Jan Morris, Conundrum (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), Chapter 10, pp.77-81

[‘I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,’ begins Jan Morris’s autobiography. Midway through s/he gives this revealing insight into ‘the male condition’.]

By my mid-thirties my self-repugnance was more specific, and more bitter, and I began to detest the physique that had served me so loyally. After the conception of Virginia I began another tentative experiment with hormones, thinking that some degree of feminization might weaken the intensity of my distress, and allow me to stagger on through life without any more drastic denouement. When the child died, though, I abandoned this attempt, and watched myself helpless and repelled as I advanced towards a male middle-age. This was the worst period of my life. I did not know what best to do, I was tormented by an ever increasing sense of isolation from the world and from myself, and I was plunged into periods of despair that frightened Elizabeth and debilitated me. I began to suffer migraines, of the classic kind-distortions of vision and of speech which were preceded by periods of terrific elation, as though I had been injected with some gloriously stimulating drug, but which worked themselves out miserably in shattering headaches.

Now for the first time, perhaps, my anxieties developed into a trace of paranoia. I loathed not merely the notion of my maleness, and the evidence of my manhood. I resented my very connection with the male sex, and hated to be thought, even by my dearest friends, a member of it. Since I still looked to all appearances very much a man, this meant that all day long I was jarred by reminders of my condition, or infuriated by well-meant pleasantries—’You won’t be interested in this, this is women’s talk,’ or ‘What fun for Joanna, to have a young man around the house!’ At formal dinner-parties, usually among diplomats, I grew to dread the moment when the ladies left the dinner-table, leaving me squirming and alone with the port, the cigars and the awful possibility of after-dinner stories. Almost my only moments of relief occurred when, now as always, sensitive souls recognized the feminine in me, and made me feel they understood: or better still, when in my dreams I was released from my conflicts altogether, and seemed to look down upon my unhappiness as from a great distance, dressed in air—

Only in sleep

did the ice melt

from about him

and then he would

     fly

     low

and to any distance

     over the oceans

My quandary was becoming obsessive, however hard I tried to concentrate upon my work, however comforting the consolations of family and friendship. The strain was telling on me—not only the strain of playing a part, but the strain too of living in a male world. This had been fun enough at first, among the indulgent elegance of the 9th Lancers, but in a muddled and unhealthy way I had come to hate it. I had been for ten years a busy foreign correspondent, and if no life could be more enthralling, equally no life could be more full of disillusionment. No foreign correspondent of my acquaintance has been either a snob or a sycophant, but few have been optimists, either. They have seen the worst too soon in life, and they know the frauds of fame and power.

For myself, I suppose, I instinctively associated those deceits with the male condition, since then even more than now the world of affairs was dominated by men. It was like stepping from cheap theatre into reality, to pass from the ludicrous goings-on of minister’s office or ambassador’s study into the private house behind, where women were to be found doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures or writing home: and though I know this is a footling simplicism, and that realities all too terrible hang upon the labour: of public men, still I began to feel that the private part of any life was the only part that mattered. Men, when they turned from their trade to their hobby, became less aggressively men. It was in the great world outside that their grosser and sillier Instincts found expression: at home, as the gossip writers well understood, they could be almost human.

And what a world it was, through which I wandered increasingly confused down the 1950s and 1960s! I reported little but misery or chicanery, as I flew from war to rebellion, famine to earthquake, diplomatic squabble to politic trial. I listened to the pratings of corrupt politicians, or the bombast of stupid generals. I investigated reports of torture, false imprisonment, intimidation. I watched the mock-marriages of tinsel monarchs, anxious only to perpetuate their dynasties. I saw people bombed, and rocketed, and beaten, and evicted. I met Che Guevara sharp as a cat in Cuba, and Guy Burgess swollen with drink and self-reproach in Moscow, and Kim Philby, whom I thought I could have loved, deceiving us all in Lebanon. I watch Eichmann humdrum and offended within the bullet-proof glass of his courtroom cage, the common man personified as the murderer he was. I saw Powers the aerial spy paraded before the People’s Court, the peasants stumbling to give their evidence like figures from Tolstoy, the thick-set judges solemn at their dais, the sense of vast unseen forces at play behind those puppets. I watched my own beloved army floundering in degradation as it was forced, year by year, from its last imperial footholds, now and then spitting back like a cornered animal, and forced at last into that distasteful ignominy, Suez.

Everywhere I met unhappy pawns of oppression, or at least of circumstance: brilliant unhappy writers in Poland, grisly black leaders in the American South, frustrated churchmen in Rhodesia, people who wanted me to smuggle letters out of Leningrad or currency into Prague, and everywhere in those days the young patriots, passionate in their love of race or country, who thought they saw in political liberation the answer to the world’s sorrows. I saw the dismembered bodies of politicians in Iraq; I saw the charred victims of napalm in Sinai; I knew too well the frenzied mouthing and posturing of the mob, anywhere in the world, when it had a cause to kill or burn for, or a charismatic leader to inspire it. Philby once quoted to me a passage of my own, in which I had tried to express my feelings about the British action in Suez, when our allies in aggression had been the Israelis and the French. There was, I had written, ‘a despairing, pitiful dignity to the part the British played in that forlorn campaign, as of a thoroughbred gone wild among mustangs’. Philby thought this sentence comic. ‘Despairing, pitiful dignity! Thoroughbred gone wild!’ He laughed at it, but without humour, and even then, though I was privy to none of his secrets, I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that there was no true dignity in the world of affairs, no thoroughbred integrity, no pity either. It was all lies. There was no place in it for innocent surmise.

No place for me, either. You must not think me conceited if I claim that, for some years in my thirties and forties, I had a world at my feet. My work was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and the opportunities I was offered were almost unbounded. In newspapers, in television, in politics, even in diplomacy I have no doubt that I could have made for myself a long and successful career. I was exceedingly confident of my abilities, and this gave confidence to others, too, and opened many doors for me.

But I wanted none of it. It was repugnant to me. I thought of public success itself, I suppose, as part of maleness, and I deliberately turned my back on it, as I set my face against manhood. I resigned from my last job, withdrew from the chances of public life, and took to writing books, or travelling on my own behalf. I was cultivating impotence.

[Near the end of her story Jan Morris writes this inspiring paragraph:]

… I believe the trans-sexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative and essentially spiritual too. On a physical plane I have myself achieved, as far as is humanly possible, the identity I craved. Distilled from those sacramental fancies of my childhood has come the conviction that the nearest humanity approaches to perfection is in the persons of good women—and especially perhaps in the persons of kind, intelligent and healthy women past their menopause, no longer shackled by the mechanisms of sex but creative still in other kinds, aware still in their love and sensuality, graceful in experience, past ambition but never beyond aspiration. In all countries, among all races, on the whole these are the people I most admire: and it is into their ranks, I flatter myself, if only in the rear file, if only on the flank, that I have now admitted myself. (Morris, pp.146-7)