Just popping this down, not to take the shine off Suki’s excellent writing and frank refusal to disappear inside Jan’s self written narrative, but to join some dots al la legendary MNetter R0wantrees…
Katy Tur, who is an American journalist/news anchor published her own childhood memoir earlier this year.
Katy’s parents were pioneers in helicopter journalism, her mother, Marika Gerrard and her father Bob Tur, documented fast paced and dangerous situations, Bob often hanging off the back of a helicopter.
Bob seems to me to be similar sort of chap to the Morris who documented the conquering of Everest.
Super macho men, but one step removed from the main adventurers, observers, but heroic, active, observers rather than passive ones. The documenting medium is different due, in part, to the decades in which these pioneering journalists made their names, but the parallels are striking.
Bob changed his name to Zoey in 2013.
theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/11/rough-draft-review-katy-turs-fascinating-and-flawed-story-of-news-and-family
look at the above article and see how far down you have to go before you get to the transition (spoiler: a long way!)
here’s a couple of extracts:
But according to Katy Tur, her father was unable to unlearn the worst lessons of his childhood and repeated the pattern of violence in his adult life, striking his wife, whipping Katy and her brother, punching holes in the living room walls.
Her father told her he had “decided to become a woman. It’s why I’ve been so angry.”
After the transition, Zoey Tur attacked Katy Tur for allegedly being transphobic. She insists she has always been supportive of such a courageous decision. But what she could not forgive was Zoey’s refusal to discuss or acknowledge the violence Bob Tur inflicted on his family, because the man who committed it no longer existed.
Tur writes: “It felt like my dad was playing a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed … I was dumbfounded by the idea that a person could change their gender … and think that in the process the deeds of the past would no longer be relevant.”
It was “like a bank robber pleading not guilty on account of gender misalignment. But that’s how my father saw it.”
“Bob Tur is dead,” Zoey Tur said.
But, Katy Tur replied, “The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead.”
Katy is Tur’s only daughter, she has one brother.
Whilst googling the links for this I was horrified to see that, according to Google, Marika Gerrard’s main achievement is being ‘Zoey Tur’s ex wife’, rather than oooh, I dunno, her 17 years working for the LA Times and then cofounding a news channel, having sound recordist and production credits on three documentary films or being a singer songwriter with a Masters in Philosophy… plus Gerrard was married to Bob, not Zoey (they split TEN YEARS PRIOR to Bob’s ‘coming out’!)
Even ‘Katy Tur’s mother’ would surely be an improvement?
here’s short interview with Bob/Zoey about transition from 9 years ago (using both names as the article does):
www.kpcc.org/show/offramp/2013-09-04/zoey-101-chopper-pilot-bob-tur-becomes-zoey-tur-part-2
Short clip of Katy here:
Excellent review of/ reflection on Katy’s memoir Rough Draft on the Children of Transitioners website here:
childrenoftransitioners.org/2022/08/14/the-wrong-side-of-his-story-reviewing-rough-draft-by-katy-tur/
I’d bloody love a long podcast series with all these three women, Suki, Katy and the author of the CoT blog.
All of them are so interesting and insightful and have grown into fascinating, intellectually accomplished women despite having incredibly difficult fathers who tried to dull their brilliance (due to what I can only assume is envy and attempts to control due to their biological, immutable, female sex).
(apologies for typos and bad formatting, Mumsnet’s current tendency to reload and jettison a long post while I’m still writing it is driving me doolally and it’s not worth the risk of losing the whole thing for the sake of a few typos/autocucumbers)
(Also, proper love that Suki is ‘Morys’ not ‘Morris’)