Writing about transgenderism being a cisgender person is always complicated and a potential minefield. Today (22 December), however, the Spanish Parliament will presumably pass the new “Ley para la igualdad real y efectiva de las personas trans y para la garantía de los derechos de las personas LGTBI”, simply known as “Ley Trans”, which Minister for Equality Irene Montero has promoted, and this seems a good moment to consider matters. The new law, as we know, has divided Spanish feminism into a pro-trans and a TERF front, but since I do not know its text sufficiently I don’t have an opinion to express. I believe in the defence of personal rights, but I see that in some fields (such as sports) there are matters to solve given the obvious biological differences between trans and cisgender women.
The inspiration for my post today is plain curiosity. I have had so far two trans students but as a teacher it would have been totally improper for me to ask them how they knew their body did not match their gender, as it would be equally inadequate to ask an LGTBI+ student (or any student) a personal question to satisfy my curiosity. This is what memoirs and autobiographies are for and, so, having learned about the amazing story of reputed Welsh journalist and writer Jan Morris, I have read her memoirs Conundrum (1972).
What makes Morris’s story special is perhaps not so much her own individual experience but her relationship with Elizabeth Tuckniss. Morris, born in 1923, always knew she was a woman but wanted very much to have children, which she could only do as a male. In 1949 she married Tuckniss, who was always aware of her husband’s transgenderism, and they parented four children together. Morris presented herself as both male and female for a few years, in her mid-thirties, but decided to transition once the elder kids were in their late teens, undergoing surgery in 1972 (in Casablanca, with the famed Dr. Georges Burou). After Morris legally became Jan, abandoning for good her male dead name, the couple had to divorce, as two women could not be legally married. They, however, maintained their relationship alive and formally entered a civil partnership in 2008, after the UK legalized same-sex unions (though not marriage). In Conundrum Jan writes that although she was a heterosexual woman attracted to men, she never considered marrying a man, for “unless some blinding passion intervenes with one or the other of us, [Elizabeth and I] propose to share our lives happily ever after” (Ch 17). Indeed, the two women were buried together and the epitaph engraved on their tombstone reads “Here are two friends, Jan and Elizabeth, at the end of one life”. Sadly, there is too little about Elizabeth in Jan’s memoirs and, as it seems, she never commented on her singular love story. When Jan writes “With Elizabeth’s loving help I abandoned the attempt to live on as a male, and took the first steps towards a physical change of sex” (Chapter 11, my italics), the memoir elicits much curiosity hat, regrettably, is never satisfied.
Morris, who died in 2020, re-issued Conundrum in 2001 and wrote in the Introduction that although “the years have made some parts of my book seem quaintly anachronistic, they have not in the least altered its fundamental attitudes”. She “amended only a few words” for “purely factual” reasons. This is quite surprising. Her publisher should have pointed out to her that many of her comments sound painfully classist, colonialist, racist, homophobic, and even misogynistic. I was astonished particularly by how unaware she is of her own privilege. The memoir begins with the famous sentences “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life” (Chapter 1). In this scene the child is beneath her mother’s piano, as she plays Sibellius in her comfortable upper-middle class home. Later, when Jan undergoes surgery, the high fee that Dr. Burou demands is mentioned at least twice (the British public health system offered the operation for free but the surgeon decided at the last moment he would only operate on Jan if she first divorced Elizabeth, which she refused to do then).
In the introduction Jan writes that she always thought of her “conundrum” as “a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory” for which explanations “were not very important anyway”. Her story (“Thirty-five years as a male, (…), ten in between, and the rest of my life as me”, Chapter 16) is not narrated as a story of liberation but as a story of normalization and it is in that sense if not quite placid (Jan claims she would have killed herself if surgery had not been available) at least devoid of high drama, no doubt because, I insist, as a respected journalist and writer Jan could make a number of choices unavailable to less privileged persons. What is striking to a contemporary reader is how small a part sexuality plays in her experience, to the point that she sees herself as a member of a future asexual avantgarde, and how accepting she is of the subordinated condition of women in the 1970s, when she transitioned, in the middle of the second feminist wave.
I was quite shocked not only by her revelation that she received her first “carnal” kiss as a woman from a male taxi driver who, in essence, sexually assaulted her, but also by passages like this one: “Men treated me more and more as a junior (…); and so, addressed every day of my life as an inferior, involuntarily, month by month I accepted the condition” (Ch 17). This set me thinking of what is quite obvious: transitioning is conditioned by the state of medicine and the understanding of gender at the time when a person decides to undergo this major change. I am sure that Dr. Burou would be very much surprised by how far others have taken his teachings (though so far full biological transitioning is not yet possible), but there is also a vast difference between the patriarchal ideas of womanhood that shaped Jan Morris’s transition and how we understand gender today.
Conundrum, in any case, got me thinking about how cisgender persons experience gender and, secondarily (or not), sexuality. The question to ask, I think, is not ‘how did you know you were a trans person?’ but ‘how do you know you are a cisgender person?’ Jan Morris writes, if you recall, that despite having been born a male she knew by age three or four that she “should really be a girl”, which constituted “the earliest memory of my life” (Chapter 1). I challenge any cisgender person to produce a matching memory of knowing that early in life that they were a boy or a girl with no trace of gender dysphoria and in full intuition of how body and gender connect. I don’t personally have that kind of memory, just as I don’t recall understanding that I am heterosexual. I might in fact argue that I don’t know for sure that I am a woman and a heterosexual person because I lack a turning point in my life in which I was aware of my own identity and knew about other options, other choices.
I was told by those surrounding me that, given the shape of my genitalia, I was a girl and I was at each point of my childhood told what was right or wrong for a girl, in the patriarchal, sexist circumstances of 1960 and 1970s Spain. Some injunctions never got through (to this day I don’t wear make-up except for lipstick and I am very uncomfortable in high-heeled shoes), and I made other choices based on my personality, friends, and education. And body shape, I must stress. I grew up very much confused about why other girls seemed to perform femininity with total ease, whereas I was always having difficulties to look a certain way, attract the boys I was interested in, or think of myself as a future mother. I admired certain types of women but I was always very far from being one of them, and I still am. This is why I am so puzzled that trans persons know with such certainty who they are in gender terms. I am cisgender and I do not yet whether I am truly a woman, though I am a biological female who happens to be heterosexual. Or so I feel.
The new Spanish law will allow trans persons to declare their chosen gender before a judge and make it official, with no need for bodily transitioning. I believe that the law should not interfere in this matter and we should all be free to live our gender as we please. Yet, perhaps it would be necessary for cisgender people to come out as such and also make a formal declaration before the judge for us to understand who we are. The same applies to heterosexuality, a condition most people assume without fully understanding why or what it is (not a tool for the reproduction of the species since many heterosexuals do not wish to have children). It is in that sense totally unfair that the cisgender heterosexuals who make the laws are asking other persons to explain themselves when we cannot explain ourselves except by mumbling that our condition is natural and normative (it is neither). We need to be ready, besides, for that future when medicine will allow individuals to fully transition and to reverse transition, so that, as happens in so many SF novels, persons can be biological mothers and fathers if they wish so at different periods of their lives (yes, I’m thinking of The Left Hand of Darkness).
The conundrum that Jan Morris describes, in short, is a conundrum for all gendered persons. We have no idea why we go one way or another in our gender and sexual preferences, despite the abundant research on the influence of chromosomes, hormones, the physiology of the brain, personal psychology and so on. Perhaps subconsciously James Morris wished to be Jan since the age of three because she didn’t want to be subjected to the terrible fate of her father, Walter Henry Morris, a man who died (when she was 12), unable to overcome the traumatic experience of being gassed in the First World War. Likewise, there must be a social reason behind the growing numbers of persons who wish to transition, the fact that they are younger than ever and the fact that they are mostly women (though not by a very high percentage).
I would say that something is very wrong with the normative cisgender model when so many young persons are uncomfortable with it and willing to risk dangerous extensive bodily modifications to heal that discomfort. According to WHO only between 0’3 and 0’5% of the world’s population is trans (about 39 million people), but beyond their numbers what matters is how they are questioning gender models that 95% of the population has so far taken for granted. Time to rethink them, then, and reconsider cisgenderism.