My fifteen-year-old granddaughter remarked to me recently that, having given the matter some thought, she would remain female. One of her friends had identified as male and it occurred to me that this was the first generation to have a widespread belief that the choice existed, not least because they have been encouraged in that belief. As it happened I had just returned from Trieste and there was a link in that what is regarded as the best book on that city is Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere; the same author wrote the best known – and possibly the best – book on changing sex, Conundrum, published in 1974.

I go back seventy years with Morris since I an old enough to remember the news about the ascent of Everest being broken on the morning of the coronation by the 26-year-old journalist James Morris. Later on I read and enjoyed his book on Oxford (1965) where I was an undergraduate and also the one on Venice (1960) where I seemed to end up at some stage every year in the 1960s, usually because I was with a companion who had never been there before.

In 1974 Morris published what was now her book on the change. The process had taken forty years. She recalls that, “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body . . . “ Nevertheless he grew up and lived an apparently happy and certainly successful life as chorister, student, soldier, journalist and then travel writer and historian. In his thirties he began hormone treatment to feminise and after twelve years, in 1972, went to Morocco for an operation which completed the process. In 1949 he had married Elizabeth Tuckniss with whom he had five children, though one died in infancy. They stayed together after his change and in 2008 registered a civil partnership as two women. Jan died in 2020 aged 94 and Elizabeth in 2024 aged 99.

Though Morris appears on many a list of “trans” icons, it is very much the case – to use an expression I have heard in Ireland more often than anywhere else – that her account of transsexuality is not what you would imagine and is actually at odds not only with many of the doctrines of the current LGBTQ movement, but also with fairly widespread liberal conventional beliefs about sex and gender. One of the first surprises is the observation that someone trapped in the wrong body can actually enjoy the use of that body. Morris reports that his fit male body was necessary for his first big break, the Everest expedition, on which he was the only journalist, because “ . . . at an agile twenty-six I was patently better suited for it than than most of my colleagues at Printing House Square”; they were smokers and drinkers who took little exercise. She also enjoyed the army as an overt man, remarking that, “I was kindly treated in the army; and far from making a man of me, it only made me feel more profoundly feminine at heart”.

For Morris sex is a feature of the body, “the equipment”, whereas gender is a feature of the self or soul, the essential and immutable part of one’s identity. She says, “ . . . . my own version of the female principle was one of gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping rather than leading . . . ”. Of course this is not just at odds with much feminist thought, but also with most conventional sociology which portrays gender as a set of characteristics which are acquired through socialisation. It is a kind of gender essentialism and descended from the gender dualism of Aristotle and Aquinas. Again it is at odds with any loose contemporary orthodoxy that male and female are at most ideal types with varied and considerable overlaps. The logic is that there would be little point in changing sex to fit gender if there were not profound differences between the genders,

She argues that she had little desire to have sex with men or to wear women’s clothes. This is surely justified by her continuing to live with the same woman for over seventy years, but it is not entirely consistent. In recounting the sort of sexual encounter between boys which is fairly common in all male educational institutions, she reports frustration that her body “yearned to give, to yield, to open itself”. And having become female in shape and clothing she reports that a male taxi driver slaps her on the bottom and gives her a kiss and she blushes with pleasure. This is a hardly a feminist response, but when I read the passage out to my wife, who in similar circumstances might have caused the taxi driver to incur serious dental bills, she was surprisingly sympathetic, pointing out that if you’ve always been a woman that sort of thing is just a damn nuisance, but if you’ve always wanted to be a woman it might be rather gratifying.

I think the most important aspect of Conundrum politically is an argument which appears to follow from gender essentialism but actually stands alone. It is that we must distinguish between genuine females in male bodies (like Morris) and several categories of people who want to change sex for other reasons. She says, “Both transvestites and homosexuals sometimes suppose they would be happier if they could change their sex, but they are generally mistaken.” She adds later, “For every trans-sexual who grasps that prize, Identity, ten, perhaps a hundred, discover it only to be a mirage in the end, so that their latter quandary is hardly less terrible than their first.” And in fact the latter passages in the book seem largely intended to put people off the change despite the author stressing that it completed her own happiness.

It is surely axiomatic that because a person wants something it does not follow that they are right to want it. People imagine that marriage, a lottery win, a university degree, a facelift, emigration and a thousand other things will complete them and make them happy, but they usually don’t. Unhappy people for the most part remain unhappy. Morris was a happy person, with a lifelong partner and children and an enormous capacity for the sensual pleasures of beauty and nature. She had a particular pity for homosexuals who “leave behind only a void”. And she would have been entirely scornful of trans-sexuals who want to compete in women’s sport since she regarded competitive sport as clearly contrary to the nature of female gender. In short nothing could be more incompatible with a genuine desire to be feminine than a desire to cycle faster than anyone else let alone a desire to beat the crap out of another woman in a boxing ring.

Thus the most famous of writers on changing sex actually offers powerful arguments against the principle that people should be allowed to become whatever it is they identify with.

(My italicised note on my article on circumcision applies in its entirety to this piece.)

Lincoln Allison November 2024