Who Are Your People? : The Losers Club

Just saw this scene for the first time, and I was actually moved to tears by it - it profoundly affected me, and got into me and affected me under my skin so much, I just found myself totally overwhelmed with a spontaneous rush of emotional intensity.

“To say it again: There is VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE between The Capacity for Mayhem and Destruction, INTEGRATED, and Strength of Character. 

This is one of the most difficult lessons of life. 

Maybe you are a loser. 

And maybe you’re not—

but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode. 

Maybe you just have a bad habit. 

Maybe you’re even just a collection of bad habits. 

Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school — it’s not necessarily appropriate now.

Circumstances change. 

If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. 

Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you should stand up for yourself. 

It will also decrease the probability that you will get to live in a good neighbourhood, have access to the highest quality resources, and obtain a healthy, desirable mate. 

It will render you more likely to abuse cocaine and alcohol, as you live for the present in a world full of uncertain futures. 

It will increase your susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and dementia. All in all, it’s just not good. Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead. That’s the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more. Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space. Alterations in body language offer an important example. If you are asked by a researcher to move your facial muscles, one at a time, into a position that would look sad to an observer, you will report feeling sadder. If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression. 29 Some of the positive feedback loops instantiated by body language can occur beyond the private confines of subjective experience, in the social space you share with other people. If your posture is poor, for example—if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory, against attack from behind)—then you will feel small, defeated and ineffectual. The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently. You might object: the bottom is real. Being at the bottom is equally real. A mere transformation of posture is insufficient to change anything that fixed. If you’re in number ten position, then standing up straight and appearing dominant might only attract the attention of those who want, once again, to put you down. And fair enough. But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you’re not only a body. You’re a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe. You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the all-too-real fact of the dragon. You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it. That can all occur practically or symbolically, as a physical or as a conceptual restructuring. To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language). To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly. It means casting dead, rigid and too tyrannical order back into the chaos in which it was generated; it means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and more productive order. So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence. People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able (or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse). Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating. Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing so will not only genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you—it will also make those good things feel better when they do happen. Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement. Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair. Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy. Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

Mama’s Rod

“And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt: and Moses took The Rod of God in his hand.” 

Exodus 4:20

Daddy’s Stick

“And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt: and Moses took The Rod of God in his hand.” 

Exodus 4:20

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The Old Maid of Anchorhead

“The exuberance of blood –the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained. 

“Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost The Only One They Ever Loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. 

The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS WE AVOID 

Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do. 

For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of Motherhood in Feminism? 

As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists. 

And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over. 

As Paglia herself has written, 

‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of The Mother in Human Life. 

Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’

If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer : three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’. 

Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless. 

Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. 

Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . 

The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. 

It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ 

Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’  

The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.

As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’ 

It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.

Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood. 

One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it, 

‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’ 

It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder. 

If it is assumed that the primary purpose in Life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. 

On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have. There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have–largely– been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives. 

But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all.

The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’. 

The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’ 

But then Berry hit on the central truth: 

“We all have to be used up by something. 

And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as–most of the time–I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. 

What better way to be used up?”

Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life? 

In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?

“Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male. 

The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism. 

The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype. But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse. 

With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy. 

She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front. 

And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today. 

Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College —and a good one, according to accounts of the time— and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National. 

Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character. 

Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness. 

For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors. But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful. 

They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos. 

Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun. 

1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.” 

The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love. 

A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “Man’s World.” 

On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society. 

In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods. 

It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny. 

Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone. 

“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!” 

A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate. 

Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder. 

In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself. 

“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!” 

However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements. 

To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy. 

Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island. 

However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least. 

As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others. 

Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock. 

Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales. 

For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph. 

Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity. 

Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther. 

The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island. 

These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations. 

The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire. 

Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result. 

Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld. 

In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.” 

And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted. 

Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth. 

It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience. 

There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat. 

She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis. 

Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy. 

As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise. 

When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients. 

Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character. 

It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together. 

The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.”

And I Did, and it Worked.

• Wisdom

• Circumspection

• Discernment 

• Trials

• Sacrifice

• Intuition

• Divination

• Prophecy

When I couldn't get Sober, 
He urged me  
Not to Give up Hope 
and 
He urged me to 
Find My Faith -

It didn't have to be his, or anyone else's, 
as long as it was rooted upon Forgiveness.

 And most importantly, 
He said that : -

If I Accepted Responsibility for My Wrongdoings,

and 
If I embraced That Part of My Soul That Was UGLY.

( "Hugging The Cactus", he calls it. )

If I Hugged The Cactus Long Enough,

I Would Become a Man of Some Humility,

and that 

My Life would Take on New Meaning.

And I Did, and it Worked.

All he asked in return was that 

I should Help The Next Guy, 

in some small way.

The Soft Power of Our Lady of Littleness

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. 

 These basic principles have not changed much in the decades since. 

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

Do a Bit, Then.

" The most striking thing is that there appear to be a set of confusions centring around the issue of  'Power'. 

Every discussion so far has centred on a presumption that almost all relationships in The Workplace and elsewhere are centred around the Exercise of Power. 

Knowingly or otherwise these Women have all imbibed the Foucauldian world view in which Power is The Most Significant Prism for Understanding Human Relationships. 

What is striking is not just that everyone seems to have paid lip-service to this, but that these women are focused only on one sort of Power. 

This is a sort of Power which – it is presumed – has historically been held solely by mainly Old, mainly Rich, always White Men. 

It is why the joking and berating about the behaviour of ‘Alpha Males’ goes down so well. 

There is a presumption that if the Alpha and Maleness could be squashed out of These People, in some great majestic Social-Justice blending device, then the Power squeezed out of them might be drunk up by Women Like Those in The Room Today. 

That it will be used to nourish, and grow, Those Who Deserve The Power More. 

Here are Deep Waters. But I suggest in my contribution that our conversations are being limited by this misunderstanding. 

Even if we concede – which we should not – that Power (rather than, say, Love) is The Most Important Force Guiding Human Affairs, why are we focusing only on one type of Power? 

There certainly are types of Power – such as rape – which Men can sometimes hold over Women. 

And there is a type of Power which some Old, typically White, Males might be able to hold over less successful people, including less successful Women. 

But there are other types of Power in This World. 

Historical Old White Man Power is not the only such source. Are there not, after all, some Powers which only Women can wield. 

‘Like what?’ Someone asks. 

At which point, having waded in this far it only makes sense to wade further. 

Among other types of Power that Women wield almost exclusively, the most obvious is this. 

That Women – not all Women, but many Women – have an ability that Men do not. 

• This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex MAD. 
• To derange Them. 
• Not only to destroy Them but to make Them destroy THEMSELVES. 

It is a Type of Power which allows a Young Woman in her late teens or twenties to take a Man with Everything in The World, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck His Life utterly for just a few moments of almost-NOTHING. "

MAURICE: 

You won't be able to do it if you can't relax and let people look at you.

It's the human form, as it is, naked, 

in all of its weakness and beauty.

JESSIE: 
Oh, yeah?

MAURICE: 

What would your mother say?

JESSIE: 

She says if I weren't born, 
She'd be better off.

JESSIE: 

Is this it?

MAURICE: 

This is it.

There.

You see?

JESSIE: 

Is her name Venus?

MAURICE: 

No.

Venus is a Goddess.

Accompanied by Eros,

She creates Love and Desire in us mortals,

leading often to Foolishness and Despair.

The Usual Shit.

For most men, a woman's body is 

The Most Beautiful Thing They Will Ever See.

JESSIE: 

What's The Most Beautiful Thing

a Girl Sees?

Do you know?

MAURICE: 

Her First Child.

Are you all right?

JESSIE: 

I'm not doing any more

of that modeling, I can tell you that.

MAURICE: 

The model for Venus was a Real Woman, 

just like you, that's what caused all The Fuss.

JESSIE: 

Do a bit, then.

MAURICE: 

Now?

JESSIE: 

If you're so good at it.

MAURICE: 

"Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand?

Come, let me clutch thee:

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still."

Now, tell me, who wrote that?

JESSIE:

I don't know.

MAURICE: 

Really?

JESSIE:

All right then, smart-arse, what about this?

"I should be so lucky,

lucky, lucky, lucky.

I should be so lucky."

Well? Who wrote it?

MAURICE: 

Not a clue.

JESSIE: 
Well, there you are then.

Hey, it's like A Beach down there.

MAURICE:

I Iived by The Sea when I was a child.

It always calms me.

Shall we go to The Seaside, Venus?

JESSIE: 

I'd rather go to Topshop.

MAURICE: 

(CHUCKLING)

I'll take you to Lunch.

JESSIE: 

Take me somewhere posh.

MAURICE: 

Posh?

JESSIE: 

I want to meet someone really famous, not just you.

Who are these bastards?

MAURICE: 

Some of these arseholes were very well-known.

JESSIE:

For what?

MAURICE: 

You cheer me up, you know.

JESSIE: 

You have a laugh at me, don't you?

MAURICE: 

Just a little.

JESSIE: 

I'll get you back.

MAURICE: 

You will.

Don't you worry.

DROOLING

The teeth prosthetics that Bill Skarsgård wore as Pennywise made him drool profusely. Director Andy Muschietti liked this as that the drooling adds onto the ravenous nature of Pennywise.

“If a culture lands on the idea that women must always be believed in cases not just of sexual assault but of unwanted sexual advances, then this must generate some confusion in society. What are people to think about, and how should they react to, those occasions when they have experienced women doing That Female Thing? 

How are they to reconcile the information that women must always be believed with the fact that there are entire industries set up to help women fool men? 

Or – to put the most positive spin on it– to entice them. 

After all, what are all those summer advertising campaigns about that invite women to ‘turn heads this summer’? 

Whose heads are they being invited to turn? 

Any and all passing women, hoping to purchase, say, the same dress or bikini? 

Or men? 

MAKE HIM DROOL 

The manner in which marketing addresses women tells us a great deal about what women are actually motivated by when they think men aren’t watching. 

Consider the endless numbers of advertising campaigns and pieces in women’s magazines dedicated to motifs like ‘Make him drool’. 

If car advertisements or shaving products aimed at men were pushed with the suggestion that the object, if acquired, would make women drool, it would not just be condemned but might well fail to appeal to men.

Google is a hive of assistance in this regard. 

Typing the words ‘Make him drool’ turns up reams of articles, adverts and online discussions. 

The words ‘Make her drool’ by contrast throw up a host of articles ranging from how to stop drooling during sleep to explanations as to why some cats dribble from their mouths. 

All this suggests our societies have arrived at a stage of seemingly industrial-strength denial. 

We have decided to forget or completely edit out things that were recognized to be valid the day before yesterday.”