Middlesex

With that, Milton rested. Tessie reached out and patted Callie’s hand. “It’ll be okay, honey,” she said in a thickened voice. Her eyes were watery, red.

“What kind of operation?” Callie asked her father.

“Just a little cosmetic procedure. Like getting a mole removed.” He reached out and playfully caught Callie’s nose between his knuckles. “Or getting your nose fixed.”

Callie pulled her head away, angry. “Don’t do that!”

“Sorry,” said Milton. He cleared his throat, blinking.

“What’s wrong with me?” Calliope asked, and now her voice broke. Tears were running down her cheeks. “What’s wrong with me, Daddy?”

Milton’s face darkened. He swallowed hard. Callie waited for him to say the word, to quote Webster’s, but he didn’t. He only looked at her across the table, his head low, his eyes dark, warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Milton’s eyes that it was impossible to look for truth.

“It’s a hormonal thing, what you’ve got,” he said. “I was always under the impression that men had male hormones and women had female hormones. But everybody has both, apparently.”

Still Callie waited.

“What you’ve got, see, is you’ve got a little too much of the male hormones and not quite enough of the female hormones. So what the doctor wants to do is give you a shot every now and then to get everything working right.”

He didn’t say the word. I didn’t make him.

“It’s a hormonal thing,” Milton repeated. “In the grand scheme of things, no big deal.”

Luce believed that a patient of my age was capable of understanding the essentials. And so, that afternoon, he did not mince words. In his mellow, pleasing, educated voice, looking directly into my eyes, Luce declared that I was a girl whose clitoris was merely larger than those of other girls. He drew the same charts for me as he had for my parents. When I pressed him on the details of my surgery, he said only this: “We’re going to do an operation to finish your genitalia. They’re not quite finished yet and we want to finish them.”

He never mentioned anything about hypospadias, and I began to hope that the word didn’t apply to me. Maybe I had taken it out of context. Dr. Luce may have been referring to another patient. Webster’s had said that hypospadias was an abnormality of the penis. But Dr. Luce was telling me that I had a clitoris. I understood that both these things grew out of the same fetal gonad, but that didn’t matter. If I had a clitoris—and a specialist was telling me that I did—what could I be but a girl?

The adolescent ego is a hazy thing, amorphous, cloudlike. It wasn’t difficult to pour my identity into different vessels. In a sense, I was able to take whatever form was demanded of me. I only wanted to know the dimensions. Luce was providing them. My parents supported him. The prospect of having everything solved was wildly attractive to me, too, and while I lay on the chaise I didn’t ask myself where my feelings for the Object fit in. I only wanted it all to be over. I wanted to go home and forget it had ever happened. So I listened to Luce quietly and made no objections.

He explained the estrogen injections would induce my breasts to grow. “You won’t be Raquel Welch, but you won’t be Twiggy either.” My facial hair would diminish. My voice would rise from tenor to alto. But when I asked if I would finally get my period, Dr. Luce was frank. “No. You won’t. Ever. You won’t be able to have a baby yourself, Callie. If you want to have a family, you’ll have to adopt.”

I received this news calmly. Having children wasn’t something I thought much about at fourteen.

There was a knock on the door, and the receptionist stuck her head in. “Sorry, Dr. Luce. But could I bother you a minute?”

“That depends on Callie.” He smiled at me. “You mind taking a little break? I’ll be right back.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Sit there a few minutes and see if any other questions occur to you.” He left the room.

While he was gone, I didn’t think of any other questions. I sat in my chair, not thinking anything at all. My mind was curiously blank. It was the blankness of obedience. With the unerring instinct of children, I had surmised what my parents wanted from me. They wanted me to stay the way I was. And this was what Dr. Luce now promised.