Women’s History Month: Deirdre McCloskey
In honor of Women’s History Month 2011, I’ve selected one woman to profile every day from March 1st - March 31st, 2011.
Deirdre McCloskey: Austrian economist and transgender activist
The tougher straight bars are good places to get killed. Gay bars also have the undercurrent of lethal violence that is the male condition. The lesbians are more civilized and don’t mind having crossdressers around, regarding them as harmless. The first place was quiet, though enlivened by the crossdressers (ten of them, others from the Tri Ess meeting, crowded along a set of bar tables like a typing pool out for an after-work drink) and then by an ineffectual fistfight between two lesbians in a love triangle. Jane danced the way the kids do, by himself, different from the lovely paired regularity of square dancing. A butch dyke paired with Jane for a while on the dance floor, and Jane gave himself over to ecstasy. “Just dance!” the dyke said, “Don’t come on to me.” When he had to go to the bathroom Jane had the others take a picture of Suzy and him outside the “first ladies’ room.” Pictures are big among crossdressers. How many crossdressers does it take to go the ladies’ room? One hundred: one to go and ninety-nine to take pictures.
They went to a much hotter lesbian bar called Temptations on Grand Avenue in the Chicago suburbs. It was in a strip mall next to a tire store, and when the stars came out it glittered. Robin had been to the place before, as everyone else had too. They regarded Jane as bold to go with the girls barhopping on her first night out. What made Jane run? Square dancer, middle-aged college professor, father of two, thirty years married, pillar of the community shook to the beat of the drum with a hundred others of assorted genders and sexual preferences. The cool dance the kids were performing turned out to be steps that Donald had learned the year before at a square dance in Iowa City. The company was diverting, and each set was long.
Robin introduced Jane to a lesbian sitting at a little table crowded with others. She looked like a suburban woman. Kids. Van. She was in her forties, dressed butch but not too. Acceptable in the mall. Though women can get away with more.
“I was married and have grown children,” she told Jane. “I only figured this out a few years ago.”
“How have they adjusted? I mean your family?” Jane was always interviewing people, gathering data like some sort of anthropologist, an anthropologist who could go native.
“Poorly.” It was not unusual news. — Excerpt from Crossing: A Memoir
Seriously, how many transgendered female Austrian economists do you know of? Right, that’s what I thought. “She describes herself as a postmodern free-market quantitative rhetorical Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian woman who was once a man. Such positions are not adopted merely to shock the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, she believes they are the only reasonable positions.”
If you’ve been reading my Women’s History Month series, then I’m sure you know the above sentence is reason enough for her to be featured.
Aside from her work as an economist, she’s also an outspoken LGBT activist who was embroiled in controversy over her criticisms re: The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. (More details on this in the links below.)
Links: Wikipedia page
Main website
Official bio
Mercatus profile
McCloskey Critique (Wikipedia page)
The Man Who Would be Queen (Wikipedia page)
Blanchard’s transsexualism etiology (Wikipedia page)
Queer Science: A data-bending psychologist confirms what he already knew about gays and transsexuals. (review of the book by McCloskey)
Can Professors Say the Truth? (critical of McCloskey, but has enough background info to get you up to speed)
Sex and Transsexuals: Are all male-to-female sex changes performed to correct a biological accident? A new book points to other reasons, and some transgendered people are furious at the implications.
Deirdre McCloskey puts J. Michael Bailey on notice: One more “remote diagnosis” of the “mental illness” of autogynephilia without ever even having met her, and she will sue him for libel
Books:
The Bourgeois Revaluation (rough draft that allows for comments/criticism)
Full book list, includes future books
