CROSSING: A MEMOIR / DEIRDRE McCLOSKEY

“Crossing”—by Deirdre McCloskey, a renowned economist and historian—is a memoir telling the story of the writer as a transsexual. Deirdre, who was born Donald McCloskey, had started cross dressing as a hobby since he was young, and one day he discovered that not only did he want to dress like a woman, but he also longed to become one. In his early fifties, after 30 years of happy marriage life, the struggle to become a woman began, and since then, he had undergone countless obstacles. He eventually achieved his goal, though; he became a woman both physically and mentally. However, in the process, he had sacrificed many things, even his intimate relationship with his family.

By DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY

Written in 266 pages

Published in the University of Chicago, 1999

Apparently, Donald was a normal boy, but he inside wanted to be a girl. From age 11, he sometimes dressed in his mother’s clothes but never got caught. And in 1925 he got married to a woman he loved, which had nothing to do with his cross-dressing or gender crossing at all; it was simply love. Three months into marriage Donald confessed to his wife about the cross-dressing, which frightened her. He told her that he just cross-dressed for fun. In fact, his wife never liked the cross-dressing, but she kept ignoring it for three decades. They had two children, and he never allowed his children see him cross-dress.

As time went on, Donald started to learn more about gender-crossing through books and the internet, and his desire to be a woman was getting stronger and stronger. And when their children grew older, he cross-dressed more often, which his wife found unacceptable. She just could not handle it to see her husband in a woman’s dress. They argued, and no matter how hard he tried to explain to her, she could never take it. Therefore, he tried not cross-dressed when she was home.

Seeing himself as a woman, Donald could never give up his cross-dressing habit. He realized that he was not a heterosexual crossdresser; all this time, he was a transsexual. He also went out to meet and learned about other cross-dresser, causing him later to cross the line and want to become a real woman, to be more than just a dress-crosser. He hankered after having a female look, despite his 6-feet tall height and muscular body. Later he decided to go for electrolysis on his face. This added to his wife’s anxiety and anger; she claimed divorce if Donald kept doing this.

At one point when the information about him being was spread, he decided to tell as many people he knew as possible about him wanting to be a woman himself. Some people could accept it; some couldn’t. His sister, a liberal professor of psychology of Harvard University, thought he was manic and demanded him to go to see a psychiatrist. And once when Donald planned some plastic surgery, because of his sister, he was arrested for mental examination a few times. She wanted him to stay confined and get treatment in the hospital for a while. However, her attempts failed and Donald was diagnosed with no mental illness.

Later, he spent his life as a woman and changed his name as Deirdre. She also received hormones to improve his femininity. One of her biggest concerns was that she was sometimes read by other people as a man in a woman’s dress; she desired to be read as a woman. One reason why she was read as a man was her big voice. She had had a few surgeries to develop female voice but failed. Besides voice operations, she had undergone cosmetic surgeries such as a facelift and a nose job. Deirdre decided to have her sex changed, too.

To Deirdre, the biggest cost of her transformation from man to woman was not the cost of cosmetic surgery or voice surgery, but it, “not to be measured, was the sacrifice of wife and son and daughter”. As a matter of fact, only her mother seemed to accept his huge change. Her wife, son, daughter, and sister were very negative about Deirdre. They felt angry, betrayed and ashamed. Her only son even celebrated his marriage without telling her a word. Since Donald’s first arrest for mental treatment, his family and Deirdre had never lived together again. Deirdre felt so alone.

The difference for Deirdre now was that, owing to the hormone replacement therapy, she became more like woman. She got less impatient, more calm, and neater, and she started to see things differently, from a woman’s perspective. She said that she was at peace as never before, being able to live a life she had always wanted.

After having read the story of Donald becoming Deirdre, I gained broader perspectives and more understanding about problems concerning transsexuality. I learned the fact that gender crossing does not have to do with homosexuality, as well as many other facts about crossing. By the way, in my opinion, I think Deirdre is a very brave person in that she dared to come out the closet and confront the world with her difference and could endure that much pain.

However, I was quite—and I am still a bit—skeptical, especially when just starting reading the story, about her desire to become a woman. Her desire, for example to dress as a woman no matter how disapproving people were of her, appeared too extreme and sometimes unacceptable. For example, one part of the book that tells that Donald would get up at 3 a.m. to cross-dress kind of shocked me. What did he do that for? Was that absolutely mandatory? It just seemed too odd and sort of outrageous. Thus, I feel I can understand the negative reactions of her wife and children; they are, to me, not very unreasonable.

All in all, this story is very good in a way that it to some extent inspires readers to accept who they really are and determine to achieve what they really want; otherwise, they will never live a happy life. Nonetheless, what I find dissatisfied with this book is probably its ways of being written, which is a bit hard for me to understand. I really wish I could comprehend every detail better.