Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey born Donald N. McCloskey; September 11, 1942 in Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, together with Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago UIC. She is also adjunct professor of Philosophy together with Classics there, and for five years was a visiting Professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctorates. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her develope examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests add the origins of the contemporary world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, and the explore of capitalism, among many others.

Personal life

McCloskey is the eldest child of Robert McCloskey, a professor of government at Harvard University, and Helen McCloskey  Stueland, a poet. McCloskey was born Donald McCloskey and lived as a man until the age of 53. Married for thirty years, and the parent of two children, she presentation the decision to transition from male to female in 1995, writing about her experience in a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crossing: A Memoir 1999, University of Chicago Press. it is for an account of her growing recognition of her female identity, and her transition—both surgical and social—into a woman including her reluctant divorce from her wife. The book describes how in her teenage years, McCloskey would commit gender burglaries of neighbors' homes, dressing up in the crinoline dresses favored by young women of that era, in addition to "shoes, garter belts and all the equipment of a 1950s girl". The memoir then goes on to describe her new life, coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. sex-reassignment surgery, in her career as a female academic economist and scholar of femininity.

McCloskey has advocated on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in the LGBT community. She was a vocal critic of J. Michael Bailey's 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which popularized the conviction of autogynephilia as a motivation for sex reassignment, by the sexologist Ray Blanchard.

McCloskey has listed herself as a "literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian Classical Liberal."

In 2008, McCloskey was awarded an honorary doctorate by NUI Galway.