continuum, enough to know that, aside from their relation to the binary, they're people like any others. But again, because I'm not trans myself, there's always that danger, in the event of my writing becoming successful, that I'll be seen as speaking for or about a population that I don't actually belong to. If and when I ever finish this particular project, I fully plan to run it by my trans friends, to make sure that it passes muster. But I still have to wonder if, someday down the line, someone will write a similarly angry piece about my writing, because I had the audacity to write something that they had not yet dared.