Betwixt Between

Anne Fausto Sterling’s book, Sexing the Body, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Middlesex, complement one another. Angier explores the concept of sex through the multifaceted lenses of scientific, medical, and popular belief as well as examines numerous case studies. Eugenides presents the idea of an androgynous gender within a fictional narrative. Together, these works focus on genetic composition in order to explore the difficulty in labeling an individual as either male or female. Society is often unaware of the complexity in determining an individual’s sex.

Sterling’s chapter, “That Sexe Which Prevaileth,” explains how European as well as American culture often falsely accepts the idea that there are only two sexes, male or female. State and legal systems have enacted legislation on the presumption that there are simply two sexes. Sterling explains that biological composition is complex and directly categorizing individuals as either male or female is not always feasible. “If nature really offers us more than two sexes, then it follows that our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits. Reconceptualizing the category of ‘sex’ challenges cherished aspects of European and American social organization” (Sterling 31). The author follows this by explaining the history of Hermaphrodites, aging back as far as the ancient Greeks. She explains that Plato discusses three sexes, male, female, and hermaphrodites, but that the third sex has become lost throughout the years. Angier’s chapter transitions nicely into Middlesex, a novel that focuses on the often neglected “middlesex” of individuals, who are neither just male nor just female.

The narrator, Cal, opens the story with an explanation of her three births. She explains that she was first born as a baby girl, named Calliope Helen Stephanides, on January of 1960. Cal explains that she was born with the recessive gene, 5-alpha-reductase. In order to correct this, she was born a second time as a teenage boy in August of 1974. At age forty-one, in 2001, Cal feels her third birth is approaching. Cal has now chosen to write her autobiography. The story then rewinds to three months prior to her first birth. Cal’s grandmother predicted her gender by holding her magical spoon above Cal’s mother’s belly. Her grandmother’s prophesy, which was correct the past twenty-three times, was that the child was going to be a boy. This prediction turned out to be only partially accurate. The author takes the reader back to her grandparent’s history. The reader learns that her grandparents, as brother and sister, fell in love and later married in order to immigrate to the United States. This incestuous relationship foreshadows Cal’s gender identity conflict.

When I signed up for this class I initially thought it was solely based on women’s studies. I became aware that one couldn’t study women without studying men. To further complicate this issue, I now recognize that it is not always possible to accurately label an individual as exclusively male or female. Therefore, a middle ground must also be examined. Unfortunately, the classification of individuals may often defocus us from the primary importance of achieving equality for all human beings.