From Donald to Deirdre

How a man became a woman--and what it says about identity.

Deirdre McCloskey from the December 1999 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Ousterhout laughed. "That's silly. I've done thousands of plastic surgeries. People like what we do. I've never heard of anyone waking up and being anything but thankful. What's her evidence?"

"She doesn't have any. But the psychiatrists will believe anything about this, they are so frightened."

"That's their normal state."

Dr. Ousterhout called the psychiatrist in Chicago who had examined Donald for a competency hearing instigated by his sister. His letter about Dee had been ambiguous in its last paragraph; for the operation to happen, Dee needed clarity. It sounded to Dee like more of the self-protection that seemed to be the main object of psychiatric practice. Ousterhout later told Dee roughly what he had said to the doctor on the phone to Chicago:

"Do you think Dee is competent to sign the consent form and be operated on?"

"Yes." He had said the same to Dee a couple of weeks earlier.

"That's wonderful! Could you write that down in the same words? You can send it to California by fax."

"Uh...My typist isn't here."

"You can write it on a sheet of paper and fax it. You know how to write, don't you?"

"Umm. I don't know how to operate the fax"

"I'll tell you how over the phone."

Nothing worked. The psychiatrist wouldn't do it, wouldn't put in writing what he had said twice and what he believed. He's afraid, thought Dee. He half believes my sister's theories about my waking up and regretting it all and going crazy. He doesn't want to be responsible. Psychiatrists don't. Cowards. Unlike surgeons, who must decide now, they can always waft. "Let's see how she looks after a month in a madhouse. A year."

But Ousterhout kept working, and told Dee to check into the Davies Medical Center as though the operation was going to happen at dawn the next day as scheduled. Ousterhout then arranged for still another psychiatrist to examine her that very evening in the hospital. Dee moaned to her friend Esther, who had canceled her appointments as pastor in Berkeley and driven across the bay to the Davies to comfort her during the evening of terror, "Another psychiatrist! I am so sick of being treated as crazy because I dislike my gender. Would I be thought crazy if I disliked a cleft palate, or a congenital heart defect?" The psychiatrist came in late, brought away in the dark from a dinner party, but he seemed sympathetic. Esther stayed outside in the hall, speaking soothingly to Dee before and after: "It will be all right. He seems sensible."

"Unlike most of them," said Dee. "I am so frightened."

About 11 p.m. the psychiatrist passed her. "You are competent to sign the consent forms to have the operations," he said. Dee slept.