Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales
![handle is hein.journals/indana80 and id is 403 raw text is: Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and
Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender
Tales
SUSAN FRELICH APPLETON*
I. CAL AND His COHORT
They're everywhere: transsexuals, intersexed individuals, and others of uncertain
gender classification. Transgender issues have come out of the closet as popular culture
seems to have discovered a new favorite. Recently, several successful books and
movies, not to mention frequent television coverage on both talk shows and science
programs, have introduced the public to numerous ordinary people whose very
existence challenges the notion that sex and gender provide life's fundamental
organizing principles. In turn, the law's reliance on strict sex-based categories becomes
increasingly fragile, indeed too fragile to withstand challenges to marriage laws
requiring a male and a female.
One of the most prominent pop-culture examples these days is Cal, formerly
Calliope (Callie), Stephanides, the protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer-Prize-
winning novel Middlesex.' Several reviews emphasize the theme of transformation in
the story told by this delightful and sympathetic narrator,2 who was born twice: first,
as a baby girl ... and then again, as a teenage boy.3 This theme of transformation
might explain why Eugenides decided on a protagonist with 5-alpha-reductase
deficiency syndrome because such male pseudohermaphrodites appear female at
birth and through childhood, only to experience at puberty the masculinization
belatedly triggered by their XY chromosomes.4 In Cal's case, the condition comes
* Lemma Barkeloo & Phoebe Couzins Professor of Law, Washington University in St.
Louis. With the customary disclaimers about their responsibility for errors, the author thanks
Martha Chamallas, Barbara Flagg, Henna Hill Kay, Laura Rosenbury, Nancy Staudt, Holly
Stone, and Mimi Wesson for their thoughtful comments and Brandy Anderson and Kimberly
Busch for their careful research assistance.
1. JEFFREY EUGENIDES, MIDDLESEX (2002).
2. See, e.g., Bill Goldstein, A Novelist Goes Far Afield but Winds Up Back Home
Again, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 1, 2003, at E1 (describing Middlesex as a novel of metamorphoses and
transformations); Julie Wheelwright, Books: Across the Great Divide; Gender Confusion and
Greek Tragedy Have Bred an American Epic, THE INDEPENDENT (LoNDON), Oct. 19, 2002, at
41 (Eugenides... brilliantly weaves together strands of genetic heritage, mistaken identity and
transformation .... ) (book review), available at LEXIS, News Library, Indpnt File.
3. Eugenides, supra note 1, at 3.
4. People with 5-ARD [5-alpha-reductase deficiency] are ...
chromosomally and gonadally male, but have genitals that may
be ambiguous or more female than male in appearance until
puberty. Due to a lack of the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase, these
children cannot convert their body's normal production of](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/indana80&div=22&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales
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