‘Once she was Jan, I never thought of her as anything other than a woman’: Jan Morris remembered by her son

Fifty years ago this year, my father published a book that, in its small but profound way, helped to change the way people thought about others. It was called Conundrum , and it charted her journey from its famous opening, describing how she realised, sitting under my grandmother's piano in 1930, "that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl", to undergoing gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1972 – from James Morris, the celebrated journalist and writer, to Jan Morris.

Conundrum was – and still is – a seminal trans work, but it was not the first account of such a journey. There was, for example, Christine Jorgensen's 1967 autobiography, which my father had read. In the US, a medical study, The Transsexual Phenomenon by Dr Harry Benjamin (whom my father consulted in the 1960s), had appeared in 1966, and its distinction between transvestism (cross-dressing) and transsexuality had created considerable interest. By 1975, about a thousand transgender people in the US had quietly been provided with gender reassignment surgery.

But Conundrum was the first autobiographical account by someone who was already celebrated for something other than gender orientation. James Morris had achieved instant fame in 1953 as the sole reporter on the successful British Everest expedition, becoming internationally known as "The Man Who Scooped the World on Everest". He had then been a high-profile foreign correspondent for the Times and the Guardian, reporting from the wartorn Middle East, covering the Eichmann and Gary Powers trials, crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, and at one point being catapulted from an American aircraft carrier.

He had cut quite a dashing and masculine figure, too, in the tradition of British foreign correspondents. His fellow correspondent David Holden described him as "slightly built but lithe. His face was bony, his nose was strong and prominent and his eyes twinkled often with masculine mischief and exhilaration." James then successfully transformed from journalist to travel writer with the publication of the bestselling Venice, which won the Heinemann literature award, and then to historian, with the first two volumes of the trilogy on the British empire, Pax Britannica.

In other words, Conundrum had a cogent stamp of writing authority, whether deserved or not. It was very well written, too, by one of the great stylists of the English language. And it dealt with what was then one of the more deeply ingrained human taboos:

"To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music."

It is perhaps difficult for those under 50 or so to realise just how different the perception of being LGBTQ+ was in 1974. It was only seven years since homosexual acts had become legal in the UK. It was only one year since the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In my current home province of Alberta, Canada, in one of the most liberal countries in the world, it was to take another 24 years before it was illegal to fire someone just for being gay. The few stories of other trans people that the British public had read in the more sensational newspapers had inevitably concentrated on titillating transgression.

For the most part, people in the UK had little or no concept of gender dysphoria, so when the book was serialised in the Sunday Times, it caused something of a sensation. Much of the public commentary was favourable, but there were some vicious attacks, notably from Germaine Greer in the Evening Standard. In the New York Times, no less a traveller, writer, and feminist than Rebecca West had this to say:

"As for her psychology, Miss Jan Morris's self portraits are chilling. She sounds not like a woman, but like a man's idea of a woman, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be."

Perhaps most infamous of all was a panel interview on Sir Robin Day's BBC Two television programme. There Jan faced what Day himself described as "the collective brutality, naivety and impertinence of the panel". Complaints poured into the BBC about how she had been treated, and Jan herself characterised the interview as "an assault".

Much more important to Jan, though, was the reception of her friends, many of whom had no idea of her transgender desires, but who (with a few exceptions) accepted the change perhaps more easily than she was expecting. Very many strangers, in everyday walks of life, wrote to tell her how Conundrum had affected them, from those who had no idea that there were others with the same transgender convictions, to those who found their own prospective journey validated by the book. There was a box of these letters in her study when she died, and I think these responses by perfectly ordinary people meant more to her than any other.

After the initial reception, Jan herself intensely disliked talking publicly about her change. However, the letters and responses continued throughout the rest of her life, and included a number of transgender people who were writing publicly about their experience, and cited Conundrum as a formative influence in their journeys. I think that the one major idea that Conundrum had brought to a wide public was the distinction between biological sex and gender identity, a concept that was little known then, and which has continued to provoke discussion and argument ever since.

I was an undergraduate at Oxford at the time, and was spat at by a formerly friendly student for being the son of someone so morally degenerate. I was also bombarded by questions, most often by gay students, who fell into two camps. The first saw Jan as a traitor to the gay community, by failing simply to come out as homosexual. The second saw Jan as a practical prophet, offering the possibility of a journey they were themselves drawn to. From such contradictions are gender wars started.

Fifty years on, the central story of Conundrum is as powerful and as cogent as when it was written, from the early desire to be a girl, through the strong feelings of inner contradictions and of being a masculine impostor, to the thoughts of suicide and the description of the lengthy process that led to surgery in Casablanca. That said, the book is undeniably flawed, and there are passages that in the 21st century make one wince.

For Jan did have a terribly conventional idea of what a woman was. In the book she delights in having doors held open for her, and she more than accepts being treated as the inferior and weaker sex, whatever her protestations that the world was changing. One gets the distinct impression that she would expect men to change a flat tyre for her. Indeed, she retained old-fashioned ideas about women and their place – bringing up children, cooking and running the household – to the end of her days. Certainly in her 70s and 80s she really did look old-fashioned, with a string of large beads around her neck and her wool skirts, rather in the same way that the queen always looked a little old-fashioned. As she herself noted, her observations of womanhood were formed in the 1930s, and honed in the 1950s, a decade of men reasserting their dominance, and women being returned to the domestic sphere.

This was pounced upon – and rightly so – by some feminists in 1974, and by many since, and there was a contradiction. For Jan herself hardly fitted the concept of such a housewife, with her incessant travelling, and her compulsive need to write and write, and her admiration for successful women, from the queen (her republicanism notwithstanding) through Ingrid Bergman, whom she once sat next to on a transatlantic Concorde flight.

Nonetheless, once she had become Jan, I never thought of her as anything other than a woman. I did so uncritically when Jan actually had the surgery (I, aged 20, drove her to the airport to catch the flight to Casablanca), and in the lead-up to the publication of the book. For the family were expected to rally around her, and the entire family concentration for three years was on Jan and nothing but Jan. I did not realise until I was in my 30s how detrimental that was, or that it was extraordinarily remiss that the children had no counselling at all at the time of her change.

For Jan was very successful in putting her own views in her writing in such a way that they were rarely questioned. Certainly that was true when painting a picture of the happy, loyal family, who supported her with their love all her life, and which so many writers about her seem to have swallowed so uncritically.

The reality was rather different. She was extraordinarily charming to friends and acquaintances, but she needed to be the constant centre of attention and, to a certain extent, admiration. Deeper empathy, deeper understanding, I never saw or experienced – she was, I think, incapable of truly understanding the feelings of others, and thus appeared to care little about those feelings. The extent of the wall she erected around herself was epitomised physically in the house she built from an old stable block after her transition – it had only one bedroom, later amended to include an add-on for my mother, Elizabeth. The message was clear.

For my part, that lack of consideration used to be deeply hurtful, whether it was the complete refusal to play in the fathers' cricket match at my prep school, to read my youthful poetry ("I don't know about poetry"), or, later in life, to attend any of the theatrical and musical events I was involved in. Parental advice, let alone help, was nonexistent, though at one point when I was a teenager, he did to my surprise suggest a game of ping-pong. The purpose was soon clear: it was to tell me – in absolute belief – that masturbation would make me blind. I had to put him right.

Over the years, I have become less angry and more accepting that Jan was psychologically incapable of comprehending the effect she could have, and consequently I have been more forgiving. Yet the hurts continued until her death in 2020 , and one example will suffice. The year before Covid, my wife and I planned to spend three days with my parents in Wales. Our time was limited, such a trip from Canada was expensive, and so I planned considerably ahead with Jan.

We had booked a bed and breakfast in the local town. We arrived on a Friday evening and checked in with my parents. I said we were looking forward to seeing them the next day and, to my astonishment, and to my wife's dismay, Jan told me: "No, you can't do that. Elizabeth and I are going to visit a vineyard tomorrow." My wife and I were expected to fend for ourselves. That consequently shortened visit was the last time I saw my father in person.

Over those 50 years since Conundrum was published, I have watched, with relief and sympathy, my undergraduate students increasingly being prepared to openly declare their gender terms, wherever they are on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and live accordingly. I have seen their fellow students accept this, though I know that in my deeply multicultural Canadian city, there are those whose cultural backgrounds understandably make this difficult.

That is a far cry from 1974, as is the shift from what was mainly a discussion about adults to the question of gender dysphoria in teens, and arguments about how much children should know about transgender issues. It is still a hard-fought freedom: in Alberta, the extreme rightwing government is bringing in legislation to ban the use of puberty blockers in gender situations (the first in Canada). In the same legislation are widespread measures to limit the teaching of gender identity, sexual orientation or sexuality, and controls on changes of names or pronouns in schools. Transgender people of all ages have become pawns in agenda power politics.

One group, though, are still a hidden story: the children of trans parents. We are our own selves – I have used "my father" throughout this piece, called him "him" when he was to me a man, and "she" when a woman. For, whether trans advocates like it or not, Jan was my father. People still call Jan to my face "your mother": to do so is to deny me my identity, and my actual mother her rightful place.

Jan herself accepted that I continued to refer to her as my father, and that perhaps reflects one message in Conundrum that has been little remarked on. We are becoming an almost violently divisive society, and nowhere more so than in the gender wars. Conundrum challenges that. It is, covertly as much as overtly, a plea for tolerance, for acceptance of people who may indeed challenge our basic beliefs but nonetheless deserve to be treated with respect for who they are.

Mark Morris is a writer, music critic, theatre director, broadcaster, curator and photographer, and has been teaching at the University of Alberta since 2000. He is the literary executor of the Jan Morris estate