[To be clear, the jest in this post is of course not directed at intersex people but at the self-indulgent introspection of the movement that inspired it, i.e. TQ+]

I read this book recently at the recommendation of a friend, who later told me she forgot I was GC when she recommended it. Which, if you've read the book (or can probably guess from the title), you can understand why. BUT, I do try to get through every rec from friends. So I slaved through this complete atrocity and, absolutely famished from the empty calories of Cal's/Calliope's never-ending gender introspection, and gasping for something of substance air, I just barely made it to the finish line.

This is seriously everything I hate about TQ+. This book is essentially an intersex person's journey of uNDerStaNDiNg him/her/themself. Calliope is a genetic male who was raised female and does not ever question her identity until witnessing her classmates develop breasts and feeling ugly in comparison (I'm not joking, more on that later). Written by a notably non-intersex man, the story really does not come off as about being intersex so much as trying to piece together the modern queer movement through a framework of intersexuality, i.e. everything is actually a spectrum, nothing is real yadda yadda, if all you do with your life is wax poetic about your gender that is completely acceptable and will most definitely be totally fulfilling in the long run, way more than leaving your house and contributing something of value to the world, blah blah blah.

For example, Calliope briefly works as a sex worker at a place with several other intersex people as well as transsexuals, and we are blessed with this gem:

There were gay customers who dreamed of boys who were almost female, smooth-skinned, hairless. There were lesbian customers who dreamed of women with penises, not male penises but womanly erections, possessing a sensitivity and aliveness no dildo ever had.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize, in case you were wanting to lose more of your sanity today. Ladies, is it gay to dream about penises?

Also, as mentioned, our Calliope only starts questioning her identity in her pre-teens when she doesn't grow breasts and thus feels inferior to the other girls after being told for a long while that she was pretty. Yes. What in r/MenWritingWomen is THIS??

Only Calliope, in the second row, is motionless, her desk stalled somehow, so that she’s the only one who takes in the true extent of the metamorphoses around her...Still pretty, Calliope soon finds herself the shortest girl in the room. She drops her eraser. No boy brings it back. In the Christmas pageant she is cast not as Mary as in past years but as an elf . . . But there’s still hope, isn’t there . . . ?

I'm never forgiving you for this BS, Eugenides. Never.

Here's a dose of NotLikeOtherGirls for your viewing pleasure (the popular girls, which straight man Jeffrey Eugenides Calliope lovingly coins, the "Charm Bracelets" versus our favorite narrator):

Let me perform a quick taxonomy of our locker room. Nearest the showers were the Charm Bracelets. As I passed by, I glanced down the steamy corridor to see them performing their serious, womanly movements. One Charm Bracelet was bending forward, wrapping a towel around her wet hair. She snapped upright, twisting it into a turban...

...maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance...

Our Calliope is Not An Idiot. She likes Books. She is Not a girl.

While college students marched against the war, Calliope protested against hair clippers. While bombs were secretly dropped on Cambodia, Callie did what she could to keep her own secrets. ... My hair! My unbelievably abundant, thirteen-year-old hair! Has there ever existed a head of hair like mine at thirteen? Did any girl ever summon as many Roto-Rooter men out of their trucks?

Folks, this is your brain on gender naval-gazing. See, you read passages like this, and you think it might be a sign that Calliope is realizing how silly it had been to be concerned about these things when there's, y'know, a whole war going on. Just a hint of character growth in the making. Spoiler: the epiphany never comes.

The very last paragraph of the second to last chapter of the book, happening after her father literally dies, discusses that he "got out just in time":

Most important, Milton got out without ever seeing me again. That would not have been easy. I like to think that my father’s love for me was strong enough that he could have accepted me. But in some ways it’s better that we never had to work that out, he and I. With respect to my father I will always remain a girl. There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

Jesus Christ, Calliope, your father is dead and you're still going on with this crap? Come on, this book is almost over you're running out of time to redeem yourself.

Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates’ legs. They came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving in the current, feeding on microscopic plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the depths.

o.o

I think we'll close with that, more r/MenWritingWomen. I genuinely laughed my ass off here, because that sub's paramount inside joke is a satire by one of the users that says, "She breasted boobily." Eugenides got pretty close here, eh?

There are honestly way more, but I could not bear use my highlighter on all of them lest someone discover my copy of the book and think someone found these quotations beautiful. Truly cannot believe I managed to finish this thing. This post got out of hand, but my frustration reached too high of a level by the end that I just needed to get it all out somewhere.

TL;DR: I do not recommend this one.