Overview

We have read the stories of those who have crossed lines of race and class and culture. But few have written of crossing-completely and entirely-the gender line. Crossing is the story of Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald), once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s and 1960s privilege, and her dramatic and poignant journey to becoming a woman. McCloskey's account of her painstaking efforts to learn to be a woman unearth fundamental questions about gender and identity, and hatreds and anxieties, revealing surprising answers.

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9780226556697

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Reviews

A testimony to her struggles and courage, Crossing invites the reader to enter Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey's mind as she decides to become a woman after a lifetime as a man, husband, and father. A renowned professor of economics at the University of Iowa, Donald McCloskey had to fight tenaciously to realize his inner call to become a woman against such foes as his sister (who had him repeatedly committed against his will for psychiatric evaluations) and his marriage family (who, in the book's most heart-wrenching scenes, renounce their father and former husband). Mixed with this trauma, however, is McCloskey's blossoming sense of self and her discovery of a tree community of friends who love her for the woman she is, not the man she was. The cantankerous halls of academe provide the setting for many of the memoir's intriguing political debates: feminists argue that McCloskey is not a women and therefore should not join female faculty groups; conservative economists accept McCloskey's new self with libertarian nonchalance. Oddly enough, though, McCloskey's views of gender seem to become more strongly reified through her experiences. Men are combative; women nurturing. Men barter for gain; women give for comfort. One is left wondering how a woman brave enough to undergo the tribulations of losing a family and to face the possibility of professional contumely could have emerged from a man so self-parodically timid of his femininity that he could not bring himself to describe his car as dark blue, with cream trim. This Trojan horse of a memoir approaches under the guise of sexual equity yet closes with gender stereotypes still firmly entrenched. Crossing remains a tribute to the power of resisting society in order to realize personal fulfillment, but McCloskey would have done so with a more incisive voice if she did not seem to believe so strongly in the many gender stereotypes she attempts to undermine. (Kirkus Reviews)

Although transexuality is now no longer a forbidden subject, this is perhaps the most detailed detail of one man's transformation into a woman that has been published since James Morris's account, some 30 years ago. McCloskey was a cross-dresser as a child, but married and had children before deciding that he must actually become a woman. The reaction of McCloskey's wife and family was one which makes for a central tragedy - yet also reveals his naivety and inability to understand his relatives' emotions any more than they could understand his. The book goes into considerable detail, not so much of the surgery involved, as of the other changes - how to walk, dress and adjust to a whole new system of male/female relationships. Unfortunately McCloskey, a distinguished economist and historian, is a rather pretentious writer, and the dull thud of his platitudes takes the edge of what might have been a classic, but is still a book that will be of great interest, especially to those men and women who find themselves in a similar situation. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history, and professor emerita of English and of communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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