Thursday, March 21, 2013

Ten top fictional sex changes

Sam Mills is the author of three YA/crossover novels, including A Nicer Way to Die, The Boys Who Saved the World, and Blackout, and the not-YA novel The Quiddity of Will Self.

One of Mills's top ten fictional sex changes, as told to the Guardian:
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides's Pultizer-prize winning epic is narrated by Cal Stephanides (initially called "Callie"), a hermaphrodite who is born with a "small crocus" for a penis. Initially, s/he is raised as a girl, but during adolescence her sexual ambiguity is revealed by a medical examination. A sexologist tells her parents that gender-identity development is determined by sex assignment and rearing, not biology, and recommends that Calliope should be "castrated" and continue to live as a female. Instead, Cal flees, renounces his feminine identity and lives life as a man. However, he reflects that, "I never felt out of place being a girl, I still don't feel entirely at home among men."
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue