>d. mccloskey actually undermines yoshie's claim that the social/discursive
>isn't real. if mccloskey feels more like a woman with the sex change op
>it is b/c she does not, despite her claims to feeling that she was born a
>woman in a man's body, feel completely like a woman without the features
>we've come to think of as signifying woman-ness.
McCloskey has some very conventional ideas of what women (and men) are - women are nurturing and girly, and men are the opposite.
There's an excerpt from McCloskey's book on the Reason magazine website <http://www.reason.com/9912/fe.dm.from.html>. She writes:
>Why, then, did Deirdre join the women's tribe? The question does not
>make sense, because it asks for a prudential answer when the matter
>is identity. Asking why a person changes gender is like asking why a
>person is a Midwesterner or thoughtful or great-souled: She just is.
>An identity is both made and not made. It is a romantic idea, which
>is strangely paired in the modern world with the antiromantic ideas
>of positivism in social science, that we all have an internal
>identity, fixed and ready made, and the only task is to express it.
>Will the real Deirdre please stand up? The "realness" is not right.
>We make ourselves, which is our freedom as human beings.
[...]
> Many men do not have penises, on account of war or accident or
>disease. This does not for most purposes make them less men. A man
>is a man because of his look and behavior, not because of what is
>secretly in his pants. And beyond the contents of pants, one's
>behavior and dress can be changed back. The hormones, too, have
>partly reversible effects. Deirdre would smile and say, "If I
>stopped female hormones and started testosterone, in five or six
>months I'd be acting like a jerk again!" The joke worked best if
>there were lots of other women present.
Doug