Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.

But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

“Each generation puts the bite on the next, turning them into the living dead.”

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

priapus

Protector of male genetailia. Oversized permanent erection lol

1876. Klebs had maintained that a person’s gonads determined sex. In cases of ambiguous gender, you looked at the gonadal tissue under the microscope. If it was testicular, the person was male; if ovarian, female. The hunch here was that a person’s gonads would orchestrate sexual development, especially at puberty. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Klebs had begun the task, but the world had to wait another hundred years for Peter Luce to come along and finish it.

In twenty-five pages of forthright, high-toned prose, 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.

In a decade of solid, original research, Luce made his second great discovery: that gender identity is established very early on in life, about the age of two.

the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

In fact, the Sambia word for ‘vagina’ translates literally as ‘that thing which is truly no good.’

I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.

I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness. The lesson of Desdemona’s suffering and rejection of life insisted that old age would not continue the manifold pleasures of youth but would instead be a long trial that slowly robbed life of even its smallest, simplest joys. Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.