Transexual Economist Argues That Gender Determines Approach to Field By LOUIS UCHITELLE
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Michael Foley, third-generation owner of Foley Fish Co., as Boston Irish as the Kennedys and as charming, greeted Deirdre McCloskey with a kiss on the cheek and a gallantry. "You look better than the last time I saw you," he said. And Deirdre melted, hugging him in gratitude and relief.
They had played high school football together, these two 6-footers, and had gone on to Harvard, class of '64. They had seen each other at the 25th reunion in 1989. Deirdre -- then Donald, still a man -- took his wife and two children to those festivities. Now, at the 35th reunion, she arrived at the opening reception alone, her blond hair pinned up with a silver clasp, her outfit a black dress, black shawl, silver bracelets and pumps -- and she ran almost immediately into her old pal Mike Foley, who put her at ease.
"I would prefer that there was a pill I could give to the world, and they would forget I had ever been a man," Ms. McCloskey said later. "But there isn't a pill, and since I want to continue in my profession, I must change people's minds."
Ms. McCloskey, who teaches at the University of Iowa and at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is gradually becoming one of the most famous American transsexuals. That is partly because of her prominence as an economist and historian, but also because of her transition strategy. She has described her experience in many articles and talks, and in September the University of Chicago Press will publish "Crossing: A Memoir," a detailed account of her journey. Her hope is that through openness, frankness and constant repetition of her story, her reincarnation as a woman will be accepted as natural and healthy.
But if Ms. McCloskey has switched sexes successfully, she is still in the early stages of a second significant transition. After years of surgery, self-discipline, a face-lift and hormones to alter her appearance, her voice, her mannerisms, her emotions and her sex organs, she is trying, at age 56, to make economists aware of just how much gender affects their thinking. Men dominate the profession, occupying most of the tenured professorships, but Ms. McCloskey argues that women by temperament and cultural conditioning make better economists. They tend to perceive the economy differently from men, she says, and more realistically.
"There is this romantic idea among men that they are free agents in the marketplace, without any ties except to their individual selves," Ms. McCloskey said. "While men think of themselves in metaphors of competition, there is an assumption among women that we are together, helping each other survive." She added: "I was an aggressive, assertive male, and I felt comfortable. Now I am ashamed because that was so very macho."
Men, in this scheme, see an autonomous individual as the chief economic actor, each individual enhancing the marketplace by seeking his own pleasure or profit. Women, in contrast, are loving, flexible, graceful and caring, particularly for their children and for others within their families and social circles. They are more willing to act as a family unit or social group, subordinating their personal desires to the needs of the group.
Although Ms. McCloskey's unusual switch might make her seem the perfect case study to test whether gender affects thinking, her views raise eyebrows among some sister economists who resist any attempt to make their discipline a matter of gender. Indeed, the notion that men and women economists -- or men and women scientists, historians or architects, for that matter -- think differently has provoked heated debate.
Many female economists agree that differences exist but insist they are learned differences, imposed by a culture and a market economy that functions mostly in the male image, assigning different roles to the sexes and treating women less well than men. Given the opportunity, "men can do anything that women can do intellectually and emotionally, and vice versa," said Barbara Bergman, an economist at American University.
Ms. Bergman is a leader of a small group of feminist economists (including men as well as women) who concern themselves with the issues that put women at a disadvantage in the marketplace. Child care is one. So are unequal pay, breast-feeding while holding a job, caring for old parents and doing most of the housework. Deirdre McCloskey is trying to join herself to this group.
"Feminine gestures are not God's own creation," Ms. McCloskey acknowledges in her book. "This of course I know. The social construction of gender is, after all, something a gender-crosser comes to know with unusual vividness. She does it for a living."
But having gone through the very difficult process of switching sexes, Ms. McCloskey, who cross-dressed for decades before she finally declared herself a woman, has a lot invested in the joys of her new womanhood. Whatever their origin, she says, feminine feelings and behavior rarely show up in men and certainly not in male-dominated mainstream economics, which she likens to "boys playing games in a sandbox."
Clearly, she enjoyed her new womanhood at the reunion. Harvard in 1964 was all male, but Radcliffe women from that year also participated, and at many events Ms. McCloskey seemed to be just another aging, successful "Cliffie," in her case a good natured one, patient and sympathetic as a listener and quick to tell her story to puzzled classmates who, upon meeting her, vaguely remembered a male McCloskey in Adams House.
She had given some advance notice. "Are you sitting down?" she wrote in the reunion book, a collection of thumbnail updates, mailed to the alumni before their gathering. "I've become a woman. No joke. I've always wanted to, and finally in 1995 did it. Now 'becoming a woman' is in some senses impossible. I still have XY genes and, what is more important, a man's life up to age 53. But some things can be done, with the result a very happy and very tall woman."
By the night of the square dance, under a huge tent in Radcliffe Yard, she felt quite at home as a woman, even having a tete-a-tete with a Radcliffe alumna whom Donald McCloskey had dated when they were college freshmen. And after the paper-plate dinner, Deirdre danced for two hours. She coaxed a shy man onto the floor as her partner, a librarian, who had not, as a Harvard student, known Donald McCloskey, or any Radcliffe girls for that matter.
"I felt, as I was being swung, like I was very much in the women's role," she said. "I felt pretty and feminine. That is a wonderful feeling, a tremendous feeling. Even saying to the men, 'Come on now, dance,' that sort of talk, that is a woman's activity, a mother's and a grandmother's. Women feel a responsibility for making social arrangements and men take them for granted."
Her memoir is laced with passages that view men and women as being locked into gender roles, the women's role being by far the more satisfying and desirable.
>From women on Iowa's faculty, for example, she learned this rule: "When you
run into somebody, never rush by self-absorbed, as Donald did; always stop
and chat." Or take this passage: "When the average grown-up woman leaves the
table, she looks for stray cups to be washed, part of the cleaning, loving,
caring that women are always doing half unconsciously."
Or this observation about herself: "Along with millions of other women in the world, she was sad watching the funeral of Princess Diana, in the coffee room of a motel in Dallas before electrolysis."
Or these nuances: "Women put their hands to their chests when speaking of themselves. Men barge through. Women look frequently at nonspeaking participants in a conversation. Men don't look at each other when talking."
Some female economists, citing such comments, call her a former man trying to teach women how to be women. "Deirdre is reprogramming herself as a woman, and that inevitably leads to a search for stereotypes," said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and friend, acknowledging the criticism. Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, offers a different slant. If Ms. McCloskey's gender assignments seem exaggerated, Ms. Folbre said, they reflect her struggle to be "read" as a woman just when gender roles are becoming more androgynous.
No one has given Deirdre McCloskey more support through her gender-crossing than her 75-year-old mother, Helen McCloskey. She is the widow of a prominent Harvard professor, an expert on constitutional law who died of a heart attack in 1969, just as their eldest son, Donald, completed his Ph.D in economics at Harvard and joined the University of Chicago faculty.
Helen McCloskey admired her husband's achievements, which she associated with maleness, and she sees in Deirdre the same "steely male intellectual quality" that her husband had, and Donald, too. Men, she argues, are the builders, the creators. She may be one herself. Left with an inadequate inheritance, Mrs. McCloskey, a housewife in marriage, has supported herself in widowhood by buying, fixing up and reselling 15 homes, living in them during the remodeling. Her latest acquisition, a two-bedroom house, is in Centreville on Cape Cod, and Deirdre visited on her way to the Harvard reunion. The subject of the steely male mind came up at breakfast.
"This is my first born, my wonderful, wonderful child who is so bright," she said. "One reason I can accept what she has done is that I do not see dramatic changes in her intellectual qualities acquired over a lifetime."
The daughter is uncomfortable. "Having done the steely bit," Deirdre McCloskey said, "I know where its cracks are, where its foolishnesses lie." And the mother replied: "Those are conclusions you could have come to as a man. It is a maturing process. I think that had you remained a man, you would have matured. You would have softened."
Deirdre McCloskey's thinking has indeed evolved. But it started long before she went full time as Deirdre in November 1995. Donald gave up tenure at Chicago and moved to Iowa in 1980 out of frustration that economic research at Chicago had become too focused on applied math and economic models that could prove any thesis, depending on the assumptions fed into the formulaic models.
Fame came to Donald McCloskey for "The Rhetoric of Economics," published in 1986, in which he argued that economics, for all its pretensions as a scientific discipline, is ultimately a conversation in which rhetoric -- language -- carries the argument. He also made a name for himself as a historian of the British economy by describing the measurable, "quantitative impact" of various forces and developments -- a far cry from the abstract, mathematical modeling prevalent today. Women are better at quantitative research than men, Ms. McCloskey says.
But few if any female economists share the policy solution that Ms. McCloskey is now trying to give to feminist economics. While the women favor a government role to help make women more equal to men in the job market -- child care subsidies, for example -- Deirdre advocates a libertarian approach, drawing on beliefs that Donald first embraced as a young economist. Government is likely to make matters worse, Ms. McCloskey says. Better to rely on the virtues that shaped economic behavior in Adam Smith's day. Instead of just "prudence," which is another way of saying self-interest or profit -- the virtue she says men like so much -- bring back four other woman-friendly virtues as motivating forces: love, courage, temperance, justice. She is writing a book on the subject.
Ms. Goldin, the Harvard economist and friend, is skeptical. Feminist economics has not produced concrete proposals, she says, and re-emphasizing the virtues is no exception. But Deirdre McCloskey persists. "You discover that no matter how you come at it mathematically, an economy takes place in a moral universe," she said. "That has been a big problem for economists to understand; they are so tied to prudence they don't regard other virtues as having anything to do with economics."