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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides   Audiobook

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Opinion Piece on Middlesex and Intersex Identity

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Opinion Piece on Middlesex and Intersex Identity

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It's about growing up in America.

In medical school we have these weekly group lunch meetings with our advisers. It's supposed to be a way for us, distressed students wading through anatomy and physiology, to reflect on what we're learning and to connect with each other plus our advisers, people who are on top and can look down with some perspective.

My adviser likes bringing us medical ethics cases, and having us debate the tired dichotomies of physician/patient autonomy, individual/surrogate decision-making, beneficence/limited resources, etc. As someone who has thought about medical and bioethics for a long time, my eyes can't help but glaze as I watch my colleagues fumble through the basic conflicts in abortion, DNRs, euthanasia - the whole gamut.

Some three weeks ago, my adviser brought a case about an intersex newborn. It went like this: baby is born with ambiguous outer genitalia, a uterus, and undescended testes. The baby is genetically male, but could theoretically be surgically operated on to have either male or female genitalia. The parents are of a religious-conservative persuasion (a not uncommon stereotype in medical ethics) with family highly anticipating the baby's gender-reveal party. They want an operation, and need some advising. What should we, as doctors-to-be, do in this situation?

I wasn't in the best of spirits that day so I sat back and listened to what my type-A classmates had to say. Unsurprisingly, they focused on the medicine, the logistics of surgery, whether fertility depended on which sex they chose, and what could be done to make the child feel more like the gender that the parents chose.

No one mentioned the word intersex. After an hour of stewing in my brooding brain, I finally let out that I thought we should consider doing nothing. I said the word intersex. "You know that's a thing right? Intersex is an identity and maybe it's not our place to judge this child...as a mistake?"

The expected responses: but the kid will get bullied! Their religious-conservative parents and family won't accept them!

Eyes roll, but time is up for our meeting.

During my first semester, I haven't had much time to read for fun (or write, I'm sorry Medium). That conversation changed that. Some fire was lit and I had an impulse to read about being intersex and to understand why this case of identity confused my fellow students so much. Luckily, I had just the right book, bought used and then ignored, on my shelf.

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Eugenides' Middlesex is Not About Being Intersex

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In medical school we have these weekly group lunch meetings with our advisers. It's supposed to be a way for us, distressed students wading through anatomy and physiology, to reflect on what we're learning and to connect with each other plus our advisers, people who are on top and can look down with some perspective.

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Intersex Society of North America review

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Intersex Society of North America review

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Middlesex | Intersex Society of North America

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This Pulitzer Prize winning novel explores the family history and life of a female-reared protagonist who has an intersex condition doctors call 5-alpha reductase deficiency.

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My Big Fat Greek Gender Identity Crisis (Published 2002)

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Laura Miller reviews book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; drawing (M)