According to Cal's grandmother, he collapses after reading his fortune in his coffee grounds. The same day, Cal's grandfather, Lefty, suffers a stroke and loses the ability to speak. Milton and Tessie conceive Cal on Greek Orthodox Easter and (s)he is born in January of 1960. After Tessie speaks with their family friend, Father Mike, an assistant pastor at their Greek Orthodox church, she sees a mysterious and precocious young girl who convinces her that she really wants a girl.

Despite Tessie's reservations that the child should be conceived spontaneously through love and not through this scientific method, she agrees to try for a girl using Uncle Pete's method. Consumed by the 1960s cultural obsession with the new-found possibilities of science, Milton believes that the male sperm would rush off and die before the egg dropped, but the female sperm would reach it just in time. Milton asked Uncle Pete, a family friend who was a chiropractor, for advice on how to conceive a girl, and Pete tells him that male sperm (Y sperm) swim more quickly than female sperm (X sperm), so the best way to conceive a girl is to have sex twenty-four hours before ovulation. Tessie and Milton conceive the child wanting a girl.

Tessie's husband, Milton Stephanides, disagrees with Desdemona, insisting that scientifically, it must be a girl. Until now, Desdemona has gotten twenty-three out of twenty-three guesses correct, and, after a little hesitation, she declares that the child will be a boy. Desdemona takes a silver spoon out of the box, ties a string to it, and dangles the spoon over Tessie's pregnant belly. Chapter Eleven finds it amid mothballs and birdcages and runs back downstairs. She instructs Chapter Eleven Stephanides, Cal's older brother, to go into the attic where she and Lefty live and retrieve the silkworm box from under her bed. He embarks upon the story of his gender prediction by his grandmother, Desdemona Stephanides.ĭesdemona, Cal's grandmother who immigrated to America from Greece with her brother Eleutherios 'Lefty' Stephanides, calls the family together to predict the gender of her daughter in law Tessie's unborn child. Cal calls upon the Greek muses to help him tell his story of self-discovery, birth, and family history. (S)he is a 5-Alpha-Reductase pseudohermaphrodite, which he discovered when he was sixteen. Cal was born a girl in January of 1960 in Detroit, Michigan to a Greek-American family. Middlesex opens with Cal Stephanides (also known as Calliope) introducing herself/himself.

Middlesex eugenides review