After Becoming a Woman,
my scale of vision seemed to contract,
and I looked less for The Grand Sweep than for The Telling Detail.
The emphasis changed,
from Places to People.
TRANSSEXUALISM
"In the post-war period in Europe and America a small number of high-profile cases emerged of people who had tried to change from one sex to the other. The transition from male to female of Roberta (formerly Robert) Cowell in Britain and Christine (formerly George) Jorgensen in the US made headlines around The World.
People still alive today remember their parents hiding the newspapers when the news of these first ‘sex changes’ were reported.
For the stories were not just salacious and highly sexualized in the telling, but seemed to strike at the most basic societal norms. Could someone change sex?
If so did that mean that anyone could? Did it mean that perhaps – if encouraged – everyone and anyone would?
Looking back it isn’t hard to see why these earliest cases caused deeper confusions. After World War I the idea of feminine men and masculine women became something of an idée fixe for people criticizing the younger generation.
One hit song of the 1920s went ‘Masculine women! Feminine men! Which is the rooster? Which is the hen? It’s hard to tell ‘em apart today.’
At the time Homosexuality and Transvestitism seemed to be at least very considerably linked: perhaps these were very committed transvestites or especially effeminate gay men.
But the first public trans figures bucked any prevailing expectations. Early in his career Cowell had been a fighter pilot, and after that became famous as a motorcar racing driver.
If not a knock-out argument, this certainly made the claim of an ultra-wild form of effeminacy harder–though not impossible –to sustain. And then there were the claims made by the individuals themselves.
For example, Cowell wanted people to believe that she had been born intersex and that her vaginoplasty and other procedures were merely correcting a glitch of birth.
So the more visible that all these categories became – homosexuality, intersex, transvestitism, transsexualism – the more they became intertwined. It took time, some individual courage and descriptive skill to even begin to extract what we now know as the ‘trans’ element from this mix.
Anybody in doubt about whether this category of individual exists should explore the work of the trans people who have not only thought deeply, but expressed themselves deeply, about this issue.
One of the most successful attempts to communicate what many trans people claim is incommunicable was by the British writer Jan (formerly James) Morris.
Like Roberta Cowell, Morris’s story introduced layers of confusion and curiosity which still preoccupy audiences and interviewers to this day. Morris had served in the army in the last days of World War II. Afterwards he had worked as a journalist for The Times and The Guardian.
Like his war service, Morris’s work as a foreign correspondent across the Middle East, Africa and behind the Iron Curtain did not fit into existing expectations of what a man who wanted to become a woman might be–any more than did the fact that he was happily married to a woman and had fathered five children. James’s transition into Jan began in the 1960s and culminated in a sex-change operation in 1972.
Already renowned as an author, this soon made her one of the most famous trans people in the world. Morris’s memoir of that transition, Conundrum (1974), remains one of the most persuasive and certainly the best-written accounts to date of why some people feel a need to transition across the sexes.
Indeed, it is hard to read Morris’s book and come away thinking that something like trans doesn’t exist or is ‘merely’ a trick of the imagination.
Morris describes her earliest memory as being a young boy sitting under his mother’s piano–at the age of three or four–and realizing that he had been ‘born in the wrong body’.11 In the years that followed – through The military, Marriage and Fatherhood – the conviction never left him.
It was only on meeting the famous New York-based endocrinologist Dr Harry Benjamin that some solution to the problem presented itself. These were the very earliest stages of trying to understand trans.
A few doctors like Benjamin had satisfied themselves from their study that a certain minority of people felt that they were born in the body of the wrong sex.
Nevertheless, all questions of what to do about this still lay before them. Some professionals like Benjamin came to the conclusion that something could be done.
And as he once put it, ‘I ask myself, in mercy, or in common sense, if we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction?’
To alter the body, or as Morris put it ‘to expunge these superfluities . . . to scour myself of that mistake, to start again’, was not just what he had wanted, but what he had dreamed of and indeed prayed for.
In Conundrum Morris describes how the desire to become a woman became stronger with every passing year.
Each year his male body ‘seemed to grow harder around me’. Morris was on a form of hormone therapy from 1954 until 1972 and describes accurately the strange effects of feeling younger and softer that female hormones have on men when they take them. The hormones not merely stripped away the layers of maleness that Morris had felt accumulating around him but stripped away too the ‘unseen layer of accumulated resilience, which provides a shield for the male of the species, but at the same time deadens the sensations of the body’.
The result over time was that Morris became a ‘somewhat equivocal’ figure. Some people thought he was a male homosexual, others something in between the sexes. On occasion, men would open doors for him and otherwise mistake him for a woman. All this was before the surgery.
In those days very few surgeons in Europe or America were willing to carry out procedures which were still at such an experimental stage. But equally nobody was sure of what it was that led some individuals to want to change from one sex to another.
Did it represent a form of Mental Illness? If not always, then might it on occasion? And if so, how could anybody tell the two States of Mind apart? How could this urge to remove a part of one’s body be distinguished from a patient telling a doctor that they believed themselves to be Admiral Nelson and in pursuit of this belief wanted their right arm removed? Could somebody wanting their penis removed be any more sane?
In the 1960s and 1970s the few surgeons willing to carry out such procedures needed a number of assurances.
- One was that The Patient must in no way be psychotic.
- Secondly, by changing sex The Patient must not be abandoning anybody who depended on them in the sex they were currently in.
- Thirdly, The patient should have been undergoing hormone treatment for a length of time.
- And finally, The Patient must have lived in The Role of the gender they were adopting for a number of years.
In the end, after years of hormone treatment, Morris chose to go for his surgery in Morocco with Dr Georges Burou (referred to in Conundrum as ‘Dr B-’).
This doctor had already performed gender reassignment surgery on another famous British male to female transsexual, April Ashley and, though he kept a low profile, by this stage Dr Burou was famous in certain circles. So much so that ‘Visiting Casablanca’ became a fairly well-known euphemism for changing sex.
For his patients, visiting Dr Burou in his surgery and recuperation centre in the back streets of Casablanca was–as Morris said–‘like a visit to a wizard’.
Anyone who doubts that there are some people completely persuaded of the need to change sex should consider Morris’s description of what he was willing to go through.
Two nurses entered his room at Dr Burou’s clinic, one French and one Arab. James is told that he will be operated on later but that they need to shave his privates.
Since he has a razor he shaves himself while the two nurses sit on the table swinging their legs. He uses the cold water and the Moroccan soap to shave his pubic region and then goes back to the bed to be injected.
The nurses tell him to go to sleep and that the operation will take place later.
But Morris gives a moving description of what happens next.
After the two nurses have left the room he gets out of bed, rather shakily, because the drug was starting to work, and ‘went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye and a wink for luck.’
Morris spent two weeks in the clinic, wrapped and bandaged, and described the feeling after the operation as one of being ‘deliciously clean. The protuberances I had grown increasingly to detest had been scoured from me. I was made, by my own light, normal.’
Morris described the period following the operation, including after the return home, as the experience of a constant feeling of ‘euphoria’.
This went along with an absolute certainty that ‘I had done the right thing.’
Nor did the feeling of happiness wear off.
At the time of writing Conundrum, Morris was aware that what had happened in the process of James becoming Jan was ‘one of the most fascinating experiences that ever befell a human being’.
There can be little doubting it.
This Tiresias had a view not only on the movement between the sexes but of The Distinctive Ways in Which Society Looks – or at any rate looked – at Men and Women.
The cab driver who sidles up to her and places a not-unwanted kiss on her lips.
The Things People Say to Men but Not to Women.
The Things People say to Women but Not to Men.
And also That Greater Secret: not how The World views Men and Women, but How Men and Women differently view The World.
Not much of this would satisfy a Modern Feminist. For instance, Morris described the fundamentally different viewpoints and attitudes between the sexes.
So, as a Man, James was far more interested in the ‘great affairs’ of his time, whereas as a Woman Jan acquired a new concern ‘for small’ affairs.
After becoming a woman Jan writes, ‘my scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for the telling detail.
The emphasis changed in my writing, from Places to People.’
She is willing to admit what problems it caused. It had been a tragedy in some ways, and it had certainly put severe strains on all those around her. Before her operation in 1972 she had to divorce her wife, Elizabeth, though she subsequently remarried her in 2008 after same-sex civil partnerships had become legal in the UK.
The four surviving children who she fathered obviously did not have the easiest time adapting to the change in circumstances, though they seem to have been as adaptive as anyone could be.
But by her own admission the whole process caused bewilderment among many, and culminated in a process by which a ‘fine body’ was ‘deformed with chemicals and slashed by the knife in a distant city!’ All this to reach what she sums up as reaching ‘Identity’, with a capital ‘I’.
As she says, ‘Of course one would not do it for fun, and of course if I had been given the choice of a life without such complications, I would have taken it.’
Nothing, she says, could have shaken her conviction that the person born as a he was in fact a she. And in search of a fulfilment of that realization there is, she says, absolutely nothing she would not have done.
If she were trapped in that cage again, she says at one point, ‘nothing would keep me from my goal . . . I would search the earth for surgeons, I would bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought.’
It is perfectly easy to recognize that there are people who are born intersex. After reading the account of someone like Morris it is possible to understand there may be some people born as one sex who sincerely believe that they should be in the body of the other sex.
What is exceptionally hard – and what we currently have few means of knowing – is how to navigate the leap beyond biology into Testimony.
Intersex is biologically provable. Trans may in the years to come turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable.
But we don’t even have much idea which field it might ever come under."
Excerpt from : —
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
by Douglas Murray
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