Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [212]
For the first few minutes I concentrated on the circular light, but finally, drawing in my chin, I looked down to see that Luce was holding the crocus between his thumb and forefinger. He was stretching it out with one hand while measuring it with the other. Then he let go of the ruler and made notes. He didn’t look shocked or appalled. In fact he examined me with great curiosity, almost connoisseurship. There was an element of awe or appreciation in his face. He took notes as he proceeded but made no small talk. His concentration was intense.
After a while, still crouching between my legs, Luce turned his head to search for another instrument. Between the sight lines of my raised knees his ear appeared, an amazing organ all its own, whorled and flanged, translucent in the bright lights. His ear was very close to me. It seemed for a moment as though Luce were listening at my source. As though some riddle were being imparted to him from between my legs. But then he found what he had been looking for and turned back.
He began to probe inside.
“Relax,” he said.
He applied a lubricant, huddled in closer.
“Relax.”
There was a hint of annoyance, of command in his voice. I took a deep breath and did the best I could. Luce poked inside. For a moment it felt merely strange, as he’d suggested. But then a sharp pain shot through me. I jerked back, crying out.
“Sorry.”
Nevertheless, he kept on. He placed one hand on my pelvis to steady me. He probed in farther, though he avoided the painful area. My eyes were welling with tears.
“Almost finished,” he said.
But he was only getting started.
The chief imperative in cases like mine was to show no doubt as to the gender of the child in question. You did not tell the parents of a newborn, “Your baby is a hermaphrodite.” Instead, you said, “Your daughter was born with a clitoris that is a little larger than a normal girl’s. We’ll need to do surgery to make it the right size.” Luce felt that parents weren’t able to cope with an ambiguous gender assignment. You had to tell them if they had a boy or a girl. Which meant that, before you said anything, you had to be sure what the prevailing gender was.
Luce could not do this with me yet. He had received the results of the endocrinological tests performed at Henry Ford Hospital, and so knew of my XY karyotype, my high plasma testosterone levels, and the absence in my blood of dihydrotestosterone. In other words, before even seeing me, Luce was able to make an educated guess that I was a male pseudohermaphrodite—genetically male but appearing otherwise, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. But that, according to Luce’s thinking, did not mean that I had a male gender identity.
My being a teenager complicated things. In addition to chromosomal and hormonal factors, Luce had to consider my sex of rearing, which had been female. He suspected that the tissue mass he had palpated inside me was testicular. Still, he couldn’t be sure until he had looked at a sample under a microscope.
All this must have been going through Luce’s mind as he brought me back to the waiting room. He told me he wanted to speak to my parents and that he would send them out when he was finished. His intensity had lessened and he was friendly again, smiling and patting me on the back.
In his office Luce sat down in his Eames chair, looked up at Milton and Tessie, and adjusted his glasses.
“Mr. Stephanides, Mrs. Stephanides, I’ll be frank. This is a complicated case. By complicated I don’t mean irremediable. We have a range of effective treatments for cases of this kind. But before I’m ready to begin treatment there are a number of questions I have to answer.”
My mother and father were sitting only a foot apart during this speech, but each heard something different. Milton heard the words that were there. He heard “treatment” and “effective.” Tessie, on the other hand, heard the words that weren’t there. The doctor hadn’t said my name, for instance. He hadn’t said “Calliope” or “Callie.” He hadn’t said “daughter,” either. He