12.) Cal

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 423-478 since last week; 735 since semester

After the incident with The Object's brother, Callie gets into a small car accident where at the hospital it's actually revealed that she's a hermaphrodite. Her parents send her to a specialist and he misdiagnoses her as a female based on false data, and Callie ends up running away.

This is the start of Callie's new life as a boy, and she gets a haircut, wears her dad's clothes, and changes her name to Cal. This part of the book reminds me of the movie Boys Don't Cry. When Cal runs away, lives with a bunch of homeless teenagers in a park, but when they leave him alone, Cal is pinned down and gets all of his things stolen by older homeless people. The homeless people find out he's a hermaphrodite and they immediately begin beating him up. It's like when in Boys Don't Cry three guys find out that Hilary Swank is actually a girl and beat her up and rape her. It's pretty sad when situations like this are addressed with pure violence. It's like some people just don't want to deal with change or different things at all, and so the only solution they can think of is process of elimination. I don't think people as ignorant as that will ever come out of their ways of thinking, so I feel pretty sorry for them.