Conundrum
23/02/25 18:53 Filed in: Personal
I have started to read books by and about trans women. This is for several reasons. One is to make my own trans journey three–dimensional. Another is to learn as much as possible about the trans condition. But most of all, I want to know what it feels like to be female. So I have started with one of the best available guides: Conundrum, the autobiography of Jan Morris.
Born James Morris, 1926. Died Jan Morris, 2020. Journalist and travel writer. Conundrum tells the story of her gradual transition from male to female. Although she knew at a very early age (3 or 4 years old) that she had been born into the wrong body and was really a girl, she did not achieve her full and true identity until she went through gender reassignment surgery in her 40s, in 1972. She was a pioneer.
Two things stand out for me from her extraordinary story. The first is her description of the effect of taking female hormones in the years leading up to surgery. Her body changed in wonderful ways – for example she narrowed at the waist, and her skin became softer and smoother. And I thought, this is what I would like to happen to my body. I identified with what she was doing even though I cannot yet do the same. Hormone Replacement Therapy is not something you can do in secret, or something you can try for a bit to see if it suits you. It is the precursor to surgery and leads inexorably towards it. I could not start HRT unless I was determined to go all the way. And this is something my circumstances do not permit.
The second is that it was only after the surgery that she truly understood what it was like to be female. Her thought processes changed, her behavioural patterns changed, and she finally saw the world completely from a female point of view. To draw a biological analogy, it is as though one organism is absorbed by another and becomes part of it, then seeing the world from the point of view of the larger organism. For a graphic description see "the robin and the worm'' in "archy and mehitabel" by don marquis. (he had a thing with lower-case.) So for me too, I will not fully know how it feels to be a woman unless I physically become a woman.
Despite this limiting conclusion, the book inspired me. I feel renewed in my trans identity and I feel encouraged to continue developing. That's important for me, because, as the reduction in my posting output suggests, I have been going nowhere fast for some time now. But the girl is here to stay.