The following review of ine appeared in today's [Saturday's] Toronto Globe
and Mail.

Mag

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Crossing: A Memoir. 1999. McCloskey McCloskey. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. xvi + 266, illus. 0-226-55668-9

By Michael A. Gilbert


McCloskey McCloskey entered the world as Donald, a  bright and athletic
youth who grew to a broad shouldered six feet with his only oddity being a
stutter. He succeeded at school and graduated Harvard, going on to make a
major name for himself in academic economics as a conservative free market
theorist. He married, had two children, and led an apparently normal,
successful and happy upper middle class existence.

Only Donald's wife knew he was a life-long cross dresser, but as long as he
kept it to himself and was very discreet, it was nothing she couldn't
handle. He was completely closeted, and only in the summer of 1994, when the
last child had left home for university, did he begin a more active cross
dressing life. He used his university conference travel and the internet to
connect to transgender conventions where, for the first times, he could go
out in women's clothing, interact with people as his woman-self, and meet
and make friends who were like him. His wife had more difficulty with his
doing more: Most cross dressers' wives have a secret fear that their
husbands are really transsexual, and that one day it will explode and then
it will all be over.

Which is exactly what happened. Donald had an epiphany: I am a woman.
"That's what the cross dressing since age eleven had been about, closeted
over four decades, confined within marriage. And the open dressing in clubs
and at home during the eight months past, more and more. The womanhood was
there beneath the surface and yearned to take form." Thus was born
McCloskey. And this book is the telling of the arduous, painful,
frightening, and enlightening journey she began with that life shattering
insight.

Crossing is an insightful and honest book that describes the feelings and
conflicts McCloskey both endured and precipitated. In coming into herself,
McCloskey lost her wife and children who still remain deeply estranged. Her
sister, a psychologist at Harvard, played a major role in planting almost
insurmountable roadblocks in her way. Twice McCloskey's sister organized her
incarceration in mental institutions on grounds of alleged mania, and
consistently tried to prevent McCloskey's doctors from proceeding with
scheduled operations by threat of legal action.

McCloskey's story centres on three inter-related themes. The first is how
love is never enough to sustain marriage and family: For many transgendered
people changing gender means changing your role in your family's life in
such a fundamental way that there may be no room for you. It's a sadness
because the gender crosser (to use McCloskey's term,) is making a choice to
survive: A transsexual denied will die - always spiritually and often
physically. So the choice comes down to life or family, and from the
crosser's point of view there's no reason not to accept both.

The second theme concerns the politics of gender changing, and the myriad
obstacles placed in the way of gender crossers. Everything from changing
your name to receiving the surgeries that will make your life safe and
complete are governed and guarded by medical, bureaucratic and legal
gatekeepers. You can get a nose job, 10 face lifts, breast enhancements,
have your tummy tucked, eyes done, and even have your genitals made more
attractive, bigger or harder-but don't think you can change your "natural"
sex without a fight. The gender defenders will stop you.

The last major theme in Crossing is the sweetest, and is about friendship.
In particular, McCloskey discovered the kinds of friendships that women form
and the meaning that lay within them. Women's concern for each other, their
demonstrations of affection and thoughtfulness from remembering special days
to hospital visits, showed her clearly the differences between the
masculinity from which she was fleeing and the femininity which she knew was
right for her to embrace.

McCloskey shows great sympathy for her grieving family. After all, it took
her 40 years to arrive at the decision that her family needed to accept or
reject in a very short time. The urgency one feels upon reaching that kind
of decision leaves little room for patience or trial runs or wait-and-sees.
The successful lawyer who decides he is giving it all up to make toys out of
apples, the stay-at-home mum who moves out for a lesbian lover, or anyone
who is suddenly throwing over what they see as the shackles of a false life
must expect that others will, in fairness, need time.

This is a book that is well worth reading both to learn about one person's
struggle to be herself, and to watch the unveiling of the gender dichotomies
in all their subtlety from an insider's seat. Crossing may well incarnate
the nightmare of a cross dresser's spouse, but it also shows us how we
internalize and reify sex and gender distinctions that then turn around and
rule our lives. Freedom should be easier, and if it were, the nightmare
might well disappear.

Michael A. Gilbert is a Professor of Philosophy at York University and a
life-long cross dresser.





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