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Book Reviews
No More Secrets
Reviewed by Emily Alford
Randi Ettner, CONFESSIONS OF A GENDER DEFENDER: A PSYCHOLOGISTS
REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AMONG THE TRANSGENDERED (Evanston, Il.: Chicago
Spectrum Press, 1996, ISBN 1-886094-51-90
Deirdre N. McCloskey, THE VICES OF ECONOMISTS, THE VIRTUES OF THE
BOURGEOISIE (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 1997,
ISBN 90 5356 233 8 paperback, 90 5356 244 3 hard cover)
At first glance it might seem that these two books have little in
common, aside from both being slim, both being written by professionals for a
non-professional readership, and the copy I read of one having been loaned to
me by the author of the other. Randi Ettner is a psychologist in daily
practice with gender clients, often in collaboration with her physician
spouse. Deirdre McCloskey is an academic historian and economist at the
University of Iowa. Ettner was born a girl; McCloskey has become a woman.
Yet the fact that McCloskey chose to share Ettner with a
transgendered friend suggests a fit between the two books in her own
mind, and, in truth, there is a congruence. Ettner's subjects are people who
went through her own practice and, most important, they are people who are
not afraid of letting the world know that they are transgendered. In one
case there is a very light disguise, but the person in question openly
maintains a web site that can be reached through TG Forum. In all the
others, there are photographs and, one can presume, real identities. One of
the subjects is now Ettner's assistant in her practice.
Similarly, Deirdre McCloskey has made absolutely no secret of her
transition. She has been written up in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER
EDUCATION, HARPERS MAGAZINE, LINGUA FRANCA, WORTH MAGAZINE and her own
local paper in Iowa City. She made the change after being chosen
president of the Economic History Association, as Donald. When Deirdre
delivered her presidential address, she received a standing ovation from her
colleagues. It has not all been easy for her; at a previous professional
meeting, police came in to take her away on the basis of assertions by
another historian and her own sister that she had become mentally imbalanced.
Like many transsexuals, she has lost some people who were close to her, but
has also retained others.
The point of reviewing the two books together is precisely the
openness of the people involved, Ettner's subjects and McCloskey alike. On
that count, both books represent a long step away from the idea that a
transgendered person was more or less obliged to abandon her (or his)
previous identity and start absolutely afresh. On the contrary, both of
these books are about affirmation, of one's previous existence, of one's
choice, and of what one has made of oneself. In one sense there is not much
that is absolutely new in this point; after all, it is just what Christine
Jorgensen did, and it is a point that a number of gender community activists
like Kate Bornstein insist upon making. But it is only ten years since Anne
Bolin described the change of name, job, dwelling, and past as one of the
normal "transsexual rites of passage" in IN SEARCH OF EVE [1988]).
There is another way in which the two books affirm transgender's
coming of age. In one of the most sensitive early explorations of the
subject sociologists Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna describe how their
subjects moved from the self-absorption of a second adolescence to
functioning in the world as what they simply are, which is as good a sign of
maturity as any (GENDER [1978]). Ettner's people and McCloskey have made
that leap fast. Like Bornstein's GENDER OUTLAW, McCloskey's book is a very
nice twist on the "normal" transgendered pattern of telling one's own story.
Instead, she used her story as a plaftorm for commenting on her life's
vocation.
In fact, McCloskey has finished a manuscript about her transition, but in
VICES/VIRTUES it forms the background to what she has to say. Her major
theme is an intense criticism of the state of academic economics, and she
brings off a fairly stunning synthesis. She belongs very firmly to the
Chicaco free-market school, which in conventional terms might put her on the
side which holds that the bottom line rules, to the exclusion of all other
values. But she has three main bugaboos, which she identifies with
male-defined economic analysis, as practiced by free-marketeers, Keynsians,
and Marxists alike. She also identifies these with the male gender of most
practicioners.
One is statistical analysis for its own sake, in which the
question of "how big is big" never really gets asked, despite all the
technical apparatus that scholars deploy. The second is blackboard
economics in place of serious encounters with data. The third is social
engineering. She uses her critique of them to plea for an introduction of
human, social, and moral values into economic analysis and economic activity.
Insistently, she does so from the perspective that her transgender
experience has given her. She adopts the persona of Aunt Deirdre patiently
observing her immature nephews (read colleagues) playing at their sandbox
games.
VICES/VIRTUES is not as easy a read as Ettner's book. The general
readership that I noted is perhaps at the level of general academics,
rather than mass readership. In places it becomes fairly technical,
although McCloskey deploys her well-known skills as polemicist and
teacher to make it accessible. From the point of view of a fellow
transgendered academic, what McCloskey achieves is an affirmation both of the
desire to do a good job on ones subject and of the truth that one always
writes oneself. From the perspective of the community of transgendered
people, both of these books add weight to the growing perception that we are
not wierd, or stigmatized, but rather, simply, ourselves in a world that has
many possible ways to be human.
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