After choosing Middlesex for her book club in June 2007, Oprah interviewed Lynnell Stephani Long, Hida Viloria, and Katie Baratz. Dr. Arlene Baratz, Katie's mother and a lifelong physician-advocate for intersex children, and Dr. Alice Dreger, a bioethicist and scholar supporting the movement, appeared in support.

Oprah's publicity helped cement the popularity of the book Middlesex, for which author Jeffrey Eugenides won a Pulitzer Prize. In a previous interview Eugenides criticized his source material, one of few first-person historical diaries by an intersex person, as "melodramatic" and "evasive [about] anatomical details."