F*** Off Eugenides! Short, Sharp and to the point!

It’s what I would love to say to a certain author’s face right now.

Oprah Winfrey, the queen of Daytime Television has recently selected a book called “Middlesex” as a top title in her reading list. Oh! How nice. No, really, it shows how much these daytime TV hosts really care. (I need convincing of that).

In case anyone has read this book and are under any illusions about people with 5 alpha “Feeling different from all the other girls at school and wanting to play with meccano sets” How about the real thing with descriptions of what actually happened?

You see the problem with 5 alpha reductase-2 deficiency is that everyone has come to believe they are born girls, but grow up to be men. This is urban myth.

While Eugenides tends to irk me often, this feels particularly nasty because Oprah Winfrey’s website has the usual “Comment on this book” page with the usual “This is so good, this book” and “Gawd damns the pervart geneytic deyfective”. So we have the modern equivalent of Vespasian’s baying mob all whipped up into a frenzy then.

You see, this is the problem when your health becomes Day Time TV Coliseum fodder. You are judged and condemned on the basis of a piece of inaccurate fiction.  I have reached the point where there is no longer any point disputing Eugenides’ book because no matter how much you try to educate people about health issues like mine, people will believe what they want to believe, and Winfrey has just provided a huge outlet for this misinformation.

You may ask yourself what is the core problem with Middlesex? Well, it is called “using stereotypes to further sanitized causes”. Does Middlesex describe the experience of being intersexed, through the eyes of “Cal”. The answer is that in some cases it may but it does not describe mine, as someone with the condition mentioned. Actually Middlesex tells the world that I want to be a man to begin with. Actually this is untrue; I was raised as a male. (If walking around with a lot of scar tissue attached to your bladder, a botched mess that some tentatively called a “penis” surgically stuck to you and being beaten senseless qualifies as being “male”). Problem number two, “Cal” was raised as a girl, and wanted the “rough and tumble” of boyhood.

This is the problem with Eugenides, the reality could not be more different from what he describes. Perhaps Eugenides will claim it was the fleshing out of a clinical model with human face and human story. But then I would argue that this was his biggest mistake, he did not talk to anyone with 5 alpha. But the end result is that he has made it so that 5 alpha always follows the same pattern in the popular imagination. Not helpful if you have this condition and have developed a pathological hatred of being defined as “male” because of what they did to you as a child.

I am not joking or being sarcastic when I say that Thomas Harris would probably have depicted my childhood more accurately. I am not saying this applies to everyone with 5 alpha, I am saying that Eugenides reads to me like socially sanitized propaganda, with undertones of “Reclaimed manhood” based on the media coverage of cases like the Riemer case. But I take it personally because it is as good as saying to me that being experimented on as a child, and worse, what they intended was the right thing, all wrapped in this sugary narrative about someone called “Cal”. It is the fact that “Cal” was not clearly based on anyone with 5 alpha that makes it personal.

Yes I do feel like saying **** off Eugenides, **** off for washing my life down the toilet. And **** off for making the world believe that I am supposed to be something I am not.

Would Oprah televise me doing that to his face I wonder?

The above commentary reflects the personal opinions of a person who is affected by this intersex variation, Sophie Siedlberg.