So, like, are those boobs real?

            One of my friends in high school was born intersex, she confided in me once, and her parents decided to raise her as male. Her given name was Padraig, she went by Paddy, and when she came out she chose the name of the Norse god of beauty for herself: Freya. The week following her announcement, I heard a lot of my friends say “I’m still going to call him Paddy,” or “I guess this explains why he likes wearing a bra. How does he have boobs, though? He's a guy.” I learned later that her parents were fairly accepting of her announcement, having known she was intersex from a young age, but that it wasn’t exactly what they wanted, either.

             Reading Middlesex, my thoughts kept floating to Freya, specifically how it differed for her to come out as female from Cal’s coming out as male. I don’t mean to say it was easy for Cal to come out as male, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, with his parents never bathing him “all over,” but it was certainly different from Freya’s experience as a female in 2012. I can’t say with any certainty what kind of person has a more difficult time with anything, but I can say what I observed.

            So far, in Middlesex, we have seen glimpses of Cal’s adult life and the struggles he experiences with Julie and with Calliope surfacing, “a little like being possessed” (41). We have seen Desdemona’s prediction that Tessie’s child will be a boy, and we have seen the boy assigned female at birth. We have not yet seen the struggles he experiences in ‘transitioning’ from publically female to male, but we get the sense that Cal is doing alright in Berlin as an adult. “After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected,” he says (41).  He mentions he uses the stalls in bathrooms, never the urinals, and showers at the gym in the men’s locker room.

            I am curious to see the bridge between Cal’s childhood and adult life, because Freya’s was fraught with her transition and the stress of being female. Cal is “not androgynous in the least,” whereas Freya is often complaining of feeling too masculine but not wanting to be “overcompensating” as Cal does. Freya is fairly androgynous, and she knows it and is ashamed of it because she feels her identity is shameful, as well as being accused of only pretending. She is quadruply fearful—as a woman, as a lesbian, as a transgender woman, and as a woman of color.

            Cal has not yet expressed these fears. I have no doubt they exist, but I can’t help but wonder how his life would have differed had he been born with, say, androgen insensitivity syndrome, where he would be genetically male but living as female. Our society has long expressed that it is more acceptable for women to act like men than it is for men to act like women, because it is more acceptable to be a man than it is to be a woman. Men acting slightly feminine, like Cal, are thought to be gay by characters like Julie, while Freya has been called a monster because of her jawline and shoulders. I have the deepest sympathy for both Cal and Freya, because I know that being anything other that cissexual is incredibly hard in our society, but I wanted to highlight the double standard that I have seen even within the harshest bigotry. Cal, troubled as his life as been, so far seems to be doing alright buying his suits in the 20th century. Freya gets harassed the minute she steps into Sephora in 2016. Is that really the same struggle?