The Transition: When Donald McCloskey Became Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey 

Deirdre McCloskey is the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She is also adjunct professor of Philosophy and Classics there, and for five years was a visiting Professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctorates. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests include the origins of the modern world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, and the study of capitalism, among many others.

Forthcoming is a 20th anniversary edition of her book, now titled, "Crossing: A Transgender Memoir," with a new Afterword.

Target Liberty was provided a copy of the Afterword via a third party.

Here are some snippets:

It’s been a long time now since, at age 53, I became a woman. Actually, I’m an old woman more than twenty years on, who walks sometimes with a nice fold-up cane, and has had two hip-joint replacements, and lives in a loft in downtown Chicago with 8,000 books, delighting in her dogs, her birth family, her friends scattered from Chile to China, her Episcopal church across the street, her eating club near the Art Institute, and above all her teaching and writing as a professor...

But of course one can’t “really” change gender, can one? The “really” comes up when an angry conservative man or an angry essentialist feminist writes in a blog or an editorial or a comment page. The angry folk are correct, biologically speaking. That’s why their anger sounds to them like common sense. Every cell in my body shouts XY, XY, XY! I do wish they would shut up. Wretched little chromosomes. In some magical future I suppose we’ll be able to change XYs into XXs. But not now...

What questions, then, after Crossing?

Has your marriage-family come around?

No.

If you are one of the angry folk you will say, “Serves you right. You did a terrible, selfish thing to your wife. And your two grown children have righteously taken her side. Good for them.” A handful people have said such things to me, and a few more probably feel so. I guess my marriage family feels it still, two decades on. But I don’t know what is meant by “selfish” here. I guess the angry folk believe I changed for pleasure rather than happiness. Are those two the same? Worth thinking about, I reckon...

 My wife soon remarried, and lives with her new husband and still enjoys the square dancing she and I loved in the last five years of our happy if sometimes tempestuous thirty years of marriage. Bless ‘em. She’s not spoken to me. In that autumn of first realization in 1995I left to my wife—stupidly, husband-style—the task of telling my children, my grown son and my college-freshman daughter. Women do emotional work, Donald must have thought, if he thought at all, which I don’t recall he did. I should have gone myself in Donald drag to my
children. Not that gender change is a theorem, to be “explained” with the snap shut of a proof. It’s a story, and in October 1995 it was in the middle of Act 1. But my confused and self- absorbed neglect was an awful mistake.

My daughter still lives in the Midwest; she is married and has a child. I’ve told in Crossing about how, a year later, when she was still in college, I saw her that one time, very early in my transition, a weeping father in a dress begging for a hug. My friend Patty had advised against the meeting, wisely. Later I occasionally wrote to her, fruitlessly, and a long time afterwards helped her financially. Her lone letter in reply said “Thanks for the money. I still don’t want you in my life.”...

 My son lives not too far from me. He too won’t speak. None of my marriage-family, out to cousins, is permitted to speak to any of my birth family, out to cousins. Is my son enforcing the embargo with threats? I don’t know...

In 2000 I had moved from sweet Iowa City to a new job at the University of Illinois at Chicago, deciding to live downtown. I learned that a neighbor on the very same hallway was also a well-known libertarian, someone who wrote blazingly on human freedom. True, I noted, he and his wife were strangely distant towards me. Odd. I heard that every month the man hosted a soirée of free-market types. Oh, nice. Natural for me, I thought. But a note I left suggesting I might join got no response. Hmm. Oh, well. I’ve got plenty to do. 

Then one day I learned with a jolt from another libertarian economist that son came to the very same soirée, and knew that I lived thirty feet down the hallway. Good Lord. My Episcopal God was tapping me on the shoulder, hard. In the same hallway. Hope flared.

Huzzah!! With the strange neighbor’s help, surely, I thought, I can get back my marriage family, my children, my grandchildren. After all, the neighbor believes in freedom. True, my son had chosen not to knock on the door down the hall. But, well, hope. I left a wrapped copy of Crossing at the neighbor’s door.

Next morning I opened my own door to get the newspaper. The package, unopened, lay on the welcome mat, a message scribbled on it, “We don’t want to have anything to do with you.”...

Have you had romance?

No.

Is it about sex?

No.

Do you care?

No.

When I moved from Iowa City to Chicago in 2000 I decided to do some video dating. I was not sexually attracted to women any more. Try men, I thought. Maybe some Big Joop will come along. Truth to tell, my surgery had left me without physical sexual feelings, which was no loss. It’s a relief, actually, to stop the biological yearning. But it seemed appropriate and interesting, so I signed up with a respectable service downtown in Chicago, at which you made a video of yourself and the men chose you, like one of those hideous mixer dances we used to have at Harvard with Wellesley in the 1960s. I leveled with the consultant, but she saw nothing wrong with keeping The Secret, at least on the video itself.

So I had some dates. One was with a guy who drove me to dinner in his Cadillac and spent the whole evening talking, talking, about (1.) his dead wife and (2.) his business. He didn’t ask me anything. Not a word. Any woman here had that experience? He drove me back to my building, parked the car and waited for me to invite him up for, well, you know, we’re all adults here. But I’m an old fashioned girl, and said Thank you for a lovely evening. Not. And scurried out of his car.

I had another date, with a guy who played the ponies, and I fantasized about becoming the girlfriend of a race-track man. I could do that. Another was a life coach. As soon as we met for lunch across the street from my place I could tell he didn’t warm to me, though he was insightful and intelligent, as one might expect from his job. My problem was that I always told the men the next day, and they never came back.

The life coach replied to my email saying,“Oh, that’s why I didn’t find you attractive.” Well, thanks.

Finally I gave up. My girlfriends remind me that a tall, successful professional woman of a certain age will find it hard to get dates. Basically, impossible. Men are such dopes...

During the late 1990s shortly after my transition I had called up a male dean at Harvard and asked him if Harvard could change my degree to the women’s college, Radcliffe. “Oh, I don’t think we can do that.” “But the U. S. State Department,” I whined, “had no trouble changing my passport from male to female.” Pause. Then with a smile in his voice, “Yes. But Harvard is older than the U.S. Department of State.” Goodness. Some things never change...

Gender change I reckon is a freedom thing, one of a long line of liberations from 1776 on. My writings are increasingly focused on the slow decline since then of the privileged classes, who get irritated or worse by the actions of the non-privileged. In 1776 John Adams, who was no democrat,worried about opening the Pandora’s box of, as the historian Alan Taylor put it, “promising equal rights in an unequal society”: “There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice.” He was right. The box could not be closed.

I’ve claimed in long books from the University of Chicago Press (2006, 2010, 2018, cheap on Amazon) that a change in ideology came over northwestern Europe in the 1700s and made the modern world, entire. Thus in America and slowly worldwide, 1800 to the present, a new liberalism gradually liberated poor white men, American Patriots (not Loyalists), Catholics, slaves, women, Irish, Jews, hillbillies, subjects of fascist tyrannies, colonized peoples, former slaves (again), women (again), other immigrants, gays, handicapped, subjects of socialist tyrannies, Chicanos, native Americans, East Asians, and, amazingly, transgender. More and more people were allowed to have a go. The result was a fantastic flowering of creativity, from jazz to Steve Jobs, from the novel to Huffington.

Liberty made us rich and made us pretty good, too. People will say that slavery and Indian removal and worker exploitation also made us rich. No, they didn’t. You’re mistaken.

Feel guilty about the evils, but do not think they were contributions to riches. I am an American humane libertarian—what is called elsewhere a “liberal” in the style of Adam Smith or Mary Wollstonecraft or Henry David Thoreau. I join, and I hope you do, with the African-American poet Langston Hughes, singing in 1935: “O, let America be America again — / The land that never has been yet / —And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”

And every woman, dear.