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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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