A remarkable explorer in the passage from one sex to another (original) (raw)
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- March 17, 1974
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It is not usually given to a man that after nearly a quarter of a century of marriage he should end up as sister‐in‐law to his own wife and aunt to his own children. Male and female created He them, says the book of Genesis; and for most of us, married or unmarried, hetero or homosexual, that has always been more or less that.
But next month there will be published on both sides of the Atlantic an autobiography that describes just such a remarkable transformation. Probably the fullest personal account so far of what it is like to cross the most basic of creation's barriers, it is the first book of a British woman writer called Jan Morris. Aptly titled “Conundrum,” it is also the 18th book of an author known to the literary world until now as James Morris. For at the age of 47, James Humphry Morris, one of Britain's best‐known writers of nonfiction, author of “Venice,” “The Hashemite Kings,” “Pax Britannice” and “Heaven's Command,” winner of Britain's Heinemann Award for Literature and America's George Polk Memorial Award for Journalism, has undergone a change of sex. Now, while living as unofficial “sister‐in‐law” in what she calls “passionate friendship” with the woman that James married 25 years ago, and as “aunt” to his four children, Jan has decided to tell the
Like a lot of people in Britain's world of journalism and books, I had known and liked James Morris for many years. We had been friends and reporters together on The Times of London and The Manchester Guardian. More than once I had followed professionally in his footsteps, taking over jobs he had just abandoned, writing about places he had already covered. He knew my wife; I knew his, and off and on I had seen his children grow from the nursery to near‐manhood. And then one day, some years ago, in our advancing middle age, there we were in the street outside my home in London. My wife had just kissed him good‐by. at the door, and I was directing him to the best shortcut out of town, when he stopped me, rather diffidently, and said: “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Well, I think you ought to know that I'm going to‐be a woman.”
I don't honestly remember what I answered. Nothing, I think, for a second or two and, then, “Good God!” or some such thing. After all, as more than one person who thought he knew James Morris was to remark in the next few years, “You read about this sort of thing in the newspapers sometimes, but it simply doesn't happen to your friends!” Yet as I gazed at James, with innocent astonishment, it was suddenly very clear that was indeed happening to him.
“It won't make any difference to you, will it?” he asked anxiously; and as I shook my head, still dumbstruck, his eyes filled with tears. All at once the vaguely disturbing oddities of appearance and behavior that had been accumulating for some time around the familiar and formerly manly figure of James Morris fell into a new and coherent shape. There was the wonderfully youthful bloom and smoothness of his skin—previously so puzzling in a man well past 40—and the strangely high‐pitched voice on the telephone; there was the growing sense of elfin shyness, as of one who belonged to some other, secret world, and, most conclusively
David Holden is a correspondent for The Sunday Times of London. as James briefly and deliberately opened the jacket buttoned high over his chest, there was the reason lie had developed of late a curious habit of.hugging himself in round‐shouldered intimacy: two budding breasts that showed beneath his shirt. A moment before he had still been James Morris to me, in spite of these hints of, femininity. Now he’ seemed Hermaphroditus incarnate, and I wondered why on earth I hadn't guessed his secret all along.
Well, now it is a secret no longer. Eighteen months ago, in a surgeon's clinic in Casablanca, the transmutation was completed, the last irrevocable physical step was taken, and Hermaphroditus emerged in dress, in law, in life and as near as possible in physiological fact as well, middle‐aged woman. Except for his books and his memory, James Morris is dead and it is long live Jan—latest and by any odds one of the most remarkable recruits to that tiny band of transsexuals who have negotiated successfully’ the ultimate exploration of the human condition, in the passage from one sex to the other.
On the face of things, a less likely candidate for a sex change than James Morris would have been hard to imagine. His whole career and reputation had created an aura of glamorous and successful masculinity. As a young man, after leaving his English boys' boarding school at the age, of 17 toward the end of World War II, he had served nearly five years as an officer in one of Britain's best cavalry regiments, the 9th Queen's Lancers. At 26, as an almost unknown journalist, he had climbed three‐quarters of the way up the highest mountain in the world to report the first conquest of Everest, by Edmund Hillary and Norkay Tensing. In his thirties, he was one of Britain's most distinguished foreign correspondents, reporting wars and revolutions from a score of countries; he described Eiehmann in the dock in Israel and Francis Gary Powers on trial in Moscow. At 40 he was an established author who had embarked on what he called “the literary centerpiece” of his life —a three‐volume survey of the rise and fall of the British Empire that some readers (albeit, perhaps, with more enthusiasm than accuracy) even likened
Physically, and emotionally too, he seemed secure for many years in the male role. He was 5 feet 9 inches tall, slightly built but lithe. His face was bony, his nose was strong and prominent and his eyes twinkled often with masculine mischief and exhilaration. His life‐style had a touch of male flamboyance. When he was married in Cairo, at the age of 22, he was just out of the army and worked at an ill‐paying’ job as temporary reporter for the local Arab News Agency. But he took the royal suite in the Semiramis Hotel for his wedding night—and moved out again the next day because he couldn't afford to stay any longer. A few years later, back in Cairo as a rising star of The Times, he characteristically preferred to live on an old Nile houseboat rather than in some anonymous apartment block. Later still—after handing his houseboat and his job to me—he bought himself an old Rolls‐Royce and moved his growing family in stately progress across half the southern counties of England, and into France, Italy and Spain, renting houses along the way that always seemed to possess some vaguely superior quality of age or distinction, and sometimes discomfort. Neither in life nor work did he shirk risks or plead caution, and in his writing he always responded sympathetically to the most
Soldiers and adventurers brought out the best in him, and in his own way he seemed to belong to their brotherhood, displaying the discipline of the one and the carefree spirit of the other. It is easy to say now that this persona may all have been romantic, overcompensating pose, but nobody gave it a thought at the time, and if they had, it would have been a great deal easier to ascribe it simply to the fact that James was Anglo‐Welsh.
Combining the supposed practicality of the English with the alleged romanticism of the Welsh, he could claim an inborn right to be what he appeared to be—and in any case and beyond any peradventure in the eyes of the world, what he appeared to be was indubitably a man.
Yet, as Jan Morris now confesses, James Morris wanted to be a woman all his life. “Please, God, make me a girl,” he prayed night after night in his childhood, and year after year, as he grew older, so did the compulsion grow. “Of course, it's irrational,” she says now, “but that's what made itresistible. In the end I couldn't go on as a man any longer because I really believed I was a woman, anyway—so I was living a lie, wasn't I?”
For many years it was a lie that he shared only with his wife, Elizabeth, whom he told even before they were married. No doubt, like most wives, she thought she might change her husband, but in the end, they agree now, she came to terms with his obsession before he did and did more than anyone to help him through the dark passages that led to his joining her own sex. From everyone else, including their children, the secret remained hidden behind the doors of an apparently happy marriage and worldly success.
That success was instant and dazzling. Returning to England from his job at the Arab News Agency, Morris went to Oxford for two years as one of the last of the postwar student veterans. An introduction from Oxford to The Times followed, and within another two years he had won himself international renown as The Man Who Scooped The World On Everest. The. story of that enterprise is now a Fleet Street legend, and it has grown with the years so that, for all I know, there may be cub reporters now who believe Morris actually got to the top with Hillary and Tensing. In fact, he only got to around 22,000 feet, but as he had never climbed a mountain before in his life, that was remarkable enough —especially as the expedition, at first, did not want him
With a serendipity that was to attend many of his best exploits, Morris got the job only because he happened, to be available. Others on The Times with more experience had been assigned elsewhere, and John—now Lord—Hunt, who led the expeditiOn, recalls now that he’ thought Morris a most unsuitable choice. “Utterly inexperienced and physically substandard. I told The Times I thought they should find someone else.” But once Morris was on the mountain he astonished the climbers with what Hunt calls his “mental, moral and physical stamina” and ‐ delighted his employers and readers throughout the world with the beauty, lucidity and regularity of his dispatches. In the end, his tenacity and the shrewd organization of his private communications system got the great and glorious news of the expedition's success down the mountain and into London just in time to give The Times a world scoop on the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation—June 2nd, 1953.
In those days, when Britain was just emerging from the gloom of postwar austerity and the new reign was being hailed as the dawn of a Second Elizabethan Age, this was a journalistic triumph beyond most reporters’ dreams, and James once told me years afterwards that his role in the great adventure was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him.
Certainly it marked him for life, for besides establishing him as a journalist of exceptional talent it gave him a romantic public image of sterling young manhood’ that could never be forgotten. The lean, stubble‐chinned chronicler and companion of the Everest climbers, wiry of body and confident of mind,.became, so to speak his life‐long Doppelganger. It was still there to haunt him, 20 years later, as the first thing that most people thought of and exclaimed over when they heard that James Morris had become a
But meanwhile Everest helped his career to blossom. A Commonwealth Fellowship took him to America for a year, and his travels there produced his first book, “Coast To Coast,” in 1956. It was hardly a best seller, but reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic were ecstatic. “This is one of the very best travel books, one of the very best impressions of contemporary America I have ever read,” wrote the late Denis Brogan in The Saturday Review. “It well become a classic.”
On his return from America, The Times sent him to the Middle East. That assignment eventually caused Morris to make his first break from journalism — and his first retreat into a more private world—when the paper, pursuing the rigid policy it then imposed on all its correspondents, refused him permission to turn his Arab experiences ihto another book. The Times had already taken the same line over Everest. His book on that adventure, “Coronation Everest,” although ‘Written soon after the event, could not be published until after he had left the paper, and he had only been allowed to publish “Coast To Coast” because he had gone to America independently of The
Now there were other books bubbling inside him, and when he had got one down on paper, to be called “Sultan In Oman,” and started another, “Islam Inflamed,” he sent his resignation to The Times and left full‐time journalism forever.
He was not yet quite 30, and already there were two children to support. To many of his colleagues it seemed a risky decision. But by now, whatever the turmoil of his inner emotions, he seemed totally confident of his powers. Editors and publishers were eager for his work and books and articles flowed forth steadily.
His assignments took him all over the world, but it was Venice that finally gave him security and, perhaps, sealed his fate.
He spent a year there with his. family in the late nineteen‐fifties, writing for The Guardian and preparing a book that, when it appeared in 1960, was greeted immediately as something more than high‐class journalism. The critical acclaim for “Venice” confirmed Morris in that peculiar niche of British letters already occupied by, among others, his own literary hero, the 19th‐century British travel writer, Alex
ander Kinglake, — whose “Eothen” is described in the “Cambridge History of English Literature” as “perhaps the best book of travel in the English language.”
Yet “Venice” also showed him as something more—a connoisseur of the exotic and a gifted amateur of historical narrative who could weave both into an imaginative panorama that was at once retrospective and contemporary. The book won the Heinemann Literature Award and quickly established itself as a steady seller that would probably be reprinted for years to come. (A new edition is appearing this spring with emendations and additions by Jan to the work of James).
More important for his private life, however, the success of “Venice” probably gave Morris the last nudge he needed not only to make the final break from newspaper work but also to take the first step into the unknown territory of womanhood that he wanted now more than ever to enter. He had already, in Venice, made his first abortive experiment with hormone pills, and his eldest son, Mark —then only eight years old—had, as he now recalls, sensed for the first time that his father was “not quite like other people's fathers.” There were two other children, and there would —enough to prove his sexual virility, if nothing else. He.no longer needed The Guardian financially any more, and he had begun to feel that the endless traveling of a reporter's job was becoming a kind of drug to mask his doubts about his own identity. So now he completed the process he had started when he left The Times, turning his back on the exposed heights of journalism and withdrawing into the greater privacy of the true writer's trade. “I was,” as Jan puts it now, “cultivating a kind of impotence”—deliberately shedding the more obvious external attributes of his masculine life in favor of a more sheltered, even neu
Neither the work nor the success ceased. On the contrary, books and magazine articles flowed as freely os ever, and the critics, by and large, continued to be lavish with their praise. But a few of them began to sense something oddly awry. The nowfamous style did not deteriorate, but it did begin to cloy. The adjectives were too many. some felt, the attitudes too romantic. Psychologists might, perhaps, have made something of the impression that words like “fabulous,” “fantasy,” “alchemy” and “wizardry” cropped up with suspicious frequency; but fastidious ordinary readers simply complained after. a few chap, ters of a gagging sensation, as if they were being fed on
“His flights of fancy can be tiresome and even faintly ridiculous,” said one reviewer in The Times. Another urged Morris to “take a grip on himself.”
In any case, with “Venice” behind him and his family complete, James began at last to pursue what he had always felt to be his true identity. Next to Elizabeth, the person who helped him most was Dr. Harry Benjamin of New York. An endocrinologist of international reputation, Benjamin was one of the first doctors in the world to take a serious interest in what he christened transsexualism; and he soon reached one conclusion that Morris recognized with relief. It was that no true transsexual ever changed the basic conviction that he—or she—had been born into the wrong sex. This was not, in Benjamin's view, a matter of psychological conditioning that might be rectified by analysis not the same as homosexuality, wherein one person could find satisfaction with another of the same sex; nor was it like transvestism, where the excitement might be gained from dressing as a member of the opposite sex. It was probably not just a matter of suspect hormones either.:—although Benjamin thought it might have something to do with unknown changes in the hormone balance at the foetal stage. In fact, for practical purposes, nobody really knew what was at the bottom of it. Yet the result, as Jan explains now, was in her case an absolute insistence that the imagined state of being a woman was more real than the apparent state of being a man. A claim, in short and to the bewilderment of the rest of
To understand this it is necessary to make the subtle distinction between sex and gender, between male and female on the one hand and masculine and feminine on the other. Sex is physical, and although all of us have varying elements of male and female in our physical composition there is normally a dividing line of chemistry or anatomy that finally distinguishes one sex from the other.
But gender is of the mind—something “spiritual” in Jan Morris's belief‐7‐and although most people will correspond in gender more or less to their sexual makeup, being both male and masculine‐or‐female and feminine and therefore roughly at ease with themselves, there are always a tiny few whose image of themselves is radically out of phase with apparent reality. These are the transsexuals—those ‘ who firmly believe themselves to be of one sex when science and common sense tell them they belong to the other. For some of them, said Dr. Benjamin, it might actually be better to alter the body to fit the mind's conviction than to strive to change the mind to
This was a thought toward which Morris himself had been groping, although other medical men he had consulted had been. much less under, standing. Few of them knew ‘much about transsexualism, it seems, and most had simply advised James to “get used” to his condition. Dr. Benjamin saw that he was not getting used to it and probably never would. Indeed, by the time Morris became his regular patient in the early nineteen‐sixties, the strain of “the lie” that was at the heart of his life was inducing frequent migraines and occasional visions of breakdown or even madness.
Cautiously, therefore, with Benjamin's advice, Morris embarked on the lengthy process of changing his mortal coil. There were two principal requirements. First, that he should gradually change his physical attributes to see if he felt more relaxed that way. Secondly, that he should experiment in the social role of a woman to see if his fantasy of femininity could stand the strain of actuality. If the answer on both counts was yes, then one day James might be ready to become a woman in as complete a sense as science would permit.
To begin with, hormone pills became part of Morris's daily diet, and gradually the appearance of his body began to change. By about the midsixties, old friends were beginning to remark with envy how young he looked. Although he never stopped traveling the world for his books, he retired still more from the rat race at home, acquiring what he called a “magic house” for the family in deepest Wales where only dedicated friends would visit him.
At the same time, though, he owned a small house in Oxford that even most of his closest friends knew nothing of, and there he would retire to write his books, alone. Soon, one or two acquaintances there heard that he had actually registered for research at the university's Bodleian Library as a woman, and after a little while it was not uncommon to encounter him in the city streets dressed in women's clothes.
But Oxford was accustomed to eccentricities, and the circle that knew remained discreet. In London or abroad other acquaintances merely went on envying his youthfulness and sometimes sniffing over his curious taste in men's fashions.
The permissive society had been born by then, however, and unisex clothes were everywhere. Maybe he was just being trendy; perhaps he was a bit “queer”? In fact, he was living a nerveracking and exciting double life, exploiting the ambiguity of modern fashion to pass from man to woman and back to man again according to the expectations of whomever he happened to meet.
When at last the growing oddness of his life‐style compelled him to take more people into his confidence, Morris planned the operation like a public relations campaign. His eldest son learned the truth as if by accident through a carefully planted shelf of books on transsexualism in the Morris library. Friends were told, as I was, and sworn to secrecy, so that often they found themselves flatly contradicting the idle speculations of others not yet in the know. In Fleet Street a kind of thieves’ loyalty prevailed. Only the satirical
magazine, Private Eye, dropped an oblique hint or two. In so private an affair the rest of the British press for once was willing to be orchestrated, practically single‐handed, by James Morris, and his confidences were never significantly breached.
He approached the appropriate departments of state for advice on passport and social security matters, and they murmured that his secret ‘would be safe with them until he chose to reveal it.
He opened the door a little wider by writing an unexpected letter to The Times about the difference between sex and gender, pointing out how simplistic the Olympics committee had been in proposing to distinguish the sex of athletes by analyzing the cells at the roots of their hair. There is, he hinted darkly, a great deal more ambiguity in such matters than was dreamed of in that philosophy. By 1972, nearly 10 years after he had started the hormone treatment, he was writing occasional book reviews under the suitably androgynous name of Jan. And by then, too, he was ready for the final step into permanent
He would have preferred to have had the ultimate operation performed in Britain, and now that he had demonstrated the strength of his conviction and his ability to live as a woman, there were surgeons there both ready and able to do it. But British law required that he “should first be divorced from Elizabeth. He chose rather to avoid that, with its risks of unpleasant inquiry and premature publicity. Instead, he flew to Casablanca and a clinic, wellknown in the small transsexual underworld; run by a man Jan will only identify as “Dr. B.”
“I should have been terrified, but I wasn't,” she says now. “It was inevitable—rd been heading there mentally all my life.” The operation went well. The removal of the male organs and the creation of a vagina in their place is by now a fairly well established surgical technique that can even leave the patient with some capacity for sexual feeling. Although the airresponding change from woman into man is, for obvious reasons, more difficult—and the result, in sexual terms, is less satisfactory—a man can be made physically a woman in about every respect save one: It is not possible to implant a womb. “Obviously, can't have a baby,” says Jan now, “so I suppose you could say there's still some ambiguity. After all, it's not natural to do what I've done. Yet I feel natural. I feel myself at
It is, I think, remarkable testimony to the memory of James Morris, as much as to the current sympathy for Jan, that most people seem to have accepted this verdict, so that most of his friends have now become hers as well. Only a very few have deliberately withdrawn, largely out of. a sort of social cowardice, feeling that the general awkwardness of treating as a woman someone they have known already as a man` is simply too much to face. On the other hand, not many old friends can accept Jan yet without a hint of special curiosity or embarrassment. Those who knew best the adventurous young man of the Everest saga probably have the hardest time adjusting. Those who met him only in the later years of ambiguity find less difficulty. But nearly all, I think, retain a little, discreetly flattering, sense of being privy to a remarkable
Women were sometimes sharper than men at divining the secret in the years before its public disclosure, sensing those hidden breasts in some flash of womanly intuition. Men—like me—were more obtuse, perhaps more conditioned by social expectations. Yet now that the change has been made and advertised there seem no hard‐and‐fast lines to divide men from women in their approach to Jan. Some women have warmly welcomed the change; a few. have expressed a faint disappointment, as if secretly perturbed by the idea of a man proving himself so thoroughly in their own feminine world —or perhaps just miffed a little at the unexpected extinction of a once‐attractive male. Others find it hard to understand why Jan should want to be a woman anyway in such a male‐chauvinist world. “Well, of course, I Jove her dearly,” they tend to say in genuine perplexity, “but she
Men, on the other hand, have no such fundamental objections. They quibble, rather, over little things. Former male colleagues, for example, still balk at exchanging with Jan the routine kisses of greeting and farewell that they bestow without a thought on other women they know. They wonder anxiously whether they should pull out her chair for her in a restaurant or if it can be quite right to direct her to the ladies’ room. And, of course, ‐ piactically everyone she knows stumbles from lime to time over the ‘proper personal pronoun. James‐Jan, he‐she, him‐her—which one are we talking about, we wonder, and is there any difference?
Surprisingly little, really. The writing talent, especially, seems unimpaired. “That was one of my great fears,” says Jan, “but, touch wood, I seem to be all right.” She is less interested in places and more in people than she used to be, drawn more towards writing fiction than before. But those have been gradual changes that might have taken place anyway. The exceptional facility with words has deserted her not at all, and the worst tricks of ‘overwriting have disappeared.
Her other great worry was that she might lose her health. “After all, nobody so tar has done this and lived to a ripe old age, you know.” Luckily, her constitution seems so far to have stood the strain. She has come to hate flying—a professional handicap to such an inveterate traveler—and she confesses that she cries now over little. things. She is probably weaker and less resistant to infection, and she shows a hint of hypochondria over common colds. There is also a niggling anxiety about the success of the operation itself—for in spite of “Dr. B's” undoubted skills, so delicate a rearrangement of organs and tissues can hardly be treated as casually as a routine appendectomy. Above all, perhaps, she seems to need more emotional reassurance, especially of her social acceptance by those she knows. But the basic physical and moral stamina that James Morris showed on Everest 20 years ago seem to me still present in Jan's mind and body. So, of course, are many of the physical features, although only a slightly manly swing of the shoulders as she walks and a ‐masculine strength about the hands are obvious reminders of her male past. The face is rounder and softer, the nose less bony and prominent, but the underlying
The incredible youthfulness induced by the hormone pills is giving way to a pleasant, middle‐aged look, with crow'sfeet around the eyes. The cheeks are ruddy, the lips lightly colored with lipstick, the figure trim but womanly, the legs smooth and surprisingly shapely. Surprisingly? Perhaps not. James Morris always had a slim, lithe figure. It has not had to change that much, after, all In her blue tweed skirt and cream silk blouse, Jan looks like a cultivated, intelligent and handsome twin sister of the James she once was—which is, more what she wants to be.
It is Jan's family, though, that, in many eyes, must provide the ultimate test of the change—and no outsider can presume to assess their innermost reactions. Jan herself is sure that love has conquered all. Indeed, because she shared the whole ‐extraordinary adventure with Elizabeth from the start, she believes they were able to give the children more love than most ordinary parents would have. “It was like being in a siege, wasn't it? The children meant so much more to us—and we to them, I hope. And whatever strains there were, they couldn't have been as bad, surely, as in all those families broken by ordinary divorce? in remember.
Certainly—and in spite of their divorce that necessarily followed the operation—Jan and Elizabeth seem remarkably united still. They live half‐apart and half‐together in a state of mutual concern and dependence. Jan continues the working tradition of her Oxford house by writing nowadays mostly in the lovely old city of Bath, in a flat overlooking the famous Regency sweep of the Royal Crescent. Elizabeth and the two younger children have moved to a new house in Wales, only 90 minutes’ drive away, with three donkeys and a pony to keep them company whet‐1'Jan is away. They telephone each other constantly, tend each other in illness, spend half their time together and generally exhibit the sort of warm, natural affection that you would expect of two deeply loving sisters who have already shared the most of their lives.
There are some, of course, who toy with suspicions of a kind of Lesbianism here, but that seems to me to reveal a total misunderstanding of the relationship. There is no suggestion of sexual” feeling between them now. Whatever there may have been once of that, it, has been absorbed into something deeper and more lasting that eminently deserves, I think, the: name of love. Of remarriage for either there seems no thought.
The children are another, perhaps more enigmatic, matter,. Mark, now 22, is at Oxford. Henry, 21, is wandering in India. What traumas they might all have endured I do not know. Elizabeth is frank er than Jan about the difficulties, as perhaps she has a right to be. It was, she says, a “real strain” deciding what to do.
Mark candidly admits that he missed an “ordinary” father in his childhood and is not looking forward to the publication of “Conundrum,” although he has recently swallowed his misgivings sufficiently to design the dust jacket for the book. Henry's absence may suggest some sort of rebellion—although, say his parents, he writes regular and most affectionate letters. The younger children, still only 12 and 10, seem to have adapted well, but theie are friends who wonder anxiously whether there are not hidden scars. How, they very reasonably ask, can the transformation of a father into “Auntie Jan” be anything but
All I can say is that the scars do not appear ‘to be deep—no worse, anyway, than those borne by most “families after 25 years of marriage and the usual schisms caused by children growing up. Yet it is still inevitable, I suppose, that many otherwise sympathetic friends go on worrying whether James Morris really,”ought” to have done what he did.
To that there is only Jan's “irrational” answer about not “living a lie”—and not everyone can accept it. Some highly intelligent doctors, for instance, dismiss it as escap ism. Sex operations, they claim, solve nothing. If the problem is mental, then the mind should be treated, and not the body. It is a perfdtly respectable view, although it may do less than justice to the caution and thoroughness with. which James Morris approached his eventual transformation.
Nonmedical people who hear the story are also often puzzled or frankly disbelieving. “It can't be that easy,” they say, or, “There must be some better way.” And there are critics even among Jan's friends who are disturbed by the publicity that must inevitably surround the affair with the publication of “Conundrum.”
This is a criticism that worries Jan, and many an agonized hour has been spent wondering how far she should go in satisfying what many will see as the prurient interest of others. Yet in the end, she insists, hers is not a prurient story. In her mind, if not in others, it is fundamentally a story of love that deserves to be told for its own sake, quite apart from any social, sexual or medical implications it may have.
As a professional writer, she claims, with reason, that she could hardly be expected not to write about the biggest thing that has ever happened to her. Moreover, as former husband and father, she feels an obligation to ‘ provide for Elizabeth and the children still.
In any case, she adds, if publicity is the issue, she has already turned down more of it in the last year or two than most writers can expect in their whole career.
But there is a wider plane, on which Jan defends herself from criticism. The distinction between sex and gender, she argues, is something that other societies have recognized at other times. She recalls ready acceptance for herself in Africa and a sense of being absorbed in the Moslem’ East in a way that has been foreign to the West in recent times. “But it's only in the last two centuries we've been so rigid about sex,” she says. “Now the sense of acceptance, of fluidity, is coming back.” Young people, she notes, mostly accept her story without question. It is those of her own age and older who still cringe or look aghast. Thus she accepts her transformation as in some small way archetypal of our times—a metaphor, so to say, of tolerance, of doing your
The children seem well yet the transformation of father into ‘Auntie Jan’ cannot be anything but disturbing. nothing you do is wrong as long as you don't hurt other people.
In this modem and more open world unisex. is more relevant for Jan Morris than. Women's Lib. “I don't feel it incumbent on me to read Kate Millet and Germaine Greer,” she says with a hint of. mischief. “I like being a woman. But I mean a woman! I like having my suitcase carried. I like gossiping with the lady upstairs. If Elizabeth would let me, I'd be wildly extravagant about clothes, though I must say I'm not much interested in cooking. Never was. And yes, I like to be liked by men.”
This is evidently not so much a question of physical as of emotional sex. As a man, James Morris was probably not greatly interested in sex as such, however dutiful and potent he was as father of hii children. As a woman, Jan hints at a similar attitude, although it is one of the few aspects of her new life she refuses to talk about in detail. “Mind your own business,” she says sharply to queries on that score, and who can blame her? What she does like is to be appreciated, admired and cared for as a woman. It was a London taxi driver who gave her, out of the blue, her first real man's kiss, and she loved it. On the other hand, she was as frightened as any woman might have been when an Indian bus driver at Madras airport made amorous advances in an empty
If this sounds old‐fashioned it is also understandable. “When you've spent all your life missing something, of course you want to make the most of it when you've got it
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22‐ROGER WENTOWSKI
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48—ASSOCIATED PRESS
49—THE NEW YORK TIMES/MIKE LIEN; CHARLES CLARKE
62—SYGMA
76—CAMERA 5/MICHAEL ABRAMSON
86—JERRY BAUER at last. And don't forget,” Jan adds, “I'm 47. I think most women of my age, if they're honest, really accept the idea of helping men, and of being cherished by them. I've always had that feeling. If I could have my life over I suppose I would have been, happiest being someone's second‐in‐command. Lieutenant to a really great man—that's my idea of happiness.”
It is enough to make Women's Libbers spit with shame and chagrin. Yet Jan adds a timely rider. “What I can't stand is being patronized by men. Treated as a secondclass citizen. Just because I'm a woman; there are people now ‘who think I haven't got a mind any more. Sometimes ”—and her face acquires for the first time a ‘touch of steely masculinity — “sometlmes even those who've known me before. That does make me angry.”
The only other handicaps she admits to are minor. “I miss the male opportunities, especially when I'm working. I can't be accepted in the officers’ mess any more. can't go so easily into pubs and clubs. I was in Hong Kong not long ago, and in the old days I would have gone round a few bars. But not now.”
Jan seems to teeter on the edge of complacency over the way she has managed it all. “Thirty‐five years of my life as a man. Ten as something in between. Now, if I'm lucky, maybe another 35 as a woman. A nice symmetry, don't you think?” But James's old twinkle of ironic self‐awareness is in her eye. She knows she has already been incredibly lucky. Lucky in Elizabeth, in her children, ‘ her friends, her career, her success, and her timing.
“It could have been a terrible mess, you know—a tragedy really. As it is for most other people in this condition. I know there aren't many of us, but there ‘are more than you may think, because ‘it's all been hidden for so long. Some of them write to me now, asking for advice. That's another of the reasons why I've written the book—Elizabeth thinks it will help them. I'm not so sure myself: I've just been so lucky, that my experience may not be veryrelevant. But'at least it brings it all out into the open.” It should certainly do that and perhaps even establish for itself and its author another niche in.the great gallery of English letters. But already Jan Morris herself is moving on There is the third volume of the British Empire trilogy to begin, and to publish, for consistency's sake, as the last book by James Morris. There are thoughts of a novel or two, perhaps a biography. There is Bath to be enjoyed, Wales to savor and the world still to travel. As the younger children grow, Elizabeth plans to join Jan in seeing more of the world—a pair of peripatetic sisters‐inlaw, like so many wandering British ladies of the past, ex
Meanwhile, in Jan's mind, the memory of what it was like ‘to be James is already growing a little dim. She finds it difficult now to recall some of the emotions she used to know, “. and really,” she adds, “I don't think I want to.” Her gestures and expectations are becoming more confidently feminine. She hitches up her skirt now as if to the manner born and looks at tradesmen with confidently appraising—and appealing—woman's eye. Little by little, the world, too, is adjusting to her. The next edition of “Who's Who” will carry a new entry for her: “Morris, James Humphry,” it will say, “see Morris, Jan,” which must surely be the first time that noble institution has
And I can attest that even greater things than that are possible. When Jan dropped me at Bath station not long ago, to catch my train to London, she leaned forward expectantly, just like any other woman friend, and found myself implanting an affectionate kiss upon her cheek. I think she was smiling slyly in the darkness, and by the time I was abgard my train, so was I. It was one more tiny triumph in Jan Morris's strange struggle for identity.
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