Conundrum

To help myself celebrate my graduation from the MLIS program, I bought myself four books from the NYRB press, which reissues out-of-print, slightly obscure classics. One of them was Conundrum by Jan Morris. Ostensibly, this book is an account of the author's experience being a transsexual, but it's actually an autobiography of someone who happened to be a transsexual. I think that's why I enjoyed it so much. Morris doesn't cater to the curiousity of the readership and try to explain herself as a transsexual archetype for all transsexuals. Instead, she emphasizes that transsexuality was one (albeit very important) part of a full life. In this way the narrative is an unspoken reprimand to a culture fixated on sexuality out of all other context.

What I found most interesting about the book was Morris' cultural perspective as she shifted from "male" to female (which she did at the age of 47--see the link under the title of the entry for more biographical details). The book was written in 1972, and so carries opinions related to the gender politics of the times, but I think that some of them are still applicable today. I really enjoyed reading about how Morris' ideas of her gender and sexuality were affected by the cultural expectations of a woman. She writes: "The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incomptetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming... 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. ...It is hard for me now to remember what everyday life was like as a man." But while acknowledging this cultural effect, she also states that she cannot say what it feels like to be a woman after being a man, since "I never thought myself to be truly a man, and do not know how a man feels. ...there are aspects of being a woman that I shall never experience...[and furthermore] nobody really knows how anybody else feels--you may think you are feeling as a woman, or as a man, but you may simply be feeling as yourself."

Overall, Conundrum provided insightful perspectives on the gray areas of gender and sexuality and their place in culture and I would recommend it for anyone interested in these things.