5/12/2023 0 Comments Middlesex eugenides reviewCallie will spend the 1960's and early 70's, the first years of her life, as the relatively unremarkable daughter of an entrepreneurial Greek-American family, only to discover at 14, in the office of a Manhattan physician, that she is a hermaphrodite - or, more precisely, a pseudohermaphrodite, a sufferer of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. Her son storms in to protest the divination the baby is a girl, he insists. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.'' Tessie complies, despite her worries that ''to tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.'' Once Tessie is pregnant, Milton's mother, Desdemona - a refugee with her husband, Lefty, from a Greek village on the slopes of Mount Olympus - dangles a silver spoon tied to a string over the belly of her daughter-in-law and pronounces the child a boy. Her parents, Milton and Tessie Stephanides of Detroit, want a girl, and a bachelor uncle convinces Milton, ostensibly on the authority of an article in Scientific American magazine, that if the couple have ''sexual congress'' 24 hours prior to ovulation ''the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. EVEN before she's born, Calliope Stephanides's gender is up for debate.
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