Sunday Times article by Jan Morris’s daughter

The Nora Ephron review is excellent. It feels amazingly fresh, in fact - but perhaps illustrates how often it happens in feminism that we have to keep relearning what previous generations of feminists had already worked out.

@DaughterOfPsychiatrist I was about to post about Katy Tur's book. I heard an interview with her on NPR and it was very powerful. Her parents used to send feed to a studio from the helicopter and one of the audio engineers made a tape of the abuse her father used to give her mother - while flying - and sent it anonymously to her mother. He was an incredibly violent and abusive man. At one point, after transition in a debate they said to Ben Shapiro"You cut that out now, or you'll go home in an ambulance"

Thank you for this post and for posting a quote that would otherwise be inaccessible to me as I do not speak Welsh.

I have never heard of JM before. I am not from the UK originally so this may be why. I have now read up a bit and echo that Suki Morys is a gifted, gifted writer.

I still find it extremely hard that this person believed from the age of 4 that they were a woman, while treating the women in their life as if they didn't really count as human beings.

Almost like it's a maladaptive psychological response to some early trauma.

Yes, that's fair enough - but I think it's pretty clear that Sukiyaki Morys does not believe that 'transition' made her father a woman in any real way. Maybe that's why the 'transition' was easy for her - different clothes, a few different words, same shitty parent.

So taking Suki's words exactly as she gives them, the transition was not difficult in itself and she would never say that people shouldn't transition. She describes the word 'daddy' being lost but presumably means that was not a particularly hard process.

What she would therefore seem to be saying is that the transition was irrelevant: JM was sexist, detached and quite cruel to women before the transition and the same afterwards. And therefore I suppose she would say that by focusing on the transition we are focusing on the wrong thing. What mattered to her was the sexism and the cruelty, to her and to her mother.

Fair enough that this is her view. I still find it extremely hard that this person believed from the age of 4 that they were a woman, while treating the women in their life as if they didn't really count as human beings.

Me too.

@OldCrone @DaughterOfPsychiatrist aaaugh what is it with trans women and their tits ??😣(please don't answer that 🙁)

I suppose one always has to be wary of an unreliable narrator in an autobiographical work, but knowing that section about the child's death is a mere romantic fiction makes me disinclined to ever read that book.

This Radio 4 Archive on 4 programme from November last year is not completely adulatory. There are clips from Twm but none of the other family members. In response to it Suki tweeted I want to correct something said about me in the programme. I didn't find Jan's transition extremely difficult at all.I don't care what gender anyone wants to be. It's the person that's important.The way Jan treated us caused the rift. The unkindness.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011jxq

I read the article and was very saddened by it. I idolised Jan Morris as a writer and still think she was a travel write par excellence. I also had some correspondence with her in the1980s/90s about the unkindness and narrow-mindedness of Thatcherism and the joy of living in places that are on the periphery. She seemed sensitive, liberal in outlook and absolutely on the same wavelength. I also read Conundrum when it first came out and found it moving. I would be more critical now, but you know: autre temps and all that....

It just goes to show how an clever use of veils allows an adroit shape-shifter to fool a lot of the people for most of the time. Good on Suki blowing it all apart.. Those are particularly nasty mind-games. Still gutted though.

There's another review of Conundrum here, by Rebecca West.

www.nytimes.com/1974/04/14/archives/conundrum-by-jan-morris-a-helen-and-kurt-wolff-book-174-pp-new-york.html

"She sounds not like a woman, but like a man's idea of a women, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be."

It's worth reading the whole review.

So doesn't look like Suki and Twm get along RoyalCorgi

Twm and Jan used to appear together at cultural events in Wales, it probably suited them both. I've just been watching a recording of one. It's interesting to hear how they both answer questions in a way which dodges any real reference to family relationships, even when it would seem to be an obvious part of the answer.

I can share the link if anyone would find it interesting.

oops!
My mother gives me unconditional love . she brought me up to accept other
people no matter what . SHE is
the epitome of kindness,There whenever I needed her , she has been a wonderful mother and I won’t say more She has dementia and so cannot have her voice right now
^^

There's this tweet reply in Welsh from Nov last year:
Diolch.
Mae fy mam yn hapus.. Dyna beth sy'n
pwysig. Mae gen i Henry a Mark .
Gobeithio cyn bo hir dwi'n gallu siarad allan.
Diolch eto, mae'n dda i gwybod mae rhai pobl yn
deall. Mae'n tipyn bach yn unig weithiau.

Which means - Thanks. My mother is happy. That's what's important. I have Henry and Mark. Hopefully I'll be able to speak out before long. Thanks again, it's good to know that some people understand. It's a little bit lonely sometimes.

And this one from today I think:

Thanks for that, @nauticant. I got most of it but the last few lines were cut off, copyright reasons I suppose. If Nora Ephron were still alive, she'd be absolutely vilified for her clear-sighted, entirely justifiable views.

I read the ST article not knowing anything about Jan Morris.
So Jan transitioned from a man into a woman-hating woman.

Love Suki's writing style. The pain and confusion are evident.

There's a November 2021 tweet here from Suki Morys referring to a BBC programme about JM. She says:

"I want to correct something said about me in the programme. I didn't find Jan's transition extremely difficult at all.I don't care what gender anyone wants to be. It's the person that's important.The way Jan treated us caused the rift. The unkindness."

It's clear from the article, though, that the transition was extremely difficult for her, so I think she's not being entirely straight there, perhaps not even with herself.

twitter.com/swiftness2009/status/1459902599465996291

Maybe it would be allowed now? I would be very interested in what you have to say

It's a horrible insight into how transgender ideology can be exploited to the extent it is. That a man's cruelty to his family can be shrouded from the public beneath the costume of acquired 'womanhood.'

And making his daughter go from school to school is horrific if there was no reason for it. It shows that it's so utterly personal.

Jan Morris fits the criteria for autogynophile completely.

The sooner this behaviour is attributed to something other than an ideology, the better.

I remember an interview with Jan M a few years ago. It was quite touching I thought at the time , I remember it featured a headstone or plaque that Jan and Elizabeth had prepared for both their deaths with an inscription beginning 'two friends'... I do wonder what Elizabeth really thinks about it all.

For anyone wanting to read the whole of Nora Ephron's 1974 review of Conundrum it's here and I'd recommend it, because what it describes is ludircrous:

books.google.co.uk/books?id=uGqKBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=%22i+suppose+everyone+knows+by+now,+james+morris+was+four+years%22&source=bl&ots=al8XjKTJ5Q&sig=ACfU3U2zhsQ1kriZLgL6ddrpKO9VYN9HGA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjp59zfzfH7AhV0m1wKHYsBCVUQ6AF6BAgJEAM#v=onepage&q=%22i%20suppose%20everyone%20knows%20by%20now%2C%20james%20morris%20was%20four%20years%22&f=false

Ephron was literally decades ahead of most of us.

(This should provide the full review but books.google can be quite temperamental and up to mischief behind the scenes, sometimes providing the full set of pages and sometimes withholding them.)

I wonder if the brothers did the decent thing and agreed to a variation of the will after Jan died, giving Suki her fair share? But I'm guessing not, or she would have mentioned it? Hmm.

What an awful person Jan turned out to be. I used to think until recently that Jan Morris was one of the exceptions but I guess not... Poor Elizabeth and poor children.

Thank you for that parallel, @DaughterOfPsychiatrist. Troubling and fascinating.

Very interesting to see Twm choose to write about his mother.

Reading Suki's article, I did wonder if Twm was perhaps Jan's favoured child - part of Jan's technique of doing Suki down was to compare her unfavourably with Twm (Sukie says "my brother" but I'm guessing it was Twm). And I've noticed there have been other articles about JM where Twm gets a positive mention. The other children rarely get talked about.