Magical or immoral?
Leo Abse
Conundrum Jan Morris (Faber and Faber £2.25) When the Queen, during her recent Far Ea% tour, arrived at Jakarta, the streets, vve told, were cleared of undesirables: the bizatc; creatures who, at night, throng the pavemea', between the tourist hotels and the Brin% Embassy were doubtless among tb°5
removed from the royal view. ,a1 Years ago, as a member of a a"'',4
Parliamentary delegation to Indonesia, Ii my first evening stroll in the breathless, dank, flat city. Suddenly, unexpectedly, 1,5`.' the tall slim English peer walking ahead 01 flis enveloped by a fluttering cluster of gait; dressed women: they commenced P°' Jring him with a reckless abandon. moonlight, his head rising above his torteo tors, I could see him immobilised, half rePe,1 j half fascinated, and then, within seconasu'f too was similarly engulfed by a cooing gr°0 which emerged out of the darkness and fail0 myself almost drowned in a swirl of sill( ael batik, half suffocated by heavy perfumes 0 musk. It was not the painted masked fac,e,.,5e the surrounding chorus that alerten,-05 perhaps it was the timbre of the vnilcv perhaps the chemistry of the situation. ' „r came aware these women prostitutes W" men. f The competent military Governor o' City, like the savage Generals who onto. Indonesia, uninhibitedly and without ai5 embarrassment willingly discussed witb„de the ubiquity of this phenomenon of gei;i0f confusion. Ready to place into concentra,0 camps and indeed to murder hundredtshek thousands of their countrymen win:nil le labelled as Communists, they neverthe,'
„
extended to these deviants a gentleness „ail permissiveness that would never be NI' among political reactionaries of the West', For my part, as I saw the mother' Jakarta bind their children in a sling and them to a surprisingly advanced age attto to their bodies, I divined that such a sY'; jt relationship was leaving an impress: tn`s,,, fant boy, dressed exactly like his sister, od) treated as if he were part of his mother's b and her identity could become his, wile, physical and hence no psychic boun between them. My surmise, I was to find' th by no means extravagant. When, late r clinical findings of the aetiology ofti4 xuals in California were published, 31 emphases were upon the early blurrb0 identity that arose as a consequence oi.,0 special circumstance of a symbiotic tionship between the mother and child. .0 Of course, transexualism biologically normal male, although c tely less frequent, is by no means unkri°7511 the occident. James Morris, the distingin Anglo-Welsh writer, a former Guardinic/150 Times correspondent, Whose elegant an 511 sitive books on Venice and Oxford, °deo nostalgic works on the Empire, have ,atio vedly brought him a considerable reP4if is one man destined to have this fate. v`ro the anatomical evidence of his body, fr°Def age of three he was possessed with the, ell that he was a woman. Dissatisfied wit",10, role-playing at public school, as a 11,11-en, and as the father of four surviving chilurxii the end, as a middle aged man, he tc)° Aro road to Casblanca. There, within the 01 ambience to which Morris has alwaYs rge dangerously emotive attraction, the sti-Col apparently untrammeled by ethical .0, siderations, ready to indulge the Will
those possessed of hard cash, removed his Penis and provided him with an artificial vagina. Metamorphosised, with external genitalia at last bearing witness to her soul, as Jan Morris, she now recounts the saga of her quest.
Such a book must find resonances in every man and woman, for we are all bisexual although more fortunate men and women accept the homosexual component in their nature as a gift which enables them to understand and deepen their heterosexual relationships with their partners. That option clearly was not open to Morris: she acts as all genuine transexuals do, compulsively, utterly lacking freedom of choice. Determined, however, to make a virtue out of a near necessity, she elevates her dilemma to what She describes, with a cloying romanticism, as "a baraka, that scented concept of the Arab mind, which means at once blessed and blessing." Like certain homosexuals, who reconcile themselves to their destiny only by asserting their superiority over mere heterosexuals, so Morris claims the transexual urge is spiritual, leading humanity to perfection: and, bereft in this work of the irony and Wit that distinguish her other contributions, She tells us quite seriously that such spiritual Perfection is embodied in kind, intelligent, sexless women past their menopause.
The book, therefore, is essentially proselyti, sing and, as such, in my judgment, immoral, it is one matter to insist that, with contemPorary psychiatry helpless in the face of adult transexualism, the law must afford as much protection as possible. That, no doubt, is why the Commons yielded to my plea that our annulment laws should leave a discretion to a judge to order a financial payment from a 'husband ' who unknowingly goes through a f,t>rin of marriage with a transexual who has
nad an operation. But it is another matter to I
abel a pathological condition, albeit one that may have beneficial creative side effects, as magical or miraculous as Morris does. In secular seasons, once the Passion no longer has its ancient significance, there are, as I am aware from my involvement in the change of the vasectomy laws, a surprising number of IntielY ambiguous men, not genuinely transexual, unable to gain a release from their ,1301.1ndless masochistic desires by contemplating the agony of the Cross. Nothing short of themselves becoming sacrificial lambs would he satisfying: it is to be hoped this book will not encourage them to believe that Casablanca is a New Jerusalem. The fact is that a great deal is now known WhY people like Morris find themselves, by a grotesque trick of fate, trapped in the wrong ?n, dY: it does not come about by magic and ,ine condition is not a sacrament or mystical ,n1.essing. The case histories reveal the empty Pisexual mothers with husbands, absent, ineffective or colluding, who do not put an end to the process of two people, mother and s°11, of opposite sex devouring each others' gender. To the published rich admonitory clinical material of mothers with sad envy of rilales, who promote an excessive symbiosis 1•1(cl feminise their sons, Morris adds nothing: deed, perhaps because she wilfully will not Urn her gaze to the origins or ner Rredicament and seeks to find her destiny in Ine stars, and not in her family, her book ,surPrisingly lacks authenticity and too often !apses into the coy and twee, almost trivialising the personal tragedy. However, this book undoubtedly has to be Written: Morris is a public figure and she nr_eeds to assert publicly her new identity. Her lends will hope that her optimism in her new it)le will prove well founded and that soon, !Y.riting on other matters from which she can distance herself, she will again give much iiielight to her readers.
'eo Abse is Labour MP for Pontypool. His tnost recent book is Private Member, a PsYchoanalytical study of Parliamentarians.
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