Conundrum

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Morris tried to explain to the reader why she felt the need to change. She said she needed to somehow reconcile her soul with her body. Her analogy of a car's fuel indicator to the difference between sex & gender was helpful to me. Not a perfect analogy but an easy visual. The gauge marking from full to empty is like the scale between the masculine and feminine genders. The pointer represents your physical sex - body parts, hormones & chromosomes. The printed scale cannot be moved but the pointer does move. Since she is unable to change her gender, the way her soul feels, then the only recourse is to try & change the pointer/the physical characteristics as much as possible so that her gender and her form align. To make herself whole. There is a lovely diary entry in the current book in which, with the weather raging outside, she determines to do her thousand steps indoors: “round and about the sofas I whistled my way, never pausing, left, right, left right… counting the paces on my fingers and sometimes bursting into song, until at last, breathless but triumphant, I reached the millennium on my thumb.” NatGeoUK (19 July 2021). " 'Women felt at ease to write about the experience of being outside.' ". National Geographic . Retrieved 27 March 2023. A very good writer telling a profoundly poetic story…In fact, it is the author’s extreme subjectivity that makes the book as good as it is…After reading this most charming of all Cinderella stories, one feels that sex is just as much a conundrum as ever, which is to say, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, ‘a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun,’ or ‘a problem admitting of no satisfactory solution.’”

At one point in Conundrum, written in 1974, Morris wonders whether she might be simply ahead of her time, a premonition of gender fluidity to come. Whatever the case, she had a certainty about her “slow motion Jekyll and Hyde” that was all her own. When the transformation was complete in Casablanca, she writes “I had reached Identity” with a capital I. (Elsewhere she described it as “At-one-ment”). She pictures herself as Ariel, “a figure of fable and allegory” in pursuit of the “higher ideal that there is neither man nor woman”. Had the possibility of safe surgery not existed, she had no doubt she would “bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought”.Hace llamadas para dejar constancia de su nueva condición de mujer. Para cerrar las posibilidades, a los demás y así misma, a la indiferenciación y/o a una vuelta a su identidad masculina. Michael Palin talks about the Jan Morris he met - witty, generous and inspirational, but also a challenging interviewee who used a variety of techniques to deflect difficult questions about her private life. Paul Clements suggests she 'played hide and seek with the facts'. Archive on Four considers how much she constructed and presented her whole life, with determination, guile and skill.

For anyone who knows the Jan Morris of today and has read fairly widely in James/Jan’s oeuvre, these statements written in 1973 sound unconvincing. And Jan would appear now to accept this. I suspect there is no real difference between what Jan Morris in her later life has been as a person and a writer, and what James Morris would have been had he remained a man. As regards her competence, anyone who has had the experience of being a passenger in her car as she drives down the rutted road to her home will attest to her skills and enthusiasm.

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It was getting dark, and we had to go down through the icefall,” Morris tells Palin. “I was hopeless – kept getting tangled up in ropes and things.” I hadn't realised that Jan Morris was in fact James Morris, the celebrated Welsh historian, author and travel writer and also to read that his wish as a young child to be a girl quite mesmerised me. It appeared he had a fixation as he wished it so much. Still he knew that he would never be a mother and so he did the next best thing and became a father with five children. Photographed in 1988, the year she published her acclaimed history of Hong Kong. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty Images Even the kindest public response at the time was bafflement. Germaine Greer was not alone in denying the validity of Morris’s female persona. Interviewers were prurient or bemused, or both; literati were spiteful –“He was a better writer than she”, spat the novelist Rebecca West, although in perspective any softening in Morris’s prose is more attributable to the era’s change of tone from public assertion to private confession, from reportage to memoir. Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, “Last Letters from Hav,” about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author’s globe-spanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud.

Morris could hardly have seen so many of us coming. She believed she was one of “at least 600 people … in the United States,” “perhaps another 150 … in Britain,” to have had gender-affirming surgery (she said nothing about how many people might want it). She predated by decades today’s galaxy of trans books for trans readers (some from queer or trans publishing houses), books like Imogen Binnie’s Nevada or Rachel Gold’s Being Emily or Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull or the anthology We Want It All. Nobody knows how many trans people there are—it depends how you count us—but a UCLA law school study from 2016 guessed over a million in the United States alone. Jan Morris on her travels in 1988. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty Images Reporting from Cyprus on the Suez Crisis for the Manchester Guardian in 1956, Morris produced the first "irrefutable proof" of collusion between France and Israel in the invasion of Egyptian territory, interviewing French Air Force pilots who confirmed that they had been in action in support of Israeli forces. [20] She also reported on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. [21] Later Morris opposed the Falklands War. [22] Personal life [ edit ] He married for the simple reason that he met and truly loved Elizabeth, as she was his soul mate. Each knew what the other was thinking. Still, apart from this he divorced his wife, who remained a lifetime friend as he still wished to be a woman. He felt he had to do this and started hormonal treatment as a beginning to his transition. Then in 1972, at the age of 46, he went off to Casablanca in Egypt where he underwent gender-reassigned surgery. He, now she, was absolutely delighted with the outcome as she now had identity, something that had been missing from her life since she was a young girl. Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: ‘And please, God, let me be a girl. Amen,‘” Morris wrote in her memoir.The tapping of the bird leads Morris into the first of a few apologies that she no longer has the eloquence she once did as an interviewee. “Sometimes I fear I am not exactly compos mentis,” she says. “It comes and goes. Like with Elizabeth. The other morning I was taking her breakfast on a tray and I fell, and there were cornflakes everywhere, and marmalade. I thought, well no good asking Elizabeth to help with this. But she came out, and miraculously was transformed into the real Elizabeth, and briskly helped me clear it all up beautifully. I said to her a few minutes later how encouraging she can still do that, but she could not remember what had happened.” a b c d "Jan Morris obituary | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 23 November 2021. I put it down to kindness,” she says. “Just that. Everything good in the world is kindness. Though the only person who ever uses that word in politics is the prime minister of New Zealand [Jacinda Ardern]. She is tremendous isn’t she? I’d like to meet her.”