Middlesex
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Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by ...more
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Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. The Navajo understand this. If a person wants to switch her gender, they let her. And they don’t denigrate that person—they honor her.
Thaís Dall'Agnol
Gender is cultural