Crossing

Deirdre McCloskey, the former Donald, tells the story of her crossing the gender line in this memoir. An economist and historian, a husband and father, Donald McCloskey had cross-dressed for years without wanting more. But rather suddenly, at age 52, a sense that he was denying his real identity grew to the point where he knew he needed to become a woman. This book is the story of this realization and its consequences. McCloskey relates in detail the process of physically becoming a woman but also the emotional wake - personal and professional - left by her decision. Her mother accepts her; her children reject her. Some conservative economists prove to be gender libertarians, but some progressive feminists prove to be gender authoritarians. McCloskey's account of her crossing and her painstaking efforts to learn to "be a woman" enfold all the aspects of her journey into fundamental questions about gender and identity, hatreds and anxieties, that have surprising answers. This is the story of a golden boy of conservative economics, a child of 1950s and 1960s privilege, who became a woman. Of necessity she also became an artist performing, and then embodying, gender. She notes that the performance was enacted "often with no audience and seldom with a script."