Jan Morris has died

[Needmoresleep]

A Mail obit, because I don’t have a Times subscription and can’t face reading the Guardian one. (It may be OK, it might not.)

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8972175/RICHARD-KAY-Jan-Morris-really-boldest-adventurer.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8972175/RICHARD-KAY-Jan-Morris-really-boldest-adventurer.html

I remember reading Conundrum when I was a teenager, along with several of the travel books. The book offered a real window into the pressure on someone with gender dysphoria and it would be hard not to feel sympathy. I wonder what she thought of the current mess.

Latterly JM did not think they had become a woman (We knew that already) but some sort of spiritual in between.

What I remember about JM is a story about the time they did not come down to join their wife and children for Christmas dinner because they were busy writing a book. Luckily JM’s wife did all that work and kept the children cheerful so that JM could be whoever they, and they alone, wanted to be.

Thanks for posting OP. I didn't know much about Jan, not being the outdoorsy adventurous type (beyond the odd ramble, nice pubs a bonus), but I had read a couple of interviews.

I probably don't agree with much of what she said and/or did, but I don't think a lot of the earlier comments on this board were in particularly good taste.

What I remember about JM is a story about the time they did not come down to join their wife and children for Christmas dinner because they were busy writing a book. Luckily JM’s wife did all that work and kept the children cheerful so that JM could be whoever they, and they alone, wanted to be.

And when JM was with the British team conquering Everest, and enjoying the glory of being the first journalist to report the success, JM's wife was at home giving birth.

I don't have any animus against JM, who seemed a likeable enough person. But I think she's interesting as an example of the old-school trans-sexual rather than the sort of person who claims to have a female penis and then demands that lesbians have sex with them. In other words, even as someone who was largely harmless, JM is still a problematic figure for feminists.

Like most AGPs, Morris is only interested in what Morris wanted

A couple of friends are going through nasty divorces and I can confirm men who are not AGP can be the same. Travel writers can be inherently selfish. (I know one who admits it is not a family friedly occupation.) Successful people are often selfish and driven.

Something drove Jan Morris. You don't chuck in what sounds like an idyllic life (family, creative career, social status) and undertake risky surgery without being driven. None of us will know whether the force was AGP or a more general type of body dysphoria, but we surely can agree it was major. It would have been difficult for the wife, but she would not be the first to have found out that their spouse was not the person they thought they married.

What was Jan Morris expected to do? Be kind and stay quiet for the sake of the spouse and family. As if they were a 'real' woman.

Jan Morris was a pioneer in many ways and should be respected for her work. (I am using her preferred pronouns - and guess what that didn't hurt me!) lols

Work largely inaccessible to women at the time.

What was Jan Morris expected to do? Be kind and stay quiet for the sake of the spouse and family. As if they were a 'real' woman.

well, I can't speak for anyone else, but for my children, and for a certain extent my partner, I'm certainly willing to come down for dinner (and even cook it!) and be present for major life-events that I had caused (such as being born - not that I had an awful lot of choice there)

I think it's tremendously selfish to expect a partner to be a bit-part in your adventurous life story. Feel free to travel and write, but how about you face up to it not being fair to others to have everything you want and damn the consequences?

@NeonIcedcoffee

Prominent woman writer's death is r elevant to feminism I'd think? *@Escapeplanning*

Um....yes, but that’s not what this is about.

If anything trans people and gender fluid challenge the patriarchal boundaries that keep us all enslaved.

I don’t agree with that. People who identify as trans or gender fluid depend on patriarchal gender stereotypes in order to define themselves. Look at the anger when signals like wearing a pink hoodie or carrying a gold lame pocketbook aren’t recognised as meaning ‘I’m a woman’, or the statement that liking makeup, heels & nail polish means someone has ‘girl genes’.

Or the anger on Twitter over men like Jaden Smith & Harry Styles wearing dresses because that’s viewed as ‘appropriating trans culture’. twitter.com/sara_james2/status/1327767658520072192?s=21

Just found the link I was looking for. www.independent.co.uk/voices/will-smith-s-son-new-face-louis-vuitton-womenswear-might-seem-progressive-it-s-threatening-transgender-territory-a6797461.html

So, many men are nasty abusive arseholes. We know that and we don't typically celebrate them on the feminism board when they die.

As ever, I'm much more interested in Elizabeth and the children who seem to be celebrated for their uncomplaining support of Morris's narcissistic excesses. Again, this is the story we're fed, about how stunning and brave the men are for transitioning at the peak of their successful careers while their wives and children are reduced to bit parts.

I don't know much about Jan but from what I've read was certainly an interesting character. I'm sure I saw something on TV about her not long ago too but can't remember what it was, part of a wider documentary I think?
Anyway, i was surprised at the tone of the Guardian's news article's (not the obit) focus on her transition.

Man or woman I think Jan Morris had an exceptional career as a journalist and writer. From the Suez crisis to the history of the British empire and travel. Of course, in that era all male writers enjoyed male and class privilege - I'm sure many too left their partners to 'do the kids'. The autobiography and sex change are well known - they were shocking and scandalous at the time (a time I would not wish to return to) but in later life he/she came to recognise that they were both male and female. To imagine Jan Morris's sexual identity is the sum of who they were is to diminish all of us. The breadth of writing was exceptional, insightful and well informed.

When I read the obit of a life well lived I thought that its a shame there aren't more transexuals today who want to pursue intellectually rigorous or useful careers - rather than simply try to become activists, feeding off their parade of self identity and wanting to take women's jobs as women's officers. I'm not sure how much Jan Morris had in common with them.

I am genuinely concerned about the erosion of women's rights but whatever 'they' might say I am not trans-exclusionary. That means I can recognise and value the life of Jan Morris. It doesn't mean I concede anything about women's rights.

The Internet has been in wide use for maybe 30 years?

Brilliant but about 5 - 10 years out in terms of wide use.

If anything trans people and gender fluid challenge the patriarchal boundaries that keep us all enslaved.

Jan Morris is a prime example of that being untrue, evidently believing wholeheartedly in gender stereotypes.

What was Jan Morris expected to do? Be kind and stay quiet for the sake of the spouse and family. As if they were a 'real' woman.

I'd be interested to know what options Morris's wife felt she had, and if she did want things to be different. She stayed with Morris despite the divorce due to the sex-change.

I can recognise and value the life of Morris too bouledeneige. I'm just not sure why that recognition is on a board which is about feminism.

Exactly boule, there's a bit in the obit about all travel writing essentially being "one enormous ego-biography". If I had any time for reading I might go and read some of Jan's work.

[quote EmpressWitchDoesntBurn]If anything trans people and gender fluid challenge the patriarchal boundaries that keep us all enslaved.

I don’t agree with that. People who identify as trans or gender fluid depend on patriarchal gender stereotypes in order to define themselves. Look at the anger when signals like wearing a pink hoodie or carrying a gold lame pocketbook aren’t recognised as meaning ‘I’m a woman’, or the statement that liking makeup, heels & nail polish means someone has ‘girl genes’.

Or the anger on Twitter over men like Jaden Smith & Harry Styles wearing dresses because that’s viewed as ‘appropriating trans culture’. twitter.com/sara_james2/status/1327767658520072192?s=21[/quote]
I think if you read the rest of the tweets by Sara James you will see that was a parody comment.

I think if you read the rest of the tweets by Sara James you will see that was a parody comment.

Is this article also a parody? It certainly reads like it is.

In another tweet Sara_James2 posted a video of herself explaining that as a trans woman she has the benefit of male biological muscle memory which is not cancelled out by oestrogen and that she disagrees with IOC's stance on trans competitors.

Back to Jan Morris.

I posted as, prior to GRA reform proposals I, like most people, was sympathetic to what were known as transsexuals. In my case influenced by reading Jan Morris' book as a teenager. I remain, and want to remain, sympathetic to the roughly 5,000 people who were protected by that act, and am pleased when people like Rose of Dawn speak up.

I'm not sure if the law was drafted for people like Jan Morris though. Wasn't it to enable same-sex marriage by allowing one of the parties to 'change sex'? Jan Morris was, and remained, heterosexual and transitioned in middle age after fathering children.

From the Guardian obituary:

Morris’s written voice always sounded certain, as if he strode about the world whistling. Yet what he was most sure about, and had been since toddlerhood, was that the male body of James was an error; that James’s identity was female.

“I was a member of two clubs in London, one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes change my identity in a taxi between the two.”

Morris first claimed the tired old "wrong body" trope to justify 'transition' into, presumably, the 'right body' which of course is simply a version of a male body minus some parts and with the addition of others.
And, having achieved that body, proceeded to airily dismiss the inconvenience of bodily realities of the opposite sex - that would be my sex then, the sex that has those ovaries Morris waves away dismissively.

Our bodies only apparently matter to the extent that they can be cosmetically appropriated by men. The rest of us, which actually comprises EVERYTHING that makes us female, is of course unimportant.

Morris may have been a great travel writer, I don't know.
But I reject those views on my sex as being incompatible with seeing me as a fully human person. In other words, those views are indistinguishable from the views any sexist man holds.

And so, whilst I have no issue with discussing Morris in a feminist forum, it won't be to celebrate those views. It will be to point out that Morris considered my sex to be a mythical amalgamation of stereotypes possessed of cosmetic skin deep modifications to male bodies. Something men can become, or be in their heads.

In short, Morris was no friend to women, and no celebratory cause for feminism.

I think if you read the rest of the tweets by Sara James you will see that was a parody comment

Thanks Dido.

I don’t see anything to suggest the Independent article isn’t serious though. This is another by the same author.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-it-s-time-take-t-out-lgbt-10493352.html

The Internet has been in wide use for maybe 30 years?

Yes, this is true. I first got online (BBS) in 1992. Compuserve and then Demon (ahhh, those were the days - my parents were on a self-hosted mail server until 2002! Because of me) about a year after that. The internet was a very restricted web at that point.

I graduated uni in 2000, mobile phones were becoming accessible for normal people, but internet still not really used. I reckon it's been 'wide use' for perhaps 20-15 years.

Having said that, as a journalist, you'd think that they might have been more au-fait sooner. My MIL (pushing 80) is completely happy on the internet, can't see why a 90 year old journalist wouldn't be.

OldCrone - that independent article apparently wasn't a parody. It was a transgender person pointing out that men who say they are women need men and women to wear a "uniform" in order that they can choose the one they want to be seen as.

The narcissism involved in thinking the rest of the world need to act in a particular way just so your identity can be recognised is quite staggering. I had previously thought it was compelled speech that was the problem!

Interesting commentary on the independent article here:

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/freerlives.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/man-wears-dress-the-two-sides-of-transgender-ideology/amp/