Chapter Nine

The mind-body problem lurks at the heart of every life. You face it when you swill a glass of vodka moments after vowing never to drink again, when you squelch the urge to watch gay porn on the Internet, when you yearn to quit your soul-crushing Wall Street job and abandon your thankless family and write novels in a cabin in the woods, when you scream at that vicious voice in your head to shut up, when you see a shrink, swallow an antidepressant or pray to quell your despair, when you fear death but don’t see the point of life, when you’re lost, with no idea who you really are.

Each identity crisis is a microcosm of humanity’s identity crisis. For millennia, we have dreamed of a world in which there are no more identity crises. We have discovered the Supreme Story, the final, true answer to the mind-body problem, the riddle of the human condition. We live together in harmony, with no more conflict, inner or outer, because we all know who we really are. We call this perfect world Paradise, Heaven, Shangri-La, Nirvana–or, if you prefer a less woo term, utopia.

Utopia, defined as a world in which we all share a common vision of who we are, is the most sublime idea ever invented–and the worst. We are never more dangerous than when we know, beyond all doubt, who we really are, and when we insist that others believe as we do. People gripped by this kind of certainty can become monsters who subjugate and slaughter others with self-righteous zeal. Faith in Supreme Stories has inspired crusades, inquisitions, slavery, genocide and countless wars, religious and secular. In the 20^th century, utopian dreams of fascists and communists culminated in Auschwitz and the gulag.

In our era “utopian” has become, with good reason, a derogatory term, meaning naively idealistic. Does that mean we should abandon the concept? Not at all. If you dislike the world as it is, you should have a vision of it as you would like it to be. That is your utopia. Imagine your utopia, your ideal world, then imagine how we can get there. All progress begins with this sort of wishful thinking. Ideally, your vision will be reasonable, not delusional. It will be based on what we have learned about ourselves from science and from history. Given our biology, and our past, is it reasonable to hope for a future without war? Poverty? Tyranny? Injustice? These, too, are mind-body questions.

Other experts in this book have dwelled on mind-body riddles like consciousness, the self, free will, mental illness, morality and the meaning of life. Economist Deirdre McCloskey, the heroine of this penultimate chapter, has focused on the knotty, practical question of how we should govern and sustain ourselves. What political and economic system gives us our best shot at communal happiness? McCloskey thinks she has found an answer. Or rather a story, one that works pretty well, that might help resolve our ancient, communal identity crisis.

Before I get to that big-picture story, I need to tell you McCloskey’s personal story. As I hope will become apparent, the two stories are not unrelated. In her memoir Crossing, published in 1999, McCloskey reveals that she was born in 1942 a boy, whose parents named him Donald. McCloskey refers to both Donald and Deirdre in the third person, as though her authorial persona is yet another self, which of course it is. In one of her earliest memories, Donald was five and his mother took him to an ice cream shop in Harvard Square. McCloskey writes:

After a hot fudge sundae and a watery Coke [Donald] had to go to the bathroom, so she took him into the ladies’ room. It was nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn’t going to leave her five-year-old son in a strange men’s room when he needed to wee-wee, not even in the safe world of 1947. What’s not ordinary was Donald’s sharp memory of it, the ladies in the tiny room speaking kindly to the boy as they straightened their seams and reapplied their lipstick.

Donald grew up tall and barrel-chested, with broad shoulders. He was captain of his high school football team, for which he played lineman. He was intellectually ambitious, not surprisingly, since his mother was a poet and his father a professor of government at Harvard. Donald earned a bachelor’s and doctorate in economics at Harvard, and in 1968 he landed a job at the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-market economics. In 1980 he moved to the University of Iowa, where he remained for 19 years and his crossing took place.

He made a name as a “tough-guy economist,” a defender of free markets and critic of his field’s methods who wrote with literary flair. At 22 McCloskey married Joanne, a nurse who eventually became a professor of nursing. They had a son in 1969 and daughter in 1975. Professionally and personally, McCloskey seemed to have all a man could want, but he had a secret. He liked wearing female clothing. He donned his mother’s panties when he was 11 and felt “a rush of sexual pleasure.” In his teens he snuck into neighbors’ homes and tried on crinolines, garter belts and other “equipment of a 1950s girl.”

McCloskey kept crossdressing after his marriage. When he confessed his secret to his wife, she wasn’t thrilled, but she accepted it, because she loved him, and he was a good husband, father and provider. He married Joanne and raised children with her because he truly loved her, not because he was trying to prove his masculinity. But he compensated for his sexual confusion by acting macho. He could be ruthless in seminars and at conferences.

Donald McCloskey, 1994

In the early 1990s his crossdressing intensified. He dressed in drag not only in private but also, increasingly, in public. He visited gay bars and attended gatherings of crossdressers, some of whom had gone to drastic lengths to prove their masculinity. One volunteered during the Vietnam War to be a “tunnel rat,” who carried out search and destroy missions in tunnels dug by the Vietcong.

Driving away from one of these meetings in 1995, McCloskey had an epiphany. “I am not a heterosexual crossdresser,” he thought. “I am a transsexual… I am a woman.” Many psychiatrists and other so-called experts insist that men who crossdress and fantasize about being women are homosexuals. They are wrong, according to McCloskey. Donald had rebuffed homosexual advances. “He wasn’t gay,” McCloskey writes. “He loved gals, not guys. He would rather have been gay than a gender crosser: it was less bother.”

When he told those close to him he planned to change gender, some, especially his wife, reacted with shock. Others were surprisingly supportive. Crossing has a scene in which McCloskey tells his dean about his plan (and passages like this might explain why McCloskey has irked feminists):

Gary sat stunned for a moment. They were both economists, conservative by academic standards, free-market enthusiasts. Then: 

“Thank god….I thought for a moment you were going to confess to converting to socialism!”

[Donald] laughed, relieved. The dean was going to act like a friend.

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