Conundrum

Conundrum is a 1974 memoir by British travel writer and historian Jan Morris. Born James Morris, the author was a forty-year-old married father of five when she transitioned and began to live as Jan, acting on the “passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction” that she was a woman. Conundrum is a memoir of her transition, as well as a work of powerful advocacy for the transsexual experience. While early reviews were mixed—largely due to confusion and prejudice concerning Morris’s transition—Conundrum has since come to be recognized as a “modern classic” (Foxed Quarterly). Morris was awarded a CBE for service to literature in 1999 and the 2005 Golden PEN Award for lifetime achievement.

With the opening sentence of Conundrum, Morris makes a simple declaration: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and I should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

For Morris, the conviction that she should be a girl was essentially spiritual, based on a sense that the soul has a gender and that hers was female. She felt instinctively that this truth about herself should be kept secret, although as a child, “I did not regard it as an especially significant secret. I was as vague as the next child about the meaning of sex, and I assumed it to be simply another aspect of differentness.”



Differentness affected her childhood acutely, although she did not see this as attributable to her gender identity. A lonely child, Morris describes watching other people through a telescope, feeling left out of life in general. Despite this, she was “not unhappy,” although “habitually puzzled” by the conundrum of her gender.

Writing for an audience that she expects to know little about the transsexual experience and perhaps to be skeptical of her account, Morris discusses the state of scientific research on the subject, pointing out that despite medical and academic debate, “Nobody really knows why some children, boys and girls, discover in themselves the inexpungible belief that, despite all the physical evidence, they are really of the opposite sex. It happens at a very early age. Often there are signs of it when the child is still a baby, and it is generally profoundly ingrained, as it was with me, by the fourth or fifth year.”

Morris attended the Cathedral Choir School at Christ Church, Oxford, and then Lancing College. She describes “fumbling” sexual experiences with boys. She stresses that her understanding of herself as a woman was not fundamentally rooted in sex, although she notes that as a woman she enjoys male attention and always has.



At seventeen, Morris enlisted to fight in the Second World War, serving with distinction for five years. She relates her close friendship with a fellow soldier, Otto. One night as the two friends traveled through the Suez Canal Zone in the back of an Army truck, Otto turned to Morris: “‘G-g-god…’ he said, ‘I w-wish you were a woman.’”

Experiences like this prevented Morris from being able to suppress or ignore her conviction of womanhood, and yet she felt tormented by what she saw as the unattainability of her goal. Rather than ever becoming physically a woman, she felt she was doomed to spend her life as something much more unusual: a woman trapped in a man’s body.

After the war, Morris studied at Oxford, and she found the atmosphere of intellectual tolerance and respect for difference healing: “Oxford made me…Of course when I speak of Oxford, I do not mean simply the city, or the university, or even the atmosphere of the place, but a whole manner of thought…near the heart of the Oxford ethos lies the grand and comforting truth that there is no norm. We are all different; none of us is entirely wrong; to understand is to forgive.”



When he met and fell in love with Elizabeth Tuckniss, Morris knew she had to tell her the truth about her identity. Elizabeth accepted it, and the two were married. Four children later, Morris was delighted with her loving family, and yet she continued to be tortured by her sense that her role was the wrong one. By her mid-thirties, she was contemplating suicide. Reading and learning about new medical procedures that could re-assign a person’s physical sex, Morris decided to transition. Elizabeth supported her decision, having, Morris suggests, fully come to terms with Morris’s true identity even before she had. At thirty-five, she began hormonal therapy.

Although reassignment surgery was available in the UK, Morris would have been required to divorce Elizabeth, which she did not wish to do. Instead, she traveled to Morocco, where the surgery was performed by “Dr. B.”

Upon returning to the UK, Morris began living as a woman. She was forty-five. She felt liberated and excited to live the life she had always wanted, although she was also struck by the to-some-extent unexpected role that patriarchy played in her new life and identity: “The more I was treated as a woman, the more a woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be oddly incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming…Men treated me more and more as a junior…and so, addressed every day of my life as an inferior, involuntarily, I accepted the condition. I discovered that even now, men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves: so I generally obliged them.”



At the center of the book’s argument is Morris’s conviction of the spiritual quality of her gender identity: “Transsexualism…is not a sexual mode or preference. It is not an act of sex at all. It is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it…I equate it with the idea of soul, or self, and I think of it not just as a sexual enigma, but as a quest for unity. For me every aspect of my life is relevant to that quest — not only the sexual impulses, but all the sights, sounds, and smells of memory, the influences of buildings, landscapes, comradeships, the power of love and of sorrow, the satisfactions of the senses as of the body. In my mind it is a subject far wider than sex: I recognize no pruriency to it, and I see it above all as a dilemma neither of the body nor of the brain, but of the spirit.”