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    Crossing: A Transgender Memoir
    Crossing: A Transgender Memoir
    Crossing: A Transgender Memoir
    Ebook423 pages9 hours

    Crossing: A Transgender Memoir

    By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
     
    “I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.”
     
    Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.
     
    Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 20, 2019
    ISBN9780226662732
    Crossing: A Transgender Memoir

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      “Being a woman is what you do... not what your wear. Caring, watching, noticing.” So says Deirdre N. McCloskey, quoting lessons learned when she was still Donald. He contrasts “the self-deprecating style women use when charming others of their tribe” with “the boasting of my tribe.” And he realizes, like a New Yorker whose heart is really in the South, that he wants to be someone else.I was an adult when I became an American. My husband and I forced a whole new world and culture on our children. There were times we wondered if family and friends would forgive us. But for Deirdre, the change is even bigger, and forgiveness can be hard to find. Doctors might easily offer a nose-job to woman who wants to change her face, but when a man wants plastic surgery to seem more womanly, the psychiatrists have to be called, and sometimes even lawyers. After expensive legal procedures (oh yes, we had those to become American) and stays in mental wards (we had none of those, but we did have to be physically examined to prove we were healthy), Deirdre finally embarks on a long series of operations. Insurance won’t pay, claiming she’s either ill, but not treatable, or mad and shouldn’t be treated. Complaining that “gender crossing is not a psychosis, and there is no medical evidence that it is...” Deirdre finally concludes “Identity is both made and not made,” while making for herself a very human, very normal new identity.As an economist, Deirdre is well-established, multiply published, very observant and very learned. One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book was her recognition of differences between male and female points of view of economics in relationships. “People have two ways, exchange and identity. Men can grasp only exchange,” she says, illustrating her point with a lovely scene where a wife recites who gave her each ornament in the collection around her house. To a man they’re just items of property; to a woman they stand in for the friends who gave them.The biggest surprise for me in this book was the author’s faith. I wasn’t expecting to see a connection drawn between finding gender and finding religion, though “rebirth” certainly makes sense in both realms. Faith does too; when he couldn’t imagine continuing as he was, Donald had the faith (and the money) to embark on his journey to Deirdre. While some readers might find it hard to imagine why, and some people of faith might find it hard to accept, Deirdre’s advice to “try to think of Jesus as a God of love” is wisely given and well-taken.A fascinating, absorbing memoir, Crossing invites us to examine who we are, and how much we care for our neighbor, in the light of someone who learned who s/he was not.Disclosure: I was lucky enough to get a free ecopy of this book.
    • 2/5
      Such anger and bitterness at everyone. Such arrogance to believe that she is the only one in her life to suffer from her to choice to be a male-to-female transsexual. Such a victim.At the age of 50-something, Donald McCloskey figures out that he's really meant to be a woman, and charges into the fray. At almost every point he is challenged; by his doctors, the psychiatrists (she has especially brutal thoughts on the mental health care field), his family (who are bewildered and brutal), and colleagues.I get that being an outsider, especially in your own body, is hard. And I understand that needing to change genders is a fearsome undertaking. I applaud and support anyone who makes this choice. But Dierdre McCloskey writes as though no one else should have difficulty with her choice and should just accept and love her as they had Donald.She also spends a great deal of ink delineating the binary roles of men and women. Women are softer and more helpful and bored by sports. Men are egoistic, chauvinistic and only interested in cars and sports. Women automatically keep cleaner homes than men, who expect their wives to take care of them.No Dierdre, as Donald you were those things. Now, as Dierdre, you have opened yourself to the others, while slamming the door on anything (except her profession) Donald.I kept reading because the thought occurred that surely at some point she would just get over it. Finding yourself and being happy with yourself is indeed wondrous, but I kept asking myself, "Can we be done now?"

    Book preview

    Crossing - Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

    receive.

    PART ONE

    DONALD

    MOTHER

    FATHER

    SISTER, ELEVEN YEARS YOUNGER

    BROTHER, THIRTEEN YEARS YOUNGER

    WIFE

    SON, BORN 1969

    DAUGHTER, BORN 1975

    LUCY, CROSSDRESSER

    ROBIN, GENDER CROSSER

    FRANK, PSYCHOLOGIST

    ARJO KLAMER, FRIEND

    1

    BOY TO MAN

    Deirdre remembers Donald’s mother taking him at age five into a tea and ice cream place called Schraft’s, in Harvard Square. After a hot fudge sundae and a watery Coke he had to go to the bathroom, so she took him into the ladies’ room. It was nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn’t going to leave her five-year-old son in a strange men’s room when he needed to wee-wee, not even in the safe world of 1947. What’s not ordinary was Donald’s sharp memory of it, the ladies in the tiny room speaking kindly to the boy as they straightened their seams and reapplied their lipstick.

    His mother took him everywhere, all over Boston to her voice lessons at the Longey School in Cambridge and to rehearsals downtown with the opera director Sarah Caldwell. Sarah took him to his first circus, and at Longey he used to slide down the banister, or imagined it. His father was a graduate student at Harvard and then an assistant professor, not doing much baby-sitting. Donald’s mother took him at age six to a rehearsal of Henry V in Memorial Hall, down the street from their married students’ housing in Holden Green. He was fascinated by the swords in the play. He loved swashbuckling, and in college he joined the fencing team. The team photo hangs on Deirdre’s office wall at home, under the mask and sword, an arrangement of artificial flowers beside it. Unfazed by her male past, she puts her coffee cup on a little brass plaque, 1889–1989. Harvard. One hundred years of fencing. As a boy Donald organized armies for mock battles, with wooden swords and trash-can lids for shields. The armies were cozy—families—though families with a lot of dramatic keeling over dead like in the movies. No girls. She’s all right.

    His mother also took him along to Filene’s Basement in downtown Boston for sale days, when the women in the aisles tried on dresses in their slips and less. It was annoying, her mother said in recollection, that men would stand at the edge of the crowd and watch silently while the women worked to clothe themselves at prices they could afford. There was nothing out of the ordinary about a mother with a full-time job, also studying singing, and therefore with child-care problems, taking her little boy along to Filene’s. It was Donald’s sharp memory of it that was out of the ordinary. He kept the memory, not yet wanting to dress as the women did, to be as the women were. He was half conscious of it: Swordplay, yes, what boys and men do. Not that other. No.

    He loved the MGM musicals that he and his mother would see at matinées at the University Theater. He would come out tap dancing, wanting to be Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly or Donald O’Connor—not Ginger Rogers, as the feminist joke goes, doing the same steps backward and in heels. When his mother signed him up for ballet lessons he balked and did not like it. The others were girls. It pulled him. No.

    He watched his mother pluck her eyebrows with tweezers and whisk mascara onto her lashes with a little square brush. Like the ladies’ room in Schraft’s and the women in their slips in Filene’s Basement, the memory hung there like a moon, meaningless. Donald shrugged and returned to being a boy.

    He was normal, happy, bookish, an only child until adolescence. He stuttered always, making the rounds of speech therapists into high school. There’s no cure for stuttering, or none that he persisted in. Stuttering either goes away or it doesn’t. His didn’t. But otherwise he was studious and obedient and cheerful—no worry, said his mother later. I’ve never worried about you, she said. He played with toy soldiers in Sammy’s basement in Holden Green and read books on astronomy until he discovered that it was applied physics and required a lot of math. He read boys’ books, which were the books he was given—the Hardy Boys, not Nancy Drew. Later he learned from his sister that she was encouraged to read Little Women, which Deirdre first read at fifty-five. His father gave Donald The Three Musketeers, but he didn’t like it as much as his father had when he was a boy, the dreams of courage on the page.

    Not that Donald had girlish dreams of love. True, he played with string puppets as though with dolls, because it was Howdy Doody time. But it’s not as simple as that, Deirdre would explain. I was not effeminate, if that’s your theory. I behaved like a boy, dreamed like a boy, was a boy. There’s nothing plain in such histories. Some male-to-female gender crossers were effeminate boys, but many were not. Effeminate boys most often become ordinary nongay men, less commonly gay men, but rarely gender crossers. A tiny share of noneffeminate boys like Donald wish in time to become women. You can’t tell. It takes time to know oneself. There will be surprises.

    And in any case, now that we’re talking about how to treat people, Deirdre would say, effeminate boys, and tomboy girls, are human too. You ought to see the Belgian movie My Life in Pink, about a little boy who shames his family by wanting to be a girl. Deirdre saw it alone in a theater near Southern Methodist in Dallas. The movie was not her boyhood, but it was her desire, which sprang to life as boyhood ended.

    So Donald had been a normal boy, though never a thrusting, macho one. He never fought, though teased about his stutter. His mother told how he came home crying at being teased by a cross-eyed playmate named Frankie.

    You didn’t tease Frankie back for his crossed eyes, did you?

    "Oh, Mommy, no. That would be a terrible thing to do. I’ll get over my stuttering someday (Donald’s optimism), but Frankie will always be cross-eyed."

    ■

    He was eleven years old. They had moved from Cambridge out to the wooded Boston suburb of Wakefield the year before. Eisenhower had won the election, and Donald had to explain to the Republican girls next door why his mother and father had voted for Stevenson. Stevenson’s the best, that’s all. He played occasionally with the girls, but at football, tussling in the scrum with girls at that age larger than the boys.

    On a day in December 1953 he was home sick from school. His mother was downstairs in the kitchen with his new baby sister. He was having the first wet dreams of maleness. Oddly, his dreams were of femaleness, of having it, of being. Upstairs in the bathroom he took a pair of his mother panties from the laundry basket, put them on, and found a rush of sexual pleasure—not joyous or satisfying, merely There. It was a mild ache, pleasant and alluring, mixing memory and desire: the women half-dressed in Filene’s, the little ballerinas, his mother. There was nothing of male lust in it except the outcome. It was not curiosity about what lay underneath women’s clothing. It was curiosity about being.

    He kept the panties on and put on his pajamas over them, and his robe too, for security, and went downstairs.

    Hello, honey, his mother said, How are you feeling? Better?

    Uh, yeah. Yy-yes. B-b-better.

    You look very handsome in your robe! A Christmas gift last year. He didn’t wear it much.

    ■

    As Donald aged thirteen or fourteen waited for sleep in his bed in Wakefield he would fantasize about two things. Please, God, please. As a little boy Donald had been holy for a while, listening every week to a radio show about Jesus, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and thrilling at rehearsals to his mother singing The Messiah. By adolescence he was not religious—something of a village atheist, actually, and starting to read Emma Goldman in the Carnegie library downtown. But the God-draped scenery of his culture remained for times of longing. Whoever: Please. Tomorrow when I wake up:

    I won’t stutter. I’ll just talk like people do. It’ll be easy for me, like flying in the stories. Sam Small the flying Yorkshireman.

    And I’ll be a girl. A girl. It’s easy. Samantha Small the flying Yorkshire WOMAN.

    Deirdre later used the memory to introduce talks, to put people at ease about both her stuttering and her crossing in one story. She would joke, "I f-f-finally got one of m-m-my two wishes!" and the audience would laugh.

    Donald crossdressed when he could. Whenever he was sure he was alone in his own house he would dress in his mother’s clothes or in clothes he had gotten out of the trash. He outgrew his mother’s shoes at age fifteen or so. He once tried on the shoes of his friend Louise next door, when the family was away, but with her he mainly played chess.

    Donald’s mother never suspected, she said later, not at all. At first this astonished Deirdre, though it shouldn’t have, thinking back on the experience of a parent. Donald as a father did not suspect what was going on in his son’s room or his daughter’s head. When he was working for the highway department during summers in college his mother found a girdle he had appropriated from the trash, but she thought it had been left by some girl he’d been entertaining. The thought was natural because he was for the usual reasons heterosexually attracted to girls. His father once nearly caught him crossdressing, at age fifteen, with his mother’s clothes strewn around. Donald had been frantically removing them as his father’s quick steps approached the room. If he grasped what his son was doing he never mentioned it. Probably he thought it some usual heterosexual fantasy. Or nothing. His father was not watchful in such matters—a private man, willing to grant others their privacy.

    The 1950s were the age of crinolines for teenage girls, and he was jealous. Oddly, now I have a crinoline, for square dancing, Deirdre thought. As a teenager Donald broke into neighboring houses to wear the crinolines, and shoes that fit, and garter belts and all the equipment of a 1950s girl. He didn’t do it much, escaping out back doors as families came in the front, leaving everything undisturbed. He didn’t steal things. Maybe a cookie now and then.

    He was never caught. Despite heart-thumping expeditions in housebreaking and almost-caughts in his own home, no one suspected, and the crossdressing never became an issue. Thank goodness, thought Deirdre. In the 1950s they gave electroshock treatment for homosexuality, to say nothing of gender crossing. In later decades the psychiatrists persisted, and gender identity disorder, as homosexuality was in the dark ages before 1973, is an item in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, the DSM-IV. The disorder did not appear in the DSM until seven years after the psychiatrists had guiltily removed homosexuality.

    Daphne Scholinski, who wanted to be a boy, or at any rate not a regular girl, tells in The Last Time I Wore a Dress how the psychiatrists tried to force her. In 1981 they locked her up with delusional patients, the only female on a male ward. She was raped twice. The womanly experience of being raped did not change Scholinski’s mind about not being a

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