‘The Definition of Possibility Was Inadequate’
Jan Morris’s memoir ‘Conundrum’
The writer Jan Morris (1926–2020) is most famous for her memoir of her gender transition, Conundrum, published in 1974. It’s good to read first-person narratives by trans people because what they find important to say (or not say) about their own lives is often different than what someone else might have tried to extract from them in an interview.
Identity
As a child, treated as a boy, she wasn’t perceived as “effeminate,” but her earliest memory was her sudden self-awareness, at the age of three or four, that she was really a girl.
She went to Oxford boarding school, starting “in 1936, when I was nine years old.” Her own family did not worry much about gender roles or gendered preferences, but the wider culture did, and “my own notion of the female principle was one of gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading.”
Of identity, she says, before her transition, “I had none. I was not to others what I was to myself. I did not conform to the dictionary’s definition [of identity] — ‘itself and not something else.’’ Some readers may hope she’ll say more about identity, but she warns them that her thought doesn’t perambulate “in such cosmic…
