Middlesex [antikvár]

THt blLVLtt bHUUII was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and dien again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may haive come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, "Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites," published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinohgy in 1975. Or maybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license (from the Federal RepubUc of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I'm a former field hockey goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me into myth; I've left my body in order to occupy others—and all this happened before I turned sixteen. But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on.