Reading (a work of fiction this time!):
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
This was quite the interesting read. Eugenides tells the story of Cal[liope] Stephanides who was born with a 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome, or in other words, a hermaphrodite. This was particularly interesting because it explore the idea of gender identity from both a social and biological/genetic perspective. Calliope was born with the genetics for a male but was raised female until the age of 14. This novel tracks the gene that caused this syndrome down through 3 generations, ending with the second birth of Calliope as Cal. What’s interesting is that Eugenides does end up using a lot of his own family history for the background, to make it that much easier for him to write about a topic that he has not personally experienced. Two fun articles:
My Big Fat Greek Gender Identity Crisis
A Novelist Goes Far Afield but Winds Up Back Home Again
It’s a long one (500+ pages), so I’m only going to talk about a few passages that stuck out to me as I was reading. When I say “he,” I will be referring to the protagonist, but with references to the character being ‘Calliope’ or ‘Cal’, depending on which point in his life I’m describing. References to the author will be by his last name. The first of these moments of pause I experienced comes at the bottom of page 37:
Now we know we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny.
As a popular author, Eugenides did of course get through some research to evaluate how he was going to treat genetics. However, this gross simplification completely discounts environment. Eugenides (directly after this statement) describes how everything down to our nervous twitches can be attributed to genetics. I can imagine that at the time he was reading this, mainstream views of genetics pretty much agreed with this statement. The humane genome was fresh, and in the process of discovering this information, people were convinced that everything could be found in your genes. Now we know a bit better and so this statement really stuck out to me. It’s such a simplification of the environment to play a role in our development. I’ve definitely noticed myself pick up certain quirks based on the people around me, and this changes over the years of my life. Also, it cheapens the idea that we get to chose anything about the way that we are.
Next point fell on page 297:
There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.
Genetic determinism, or the idea that the way we turn out is based completely on our genes, is a topic that you may remember us commenting on before. While this is a comical reference to the concept, I think it speaks volumes about what is actually true. And while ultimately for Cal, genetics win out, that is not the case in every situation.
The final two quotes come from the description of Dr. Luce (the leading authority on human hermaphroditism) and the work that he had done.
..Luce argued that gender is determined by a variety of influences: chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; hormones; internal genital structures; external genitals; and, most important, the sex of rearing. Drawing on studies of patients at the pediatric clinic at New York Hospital, Luce was able to compile charts demonstrating how there various factors came into play, and showing that a patient’s gonadal sex often didn’t determine his or her gender identity. (Eugenides 410-411)
All of the preliminary study described from pages 435-437 where Eugenides writes up a report by Dr. Luce stating that Calliope, despite having an XY genotype clearly identifies in all ways as a girl, and therefore supports his own theory.
These descriptions of Cal[liope]‘s situation, while detailed, still make for an incomplete picture. There is a vague medical description and an intense discovery process, but little afterward. Cal undergoes a process by which he discovers his gender identity, but what I feel is somewhat lacking, is what happens afterward. We know that Cal chose to stay as he was, and identified as male, but what were the decisions for staying as he was physically? My understanding is that surgery was not done to anatomically adjust external genitals and it would have been cool to have a description of what decision process would have been like. In the same way that we were able to see how the discovery of carrying the BRAC1 or BRAC2 gene led to making a decision in Joanna Rudnick’s documentary In the Family (2008) that we watched a while back. I acknowledge the difference between a documentary and a fiction novel, but even as a piece of fiction, it would have been interesting to see how the decision-making process would have been interpreted. In one of the articles linked above, Eugenides mentioned that he had never met a hermaphrodite before, and I think that that would have been invaluable to the process of writing his book.
I feel like, in general, the process is more important to people than what happens afterward. Eugenides did a good job describing the process of discovery, but then it dropped off at the consequences of that discovery. I believe this functions the same way for the thylacine as well. There is great documentation of the entire process, the significance of getting one protein to work, or the successful recovery of a full mitochondrial DNA, but then what happens after? We have this full genome and then what? The scientific discovery itself is so exciting that consequences are overlooked. True, the stated purpose is to learn about evolution, but what about the effects of the newly developed technology? That will be applied to new areas, and even the thylacine itself will become of more use than just evolutionary knowledge because once it exists, it’s out there. Even from an economic sense, this object/technology will exist, a market will be created for it, and a profit will stand to be made. By virtue of that alone, there will be a lack of control over it.
