Jeffrey Eugenides

Before he wrote Middlesex, Jeffrey says he did a lot of research on intersex conditions. "Because there have been a lot of characters that changed gender in literature Tiresias, Orlando from Virginia Woolf. I wanted to do it different. I wanted to write about a real person, so I wanted to be as accurate as I could be about the medical, biological facts."

Jeffrey says he spent a lot of time at the medical library at Columbia University. "I researched all the different intersex conditions and then I found the one that I used 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, which Callie has," he says. "I used that one because it's a very dramatic shift in gender."