A woman is an adult human female. James/Jan Morris was a biological male. He was suffering from the long recognised and extensively documented mental illness known as gender dysphoria. The symptoms of the illness are that an individual feels a subjective sense of their “gender” that does not accord with what they believe someone of their biological sex should feel.
Apparently sufferers of this illness get relief from pharmaceutically and surgically altering their bodies to resemble the opposite biological sex.
Mental illness takes many forms and involves many different types of delusional beliefs. In almost all cases mental health professionals try to communicate to their patients that their delusions are not real but a product of their illness. Patients are given medication and counselling to help them cope with their condition. Mental health professionals do not accept and reinforce the delusions of their patients. That would be gross professonal negligence. Until relatively recently the same approach was taken with sufferers of gender dysphoria.
Transgenderism is not:”an ideology that has swept across the Western world in the past 30 years”. It has crept out of the obscure recesses of academia as part of postmodernism only relatively recently. Until then it well understood as the mental illness of gender dyphoria
The author, as per usual goes in to flouncy, unspecific language on the subject, and in doing so prevents intellectual scrutiny.. Any reference to scientific research in differences between female and male brains is not presented.
Transgender ideology is an fad. It is a set of absurd, anti-scientific notions, dreamt up by third rate professors playing with postmodernist ideas in the rarefied atmosphere of academia. Somehow it escaped in to the real world, and should have been ridiculed back to where it came from long ago. But it has been sustained by the climate of fear the vicious trans activists have created by their attacks on anyone questioning their dogma, and by gullible people who have overintellectualised themselves in to believing patent nonsense. Finally, however, it seems that the tide is turning against the trans zealots.
Those third rate professors in search of tenure cooking up fantasies like “trans” victimization sure have made a lot of money for so-called children’s hospitals. It’s shocking how quickly these profitable mass psychoses take hold. Or is it . . .?
Gender Dysphoria is no longer classified as a mental health disorder by the world health organisation but the nub of really good evaluation by a psychologist is to determine if the person in front of them is a successful functioning adult who in every other respect is healthy both mentally and physically where the only remaining element is they believe that they identify in a different gender.
That very careful diagnosis, which many transgendered people wish to sidestep in favour of self-ID, is why a small number of people have reassigned their gender since the act was introduced eighteen years ago.
Jan was an interesting and capable writer and some of the most revealing qualities of her own journey and why, are beautifully elaborated on in her book “Conundrum”. My sense with Jan is as a bright soul she tried to articulate very complex feelings which no one who does not feel the same way could understand, just as there is no reason as to why Jan should understand what it feels like to have no questions on this matter at all.
All we can do is be compassionate and understanding but because this is genuinely a rare occurrence we are unlikely to encounter, it is left to MSM to reduce it to dodgy appearances, preoccupations with “bits” and all the bruhaha that has developed in recent years.
“Gender Dysphoria is no longer classified as a mental health disorder by the world health organisation but the nub of really good evaluation by a psychologist is to determine if the person in front of them is a successful functioning adult”
I think the problem with this statement is that your faith in psychologists is a bit misplaced. Tavistock is an example of this. Teenage girls, like all teenagers, are complicated and fragile. It’s fine to no longer regard it as a health disorder, but to begin serious treatment at that age was always a risk, as it has turned out to be.
It is possible to be ‘compassionate’ towards a mentally ill person who believes a delusion without reinforcing that delusion.
The delusion is not only that a man can ‘become’ a woman, or vice versa (and the motives are very different) but that ‘gender’ exists outside linguistics. Replace ‘gender’ with ‘individual personalities’ and the whole ridiculous edifice comes crashing down.
Would you rather that gender dysphoric people commit suicide? Your post shows little insight and zero compassion. People with psychological conditions and/or mental illnesses deserve respect, just like anyone else.
You present as many others do, a false dichotomy. Affirmation and suicide are not the only options. Just as well given 40% of “trans” kill themselves regardless of wether their delusions are affirmed.
If 40% of any section of society is inclined towards suicide suggests a high degree of mental illness.
Compassion is giving people the tools and techniques to cope with a life not in accordance with their wishes. Not acquiescing to either their or your emotional blackmail.
The point I was making up the thread and was downvoted for was that those who successfully transition through the support of their clinicians are only supported in that transition if they are not diagnosed as suffering from any kind of mental illness. That they are gender dysphoric is no longer considered a mental illness.
Other studies show that in people who transition, the desire to consider suicide reduces from a very high level to barely recorded afterwards. That suggests for a very small number of well-adjusted successful adults who actually transition the journey is one to happiness.
What I am sensing in these comments and some allude to it is people who would otherwise offer transgendered people polite indifference have found the zealotry among part of the community has placed them on the defensive.
The sadness is so few people actually transition each year like Jan just over 400 a year since the act was introduced the entire subject takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of air time.
I do wonder what those from this very small community feel about the idea of self-identification who are a much larger group where men retain all the characteristics and drivers of their manhood and vice versa.
It’s the only mental delusions that is treated by affirming the delusion. The only mental disorder treated this way. Now that’s insanity!
j morgan
1 year ago
What an utter waste of mental energy it is, trying to nuance your way to a place where a man can be a woman (sort of, if you squint, and ignore reality).
He can’t be. Not everything has to be complicated. Society has better problems to confront than trying to reconcile reality with the fantasies of men such as James Morris.
N Forster
1 year ago
The author of this piece seems either uncertain, or confused as to when or how to refer to Morris. Sometimes “she” other times “he.” At times he refers to Morris as “she” when Morris was actually “he.”
Morris, be it James or Jan, was male and should be referred to as “he”.
Anything else is a lie. No matter the intention.
Morris was born male and died male. That he may have undergone surgery, taken drugs and changed his clothing to more resemble a woman does not change the fact (and it is a fact) that Morris, despite how he perceived himself was male.
Saying ‘she’ and ‘Jan Morris’ instead of ‘he’ and ‘James Morris’ does not cost us very much, if it makes the person feel better. Much like there is no compelling need to refuse to say ‘Bob Dylan’ when you mean the person whose real name is Robert Zimmerman. James/Jan Morris was a male and we should not deny the truth of that. Who get access to female loos, prisons and sports teams is another matter. But some reasonable accommodation would seem only polite.
If the question of how to address a person suffering from gender dysphoria was left as a personal choice, then most people would be content to play along with the fiction.
But throughout the world, not referring to a person by their “preferred pronouns” is being criminalised and used a basis for sacking people and taking away their livelihood.
When the law compels me to engage in a fiction under threat of criminal sanction, or my livelihood is threatened unless I kowtow to the demand that I deny biological reality, then the issue becomes political, as my right to freedom or thought and expression is being taken away.
Unfortunately the trans zealots have imposed a cost on being polite and humouring gender dysphoriua sufferer. By being polite I would now be outwardly tacitly showing acceptance and support for the absurd ideology of the vicious, intolerant trans zealots who are hacking away at the established rights and protections for women and children and the rights of freedom of thought and expression.
When the zealots have been defeated and retreat, then we can go back to being polite. Until then this is a serious political battle about rights and reason.
OK, this is not just about politeness. But I would rather look for a tolerable compromise than saying ‘once we have total victory, we shall be magnanimous’. Total war comes with high costs.
The best I can think of is to *avoid* the argument what a woman ‘really’ is, because it leads to all-or-nothing thinking. That means refusing to accept “I am really awoman so never mind my anatomy I have the right to access women’s prisons and sports teams”. And also avoiding “You are really a man so never mind what you feel like I will call you ‘he'”. ‘Woman, as a word, means people with a female body, a female sense of self, female behaviour, female rights and obligations. Unfortunately there are people who tick only some of the boxes and refuse others. Instead of refusing to acknowledge their existence (or demanding that they take over completely), let us just look on this as a series of separate, practical problems. Does person X have the right to be refered to as ‘she’? to appear on a Labour all-women shortlist? to use female loos? to compete as a female in sports? Then we can solve each problem by itself to minimise friction and suffering, without being obliged to give the same answer to very different questions. If it offends some people’s sense of self to not be treated as their chosen gender in each and every case that is just tough, but at least we can accommodate them where the costs is reasonable on balance.
Woman as a word means: adult human female.
Female means: “of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes”
Once we start with that, we can add the sopistication of an individual being described as a feminine male or a masculine female. In doing that we have not compromised objective biological science but have accounted for the fact that many individuals show atypical behavior from that normally associated with their biological sex.
Now we have three categories.
Males/Females whose behaviour accords with that typically associated with their biological sex
Males/Females whose behavior does not accord to some degree with that typically associated with their biological sex (effemiminate males and masculine females).
Sufferers of the mental illness of gender dysphoria who are afflicted with an internal conflict between their conception of their biological sex and the objective reality.
Both one and two are completely normal aspects of human behaviour and require no delving in to postmodernist anti-scientific fiddle faddle to accommodate. Three is a longstanding recognised and well documented mental illness that deserves sympathy and proper treatment; not medical health professionals legitimising delusional beliefs and pushing mentally ill people ,to pump their bodies full of hormones and disfigure themselves with ammutations.
These categorisations have sufficed for humanity since time immemorial, and there has not been any new scientific discovery that puts a question mark over their legitimacy.
These categorisations have sufficed for humanity since time immemorial,
That is not quite as true as you think it is. There are examples of societies (uncommon, but real) that operated with more than two genders (some Asian of native American societies), or where you could be treated as e.g. a man socially, even if you are a women biologically (herders in Montenegro e.g.). It can be done. Once you get into ‘behaviour associated with biological sex’ you have multiple things associated with the words, and they can sometimes split.
For comparison, consider the word ‘mother’ We all know what a mother means. Yet in the real world we have surrogate mothers, gene mothers, birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and foster mothers. Would you say that (most of) these are not mothers after all? If so I know some adoptive mothers who will have your hide. For mothers we can mange the whole thing quite easily. The word ‘mother’ means the same as it always has, someone who has *all* the necessary characteristics. The groups I mentioned above all count as mothers – of sorts. Whether a given person qualifies as ‘the mother’ depends on circumstance, whether we are talking about permission for a school trip, inherited disease, emotional bonds, or whatnot. And we avoid a divisive and damaging discussion about what the word means and who is a ‘real’ mother. Maybe we can do the same with the word ‘woman’?
What you are saying is that gender non conforming people have always existed. The previous comment addresses this in point number two. We have always had ‘two spirit’ people, it is not a new thing. What is different now is the medicalizing of the ‘two spirit’ condition. If you can find a culture that mutilated the genitals of GNC people to ‘cure’ them then I might grant the relevance of your point. The difference now is not that we are more inclusive and understanding of GNC people but more barbaric.
There are examples of societies (uncommon, but real) that operated with more than two genders (some Asian of native American societies), or where you could be treated as e.g. a man socially, even if you are a women biologically (herders in Montenegro e.g.). It can be done. Once you get into ‘behaviour associated with biological sex’ you have multiple things associated with the words, and they can sometimes split.
These cultures made social space for non-gender conforming males, rarely were females given the same leeway, except in dire economic circumstances. None of these cultures ever lost sight of what it was to be biologically male or female. Other social institutions like marriage and child care were not touched by the small accomodations made. 21st century western liberals are a historical anomaly in denying the material reality of sex.
Yet in the real world we have surrogate mothers, gene mothers, birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and foster mothers. Would you say that (most of) these are not mothers after all?
All these varieties of mothers are female. Let’s not play silly games here.
Generalizing about “Native American” (or any) cultures to which you do not belong, is risky. The so-called “contraries” were called that just because they were the exception rather than the rule.
Even these societies did not think that people living in something like the opposite sex role had really changed sex. Instead, they saw them as a means to deal with exceptions to what were typically extremely narrow gender roles in the society – most often around male homosexuality. Notably, such males usually had a lot more sexual freedom than actual women did in the same culture.
Males/Females whose behaviour accords with that typically associated with their biological sex
Males/Females whose behavior does not accord to some degree with that typically associated with their biological sex (effemiminate males and masculine females).
Sufferers of the mental illness of gender dysphoria who are afflicted with an internal conflict between their conception of their biological sex and the objective reality.
Number 1 is erroneous as what you describe as ‘typical’ is mostly (though probably not all) socially constructed. Number 2 sets forth what is needed (and that we had come to understand and accept) is that a more expansive way of being M/F is natural and normative and thus is not ‘atypical.’ Many of these people grow up to be LGB and until the T force-teamed itself onto the LGB and parasatised the entire movement we could maintain women’s/girls’ single-sex spaces and opportunities. And no ridiculous, fraudulent pronouns were required nor was there a need to hormonally and surgically mutilate people’s bodies to create simulacrums to perpetrate a fraud on the public. LGB people required none of this trans lunacy. LGB is a sexual orientation based on the material reality of sex but trans is an ‘identity’ based on no material reality and reifies old stereotypes–two different things. LGBs just wanted equality and to integrate into society but Ts want to deconstruct society and eliminate the reality of sexual dimorphism. No.3 I would say is accurate in that I think mostly young people have been sucked into a cult that is more funded and promoted by and in service to mostly trans, heterosexual, male cross-dressers w/ a fetish, autogynephiles/transvestic fetishists (see the 11th Hour blog). These men w/ paraphilias are under the trans umbrella (as are other pervs) and some of them are dangerous to females. So in accepting and legalizing ‘gender identity’ we are legalizing male fetishes and trashing females and their rights, dignity, safeguarding,and entire lived experience by considering these pervy men as any kind of woman. And we are resurrecting homophobia as trans is not only misogynist but is also deeply homophobic.
Only when my now dead ex-H left us did he reveal that he was a transsexual. I considered carefully how to reply to his e-mails from a new gmail account with first name “Elizabeth”. I decided to call him “Paul/Elizabeth”. I wanted him to understand that I did understand his delusion: his real name followed by a forward slash and then the new female name conveyed correctly that he was confused. This was not a criticism: it was a fact.
I was trained as a physical scientist. I deal in facts. He had not and never would “change sex”.
And when I found out that in his last years his prostate problem recurred despite the estrogen he was taking, I didn’t laugh but I did sigh: you just have to wait for people to learn the truth.
It is not polite to ask me or anyone else to lie in order to affirm a persons perceptions or delusions. The “polite” argument is false.
As for it being “cost free” it isn’t. As it is the first step in allowing men access to female spaces. If you wish to preserve those, no quarter should be given. None.
There are transsexuals in the UK who are quietly living their lives without fuss or bother. I know and love two who I do use the pronoun “she” for in the same way as I call them both Aunt when with them as I have done for the last 52 years. Both will tell you if you ask that if they had lived in other times and been brought up in a different place, they would now be the gay men they were born to be.
But they both grew up in the Bible Belt of America (100 miles apart) with fathers who were pastors and who could not have homosexual sons because homosexuality was illegal. They met in Argentina where German surgeons operated on them. And they came to the UK in the hope they would pass as women and be able to get on with their lives. My mother met them at a youth and community event and brought them home for tea. The rest is history.
They are happy to tell you they are biological men who present as women. They support our fight to keep women’s spaces free of biological men. I have never known either to use a women only space.
They are now elderly transsexual women hoping to carry on living as they do for the rest of their lives. I will fight for that to happen as they are not hurting anyone or taking space from any biological woman.
What an awful analogy: calling Robert Zimmerman Bob Dylan is quite unlike the practice of using “she” to refer to a biological male. The latter is a corruption of word’s relationship with reality, since it is tied specifically to femaleness.
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
It’s funny how current society has so readily accepted the physically extreme changes for the body and brain of men claiming to be women because they feel as if they are women, and yet they completely reject the concept of white people claiming to be black because they feel as if they are black, requiring no physical or mental change at all, but a mere adoption of cultural attitudes, and tanning product.
Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
David Baker
1 year ago
“Our great-grandchildren may come to view the idea that only natal women can bear children with a mixture of condescension, alarm, and laughter.”
I was going to make an analogy about denying some even more basic truth to show how ridiculous this statement is. But there might not be a more obvious truth than women being the only ones capable of giving birth.
So congratulations on hitting the bedrock of reality I guess, hopefully our great-grandchildren don’t crack their skulls ramming their heads against it.
Indeed, I would say the opposite: in the future the fact that surgeons in our time were operating on and prescribing unnecessary medicines to sexually-confused children will be viewed with the same horror and disgust we have when we hear about the lobotomies performed on the depressed women of the nineteenth century.
Please can you explain why you have specified “depressed women” ? Lobotomies were performed from the 1880s up until the 1950s on both women and men with all kinds of mental problems, from relatively minor – depression in both sexes, to severe – psychizophrenia in both sexes.
There simply wont be many great grand children to mock us ancients if biological women arent the ones getting pregnant and delivering children! Yes, the great Technology Gods may create an artificial uterus or two, but the expense and stupidity of that venture will mean only a tiny population of future humans.
Christine Hankinson
1 year ago
Yes, the problem with James/Jan Morris’s interpretation of being female was so damagingly stereotypical. I am a woman and accept that, because it is a fact and I have necessarily enjoyed and suffered the physicality of my sex. However I have always resisted stereotypical gender expressions of femininity. Equally although I was always aware of the privilege of males and how relatively easy their social and professional lives were, I never would pretend to be one.
What you can do is constantly fight to extend the boundaries of acceptability of gender expression. To be small soft and sweet, caring and male, or large ambitious, brave, tough and female, without ridicule.
That’s where freedom lies.
That’s the dog wagging the tail.
There is NO reality of male humans giving birth in the future, only a man could think that. Women can now choose not to bear children, but they will never be able to inseminate. As Philip K d**k memorably said ‘reality is that which when it is no longer believed doesn’t go away’ gender is a belief. Sex is real. It would have been much braver for James Morris to have challenged the limits of masculinity than to have become a fantasy female.
You were aware of the “the privilege of males”? Like getting blown to pieces in wars, like doing the dangerous jobs and so making up most workplace deaths?
The ‘privilege’ of males is real, as are the great responsibilities that have always come with that privilege, the absence of which have been the ‘privilege’ of females.
Nicola Bown
1 year ago
The article almost entirely erases Morris’s wife Elizabeth and his children. As Germaine Greer remarked, ‘Elizabeth’s silence is the truest measure of Morris’s continuing masculinity.’ No commitment to his wife or family could be allowed to get in the way of the fascinating drama of his identity, and this article, I’m afraid, simply admires that drama. It’s always, always about how important and interesting men are, isn’t it, even when they pretend to be women – as if they do the business of being a woman so much more interestingly than actual women, who might as just well stay silently in the background, where they belong.
In a 2008 interview Morris tells us that he has headstone prepared for use after his death. He states that it’s for him and his ‘partner’- apparently Elizabeth is no longer his wife, despite their marriage cert and all those children. It reads ” Here are two friends,Jan and Elizabeth Morris at the end of one life’. Says it all. We’ll never know what Elizabeths thoughts were on it.
“ …the fascinating drama of his identity, and this article, I’m afraid, simply admires that drama. It’s always, always about how important and interesting men are, isn’t it …”
It’s not as if the writer has made up things or even exaggerated them. Your feelings about men do not reduce the interesting nature of Morris, good or bad. What would you want in an article about Morris? Obviously not a person who’s personality was not just a man who claimed to be a woman, but something far more complex and interesting, and fascinating.
Last edited 1 year ago by Brett H
Andrew Blake
1 year ago
I like the thesis here that Morris’s decision was a response to the end of British power and authority. Ergo, Morris thought, we were collectively castrated, and the trappings of gentlemanly masculinity – stoicism, duty, consensual competition – should be replaced by feminine gentleness expressed both collectively and in his case personally. Very neat.
Trouble is, he always looked and sounded like a man in a frock pretending to be a caricature of 1940s femininity; he always seemed very male in his (understandably) prickly defence of his lifestyle choice. He was trying to ‘perform’ gender, as the prophet Butler has it – and the result was amateur dramatics.
Yes, your (Andrew Blake’s) use of the word “caricature” I think is very apt. A biological male can at best only become a caricature of a female, and the reciprocal is also true.
That’s not to say that one should be rude to people who think they are of the other sex, but to legislatively require all of society to treat them in all respects as if they truly are is to privilege them in a way that places society and culture on a foundation based not on realty but on illusion..
Mirax Path
1 year ago
Nora Ephron wrote in an Esquire article (now taken down) :
“I always wanted to be a girl, too. I, too, felt that I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could manage, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was… I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be – Feminine and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand I am not half bad at being a woman. In contrast Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is precisely what James Morris wanted to become all those years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl.”
It was a prescient observation : nearly every transwoman of recent vintage self-identifies as a girl even if they are 75 and grizzly with a beer gut. Often a flirty barbie girl in a miniskirt, knee-high socks and bangs. Funny how the ineffable essence of femininity is so narrowly manifest.
“Funny how the ineffable essence of femininity is so narrowly manifest.”
The lost mens’ fantasy of women.
Last edited 1 year ago by Brett H
Claire D
1 year ago
“Biological facts exist only up to a point. Power is more important.”
Ah, post-modernism, don’t you just love it ?
“The whole world is nothing but power games on top of more power games. If so the only possible goal is to take some power for yourself, and it will have to be taken from others.” Foucault.
Just to be clear, I don’t agree with this but Will Lloyd appears to.
Biological facts exist, not up to a point, they exist. But power comes and goes, shifts from one group to another, in the case of Jan Morris’s imagination – from Men to Women in the late 20th century.
Humans are capable of extraordinary behaviours under particular conditions, eg, the flagellants during the black death, the skopits in Russia, and trans now, here, in the West.
It is highly likely male-to-female trans activism has much to do with power, but ordinary trans who just want to get on with their lives in peace ? or underage children getting caught up in it ? I don’t think so.
Last edited 1 year ago by Claire D
Michael Kellett
1 year ago
I’m sure that HM the Queen was perfectly well aware of who Jan Morris was and the assertion that she gave a ‘sharp’ reply is probably just an example of Morris’ ‘complicated’ persona.
You are perfectly right here. The Queen was always well informed on who was in the room. The author make out as is she was a sheltered fool, of course she knew all about Ms Morris.
“an example of Morris’ ‘complicated’ persona.” Self aggrandisement.
Michael Askew
1 year ago
The technology does not exist (as the writer claims) to socially engineer us into believing manifestly untrue notions. Biological men cannot ovulate, conceive and gestate a baby. The End.
Sandra Currie
1 year ago
Gender express away as your little heart desires – just don’t expect the rest of us to deny reality because you can’t accept it.
Russell Hamilton
1 year ago
“If power decides that fantasy and feeling take precedence over evolution and biology, then fantasy and feeling become fact”
Or rather, fantasy and feeling may become accepted as fact. But as Will goes on to write, Jan Morris didn’t actually seem to genuinely feel that s/he was really a woman, try as s/he might, the fantasy just wouldn’t become a fact.
Surely, things don’t “become fact”… they either are, or they aren’t.
Sandra Currie
1 year ago
Jan was born a man and died a man. There is nothing progressive about believing you can change sex, and wanted to do so because you have some or all of the traits the social construction of gender assigns to women. The backlash against second wave feminism started almost immediately when we raised our heads above the parapet and continues to this day. No one seems to remember that we wanted people to be free to be themselves, unrestrained by gender stereotypes. Now we have been captured by an ideology that says those stereotypes are more real than biological sex and intelligent people are going along with this in the name of diversity and inclusion. Sex is why women are oppressed-gender is how.
David Whitaker
1 year ago
I don’t think anyone knows what anyone else feels like, or what it might feel like to be someone else. We might think we do, but I’d say that was a delusion: no doubt some people are capable of more empathy than others, and they may get closer to feeling what it is like to be another person, but we are all guessing. So for someone to be sure that they feel as another person (of the opposite sex) feels is remarkable. And to be so certain of it as to have surgery etc is beyond remarkable.
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago
The author almost gets to the essence of the question at the beginning of the penultimate paragraph: will the spread of this ideology make anyone happier?
Has feminism made people happier? Has any ‘progressive’ ideology made people happier?
Well, it certainly makes me very happy that I’m living in times when I’m allowed to choose who I’ll mary or if I’m going to marry at all, vote, own property, open my own bank account and be protected from sexual violence.
None of those things were brought about by feminism. Women have’nt been dragged to the altar for hundreds of years and the ability to choose independence over marriage is linked to post industrialisation and the consequent increase in value of women’s labour outside the home, enabling them to earn enough money to live alone.
Same with the Property Acts in the late 19th century. Thus, the vote was given to property owning women in 1918 after they showed their courage and willingness to share in the war effort, not because of their terrorist activities as suffragettes before the war. The franchise was only extended to all women in 1928 because almost all nations around the world were doing the same and women were behaving themselves.
Banks decided to give women bank accounts when they realised in the 1960s how lucrative that would be with more and more women working. Nothing to do with feminism.
The change in the law around sexual violence, again had little to do with feminism and much more to do with the change in a woman’s status as a wage earner and tax payer due to labour demand in the modern era. Plus the development of Human Rights post WWII.
Last edited 1 year ago by Claire D
Rose D
1 year ago
Times have changed.
The misogyny of men who fancy themselves women has not.
Last edited 1 year ago by Rose D
Jane Watson
1 year ago
I was having breakfast in Durrants hotel in Marylebone in maybe 2006 with my mum. As we went to sit down we walked by a smartly dressed couple of mature years, the woman with her back to me.
Very soon I became aware that the animated conversation from the nearby table was in fact man to man. I looked over my shoulder and recognised Jan Morris.
For the hour we were in proximity I was fascinated by how different that conversation was, in tone, substance and opinions shared than a conversation between a man and woman would be.
J Bryant
1 year ago
A very fine essay, imo. I had never heard of Jan Morris. I suspect a lot of modern trans people haven’t either. They don’t seem to be much into history, least of all their own personal history. If you don’t like who you were, there’s something attractive about the eternal now.
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago
Another beautifully written and well-argued piece in UnHerd, by far the best journal of its kind, at least of which I know. Though I tend toward Marcus Leach’s comment here, this is a really interesting thesis. But perhaps Jan Morris might also just have wanted to experience everything, the entertainment principle made manifest, as in the rest of his/her life. A bit like the kind of person who wants to own, not just visit, a large number of diverse homes in diverse places, in case there’s somewhere they haven’t lived. And they just can’t stand it.
Rasmus Fogh
1 year ago
Lots of posts have disappeared. For a site that prides itself on starting discussions on edgy topics Unherd is sure censorious.
Josef Oskar
1 year ago
I have Morris’ book Pax Britannica, it is excellent. Apart from that people have the most peculiar of fixations. In the second half of the 19th century an important banker in Wien suddenly started to dress like a woman. He became a sensation and the first psichiatrists of the fin de siecle in town rushed to examin him. It always existed and it is not new. What is new is the proportions it has taken. Decades of affluence and relative peace gave certain people time to meditate on many unusual matters as other more basic worries were less urgent. These days are approaching their end, dark clouds are gathering above our skies like not seen since the first half of the twentieth century. I am curious to see what will happen in ten or fifteen years time.
Last edited 1 year ago by Josef Oskar
Smalltime J
1 year ago
Morris’ book on Venice is one of the best pieces of travel writing ever imho. I agree she is an interesting figure – her ‘out-of-timeness’ in being such a pioneer does invite questions about how our current sexual politics will be seen in generations to come.
I enjoyed this essay but for this line: “In her life as a woman, we can detect something quietly unwell about Morris.” I’m not sure that this assertion is in fact supported by the remainder of the article. And it seems a bit intrusive to pick over the dead for evidence of malcontent to support a social theory. Most of us have some melancholy in our lives by the end.
As are millions of others, I have been a fan of Morris since those early books but in the live interviews after his transformation I found him to be unsettling in an undefinable way. Certainly his clothing choices, jewellery etc reminded me of aged aunts. Perhaps because I was a fan I was unwilling to see him as he really was. A boy grown into a man, lived life as a man but who all the time regretted that he’d never been a little girl with access to those clothes and styles that he simply found attractive. I’m 70 yrs old and all through my life I’ve met and observed men dressed as woman mingling socially. They didn’t present any challenge for those of us broadminded enough to believe they were free to live as they desired. It’s the pure nastiness inherent in current times that is so repellent.
Regardless of what you think about the gender change, I’m not sure you can really describe the life of Jan/James Morris as ‘sad’. Queens Royal Lancers, outstanding Times journalist, part of the 1953 Everest Expedition, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Golden PEN Award, an incredible bibliography. A very long life well lived. If that’s a ‘sad’ life then, most lives are complete and utter failures.
“In post-Imperial Britain, if Morris could not be a wolf, she would be a lamb. She would escape into her own romantic idea of femininity. To be a woman rather than a man, she argued, was simply a matter of “good taste”.” This story suggests something far more complicated than just being brave, that she adjusted her gender in tune with a perception of empire and manhood. People are complicated, no doubt, but their actions are not so simple as “brave”.
A woman is an adult human female. James/Jan Morris was a biological male. He was suffering from the long recognised and extensively documented mental illness known as gender dysphoria. The symptoms of the illness are that an individual feels a subjective sense of their “gender” that does not accord with what they believe someone of their biological sex should feel.
Apparently sufferers of this illness get relief from pharmaceutically and surgically altering their bodies to resemble the opposite biological sex.
Mental illness takes many forms and involves many different types of delusional beliefs. In almost all cases mental health professionals try to communicate to their patients that their delusions are not real but a product of their illness. Patients are given medication and counselling to help them cope with their condition. Mental health professionals do not accept and reinforce the delusions of their patients. That would be gross professonal negligence. Until relatively recently the same approach was taken with sufferers of gender dysphoria.
Transgenderism is not:”an ideology that has swept across the Western world in the past 30 years”. It has crept out of the obscure recesses of academia as part of postmodernism only relatively recently. Until then it well understood as the mental illness of gender dyphoria
The author, as per usual goes in to flouncy, unspecific language on the subject, and in doing so prevents intellectual scrutiny.. Any reference to scientific research in differences between female and male brains is not presented.
Transgender ideology is an fad. It is a set of absurd, anti-scientific notions, dreamt up by third rate professors playing with postmodernist ideas in the rarefied atmosphere of academia. Somehow it escaped in to the real world, and should have been ridiculed back to where it came from long ago. But it has been sustained by the climate of fear the vicious trans activists have created by their attacks on anyone questioning their dogma, and by gullible people who have overintellectualised themselves in to believing patent nonsense. Finally, however, it seems that the tide is turning against the trans zealots.
Those third rate professors in search of tenure cooking up fantasies like “trans” victimization sure have made a lot of money for so-called children’s hospitals. It’s shocking how quickly these profitable mass psychoses take hold. Or is it . . .?
Gender Dysphoria is no longer classified as a mental health disorder by the world health organisation but the nub of really good evaluation by a psychologist is to determine if the person in front of them is a successful functioning adult who in every other respect is healthy both mentally and physically where the only remaining element is they believe that they identify in a different gender.
That very careful diagnosis, which many transgendered people wish to sidestep in favour of self-ID, is why a small number of people have reassigned their gender since the act was introduced eighteen years ago.
Jan was an interesting and capable writer and some of the most revealing qualities of her own journey and why, are beautifully elaborated on in her book “Conundrum”. My sense with Jan is as a bright soul she tried to articulate very complex feelings which no one who does not feel the same way could understand, just as there is no reason as to why Jan should understand what it feels like to have no questions on this matter at all.
All we can do is be compassionate and understanding but because this is genuinely a rare occurrence we are unlikely to encounter, it is left to MSM to reduce it to dodgy appearances, preoccupations with “bits” and all the bruhaha that has developed in recent years.
“Gender Dysphoria is no longer classified as a mental health disorder by the world health organisation but the nub of really good evaluation by a psychologist is to determine if the person in front of them is a successful functioning adult”
I think the problem with this statement is that your faith in psychologists is a bit misplaced. Tavistock is an example of this. Teenage girls, like all teenagers, are complicated and fragile. It’s fine to no longer regard it as a health disorder, but to begin serious treatment at that age was always a risk, as it has turned out to be.
It is possible to be ‘compassionate’ towards a mentally ill person who believes a delusion without reinforcing that delusion.
The delusion is not only that a man can ‘become’ a woman, or vice versa (and the motives are very different) but that ‘gender’ exists outside linguistics. Replace ‘gender’ with ‘individual personalities’ and the whole ridiculous edifice comes crashing down.
Would you rather that gender dysphoric people commit suicide? Your post shows little insight and zero compassion. People with psychological conditions and/or mental illnesses deserve respect, just like anyone else.
You present as many others do, a false dichotomy. Affirmation and suicide are not the only options. Just as well given 40% of “trans” kill themselves regardless of wether their delusions are affirmed.
If 40% of any section of society is inclined towards suicide suggests a high degree of mental illness.
Compassion is giving people the tools and techniques to cope with a life not in accordance with their wishes. Not acquiescing to either their or your emotional blackmail.
The point I was making up the thread and was downvoted for was that those who successfully transition through the support of their clinicians are only supported in that transition if they are not diagnosed as suffering from any kind of mental illness. That they are gender dysphoric is no longer considered a mental illness.
Other studies show that in people who transition, the desire to consider suicide reduces from a very high level to barely recorded afterwards. That suggests for a very small number of well-adjusted successful adults who actually transition the journey is one to happiness.
What I am sensing in these comments and some allude to it is people who would otherwise offer transgendered people polite indifference have found the zealotry among part of the community has placed them on the defensive.
The sadness is so few people actually transition each year like Jan just over 400 a year since the act was introduced the entire subject takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of air time.
I do wonder what those from this very small community feel about the idea of self-identification who are a much larger group where men retain all the characteristics and drivers of their manhood and vice versa.
He was a misogynist . Men can be women…. Misogyny at its finest!
It’s the only mental delusions that is treated by affirming the delusion. The only mental disorder treated this way. Now that’s insanity!
What an utter waste of mental energy it is, trying to nuance your way to a place where a man can be a woman (sort of, if you squint, and ignore reality).
He can’t be. Not everything has to be complicated. Society has better problems to confront than trying to reconcile reality with the fantasies of men such as James Morris.
The author of this piece seems either uncertain, or confused as to when or how to refer to Morris. Sometimes “she” other times “he.” At times he refers to Morris as “she” when Morris was actually “he.”
Morris, be it James or Jan, was male and should be referred to as “he”.
Anything else is a lie. No matter the intention.
Morris was born male and died male. That he may have undergone surgery, taken drugs and changed his clothing to more resemble a woman does not change the fact (and it is a fact) that Morris, despite how he perceived himself was male.
Saying ‘she’ and ‘Jan Morris’ instead of ‘he’ and ‘James Morris’ does not cost us very much, if it makes the person feel better. Much like there is no compelling need to refuse to say ‘Bob Dylan’ when you mean the person whose real name is Robert Zimmerman. James/Jan Morris was a male and we should not deny the truth of that. Who get access to female loos, prisons and sports teams is another matter. But some reasonable accommodation would seem only polite.
If the question of how to address a person suffering from gender dysphoria was left as a personal choice, then most people would be content to play along with the fiction.
But throughout the world, not referring to a person by their “preferred pronouns” is being criminalised and used a basis for sacking people and taking away their livelihood.
When the law compels me to engage in a fiction under threat of criminal sanction, or my livelihood is threatened unless I kowtow to the demand that I deny biological reality, then the issue becomes political, as my right to freedom or thought and expression is being taken away.
Unfortunately the trans zealots have imposed a cost on being polite and humouring gender dysphoriua sufferer. By being polite I would now be outwardly tacitly showing acceptance and support for the absurd ideology of the vicious, intolerant trans zealots who are hacking away at the established rights and protections for women and children and the rights of freedom of thought and expression.
When the zealots have been defeated and retreat, then we can go back to being polite. Until then this is a serious political battle about rights and reason.
OK, this is not just about politeness. But I would rather look for a tolerable compromise than saying ‘once we have total victory, we shall be magnanimous’. Total war comes with high costs.
The best I can think of is to *avoid* the argument what a woman ‘really’ is, because it leads to all-or-nothing thinking. That means refusing to accept “I am really awoman so never mind my anatomy I have the right to access women’s prisons and sports teams”. And also avoiding “You are really a man so never mind what you feel like I will call you ‘he'”. ‘Woman, as a word, means people with a female body, a female sense of self, female behaviour, female rights and obligations. Unfortunately there are people who tick only some of the boxes and refuse others. Instead of refusing to acknowledge their existence (or demanding that they take over completely), let us just look on this as a series of separate, practical problems. Does person X have the right to be refered to as ‘she’? to appear on a Labour all-women shortlist? to use female loos? to compete as a female in sports? Then we can solve each problem by itself to minimise friction and suffering, without being obliged to give the same answer to very different questions. If it offends some people’s sense of self to not be treated as their chosen gender in each and every case that is just tough, but at least we can accommodate them where the costs is reasonable on balance.
Woman as a word means: adult human female.
Female means: “of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes”
Once we start with that, we can add the sopistication of an individual being described as a feminine male or a masculine female. In doing that we have not compromised objective biological science but have accounted for the fact that many individuals show atypical behavior from that normally associated with their biological sex.
Now we have three categories.
Both one and two are completely normal aspects of human behaviour and require no delving in to postmodernist anti-scientific fiddle faddle to accommodate. Three is a longstanding recognised and well documented mental illness that deserves sympathy and proper treatment; not medical health professionals legitimising delusional beliefs and pushing mentally ill people ,to pump their bodies full of hormones and disfigure themselves with ammutations.
These categorisations have sufficed for humanity since time immemorial, and there has not been any new scientific discovery that puts a question mark over their legitimacy.
That is not quite as true as you think it is. There are examples of societies (uncommon, but real) that operated with more than two genders (some Asian of native American societies), or where you could be treated as e.g. a man socially, even if you are a women biologically (herders in Montenegro e.g.). It can be done. Once you get into ‘behaviour associated with biological sex’ you have multiple things associated with the words, and they can sometimes split.
For comparison, consider the word ‘mother’ We all know what a mother means. Yet in the real world we have surrogate mothers, gene mothers, birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and foster mothers. Would you say that (most of) these are not mothers after all? If so I know some adoptive mothers who will have your hide. For mothers we can mange the whole thing quite easily. The word ‘mother’ means the same as it always has, someone who has *all* the necessary characteristics. The groups I mentioned above all count as mothers – of sorts. Whether a given person qualifies as ‘the mother’ depends on circumstance, whether we are talking about permission for a school trip, inherited disease, emotional bonds, or whatnot. And we avoid a divisive and damaging discussion about what the word means and who is a ‘real’ mother. Maybe we can do the same with the word ‘woman’?
What you are saying is that gender non conforming people have always existed. The previous comment addresses this in point number two. We have always had ‘two spirit’ people, it is not a new thing. What is different now is the medicalizing of the ‘two spirit’ condition. If you can find a culture that mutilated the genitals of GNC people to ‘cure’ them then I might grant the relevance of your point. The difference now is not that we are more inclusive and understanding of GNC people but more barbaric.
These cultures made social space for non-gender conforming males, rarely were females given the same leeway, except in dire economic circumstances. None of these cultures ever lost sight of what it was to be biologically male or female. Other social institutions like marriage and child care were not touched by the small accomodations made. 21st century western liberals are a historical anomaly in denying the material reality of sex.
All these varieties of mothers are female. Let’s not play silly games here.
Generalizing about “Native American” (or any) cultures to which you do not belong, is risky. The so-called “contraries” were called that just because they were the exception rather than the rule.
Even these societies did not think that people living in something like the opposite sex role had really changed sex. Instead, they saw them as a means to deal with exceptions to what were typically extremely narrow gender roles in the society – most often around male homosexuality. Notably, such males usually had a lot more sexual freedom than actual women did in the same culture.
Number 1 is erroneous as what you describe as ‘typical’ is mostly (though probably not all) socially constructed. Number 2 sets forth what is needed (and that we had come to understand and accept) is that a more expansive way of being M/F is natural and normative and thus is not ‘atypical.’ Many of these people grow up to be LGB and until the T force-teamed itself onto the LGB and parasatised the entire movement we could maintain women’s/girls’ single-sex spaces and opportunities. And no ridiculous, fraudulent pronouns were required nor was there a need to hormonally and surgically mutilate people’s bodies to create simulacrums to perpetrate a fraud on the public. LGB people required none of this trans lunacy. LGB is a sexual orientation based on the material reality of sex but trans is an ‘identity’ based on no material reality and reifies old stereotypes–two different things. LGBs just wanted equality and to integrate into society but Ts want to deconstruct society and eliminate the reality of sexual dimorphism. No.3 I would say is accurate in that I think mostly young people have been sucked into a cult that is more funded and promoted by and in service to mostly trans, heterosexual, male cross-dressers w/ a fetish, autogynephiles/transvestic fetishists (see the 11th Hour blog). These men w/ paraphilias are under the trans umbrella (as are other pervs) and some of them are dangerous to females. So in accepting and legalizing ‘gender identity’ we are legalizing male fetishes and trashing females and their rights, dignity, safeguarding,and entire lived experience by considering these pervy men as any kind of woman. And we are resurrecting homophobia as trans is not only misogynist but is also deeply homophobic.
Only when my now dead ex-H left us did he reveal that he was a transsexual. I considered carefully how to reply to his e-mails from a new gmail account with first name “Elizabeth”. I decided to call him “Paul/Elizabeth”. I wanted him to understand that I did understand his delusion: his real name followed by a forward slash and then the new female name conveyed correctly that he was confused. This was not a criticism: it was a fact.
I was trained as a physical scientist. I deal in facts. He had not and never would “change sex”.
And when I found out that in his last years his prostate problem recurred despite the estrogen he was taking, I didn’t laugh but I did sigh: you just have to wait for people to learn the truth.
It is not polite to ask me or anyone else to lie in order to affirm a persons perceptions or delusions. The “polite” argument is false.
As for it being “cost free” it isn’t. As it is the first step in allowing men access to female spaces. If you wish to preserve those, no quarter should be given. None.
There are transsexuals in the UK who are quietly living their lives without fuss or bother. I know and love two who I do use the pronoun “she” for in the same way as I call them both Aunt when with them as I have done for the last 52 years. Both will tell you if you ask that if they had lived in other times and been brought up in a different place, they would now be the gay men they were born to be.
But they both grew up in the Bible Belt of America (100 miles apart) with fathers who were pastors and who could not have homosexual sons because homosexuality was illegal. They met in Argentina where German surgeons operated on them. And they came to the UK in the hope they would pass as women and be able to get on with their lives. My mother met them at a youth and community event and brought them home for tea. The rest is history.
They are happy to tell you they are biological men who present as women. They support our fight to keep women’s spaces free of biological men. I have never known either to use a women only space.
They are now elderly transsexual women hoping to carry on living as they do for the rest of their lives. I will fight for that to happen as they are not hurting anyone or taking space from any biological woman.
Okay. Yeah, you do look fat, says a mother to her anorexic daughter. Feel better?
Nice and polite is/was the ‘camel’s nose under the tent,’ language matters and is important in describing reality, so a hard no to pronoun nonsense.
What an awful analogy: calling Robert Zimmerman Bob Dylan is quite unlike the practice of using “she” to refer to a biological male. The latter is a corruption of word’s relationship with reality, since it is tied specifically to femaleness.
It’s funny how current society has so readily accepted the physically extreme changes for the body and brain of men claiming to be women because they feel as if they are women, and yet they completely reject the concept of white people claiming to be black because they feel as if they are black, requiring no physical or mental change at all, but a mere adoption of cultural attitudes, and tanning product.
“Our great-grandchildren may come to view the idea that only natal women can bear children with a mixture of condescension, alarm, and laughter.”
I was going to make an analogy about denying some even more basic truth to show how ridiculous this statement is. But there might not be a more obvious truth than women being the only ones capable of giving birth.
So congratulations on hitting the bedrock of reality I guess, hopefully our great-grandchildren don’t crack their skulls ramming their heads against it.
Indeed, I would say the opposite: in the future the fact that surgeons in our time were operating on and prescribing unnecessary medicines to sexually-confused children will be viewed with the same horror and disgust we have when we hear about the lobotomies performed on the depressed women of the nineteenth century.
Please can you explain why you have specified “depressed women” ? Lobotomies were performed from the 1880s up until the 1950s on both women and men with all kinds of mental problems, from relatively minor – depression in both sexes, to severe – psychizophrenia in both sexes.
Apparently also on homosexuals.
There simply wont be many great grand children to mock us ancients if biological women arent the ones getting pregnant and delivering children! Yes, the great Technology Gods may create an artificial uterus or two, but the expense and stupidity of that venture will mean only a tiny population of future humans.
Yes, the problem with James/Jan Morris’s interpretation of being female was so damagingly stereotypical. I am a woman and accept that, because it is a fact and I have necessarily enjoyed and suffered the physicality of my sex. However I have always resisted stereotypical gender expressions of femininity. Equally although I was always aware of the privilege of males and how relatively easy their social and professional lives were, I never would pretend to be one.
What you can do is constantly fight to extend the boundaries of acceptability of gender expression. To be small soft and sweet, caring and male, or large ambitious, brave, tough and female, without ridicule.
That’s where freedom lies.
That’s the dog wagging the tail.
There is NO reality of male humans giving birth in the future, only a man could think that. Women can now choose not to bear children, but they will never be able to inseminate. As Philip K d**k memorably said ‘reality is that which when it is no longer believed doesn’t go away’ gender is a belief. Sex is real. It would have been much braver for James Morris to have challenged the limits of masculinity than to have become a fantasy female.
‘What you can do is constantly fight to extend the boundaries of acceptability of gender expression.’
The nub of the problem in my opinion. There is no need to fight any such thing.
You were aware of the “the privilege of males”? Like getting blown to pieces in wars, like doing the dangerous jobs and so making up most workplace deaths?
The ‘privilege’ of males is real, as are the great responsibilities that have always come with that privilege, the absence of which have been the ‘privilege’ of females.
The article almost entirely erases Morris’s wife Elizabeth and his children. As Germaine Greer remarked, ‘Elizabeth’s silence is the truest measure of Morris’s continuing masculinity.’ No commitment to his wife or family could be allowed to get in the way of the fascinating drama of his identity, and this article, I’m afraid, simply admires that drama. It’s always, always about how important and interesting men are, isn’t it, even when they pretend to be women – as if they do the business of being a woman so much more interestingly than actual women, who might as just well stay silently in the background, where they belong.
In a 2008 interview Morris tells us that he has headstone prepared for use after his death. He states that it’s for him and his ‘partner’- apparently Elizabeth is no longer his wife, despite their marriage cert and all those children. It reads ” Here are two friends,Jan and Elizabeth Morris at the end of one life’. Says it all. We’ll never know what Elizabeths thoughts were on it.
“ …the fascinating drama of his identity, and this article, I’m afraid, simply admires that drama. It’s always, always about how important and interesting men are, isn’t it …”
It’s not as if the writer has made up things or even exaggerated them. Your feelings about men do not reduce the interesting nature of Morris, good or bad. What would you want in an article about Morris? Obviously not a person who’s personality was not just a man who claimed to be a woman, but something far more complex and interesting, and fascinating.
I like the thesis here that Morris’s decision was a response to the end of British power and authority. Ergo, Morris thought, we were collectively castrated, and the trappings of gentlemanly masculinity – stoicism, duty, consensual competition – should be replaced by feminine gentleness expressed both collectively and in his case personally. Very neat.
Trouble is, he always looked and sounded like a man in a frock pretending to be a caricature of 1940s femininity; he always seemed very male in his (understandably) prickly defence of his lifestyle choice. He was trying to ‘perform’ gender, as the prophet Butler has it – and the result was amateur dramatics.
Yes, your (Andrew Blake’s) use of the word “caricature” I think is very apt. A biological male can at best only become a caricature of a female, and the reciprocal is also true.
That’s not to say that one should be rude to people who think they are of the other sex, but to legislatively require all of society to treat them in all respects as if they truly are is to privilege them in a way that places society and culture on a foundation based not on realty but on illusion..
Nora Ephron wrote in an Esquire article (now taken down) :
It was a prescient observation : nearly every transwoman of recent vintage self-identifies as a girl even if they are 75 and grizzly with a beer gut. Often a flirty barbie girl in a miniskirt, knee-high socks and bangs. Funny how the ineffable essence of femininity is so narrowly manifest.
“Funny how the ineffable essence of femininity is so narrowly manifest.”
The lost mens’ fantasy of women.
“Biological facts exist only up to a point. Power is more important.”
Ah, post-modernism, don’t you just love it ?
“The whole world is nothing but power games on top of more power games. If so the only possible goal is to take some power for yourself, and it will have to be taken from others.” Foucault.
Just to be clear, I don’t agree with this but Will Lloyd appears to.
Biological facts exist, not up to a point, they exist. But power comes and goes, shifts from one group to another, in the case of Jan Morris’s imagination – from Men to Women in the late 20th century.
Humans are capable of extraordinary behaviours under particular conditions, eg, the flagellants during the black death, the skopits in Russia, and trans now, here, in the West.
It is highly likely male-to-female trans activism has much to do with power, but ordinary trans who just want to get on with their lives in peace ? or underage children getting caught up in it ? I don’t think so.
I’m sure that HM the Queen was perfectly well aware of who Jan Morris was and the assertion that she gave a ‘sharp’ reply is probably just an example of Morris’ ‘complicated’ persona.
You are perfectly right here. The Queen was always well informed on who was in the room. The author make out as is she was a sheltered fool, of course she knew all about Ms Morris.
“an example of Morris’ ‘complicated’ persona.”
Self aggrandisement.
The technology does not exist (as the writer claims) to socially engineer us into believing manifestly untrue notions. Biological men cannot ovulate, conceive and gestate a baby. The End.
Gender express away as your little heart desires – just don’t expect the rest of us to deny reality because you can’t accept it.
“If power decides that fantasy and feeling take precedence over evolution and biology, then fantasy and feeling become fact”
Or rather, fantasy and feeling may become accepted as fact. But as Will goes on to write, Jan Morris didn’t actually seem to genuinely feel that s/he was really a woman, try as s/he might, the fantasy just wouldn’t become a fact.
Surely, things don’t “become fact”… they either are, or they aren’t.
Jan was born a man and died a man. There is nothing progressive about believing you can change sex, and wanted to do so because you have some or all of the traits the social construction of gender assigns to women. The backlash against second wave feminism started almost immediately when we raised our heads above the parapet and continues to this day. No one seems to remember that we wanted people to be free to be themselves, unrestrained by gender stereotypes. Now we have been captured by an ideology that says those stereotypes are more real than biological sex and intelligent people are going along with this in the name of diversity and inclusion. Sex is why women are oppressed-gender is how.
I don’t think anyone knows what anyone else feels like, or what it might feel like to be someone else. We might think we do, but I’d say that was a delusion: no doubt some people are capable of more empathy than others, and they may get closer to feeling what it is like to be another person, but we are all guessing. So for someone to be sure that they feel as another person (of the opposite sex) feels is remarkable. And to be so certain of it as to have surgery etc is beyond remarkable.
The author almost gets to the essence of the question at the beginning of the penultimate paragraph: will the spread of this ideology make anyone happier?
Has feminism made people happier? Has any ‘progressive’ ideology made people happier?
Well, it certainly makes me very happy that I’m living in times when I’m allowed to choose who I’ll mary or if I’m going to marry at all, vote, own property, open my own bank account and be protected from sexual violence.
None of those things were brought about by feminism. Women have’nt been dragged to the altar for hundreds of years and the ability to choose independence over marriage is linked to post industrialisation and the consequent increase in value of women’s labour outside the home, enabling them to earn enough money to live alone.
Same with the Property Acts in the late 19th century. Thus, the vote was given to property owning women in 1918 after they showed their courage and willingness to share in the war effort, not because of their terrorist activities as suffragettes before the war. The franchise was only extended to all women in 1928 because almost all nations around the world were doing the same and women were behaving themselves.
Banks decided to give women bank accounts when they realised in the 1960s how lucrative that would be with more and more women working. Nothing to do with feminism.
The change in the law around sexual violence, again had little to do with feminism and much more to do with the change in a woman’s status as a wage earner and tax payer due to labour demand in the modern era. Plus the development of Human Rights post WWII.
Times have changed.
The misogyny of men who fancy themselves women has not.
I was having breakfast in Durrants hotel in Marylebone in maybe 2006 with my mum. As we went to sit down we walked by a smartly dressed couple of mature years, the woman with her back to me.
Very soon I became aware that the animated conversation from the nearby table was in fact man to man. I looked over my shoulder and recognised Jan Morris.
For the hour we were in proximity I was fascinated by how different that conversation was, in tone, substance and opinions shared than a conversation between a man and woman would be.
A very fine essay, imo. I had never heard of Jan Morris. I suspect a lot of modern trans people haven’t either. They don’t seem to be much into history, least of all their own personal history. If you don’t like who you were, there’s something attractive about the eternal now.
Another beautifully written and well-argued piece in UnHerd, by far the best journal of its kind, at least of which I know. Though I tend toward Marcus Leach’s comment here, this is a really interesting thesis. But perhaps Jan Morris might also just have wanted to experience everything, the entertainment principle made manifest, as in the rest of his/her life. A bit like the kind of person who wants to own, not just visit, a large number of diverse homes in diverse places, in case there’s somewhere they haven’t lived. And they just can’t stand it.
Lots of posts have disappeared. For a site that prides itself on starting discussions on edgy topics Unherd is sure censorious.
I have Morris’ book Pax Britannica, it is excellent. Apart from that people have the most peculiar of fixations. In the second half of the 19th century an important banker in Wien suddenly started to dress like a woman. He became a sensation and the first psichiatrists of the fin de siecle in town rushed to examin him. It always existed and it is not new. What is new is the proportions it has taken. Decades of affluence and relative peace gave certain people time to meditate on many unusual matters as other more basic worries were less urgent. These days are approaching their end, dark clouds are gathering above our skies like not seen since the first half of the twentieth century. I am curious to see what will happen in ten or fifteen years time.
Morris’ book on Venice is one of the best pieces of travel writing ever imho. I agree she is an interesting figure – her ‘out-of-timeness’ in being such a pioneer does invite questions about how our current sexual politics will be seen in generations to come.
I enjoyed this essay but for this line: “In her life as a woman, we can detect something quietly unwell about Morris.” I’m not sure that this assertion is in fact supported by the remainder of the article. And it seems a bit intrusive to pick over the dead for evidence of malcontent to support a social theory. Most of us have some melancholy in our lives by the end.
As are millions of others, I have been a fan of Morris since those early books but in the live interviews after his transformation I found him to be unsettling in an undefinable way. Certainly his clothing choices, jewellery etc reminded me of aged aunts. Perhaps because I was a fan I was unwilling to see him as he really was. A boy grown into a man, lived life as a man but who all the time regretted that he’d never been a little girl with access to those clothes and styles that he simply found attractive. I’m 70 yrs old and all through my life I’ve met and observed men dressed as woman mingling socially. They didn’t present any challenge for those of us broadminded enough to believe they were free to live as they desired. It’s the pure nastiness inherent in current times that is so repellent.
He. Not she. She is reserved for women. It is already taken.
The 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers used to rejoice in two nicknames, ‘The Magpies’ and ‘The Delhi Spearmen’.
How very apposite!
9/12 Lancer.. so… no surprise!
Don’t blame the 12th, it was still just the 9th when Jan/James was in the saddle.
I’m wondering why more genders haven’t been created.
there is no such thing as transition
A very brave human being.
Not brave, but intensely sad.
Regardless of what you think about the gender change, I’m not sure you can really describe the life of Jan/James Morris as ‘sad’. Queens Royal Lancers, outstanding Times journalist, part of the 1953 Everest Expedition, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Golden PEN Award, an incredible bibliography. A very long life well lived. If that’s a ‘sad’ life then, most lives are complete and utter failures.
“In post-Imperial Britain, if Morris could not be a wolf, she would be a lamb. She would escape into her own romantic idea of femininity. To be a woman rather than a man, she argued, was simply a matter of “good taste”.”
This story suggests something far more complicated than just being brave, that she adjusted her gender in tune with a perception of empire and manhood. People are complicated, no doubt, but their actions are not so simple as “brave”.