Like a hermaphrodite, Middlesex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Jeffrey Eugenides is composed of two parts that are not usually joined together.

The first half of this 529-page novel is a memoir of an average Greek-American family living in Detroit. I was expecting a story about a person with genetic mutation that deeply affects his identity and sex life, but what is presented in that first half of the novel is a nostalgic tale of a Greek couple fleeing the Greek-Turkish war in 1922, settling down, in what was then becoming the Motor City,  having children, running into financial problems, and surviving a race riot.

None of this had much to do the immigrant couple’s grandson (née granddaughter, apparently). That novel didn’t start until the chapter called “Middlesex” on page 253 where an amazing coming-of-age story finally begins to unfold. Cal/Calliope was born with undeveloped genitals and was mistaken for a girl until puberty started to try to catch his body up at fourteen.

I was disappointed that the very interesting plight of this person — who was “born twice, as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan in August of 1974”— was jettisoned in order to travel back in time to describe his parents’ lives, and his grandparents lives to explain how it came to be that a recessive gene appeared in both his mother and father. This is not to say that the first half isn’t well written. I just wasn’t prepared, when I opened the book, for a Greek-American version of The Adventures of Augie March.

However, the first half wasn’t without its intersexual charms. Upon reading the first few pages, I was delighted by the narrative style and metafictional elements,

Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this.

which — I intrude to mention — remind me of my own narrator in my forthcoming novel, The Girlie Playhouse, who likewise believes her fate is somehow the culmination of her dead mother’s life, about which she can’t possibly know many details. (I will return to this discussion of my felt kinship with Eugenides in moment, when we get to the topic of exotic dance clubs.)

The narrator Cal is the most interesting character in the novel and there isn’t enough of him in the first half. But when he does step in occasionally, it’s charming.

…despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story that I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

I loved the narrative “intrusions” when he inserts himself to justify this fabrication or that untruth for the sake of art. The reader can appreciate the Homeric references in a story about a Greek family,

…now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on. After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-aunts and -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or, in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. And so before it’s too late I want to get it down for good: this roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!

Incest and Intersex

We learn early on the shocking fact that Cal’s grandparents are brother and sister. After fleeing Turkey following a bloody war between the Greeks and the Turks, they decide to marry on the ship to America.

In the extended backstory, the reader learns that Cal’s grandfather, “Lefty” long desired his beautiful sister Desdemona, partly because there were no other young women to lust over in their small village. Eugenides did not follow Vladimir Nabokov or A. S. Byatt in describing shameful but irresistible cravings between siblings. Instead, under Eugenides’ direction, the taboo relationship is domesticated into the most banal of American immigrant marriages.

I don’t understand why Eugenides felt he had to reach so far —seizing upon incest— to explain how the recessive gene came to decide the fate of the narrator’s body, when he could have just blamed it on generations of intermarrying cousins, which is not taboo in the way that incest between siblings raised together is taboo in all cultures. The incest theme is not motivated by the plot since the recessive gene is not expressed in the child of the married siblings; it doesn’t appear until their son marries his second cousin. The degree of shame that Eugenides has Desdemona harbor is about consistent with someone who has married her first cousin and wants to keep that a secret. The reader only gets a brief glimpse of Lefty’s feelings of shame, before he seduces his sister. Once married and living in Detroit, the illicit nature of their relationship seems to have been neutralized in his mind by the marriage certificate.

As a Greek-American raised in Detroit, Eugenides appropriates some of the details of his family life to add an extraordinary degree of verisimilitude to this artistic distortion of a personal history.

Intersex and Transsexual

The fact that, not long after Middlesex was published in 2002, the transgender movement arose with fervor complicates the present-day reception of this sensitive depiction of an intersex adolescent’s experiences.

Some have criticized Eugenides for telling a story that he is not entitled to tell as a “straight, cis man” — ignoring the fact that fiction writers use their imaginations to get inside the heads of other people; it is the nature of their craft. But I will explore how Eugenides handles some of the transsexual issues in the novel, which, in important ways, goes against recent trends. Briefly put, Cal learns to accept his body rather than to try to alter it artificially.

If there is a villain in the novel, it is a clinician who decides that Cal is really female. Dr Luce is described as somewhat perverse and fraudulent; his office has off-putting depictions of sex acts (historical) and he behaves in a somewhat unprofessional way that may have been typical of 1970s-styled progressive reformers during the “sexual revolution.”

According to Dr Luce’s theory that gender is determined by upbringing, he prescribes hormones and surgery even to patients with XY chromosomes if they were raised as females. Cal’s parents don’t understand (and are not really told) the true physical details of Cal’s body, and when they and the doctor decide on surgery, the horrified fourteen-year-old Cal runs away from home. Stopping first to buy a men’s suit and to get a men’s haircut, he then hitchhikes his way to San Francisco.

Cal immediately embraces the fact of his XY chromosomes (he had always been attracted to girls). As an adult looking back, he speaks favorably of the North American Intersex Society’s position that “corrective” surgery performed on children is abuse because they are not in a position, as minors, to consent to life-changing treatments that rob them of their ability to experience sexual pleasure. Cal discovers that he prefers to be accepted for what he is, a man with a small member and testicles that have failed to descend.

Eugenides got the idea for Middlesex from Herculine Barbin, a 19th century memoir about a French intersex male raised as female, who falls in love with a woman, and who was then subsequently forced by the courts to live as a man. That memoir ends tragically, and Cal’s story seems to be Eugenides’ effort to undo such a sad outcome. What if, instead, the intersex person accepts the newly discovered maleness of his body, rejecting the mistaken gender identification? In the end, Cal’s life leads to a happy marriage with a woman.

Cal’s decision to reject the gender mis-identification that does not conform to his chromosomes nor to his outward appearance as a teenaged boy on his way to becoming a muscular man with a beard, does not mean that Cal is unsympathetic to other intersex people he meets in California who make different life choices. He forges an important relationship with a hermaphrodite named Zora, who, due to a different kind of genetic mutation, is a male with female attributes, large breasts and hairless skin. Nevertheless, Zora is model-esque, tall, with lean angular features that hint at XY chromosomes. Zora, who outwardly appears to be female, prefers lesbian partners. This friendship is crucial for Cal in learning acceptance.

Cal is also friends with a gay male, now called Carmen, who is on synthetic estrogen treatments and is halfway through surgical transition (the top but not the bottom yet). But Cal’s feelings about Carmen do not appear as sympathetic as those toward Zora, who like him, decides against hormone treatment and surgical alteration in favor of acceptance of the mixed messages of his body. Carmen is shown to have dissociative feelings about his own body: “I was like yo! Who put this dick on me. I never asked for no dick.”

I am reviewing into dangerous territory here, given the explosive political nature these days of transsexualism. But praise is due to Eugenides for his sensitive portrayal of the feelings and experiences of people whose whose sexual category is atypical. The overwhelming message Cal learns is one of acceptance.

The message that many of today’s sociologists promote — telling a child who rejects the superficial cultural stereotypes association with his/her sex that he/she is in the “wrong” body — is so much less “nuanced” — as they say these days — than the message that Eugenides explores in this novel.  Cal may be seen as heroic for resisting Dr Luce and his potentially devastating diagnosis and treatment.

Finding Acceptance in a Strip Club

The runaway fourteen-year-old Cal is, predictably, exploited by a predator in the final chapters of the story. A strip club owner in San Fransisco gets Cal to perform in a glass swimming pool to voyeurs who are curious about “hermaphrodites.” Cal’s two above-mentioned friends are also part of the show. Despite the unhealthy circumstances of the club (drug use and exploitation of a minor), meeting people in situations similar to his own allows him to come to terms with who he is. The two different examples help him choose the path that’s right for him.

The characters at the club, the customers and the performers, are flawed and yet Eugenides refrains from making judgements. In the end, police raid the club. Although Eugenides narratively punishes the club owner for exploiting Cal, we understand as well that he may have saved the boy’s life. Cal might not have been able to accept his body without his experiences as part of a freak show. Eugenides even reveals the humanity of the voyeurs in the club as well. Says Cal,

I saw the faces looking back at me and I saw that they were not appalled. … It was therapeutic. Inside Hermaphroditus [Cal’s stage name] old tension were toiling, trying to work themselves out. Traumas of the locker room were being released. Shame over having a body unlike other bodies was passing away. The monster feeling was fading…

Eugenides is a master at emotional complexity. Middlesex is a refreshing and enlightening literary telling of a story about being different that has elsewhere been forced into the service of propaganda.

-V. N. Alexander, author of The Girlie Playhouse, forthcoming in 2026 from Heresy Press.