Like Tiresias, an individual's gender depends upon how he or she performs as much as it does upon an innate sexual, or biological, characteristic.
Desire initiates episodes where gender roles are destabilized.
The erotic gaze upon the eroticized body often acts as a catalyst for transformation. However, who is transformed depends entirely upon who possesses a greater agency. Thus, sometimes it is the subject of desire who affects the object's metamorphosis, while in other cases both subject and object of desire mutate. Bataille's notion of the erotic moment presupposes just the sort of violation that Ovidian metamorphosis entails. Book 3 of the Metamorphoses focuses the issues of power, desire and gender.