Aunt Deirdre and the Greatest Story Ever Told

Crossing - A Memoir

Deirdre N. McCloskey
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois
Hardcover - 288 pages
$25.00
reviewed by Jamie Faye Fenton
Crossing - A Memoir

Transgenders are storytellers. Thousands of web pages, dozens of books, and every new meeting echoes with our tales. The best rendition yet describes the journey of an economics professor named Deirdre McCloskey.

Gender crossing is difficult to explain to a general audience as the fundamental emotions are alien. The most effective technique is the metaphor, usually involving metamorphosis or a journey. Deirdre employs the later, comparing her gender transformation to an act of immigration -- a crossing from one place to another motivated by the quest for identity. The story begins with a normal boy living with his parents in Boston.

Donald to Deirdre

Donald was born in 1942 into a normal household. He had no strong urge to be a girl then, having only sparse vivid memories of enjoying his mother's feminine world. He stuttered then and now.

Awareness of femininity came with puberty. Donald began a 40-year career as a fetishistic cross-dresser. While longing to be female, it seemed utterly impractical to him, and he succumbed to the imperatives of masculinity. As desire repeatedly confronted guilt, Donald experienced cycles of purging and hypermasculine overcorrection. Donald builds his dam and becomes a ferocious academic warrior.

Early in graduate school, Donald marries. Three months later, he tells his bride of his crossdressing, which she accepts. Donald starts teaching at the University of Chicago and later, the University of Iowa. He is happy as a husband and the father of a son and a daughter.

Children grown and gone, he crossdresses more. In 1993, he discovers the Internet and the nascent electronic transgender community. He acquires a better wardrobe and a feminine name: Jane Austen. Don shaves off his beard, alarming the wife.

Soon it is a full-blown blow out. Jane attends TG club meetings, and then the Be-All convention in Cincinnati. She goes shopping, goes dancing, and goes on a crash diet. The taste of feminine being draws her deeper. She begins electrolysis.

One day on the drive home from a Chicago Gender Society meeting, the Epiphany comes. She can indeed become a woman. The wife is mortified, mother and sister perplexed. Her wife and children draw away in shame.

Maleness becomes alien. Soon she is on hormones. At Southern Comfort she devours the TS track and plans a visit to Dr. Ousterhout in San Francisco.

She returns home to find herself outed on campus, which she quickly counters with her own coming out letter. Women accept her, and the men say "what does it matter?". Talk at home turns to divorce.

Deirdre's younger sister, a psychology professor, is alarmed, convinced that Deirdre is trapped in a manic/depressive cycle. Learning of Deirdre's plans to reform her face, she first pleads with her to seek psychiatric treatment. Unheeded, the sister then conspires with an academic friend to have Deirdre forcibly committed for treatment. The police arrest Deirdre and take her to the University hospital.

The psychiatrists, all ignorant of transgender healthcare, were primed by Deirdre's sister and they hold Deirdre overnight. The next day, after a lengthy competency hearing, Deirdre is deemed harmless and released pending further evaluation.

Two weeks later, Deirdre attends an academic conference in Chicago and her sister strikes again. This time Deirdre is taken to the University of Chicago hospital where she encounters the same cluelessness and the same terrors. Again, after a lengthy and expensive hearing, she is released.

Transitioning in earnest, Deirdre changes her name and visits Electrolysis 2000. Arriving at Dr. Ousterhout's hospital in San Francisco, her sister makes one last attempt to stop her. Fortunately the good doctor and his assistant cajole two psychiatrists into declaring Deirdre competent and matters proceed. After recovering in California with friends, Deirdre has unsuccessful voice surgery in Philadelphia.

Deirdre accepts an appointment as a visiting professor at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The subject of a full-page article in the national newspaper, she is warmly received by the tolerant Dutch. She masters the art of passing, and more importantly, the rituals of feminine friendship. Women build friendships by exchanging confidences, supporting each other emotionally, helping each other out, and expressing love through giving. This is Deirdre's most surprising and most rewarding discovery.

Seven months after living full-time, Deirdre has GRS in Australia, experiencing some complications and eventually recovering. Later, she has a face-lift with mixed results.

She returns to America and to an apology from her sister, who rationalizes her interference as an act of love. Her marriage family first draws away, and then completely freezes her out of their lives. She learns of her son's marriage a week after the fact, her grandchild's birth 9 months later. Letters are unanswered and phone numbers are changed. Heartbreak for a new woman with deepened emotions.

With trepidation, Deirdre returns to her job at Iowa State. Her academic colleagues accept her and the women faculty embrace her. After another operation, her voice is serviceable.

The journey is complete. She is accepted into the female tribe and is settled. While harrowing and frightfully expensive, Deirdre is rewarded with fulfillment and a deep Christian faith.

Reactions

Of every transsexual whose biography I have read, Deirdre is the most like me. We both had normal boyhoods, stuttered, discovered our interest at puberty, dammed it up, and then awakened later in life with help from the Internet. This many correspondences is eerie. She, like me, found support and guidance in the transgender community.

Following behind, I am discovering many of the simple pleasures of femininity the same way she did. In particular, I also enjoy the closeness of feminine friendship.

We both have families, hers lost, and mine in peril. I feel for her losses and dread my own.

I admire her humor and her pride in her transsexuality. I want to be like that. I resolve to someday write my own story.

Interpretations

Her book is divided into 3 major sections representing 3 major identities. We have Donald, Dee the intimate friend, and Deirdre the new woman. There is also Jane Austen, DonaldŐs feminine name as a cross-dresser. Each paragraph has a plain-text narrator and an interpreting self commenting in bold type. The identities morph from one to the next as the story unfolds.

Most genetic women will enjoy this book -- Maxine Kumin wrote a favorable review of it for the New York Times. Men may find the going harder. Transgender readers will resonate with every page.

When skimming the text, apparently insignificant accounts of daily life are mixed in with the narrative of significant events. Reading straight through their importance emerges. Each meeting with friends, each gift exchanged, each time out passing illustrates Deirdre's mind rewiring for the feminine. It is happening the same way with me.

Just before the table of contents, Deirdre lists hundreds of women's names, all friends who helped along the way. Many names are familiar. Deirdre emerged with the support of the contemporary transgender community and I am delighted to see us acknowledged for the first time in a major autobiographical work. Her friends are our friends. She is revising her many books on economics to include her new perspective and proudly declares her transsexuality in each one, sometimes referring to herself as "Aunt Deirdre".

Deirdre spends many pages complaining about psychiatry and its unhelpful influence. Considering her dreadful experience, no wonder. Psychiatry, like economics, is corrupted by power. The impulse to control others, through gate-keeping or social engineering, invariably distorts the science and often leads to misadventures. Still, there are competent and compassionate caregivers in the mental health field and TGForum readers are strongly encouraged to seek them out.

One of Deirdre's many contributions to the science of economics is the concept of gift culture. Men participate in an exchange economy, exchanging goods or favors and expecting value in return. Women give objects as tokens of love. The gift culture is the founding culture of the Internet and the growing Open Source software movement. If you take nothing else away from this writing, may I suggest you give someone you love something today "to make up for God's neglect".

Economic life, like all cultural life, is ultimately about storytelling. Deirdre's many academic breakthroughs have come by carefully exploring this boundary between the economic and the cultural. Women have intricate economic and cultural lives bound up together. By doing and sharing knowing as a woman we can find being as a woman.

Deirdre's loss of her marriage family illustrates the fundamental transsexual dilemma. To become who you really are, you must die slowly before those you love. While you have no choice but to go forward, they recall the man who was able to hold it all in and wonder why he can't keep up the act. The pain and shame can cause them to pull away and to abandon you.

Our culture has a similar story, 2000 years old. The protagonist challenges those around him, is rejected, is made to die slowly, in dying loses all illusions, and through grace is reborn. Loosing her marriage family was Deirdre's imitation of Christ, and coming to faith, her redemption.

All of us are placed in similar situations when our illusions are shattered and our soul is exposed. We feel ourselves dying and we can not escape. Our only choice is to either construct a new wall of illusion, or to choose freedom. Simply put, you are given a choice of which story to tell.

Bibliography

Deirdre has written over 10 books and dozens of papers on economics, rhetoric, and writing. Her first book as a woman is "The Vices of Economists -- The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie", in which "Aunt Deirdre" condemns 3 major perversions of economic science.

"Rhetoric and Economics" is a broader exposition of her views, which establishes Deirdre as the first postmodernist thinker I can laugh with, as opposed to at.

"Economical Writing" is a short style guide for economics students. If my writing has improved with this review, credit this book and the helpful suggestions of my early critics.