Why this gender-crossing economist prefers motherly libertarianism to government paternalism

Economist Deirdre McCloskey, a motherly libertarian, wants to be taxed to provide a minimum income (not a minimum wage), which would treat adults like adults. Photo by JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty Images.

A Note from Paul Solman: Deirdre McCloskey is a freshwater economist with a twist. A career that began on the banks of Lake Michigan at that bastion of free market economics, the University of Chicago as opposed to those saltwater havens of bi-coastal Keynesianism, Harvard, MIT and Berkeley continued at the University of Iowa, where McCloskey became one of the countrys foremost economic historians and a prolific and esteemed writer on the rhetoric of economics. The byline for all this work was not Deirdre McCloskey, however, but Donald.

In 1995, at age 53, with a wife and two grown children, all of whom he loved, Don changed his gender identification and name. She says now that leaving Chicago for Iowa may have been impulsive, but she has never doubted the wisdom of acting on a lifelong drive. Some family and friends were freaked out. But as Deirdre (Dee) tells it in her 1999 memoir, Crossing, the response of the first administrator she came out to, the dean of Iowas business school, Gary Fethke, was not untypical of the reaction within economics.

One day, as McCloskey had begun the process of what she calls gender-crossing, Fethke noticed McCloskeys ear studs, small, but both ears. McCloskey and Fethke had known each other since 1980 and were on man-to-man terms. Fethke thought he knew that McCloskey was straight, even macho. I met McCloskey earlier that same year and thought the same.

Fethke smiled and said jocularly, Whats this, Don? The earrings! Have you turned gay?

You want to know, Gary?

Uhyes. Come into my office. He shut the door.

Dee spoke with his ironic, tough-guy demeanor, the last defenses of masculinity. He admitted to being terrified at how the university community might react.

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!

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Why this gender-crossing economist prefers motherly libertarianism to government paternalism