Association of Libertarian Feminists
Main Page
Book Review
Donald's Smarter Sister
by Joan Kennedy Taylor
Crossing: A Memoir, by Deirdre McCloskey, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, 299 pp., $25.
This is a wonderful book. For all libertarians, its an account of a courageous personal journey in the face of psychiatric tyranny that should have won a Thomas Szasz Civil Liberties Award when it was published in 1999. And for all feminists (except for those Deirdre McCloskey calls "a tiny group of separatist feminists of the second wave [who] make a point of persecuting gender crossers") this memoir adds to and deepens that account with an analysis of gender differences, experienced from the inside first as a man, and then as a woman. In fact, the author feels that she learned so much from her crossing, that she tells us that she sometimes identified herself, when asked if she was related to her previous persona, Donald McCloskey, as "Donald's smarter sister."
When Thomas Gramstad wrote an article on masculinity and femininity that included gender crossing some time ago in ALF News, I must admit I didn't grasp how important an issue it was. Perhaps it took this sometimes almost moment-to-moment account of a crossing to an unknown land that was also a transformation, to enable me to see that as Deirdre keeps saying to family and colleagues it's not about sex, it's about identity. An identity deeper than family ties, or even avocation, for which she was willing to gamble all that most people think would make up the good life for a man in his fifties: a home and retirement savings, a prestigious career, an international reputation, and, most of all, thirty years of marriage and family life, and the love and respect of two grown children.
Donald McCloskey has been known for years as a Chicago-trained economic historian, on the faculty of the University of Chicago for 12 years before becoming a professor of economics and history at the University of Iowa. Rhetoric is his subspeciality, and this book is written by someone who knows the English language and its glories well, full of unattributed and unidentified quotations from English and American poetry, as well as a final apt and moving sonnet by May Sarton. The author speaks in three voices, in three chronological sections - Donald, Dee, and finally, Deirdre.
What was not generally known for years about Donald is that he was a secret cross-dresser from the age of 11; his wife knew it from the first year of their marriage, but friends and children did not. After years and years of this, secret cross dressing was not enough. In 1994, at the age of 52, he began to seek out cross-dressing clubs and join them. The children were out of the house, and he wanted to be able to dress as a woman every other day at home - on odd days, he suggested, relishing the joke. He hoped it would save his marriage. He even told his sister, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, when she came through Iowa City on her way to a sabbatical at Harvard, and she, the first to know beside his wife ("outside The Community"), seemed to accept his secret
His wife became more and more perturbed, though he assured her and himself that he was not a gender crosser. But then he realized that he was, and thus began the journey chronicled in this book. After his realization, he had to take action - to out himself, before others began to speculate. That meant to tell his wife and his mother, and to discover that his sister had been calling his wife, suggesting that he should be committed to an asylum, perhaps only for a month or so. And he needed to tell his colleagues. The first colleague he told was a Dutch friend at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who immediately started arranging a visiting professorship for him. Starting a few months later, in January, 1996. As a woman.
He spoke to his sister at Harvard, who feared he was crazy, and assured her that he didn't wear women's clothes to professional meetings, not realizing how much her attitude had changed. His wife complained to their son, and saw a lawyer about a divorce. He consulted a psychiatrist, who told him he was not manic, as his sister feared, he was transsexual. At Iowa, he decided to go to the top and then send letters to all his colleagues there, and to all those he knew in economic history. "I am not ashamed," he wrote. "For one thing, I do not regard being a woman as shameful." The reaction was generally surprisingly friendly. (When he told his Dean, the Dean said, "Thank God! I thought for a moment you were going to confess to converting to socialism!"). He began exploring various options to enable him to pass as a woman - he had already begun electrolysis, but he made future appointments for facial surgery and voice surgery from specialists. He found an endocrinologist; he began speech therapy to make his voice less masculine.
However, he had already discovered that he would have a long wait until he could completely reach his goal. Wishing to be a member of the opposite sex is listed as "gender identity disorder" in the fourth edition of the psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as DSM-IV to the profession. Deirdre tells us that it became listed in 1980, seven years after homosexuality was removed as a disorder. This listing sets up psychiatrists as "gatekeepers" for gender crossers. This in turn means two things -- that surgeons will not perform the genital operations that mean true gender crossing unless the patient is certified by a psychiatrist as competent to make the decision, and that psychiatrists require two years of full-time life as a member of the opposite gender before they will allow the operation. "Two years as an unconvincing and indeed illegal woman is a long and dangerous time," writes Donald.
On November 2, 1995, two sheriffs deputies showed up at his house with a warrant "for arrest for mental examination," cuffed him in his front yard, took him two blocks to a hospital, and walked him through the ER to the psychiatric unit, where he had to wait an hour for an admitting psychiatrist and was then held and questioned in a locked ward for eight days before he had a trial, called a "competency hearing." His sister had talked a former colleague into co-signing a written declaration, that contained, among other things, the following untrue statements: that Donald was "manic" and had recurring fits of depression, that his mother and brother had been hospitalized for "bipolar disorder" (formerly called manic depression), and that he was planning to have a sex-change operation in a month. (That was when his facial and voice-box surgery was scheduled.) After a long hearing, the judge found no proof of immediate danger and released him, after two experts found him competent to sign surgical forms. Since Donald was scheduled to give a paper at a meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago shortly, the judge allowed him to leave the state.
In Chicago, he was listening to a panel of three papers praising his work when he was asked to leave the meeting for an urgent phone call. And there was his sister again, trying her luck at getting him committed in another state, bringing with her two Chicago policemen, who took him in a paddy wagon to the University of Chicago hospital, where he was left in a locked room for six or seven hours, taken to a locked psychiatric ward, and awakened in the middle of the night by a medical student for more tests and questions. This time he had the Social Science History Association behind him, who got him the best lawyer in Chicago and presented "a resolution condemning the seizure of their former president" to an astonished judge. This time, he was only held a little over a day, and was released the evening of the day after he was seized. The Association rescheduled the session of their meeting honoring his work that had been interrupted by his arrest.
When he went to California for his surgeries, he hid in the houses of various friends so his sister couldn't find him again and test the laws of a third state. His surgeon got a psychiatrist to put in writing that Donald could sign the consent form, but the hospital wanted a written opinion from the Chicago psychiatrist he had seen and delayed the facial operation until it was received, which meant that the operation could no longer be done in two days but had to be spread over three, adding considerably to the cost. His voice operation was cancelled without notification.
At the Social Science History Association in Chicago, Donald (now thinking as Dee) had worn a mans three-piece suit. But her debut as a "professional girl economist" was to be at the American Economic Association convention in San Francisco in January. Dee was a member of the twenty-person executive committee, and went to their pre-convention meeting, introducing herself to another member by saying, "Haven't you heard? I'm the former Don McCloskey." He hadn't, but immediately started calling her Deirdre. "Economists tend to be libertarian," writes Dee, and indeed, as she moved into her full time life as a woman, her colleagues were almost uniformly helpful and supportive.
She legally changed her name to "Deirdre," and was divorced. In that order, which distressed her wife ("Donald's wife," as she is henceforth called in the book.) Her voice surgery, which she finally had in Philadelphia before she left the U.S., never worked the way she had hoped, and in the end she advises other crossers to avoid it and concentrate on speech therapy instead. In Holland, of course attention was paid to her life change (she was called a "free market feminist" by some Dutch journalists) and there were new friends, especially women friends, who helped in her transition and her remaining problems. Huge medical bills followed her abroad thousands of dollars for hospital time, including waiting time, for the unsuccessful surgery, and more thousands for the involuntary commitments to the two psychiatric units.
She was able to arrange to have The Operation in Australia in June of 1996, which she calls "important, but not defining." It is important, of course, because of the sometimes murderous hatred some men have for transsexuals. As long as you have male genitalia, you are legally a man - may not go into women's restrooms, may not change your sex designation on your passport (but she managed to get a bureaucrat to do it because of the legal wording of her name change). The laws that protect women from harassment and sexual assault are ambiguous about you, and so are many people that you meet. Once she was free of the American standards of treatment, she could have the operation when she was ready. It marks, she writes, "a social agreement that you are a woman."
During all of this, her career continued to flourish. She was asked to give papers at conferences, she was honored at meetings, in September of 1996 she was inaugurated as president of the Economic History Association in San Francisco. In January of 1997 she came back to the University of Iowa, nervous about how people would treat her. There were, of course costs. Embarrassing moments of being shunned by "Christians" and radical feminists. The monetary cost, she says, was $90,000, and would have been $22,000 more if she hadn't fought those extortionist hospital bills. But the real cost, she says, was "the sacrifice of wife, son, and daughter." She was able to maintain relationships with her mother and her brother, but Donald's wife refused to meet, although an accidental meeting was always possible, since she still was a professor of nursing at the university. Their son asked her not to attempt to communicate. Their daughter changed her phone number and moved after Deirdre came to see her.
This book reminds me of the Buddhist story of the man whose wife feared that her brother would become a priest, because he was studying how to leave the world. "That s not how one leaves the world!" said her husband. "Shall I show you how one leaves the world?" And he poured ashes on his head, and told his wife that henceforth she and all other women were his sister, and he left the house, never to return.
And indeed, the similarity to religious transformation may be what led Deirdre, some years later, to be received into the Episcopal church. Donald McCloskey called it an epiphany. After years of telling himself that he was a heterosexual cross dresser, not a gender crosser, his accumulated feelings broke the dam behind which he had kept them. This is how Deirdre describes it.
"I can be a woman, he said. And he wept in relief, as the car drove itself. I am a woman, she said. Yes!
"She said again, I am a woman, and wept."
Very few people face such choices. Those who don't, as is manifest in this book, try to explain them away, if not as wickedness of some sort, then as sexual oddities, as faddish ways of deconstructing gender, even as ways of promoting a career through public relations. But Deirdre McCloskey shows us in this excruciatingly personal and honest book that even here, it is possible for an individual to succeed in constructing a life according to one's deepest sense of self.
Update
The rock band, Point of Ares, has released its new CD, "Enemy Glory Darkly Blessed," which is a rewritten and rearranged version of its 1996 debut concept album, based on ALF member Karen Michalsons fantasy series, Enemy Glory, the first volume of which was published by Tor Books earlier this year. The CD was featured as "CD of the week" at the end of June by Indie Productions (http://www.indiepro.com), and is for sale there and through CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com) The CD is produced by Arula Records (http://www.arularecords.com).
Karen is the bassist and lead vocalist of Point of Ares, as well as the holder of a doctorate in English Literature and the author of the nonfiction book, Victorian Fantasy Literature: Literary Battles with Church and Empire, as well as of the fantasy series. The first volume, also called Enemy Glory, was a recommended book by ivillage.com after its publication. The manuscript for the second volume of the fantasy series has been recently delivered to Tor Books, which has not yet set a publication date. The title for this volume has not yet been announced.
A paperback edition of Joan Kennedy Taylor's book on sexual harassment will be published this fall by New York University Press under the title Sexual Harassment: A Non-Adversarial Approach. With another hat on, that of Vice President of Feminists for Free Expression, she has a letter in the Playboy Forum in the August issue of Playboy.
ALF member Wendy McElroy is not only the guiding spirit behind the ifeminist newsletter (http://www.ifeminists.com), but she is also now a regular contributor to Fox News Online (http://www.foxnews.com)