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This letter to the editor is in response to the April 8, 2003 article titled "Transgender novel Middlesex wins Pulitzer." After receiving this email, The Advocate changed the title to "Intersex novel, gay playwright win Pulitzers" and re-wrote the paragraph about Eugenides' work. The revised article is found here.
Editor,
Congratulations to Jeffrey Eugenides for winning the Pulitzer for his novel, "Middlesex." But the headline for the advocate.com article about this year's Pulitzers puzzled me. While Cal, the protagonist for the novel, may be described as "transgender" under some definitions, the article describes the novel as a story about a "hermaphrodite," or an intersex person, that would make it different from a "transgender novel."
Further, I found what little the article discussed about intersex existence misleading and stigmatizing. For example, the article quotes Eugenides as getting the idea for the novel from Michel Foucault's book about "a 19th-century hermaphrodite," but fails to note that feelings of shame, secrecy and isolation that Cal lived through is a common experience among intersex people today --NOT because our bodies are so freakish, but because the society silences and erases intersex people through invasive and often traumatizing medical "treatments" including cosmetic surgeries during infancy.
Also, the article fails to note that "hermaphrodite" is generally not an appropriate term to refer to people with mixed or atypical reproductive organs, even though Eugenides may have needed to use it in order to connect Cal's (and his own) Greek ancestry to the Greek mythology of Hermaphroditus. In reality, intersex people do not have "both sets of genitals" as the mythical Hermaphroditus does.
Eugenides' work has raised public awareness of at least some aspect of intersex experiences, however limited it may be by the fact that he had never actually spoken with an intersex person before publishing "Middlesex." I would only hope that, in the future, there will be more writings about intersex people written by intersex people and others close to us, not only in the literary world, but also in The Advocate.
Emi Koyama
Director, Intersex Initiative Portland