Been There, Done That

Sam Kalda for The Chronicle

My born name was the gloriously Celtic Donald. It means in Old Irish “world ruler,” and is out of favor now for its association with a duck. One wonders what The Donald’s impact will be.

In 1995, to keep the D and the Irish, while losing the masculinity, I chose Deirdre, which may have meant “wanderer,” and whose ravishingly romantic myth inspired two plays in the Celtic Revival, by Yeats and by Synge. That fact — and that university teachers in Britain are called “dons” — illuminates one of my favorite headlines. Written by some genius at the (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, it was affixed to a column I wrote saying that transitioning in academic life is far less traumatic than one might expect, and certainly easier than, say, in the Navy or on a football team: “It Helps to Be a Don if You’re Going to Be a Deirdre.”

Two decades later, that’s even more true, and academe should take a moment out of its busy day to congratulate itself for setting a good example for the rest of society, which has caught up to a surprising degree.

Even in 1995 I met someone who transitioned while working at an auto factory in Tennessee. She had little trouble, being very open about it, and having acquired through sheer force of will and much practice a suitably feminine voice. And in one way, 1995 was easier than 2015 — the lawyers had not gotten into the game.

When in Iowa City I went to the courthouse to change my name, the judge had seen such efforts before and had no over-lawyered regulations to undermine Iowa common sense. Likewise at the Iowa Motor Vehicle Division. Even the feds took things in stride. A few days before flying to Holland to teach for a year, I pleaded through tears on the telephone for a New Hampshire office to send me a passport with my new name, and the woman did, possibly skirting a regulation or two.

Early in 1997, when I came back, terrified, to teach again at the University of Iowa, the students weren’t rattled. They had grown up with Boy George and other rock musicians in eye makeup. The swing to toleration — or maybe it was indifference — had begun. “Oh, professor, you changed gender. Cool. Say, how about them Hawks!”

It turned out, actually, that well before 1995, the University of Iowa had adopted a highly liberal policy on gender crossers. It was ahead of the curve. Again, common sense ruled. My business-school dean, Gary Fethke, said, “Thank God. I thought you were going to confess to converting to socialism.” And, “This is great for affirmative action: Up one, down another.” And then he protected me from the few illiberal doubters.

Around that same time, I heard about how the president of a Southern university, a businessman, had reacted to an assistant’s rushing in to breathlessly report a “crisis": The chair of the chemistry department was going to become a woman. “You call that a ‘crisis’? When the legislature cuts our budget in half, that’s a ‘crisis.’ " Up one, down another.

When, in 1995, Terry Branstad, then as now the conservative governor of Iowa, was asked about the gender-crossing professor at the university, he replied, in substance, “Can she still teach? Is her CV the same?”

On most campuses today, transitioning is an even less dramatic scenario. It can verge on boring. People often do it younger — wisely, as adolescents. Understand, changing gender is a distinctly minority desire, experienced by one person out of hundreds, studies suggest. True, it’s more common than you think, and vastly more common than psychiatrists, who are mystified by it, had long assumed, the better to “cure” people.

They are still trying coercive cures up at Toronto’s Gender Identity Service in the Child, Youth, and Family Program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, on the assumption that a deep-seated, harmless human desire is a pathology. And the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival had its 40th and final event this past August without ever resolving its longtime tensions with the transgendered community. But gender change is no threat to feminism, womanhood, manhood, male-female ratios, sanity, or music, and most constituencies understand that perfectly well.

Acceptance has come mainly, as Lincoln said in 1858, through public opinion, not laws: “He” — or she, might I add — “who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” Oprah had a show on trans issues every 18 months or so (I was on one), asking the questions your girlfriend would ask. When among my relatives in Norway I was to reappear not as Donald but as Deirdre, an elderly female cousin of mine, who we thought would have a hard time, said, “Oh, I know about that. I saw it on television.” She urged me to try on her traditional costume, or bunad. The sweet, accurate, funny 2005 movie Transamerica, with an Oscar-nominated performance by Felicity Huffman, did more than any army of lawyers and psychiatrists to make the unusual normal. Caitlyn (another fine Celtic name) is icing on the cake.

Aside from some confused “Christians” — I am an unconfused one myself — who haven’t asked themselves how our Lord and Savior would actually respond to a Deirdre or a Caitlyn (hint: ask Papa Francesco), society has calmed down on this issue. Colleges have led the way, and they should continue to.

Carry on, deans.