Hello all, I am here to report that our Class of 1977 Book Club is alive and flourishing! On September 19th we held our 2nd Book Club Zoom meeting, where 25 of us had very lively discussions of the book, A Discovery of Witches, by an MHC alum, Deborah Harkness. Some of us loved it, some of us hated it, and some of us were just not sure – what a great book for our class! And a special thank you to Sue Berry Duncan, Nancy Mathiasen and Maureen Harrigan for their leadership of this book club meeting.
And we are very lucky that immediately after our September meeting, Sandy Jones and Pam Taylor reached out to say they would like to recommend the book for the next Book Club and would lead the discussion. So I am happy to report that our next book will be the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and our discussion will take place on January 25th at 8pm ET. It’s a long book and since there are a lot of holidays coming up between now and then, we wanted to make sure everyone has enough time to read the book.
When I asked Sandy to write a little blurb about the book and why she and Pam suggested it, the “Professor” in Dr. Sandy Jones came out (as well as her “tell it like it is” attitude) and she provided the following:
In 2007 when I was restricted to bed rest recovering from bilateral knee replacements, Pam Taylor sent me a copy of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Not only was the book an excellent read, but it also had a special fascination for me because I am a reproductive physiologist and had learned about this intersex condition in graduate school.
We proposed a Class of 1977 discussion of the book because of its timeliness in the context of current political controversy surrounding gender issues. The unfortunate conflation of sex and gender reflects widespread ignorance regarding the distinction between the biological and socio-cultural roots of these very different terms. Multiple state legislatures have banned any intervention or treatment for transgender youth while overlooking the fairly standard medical practice that continues to lead doctors to advocate for and perform “corrective” surgeries on intersex babies. The long-term success of this practice has been seriously questioned and these operations have been compared to genital mutilations by intersex adults.
I actually had to get legal protection from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, to continue to teach a combination of lectures on the biological basis of sex and the cultural construction of gender in my non-majors’ biology course after a parent complained to the university about their daughter being exposed to “woke shit.” Most people seem to think that sex is dichotomous because they have never learned that it is actually bimodal with more than 30 different genetic and developmental anomalies that lead to intersex births. My commitment to teaching this has become deliberate advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community because I am so tired of the ignorance that is used to justify social persecution. Students of this generation are much more open, and the ones in my classes consider this valuable information that they have never been taught before.
Pam suggested that I open our Zoom meeting with a very short explanation of the 5alpha reductase deficiencythat causes the particular intersex condition that is the topic of the book. It will not be a lecture!!! (5 minutes max) The scientific accuracy of the story is extremely impressive, especially since medical science has learned so much more about this, very recently. Wikipedia has an extensive article on this Pulitzer Prize winning book, if you would like a preview.
Below is the Zoom link for the meeting, and of course I will send out several reminders before January 25th.. And I really hope many of you can join – I am pretty sure it is going to be a very lively and thought-provoking discussion.
See you all on January 25th at 8pm ET
Fondly,
Liz
