Dec 14, 2023
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute)
Crossing: A Transgender Memoir
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.