Half a century ago, when I was a kid, the most famous “male-to-female” person on earth – in fact, the only really famous one at all – was Christine Jorgensen (1926-89), a sometime GI who underwent “sex-change” surgery in Denmark in 1952 and who, in a bestselling 1967 autobiography, bared it all, including the fact that his name at birth was George William Jorgensen, Jr.
Nowadays, that’s called “deadnaming.” A transgender person’s birth name is a historical fact, but the convention now – the iron law, in fact – is to treat it as the most shameful of secrets. On Christine Jorgensen’s Wikipedia page, consequently, the name George William Jorgensen, Jr., is nowhere to be found. On the “talk” page, where the main page’s contents are debated by Wikipedia contributors, you can find a staggeringly long thread about “deadnaming.” While multiple contributors fiercely defend the absence of Jorgensen’s original name on the grounds that deadnaming is “an act of violence” – with one of them aping transgender rhetoric to the effect that Jorgensen was “always” Christine and that “her being named ‘George’ at birth was an error” – another contributor, to his credit, dares to question the requirement that a transgender person’s “entire pre-transition life should be forcibly erased from collective memory.”
My subject here, however, is not Christine Jorgensen, whose only claim to fame was being transgender avant la lettre, but Jan Morris (1926-2020), who was one of the most celebrated travel writers of the era, and whose biography, Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides, has just appeared in her native Britain and will be published in the U.S. in early December. There is much to say about Morris, a fascinating figure who in 1953, as a London Times correspondent, accompanied Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their pioneering ascent of Mount Everest, but the first thing that Morris’s biographer, Paul Clements, wants to tell readers in this 597-page volume, is that, since Morris’s “chosen pronouns were ‘she’ and ‘her,’” he has “honored” this choice “throughout the book.” That explanation appears in an “Author’s Note” in which Clements, himself a travel writer and a longtime friend of Morris’s, cringingly apologizes to sensitive readers who might be offended by his quoting of old materials in which Morris, who was christened James, is – gasp – referred to by that forbidden name.
So it is that while Clements, in the early chapters about his subject’s childhood in Clevedon, Somerset, calls Morris’s two older brothers by their birth names and refers to them as “he” and as “boys” and, indeed, as “brothers,” Morris, who at the time was known to all and sundry as James, is referred to consistently as “she.” And so we get sentences like this: “Not yet ten, she was about to embark on the next phase of her education.” That next phase took place at Oxford, where “she” sang in the boys’ choir at Christ Church Cathedral. Later we read about “her” joining the army right after the end of the war in Europe. (During “her time in the army,” Clements tells us, “she and another soldier were immediately seconded to operate all Venice’s motor boats.”) Later still, “she” marries a woman, Elizabeth, and fathers several children. On the Everest expedition, “she” grows a beard.
We read a quotation from one of Morris’s Times colleagues, Peregrine Worsthorne, who explains that Morris’s first job at the paper, as a copyeditor, involved securing approval from academic specialists for editorial changes, which, Worsthorne recalls, required a “great gift of diplomacy, charm and sensitivity, with all of which [Morris] was preternaturally endowed.” See what Clements did there? Obviously Worsthorne must have said “he,” but Clements chose to spare us from the pronominial malfeasance by replacing “he” with the name Morris in brackets. Clements pulls this sort of thing a bunch of times.
To be sure, he strives not to write sentences that sound too absurd. So when he’s writing about Morris growing a beard, he says “Morris” and not “she.” But there’s always a “she” a sentence or two away – so that in the chapters about pre-op Morris we’re constantly being invited to picture a girl, and, later, a woman, when the person in question was, biologically, and to all appearances, a full-blooded XY male. As a result, the reader is obliged, sentence by sentence, to translate Clements’s politically correct language into images – a boy chorister, a male soldier – that the biographer is prohibited by the current rules from describing honestly.
Reading this book, then, is a weird experience: at every turn, one feels pressured to swallow a patently false picture of the world, a picture shaped retrospectively by an ideology that didn’t even exist during the time period that one is reading about. Hence a book that should have been a pleasant enough read – it’s the colorful, well researched story of a journalist who traveled everywhere and who interviewed the likes of Che Guevara and Kim Philby – instead fosters a strange tension. Instead of getting lost in Morris’s life, one is constantly noticing Clements’s fancy pronoun footwork. One finds oneself wondering: What phenomenon on earth, other than transgenderism, requires a writer to jump constantly through such hoops to avoid facing squarely up to a simple fact – in this case, the biological sex of his subject? Why should an account of events that took place almost a century ago be distorted by the ideological fetishes of the present day? Quick question: let’s say somebody wanted to make a movie out of Clements’s biography. Would it be considered unacceptable to have male actors play the young James Morris, and to have other characters actually call him “James”? Presumably so.
Another thought: even if you affirm the magical idea that when a man announces he’s a woman he not only becomes a woman from that moment forward but retrospectively becomes a woman, and, prior to that, a girl, I don’t understand the need to make James Morris, in this book, “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” It seems to me that if your inclination is to celebrate this person’s supposed discovery of his “real” self, and the drastic – heroic? – measures he undertook to make his body conform to his perceived inner identity, then wouldn’t it underscore the drama of his transformation, and the courage of his actions, to refer to his pre-op person by his pre-op name and pronouns? Wouldn’t a sudden switch from “he” to “she” at the time of the surgery only underscore the magnitude and supposed triumph of the change?
Needless to say, throughout most of Morris’s life, nobody believed that a man could become a woman. When James became Jan, the word “transgender” had yet to be coined; its predecessor, “transsexual,” was coined by Harry Benjamin, the Park Avenue endocrinologist who first gave Morris hope that he might be able to make the journey from he to she. Back then, a person like Morris was considered by every doctor on earth to be suffering from a mental disorder, although one that in most cases was relatively benign.
Referring to Morris as “she” or as “Miss” or “Ms.,” was a matter of politeness, equivalent to a courtesy title. After all, Morris had gone to such trouble to look and act and sound like a woman that it seemed harmless to play along, especially since his kind was such a rarity. Nowadays, however, claimants to transgender identity are rare no longer, and we’re expected not only to reject biology itself by saying that trans women are women but also, by saying that they always were women, to buy into a Stalinist rewriting of history. Yes, swapping out “he” with “she” may seem like an act of kindness, but experienced at over 500 pages’ length in Clements’s book, it feels like a brutal beating – with truth as the victim.
Confession: I stopped reading Clements’s book at page 123, before the operation. I couldn’t take any more mind-fucking. Maybe I’ll return to it later. But for the moment I decided to turn instead to Morris’s own book Conundrum (1974), an intelligent, honest, and elegantly written little work of 148 pages that, in lucid, moving prose, explains how the author, at age forty-seven, ended up on an operating table having his manly bits removed. The operation had been a long time coming: “I was three or perhaps four years old,” writes Morris, “when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body.”
What a difference between the two books! In Conundrum, unlike in Clements’s biography, there are no hang-ups about deadnaming. “I was named James Humphry Morris,” Morris states on page two. Morris doesn’t pretend to have always been a girl: “I was rather an attractive boy,” she tells us on page 19. And on page five, Morris writes about gender identity as follows: “I present the confusion in cryptic terms, and I still see it as a mystery. Nobody really knows why some children, boys and girls, discover in themselves the inexpungable belief that, despite all the physical evidence, they are really of the opposite sex.”
Note the modesty of this formulation, as compared to the impudent, reality-denying way in which transgender activists nowadays demand that we talk about this phenomenon. Morris calls it a “mystery,” speaks of discovering not a fact but a “belief,” and provides a personal interpretation consistent with the traditional view of it as a psychiatric disorder of unknown cause – perhaps genetic, perhaps hormonal, perhaps environmental. In any event, Morris confesses to still seeing the whole thing as a “riddle” and admits to having been driven by a “tragic and irrational ambition…to escape from maleness into womanhood.” Clements claims to skirt the name “James” and the pronoun “he” out of respect for Morris, but Conundrum makes it clear that Clements is being guided not by Morris’s approach – which was grounded in reality and suffused with humility – but by the inexorable, bullying dictates of trans ideology.
Conundrum makes another thing clear: namely, that unlike the overwhelming majority of the hordes of young people who today have succumbed to the trans trend, Morris was plainly a legitimate case of gender dysphoria, experiencing it from earliest childhood at a time when absolutely nobody in his world, as far as he knew, had similar experiences or could explain to him what he was feeling. From beginning to end, Conundrum is wise and charming and tender – a beautiful book that makes one feel nothing but respect and empathy for its remarkable author. It models a way of writing about gender dysphoria, at once sensitive and sensible, that Clements should have sought to emulate. And it could not differ more strikingly from the testimonies served up on social media by armies of callow, narcissistic young people who, mindlessly regurgitating trans-movement talking points after having decided the day before yesterday that they’d been born into the wrong body, aggressively demand, to the cheers of their friends and teachers, that all of society reorder itself around their delusions.
This all started back in the early 1970s with that David Bowie’s ”Ziggy Stardust ” ….. the times are a ch ch changing , but not for the better as it’s a great unravelling of society as it’s a much under apreciated achievement to have corralled, disciplined and regimented the sexes into male/female
Unreason is primordial. We are born magical thinkers. Religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism) are filled with magical thinking premises and magical thinking beliefs. We develop our rationality as we grow into maturity, few people ever become completely rational, and follow reason all the way in every sphere of their lives. Rationality always remains a constant choice of free will, at any point in an individual’s life he can either make honest mistakes leading him to wrong conclusions or willfully choose the irrational, wilfully choose unreason, wilfully choose to evade reality.
“Our minds are lazier than our bodies…. We have not the strength to follow our reason all the way.” – La Rochefoucauld
I’m not sure which is lazier, your mind or your body.
You forgot to mention one more example of magical thinking – the vote
You gutless coward.
You sit there pretending to be brave when you bash the religions that gave you an actual vote, but you are far too much of a worm to call out the rampant and obvious electoral fraud
Go on, keep telling us more of your “brave, revolutionary thinking against religion”
As if anything that comes out of your mouth isn’t perfectly in line with the powers in charge
Worm.
It sounds all to confusing to read
Why did you bother to read the book at all?
I can understand why you read his own autobiography but reading today’s sycophantic drivel is beyond me.
Perhaps I should thank you for taking the trouble on my behalf.
Bc he wants to pretend that anything else matters when the vote has been stolen.
Its all normal citizen. See, hes “edgy” he even used the word “mindfuck” in his cool, edgy article. He’s a scholar. Dont worry citizen, those “cheating” dems were naughty, but we’ll get those rascals, dont you worry!
We’ll see.
Boys have a penis. Girks have a vagina.
You can’t say that! Men give birth! 6’5″, 250-pound women compete better at sports than the average woman, even if the better competitor has to shave twice a day! Please, keep up with things — we have entered a brave new world and it has SUCH people in it! //sarc//
………………..
“SEX is determined by what’s between your LEGS.
GENDER is determined by what’s between your EARS.”
………………..
I take a sort-of Engineering/Scientific Approach to the issue or question “What is a ‘Woman’?”
I like to use the ‘definition’ that a “Woman” is an adult female “Human Being.”
One fairly simple, foolproof measure is that, if their genetics indicate “XY Chromosomes,” the individual is a Female (or, if you prefer, ‘Woman.’)
I’ve never heard of ANY possible way to take an individual with XY chromosomes and somehow “convert” or “change” their chromosomes to “XX”.
From that, I conclude and assert that ‘no one can change from ‘male’ to ‘female’ or vice versa. (At least, given “today’s” science.)
BUT, if either ‘flavor’ of individual ‘human’ chooses, for whatever reasons, to present themselves to the ‘outside world’ as someone displaying the outside or ‘visible’ characteristics of the opposite sex, that is their choice and nobody should deny them the right to do so, whether they also choose anatomical modifications to more closely resemble their chosen or preferred Gender.
That may not be a complete ‘answer,’ but I think it’s a start. 🙂
Take That, Matt Walsh!
Could this be the solution to pronouns when writing:
State clearly that the person being discussed is a transwoman or transman and then use
s/he, he/r, he/rs as pronouns…
Ziggy Stardust was fun, but what came after…
Reasonable, but isn’t “it” more useful after a person has transitioned? Things that have no innate sex are neuter. English, with its neuter third person pronouns, is a very practical language for this.
An interesting analysis, and one that puts me off reading the biography under discussion. I have a few volumes of Morris’s writing (pre-transition) on my bookshelves and have always considered the irony of such beautifully descriptive prose as coming from a writer so tortured; in much the same vein as Walter/Wendy Carlos.
Eddie Willers would have no idea what you’re talking about. Nor would he care to find out. Healthy soul that he is.
Eddie Willers is probably the most noble character in “Atlas Shrugged” and I just hate what Rand did to him in the end.
You’re failing to understand the meaning of Eddie Willers character. Ayn Rand is not punishing Eddie at the end of the novel. What Ayn Rand is illustrating with Eddie’s ambiguous fate (he could still be rescued by Dagny and Galt) is that the common man (and we are all the common man in one way or another) depends on the brains of the genius for intellectual and economic progress.
I don’t know about you, but I could never invent the internal combustion engine from scratch, or formulate the Calculus like Isaac Newton from scratch, or formulate the Theory of Relativity like Einstein. The vast majority of us are the Eddie Willers that without the Newtons, the Einsteins, the Rockefellers, the Steve Jobs, would be left behind in a stagnant world. That’s just a FACT of life. I can be the most decent, kind, dedicated, loving, person in the world but without the towering geniuses we would all be living in a stagnant economy.
“Critical Essays The Role of the Common Man in Atlas Shrugged: The Eddie Willers Story”
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/atlas-shrugged/critical-essays/the-role-of-the-common-man-in-atlas-shrugged-the-eddie-willers-story
“Ayn Rand deliberately leaves Eddie’s fate unresolved. His friends may rescue him and take him to the valley, where he deserves to be, but it’s also possible that Dagny and Francisco will be unable to find him in the desert and he’ll die. Eddie’s dependence on the strikers is a final example of the relationship between the common man and the creative geniuses. When the great minds are free to act upon their thoughts, they create abundance and the common man flourishes. However, when geniuses are enslaved, they’re unable to generate prosperity, and the common man suffers as a result. Eddie Willers — the moral best of every man — understands this truth. His moral status lies in his veneration of the mind.” – Objectivist philosopher Andrew Bernstein
“The Psychology of Atlas Shrugged Characters | Eddie Willers”
You lose me when you write “she FATHERED”! I refuse to indulge the INSANE by using nonsense nouns! NO ONE PERSON can be “they” or “them”! And no FATHER can be a “she” or “her”! Hey, I’m old and didn’t get this way by being STUPID!
1. While still in the US, in elementary school at the time, the joke among boys was to refer to Jorgenson as “A Danish without nuts”
2, My question to transgender advocates is: How does a transgender person put a tampon in her penis at that time of the month when he is menstruating?
They put the tampon in a different hole, because, like most of their homosexual counterparts they get anything they can.
Gender “confusion” is indeed, a mental disorder. Pretending that you can alter what “biology” nature gave you, is an insult to science itself.
Their getting more scary all the time time to hide your kids from these perverts
Religious people throughout history voluntarily die for their god. They are so convinced in that reality! That god loves and approves of them But its only a belief. Not a fact!
Yes a Trans can believe they changed their sex. But its all in their heads and being supported by friends.
I say no matter how many hormones and surgeries a woman has… If she has a womb, the person is biologically a female.
Its wrong to condemn a person because of their religious beliefs just as its wrong to condemn a transsexual actually believing they changed their sex. But note again! Beliefs and facts are two different things.
“Its wrong to condemn a person because of their religious beliefs…”
That depends on what the SPECIFIC religious belief is. Religious beliefs can be benign or outright evil. Religious beliefs can be semi-rational, i.e., the conclusion itself can be benevolent but the reasoning supporting it can be irrational.
Killing infidels because they are infidels deserves all the rational, moral, condemnation possible. Female Genital Mutilation is abonimable. Sex slavery because your Holy Scripture claims it is moral and justified is rationally grotesque. Throwing homosexuals off roof tops is monstrous.
Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
RAND:
Qua religion, no—in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very—how should I say it?—dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand
Playboy, March 1964
Recently a writer, one I had been following, described a person who is a self proclaimed “transgender”and who was arrested (for a sex crime on a child, no less) as having done an act with “her (male sex organ)”.’
It may be politically correct but a “her” cannot have a (male sex organ), so which will it be. Her or not a her? Male body part or no male body part?
They’re not only butchering language but young people’s bodies now.
I am sympathetic to mental illness, but I just cannot do this.
And I Unfollowed that writer.