Changeling Aspects

Home

About Us

Contact Us

KATHY'S KOMMENTS

Kathys Writings

Best Info-WebSites

Articles

Technical

For Parents of Gender-Variant Young

Life Stories

FtM

Sports

Support Groups

Practitioners

Advocacy

Brochures and PDFs

What's New - This Month

Conundrum

Copyright © 1974 Jan Morris

First published in 1974 by Faber and Faber Limited

 Coronet edition 1975 ………. ISBN 0 340 19996 2

Printed and bound in Great Britain for Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton,

St. Paul’s House, Warwick Lane, London, EC4P 4AH

By Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

Introductory

                                                                               
This book describes a tangle in my life, and parts of it have been painful to write. Happy as I am by disposition, disinclined to self-analysis, and exceedingly lucky in all other respects, I have found it hard to rake over old torments and ambiguities. I have done my best, though, to make it an honest self-appraisal, and at least cheerfulness keeps break ing in. Where there are omissions, they are generally to spare other people distress, and only occasionally to save myself from chagrin. Where there are evasions, they are aesthetic rather than secretive. If the whole fable is blurred in a suggestion of arcanuni, that it is because I see it so. I offer it diffidently, like a confidence: in love to my family, in explanation to my friends, and in sympathy to all my corn­rades, anywhere in the world, who are suffering still in the same solitary and unsought cause.
J.M. Bath, 1973
                                                                                    
 

Acknowledgments

I owe my thanks to all those who, by reading my book in early drafts, acted as guides or bearers in this self-exploration—but especially, of course, Elizabeth and Mark, who knew the terrain as well as I did, and often spotted the route sooner.

The quotations from Dr. Robert Stoller come from his book Sex and Gender, Hogarth Press, London, 1968. The C. S. Lewis passage is from Perelandra, The Bodley Head, London 1943. The verses by Cecil Day Lewis are from Overtures to Death, Jonathan Cape, London, 1938.

1

Under the piano—above the sea—trans-sexuality—my conundrum

I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.

I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave. The round stumpy legs of the piano were like three black stalactites, and the sound-box was a high dark vault above my head. My mother was probably playing Sibelius, for she was enjoying a Finnish period then, and Sibelius from underneath a piano can be a very noisy composer: but I always liked it down there, sometimes drawing pictures on the piles of music stacked around me, or clutching my unfortunate cat for company.

What triggered so bizarre a thought I have long forgotten, but the conviction was unfaltering from the start. On the face of things it was pure nonsense. I seemed to most people a very straightforward child, enjoying a happy childhood. I was loved and I was loving, brought up kindly and sensibly, spoiled to a comfortable degree, weaned at an early age on Huck Finn and Alice in Wonderland, taught to cherish my animals, say grace, think well of myself and wash my hands before tea. I was al­ways sure of an audience. My security was absolute. Looking back at my infancy, as one might look back through a windswept avenue of trees, I see there only a cheerful glimpse of sunshine—for of course the weather was much better in those days, summers were really summers, and I seldom seem to re­member it actually raining at all.

More to my point, by every standard of logic I was patently a boy. I was named Humphrey Morris, male child. I had a boy’s body. I wore a boy’s clothes. It is true that my mother had wished me to be a daughter, but I was never treated as one. It is true that gushing visitors sometimes assembled me into their fox furs and lavender sachets to murmur that, with curly hair like mine, I should have been born a girl. As the youngest of three brothers, in a family very soon to be fatherless, I was doubtless indulged. I was not, however, generally thought effeminate. At kindergarten I was not derided. In the street I was not stared at. If I had announced my self-discovery beneath the piano, my family might not have been shocked (Virginia Woolf’s androgynous Orlando was already in the house), but would certainly have been astonished.

Not that I dreamed of revealing it. I cherished it as a secret, shared for twenty years with not a single soul. At first I did not regard it as an especially significant secret. I was as vague as the next child about the meaning of sex, and I assumed it to be simply another aspect of differentness. For different in some way I recognized myself to be. Nobody ever urged me to be like other children: conformity was not a quality coveted in our home. We sprang, we all knew, from a line of odd forebears and unusual unions. Welsh, Norman, Quaker, and I never supposed myself to be much like anyone else.

I was a solitary child in consequence, and I realize now that inner conflicts, only half formulated, made me more solitary still. When my brothers were away at school I wandered lonely as a cloud over the hills, among the rocks, sloshing through the mudbanks or prodding in the rockpools of the Bristol Channel, sometimes fishing for eels in the bleak dykes of the inland moors, or watching the ships sail up to Newport or Avonmouth through my telescope. If I looked to the east I could see the line of the Mendip Hills, in whose lee my mother’s people, modest country squires, flourished in life and were brass-commemorated in death. If I looked to the west I could see the blue mass of the Welsh mountains, far more ex­citing to me, beneath whose flanks my father’s people had al­ways lived—’decent proud people,’ as a cousin once defined them for me, some of whom still spoke Welsh within living memory, and all of whom were bound together, generation after generation, by a common love of music.

Both prospects, I used to feel, were mine, and this sense of double possession sometimes gave me a heady sense of uni­versality, as though wherever I baked I could see some aspect of myself—an unhealthy delusion, I have since discovered, for it later made me feel that no country or city was worth visiting unless I either owned a house there, or wrote a book about it. Like all Napoleonic fantasies, it was a lonely sensation too. If it all belonged to me, then I belonged to no particular part of it. The people I could see from my hilltop, farming their farms, tending their shops, flirting their way through seaside holidays, inhabited a different world from mine. They were all together, I was all alone. They were members, I was a stranger. They talked to each other in words they all understood about matters that interested them all. I spoke a tongue that was only mine, and thought things that would bore them. Sometimes they asked if they might look through my telescope, and this gave me great pleasure. The instrument played an important part in my fancies and conjectures, perhaps because it seemed to give me a private insight into distant worlds, and when at the age of eight or nine I wrote the first pages of a book, I called it Travels With A Telescope, not a bad title at that. So I was al­ways gratified when after a few preliminary banterings— ‘That’s a big telescope for a little boy! Who are you looking for— Gandhi?’—they wanted to try it for themselves. For one thing I was a terrible swank, and loved to focus my lens for them deftly upon the English and Welsh Grounds lightship. For another, the brief contact of the request made me feel more ordinary.

I was intensely self-conscious, and often stood back, so to speak, to watch my own figure stumbling over the hills, or W sprawled on the springy turf in the sunshine. The background was, at least in my memory, brilliant and sharp-edged, like a I pre-Raphaelite painting. The sky may not always have been as 52 blue as I recall it, but it was certainly clear as crystal, the only smoke the smudge from a collier labouring up-Channel, or the blurred miasma of grime that hung always over the Swansea  valleys. Hawks and skylarks abounded, rabbits were every- W where, weasels haunted the bracken, and sometimes there came in trundling over the hill, heavily buzzing, the daily de Havilland biplane on its way to Cardiff.

My emotions, though, were far less distinct or definable. My as conviction of mistaken sex was still no more than a blur, tucked away at the back of my mind, but if I was not unhappy, I was habitually puzzled. Even then that silent fresh childhood above the sea seemed to me strangely incomplete. I felt a yearning for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from to my pattern, or some element in me that should be hard and  permanent, but was instead soluble and diffuse. Everything seemed more determinate for those people down the hill. Their lives looked pre-ordained, as though like the old de Havilland  they simply stuck dogged and content to their daily routes, comfortably throbbing. Mine was more like a glider’s movement, airy and delightful perhaps, but lacking direction.

This was a bewilderment that would never leave me, and I see it now as the developing core of my life’s dilemma. If my landscapes were Millais or Holman Hunt, my introspections  were pure Turner, as though my inner uncertainty could be represented in swirls and clouds of colour, a haze inside me. I  did not know exactly where it was—in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my blood. Nor did I know whether to be ashamed of it, proud of it, grateful for it, resentful of it. Sometimes I thought I would be happier without it, sometimes I felt  it must be essential to my being. Perhaps one day, when I grew up, I would be as solid as other people appeared to be: but is perhaps I was meant always to be a creature of wisp or spindrift, loitering in this inconsequential way almost as though I were intangible.

??????????

present the confusion in cryptic terms, and I see it still as a mystery. Nobody really knows why some children, boys and girls, discover in themselves the inexpungable belief that, des­ite all the physical evidence, They are really of the opposite sex. It happens at a very early age. Often there are signs of it when the child is still a baby, and it is generally profoundly ingrained, as it was with me, by the fourth or fifth year. Some theorists suppose the child to be born with it: perhaps there are undiscovered constitutional or genetic factors, or perhaps, American scientists have lately suggested, the foetus has been affected by misdirected hormones during pregnancy. Many more believe it to be solely the result of early environment: too close an identification with one or the other parent, dominant mother or father, an infancy too effeminate or too tomboylsh. Others again think the cause to be partly constitutional, partly environmental—nobody is born entirely male or entirely female, and some children may be more susceptible than others to what the psychologists call the ‘imprint’ of cir­umstance.

Whatever the cause, there are thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, suffering from the condition today. It as recently been given the name trans-sexualism, and in its classic form is as distinct from transvestism as it is from homosexuality. Both transvestites and homosexuals sometimes supp­ose they would be happier if they could change their sex, but they are generally mistaken. The transvestite gains his gratific­ation specifically from wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, and would sacrifice his pleasures by joining that sex: the homosexual, by definition, prefers to make love with others of is own sort, and would only alienate himself and them by changing. Trans-sexualism is something different in kind. It is not a sexual mode or preference. It is not an act of sex at all. It a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it.

I have tried to analyse my own childish emotions, and to discover what I meant, when I declared myself to be a girl in a boy’s body. What was my reasoning? Where was my evi­dence? Did I simply think that I should behave like a girl? Did I think people should treat me as one? Had I decided that I would rather grow up to be a woman than a man? Did some fearful legacy of the Great War, which ravaged and eventually killed my father, make the passions and instincts of men re­pugnant to me? Or was it just that something had gone wrong during my months in the womb, so that the hormones were wrongly shuffled, and my conviction was based upon no reasoning at all?

Freudians and anti-Freudians, sociologists and environ­mentalists, family and friends, intimates and acquaintances, publishers and agents, men of God and men of science, cynics and compassionates, lewds and prudes—all have asked me these questions since then, and very often provided answers too, but for me it remains a riddle. So be it. If I have evoked my childhood briefly and impressionistically, like a ballet seen through a gauze curtain, it is partly because I remember it only as in a dream, but partly because I do not want to blame it for my dilemma. It was in all other ways a lovely childhood, and I am grateful for it still.

In any case, I myself see the conundrum in another perspec­tive, for I believe it to have some higher origin or meaning. I equate it with the idea of soul, or self, and I think of it not just as a sexual enigma, but as a quest for unity. For me every as­pect of my life is relevant to that quest—not only the sexual impulses, but all the sights, sounds and smells of memory, the influences of buildings, landscapes, comradeships, the power of love and of sorrow, the satisfactions of the senses as of the body. In my mind it is a subject far wider than sex: I recognize no pruriency to it, and I see it above all as a dilemma neither of the body nor of the brain, but of the spirit.

Still, for forty years after that rendezvous with Sibelius a sexual purpose dominated, distracted and tormented my life: the tragic and irrational ambition, instinctively formulated but deliberately pursued, to escape from maleness into woman­hood.

2

Living a falsehood—the nest of singing-birds——on Oxford —a small lump—in the cathedral—laughing

As I grew older my conflict became more explicit to me, and I began to feel that I was living a falsehood. I was in masquerade, my female reality, which I had no words to define, clothed in a male pretence. Psychiatrists have often asked if this gave me a sense of guilt, but the opposite was true. I felt that in wishing so fervently, and so ceaselessly, to be transplanted into a girl’s body, I was aiming only at a more divine condition, an inner reconciliation: and I attribute this impression not to the influences of home or family, but to an early experience of -  Oxford.

Oxford made me. I was an undergraduate there, and for much of my life I have owned a house there—doubly fulfilling my own criteria of possession by writing a book about the city too. But far more important, my first boarding-school was there: the signs, values and traditions of Oxford dominated my early boyhood, and were my first intimations of a world away from home, beyond my telescope’s range. I have, I hope, no sentimental view of the place—I know its faults too well. It remains for me .nevertheless, in its frayed and battered in­tegrity, an image of what I admire most in the world: a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance.

Of course when I speak of Oxford, I do not mean simply the city, or the university, or even the atmosphere of the place, but a whole manner of thought, an outlook, almost a civilization. I came to it an anomaly, a contradiction in myself, and were it not for the flexibility and self-amusement I absorbed from the Oxford culture—which is to say, the culture of traditional England—I think I would long ago have ended in that last haven of anomaly, the madhouse. For near the heart of the Oxford ethos lies the grand and comforting truth that there is no norm. We are all different; none of us is entirely wrong; to understand is to forgive.

I became a member of the University of Oxford in 1936, when I was nine years old, and my name will be found in the uni­versity calenders for that year. This is not because I was any kind of prodigy, but because I was first educated there at the choir school of Christ Church, a college so grand that its chapel is actually the cathedral of the Oxford diocese, and maintains its own professional choir. No education could leave a more lasting effect than this experience did on me, and I doubt if any other kind of school could have satisfied so curiously my inner cravings. A virginal idea was fostered in me by my years at Christ Church, a sense of sacrament and fragility, and this I came slowly to identify as femaleness—’eternal womanhood’, which as Goethe says in the last lines of Faust, ‘leads us above.

In those days the Cathedral Choir School, housed in un­lovely obscurity in a high-walled narrow lane in the heart of the city, was virtually limited to the choristers themselves— sixteen boys in all. We were a medieval establishment, and we lived medievally—a nest of singing-birds in an Oxford attic. We could produce a cricket team, but were too few to play each other. We acted in plays, but small ones. Our school con­certs were mercifully short. We were, so to speak, custom-built: we were there to sing sacred music in the cathedral of St. Frideswide (an Oxford saint elsewhere considered un­reliable, I have since sadly discovered, if not actually fictional), and everything else was sacrificed to that end. Our education was adequate, but was necessarily spasmodic: for twice a day we must put on our mortar-boards, Eton collars and fluttering gowns and walk in file across St. Aldate’s to the cathedral— gratifyingly stared at by tourists, and sometimes passed rather comically in the opposite direction by a parallel line of police­men, clumping in single file, helmeted and heavy-booted, to­wards their headquarters down the road.

Educationalists now would probably be horrified, if they inspected the conditions of our schooling: we must have been among the smallest boarding-schools in England, and obviously this cramped our intellectual style. I see my time there, though, as one of benign beauty. It has often been suggested to me that, in those post-Victorian years of the 1930s, conventions of the day might have distorted my sexual notions. Man was for hard things, making money, fighting wars, keeping stiff upper lips, beating errant schoolboys, wearing boots and helmets, drinking beer: woman was for gentler, softer purposes, healing, sooth­ing, painting pictures, wearing silks, singing, looking at colours, giving presents, accepting admiration. In our family, as it happened, such distinctions were not recognized, and nobody would have dreamt of supposing that a taste for music, colours or textiles was effeminate: but it is true that my own notion of the female principle was one of greatness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, help­ing more than leading. Oxford seemed to express the distinc­tion in a way that Cardiff, say, or even London never could, and in responding so eagerly to her beauties I did feel myself succumbing to a specifically feminine influence. I still do, and from that day to this have habitually thought of Oxford as ‘she’  ???????????

—unctuously following the example, as a critic once corn­plained, of the worst Victorian belles-lettreists.

Much of the beauty was purely physical, and my pleasure in it was physical too. Every afternoon we would cross to our playing-fields in Christ Church Meadow, an oblong of meadow-land beneath the walls of Merton. I loved this place with the sort of vibrant surrender, I see in retrospect, with which the poet Marvel loved his garden,                                                                       

                  Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Three big chestnuts grew in the corner, and in the long damp grass beneath them I used to lie unobserved and ecstatic, in the heavy sweet-smelling hush of an Oxford summer afternoon. Frogs leapt up there, and kept me amused; grasshoppers quivered on grasses beside my eye; the bells of Oxford lan­guidly chimed the hours; if I heard somebody looking for me

—‘Morris! Morris! You’re in!’—I knew they would not bother to look for long. Marvell thought the Garden of Eden must have been best when Adam walked alone there, and all my life I have felt in places, in landscapes as in cities, an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body. I trace this perverse but convenient emotion to those scented afternoons of cricket long ago—

                      The Gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race, And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

Other Oxford seductions were less obvious. I loved the idea of the place hardly less than the look of it. I loved its age and oddity, its ceremonials, its quirks and antiquities. I loved the massed banks of books so often to be glimpsed through college windows, and the faces of the remarkable men we saw around us every day-statesmen and philosophers at the high table in Christ Church Hall, theologians stately as knights in the pulpit, wild scholars talking to themselves in High Street. I loved the Christmas parties arranged for us by the Canons of Christ Church in their great canonical houses facing Tom Quad. How tall the candles were then! How rich but wholesome the cakes! How twinkling the Regina Professors turned out to be, stripped of their awful dignities! What thrilling presents we were given—envelopes with Penny Blacks upon them, mag­nificent wax seals of Bishops or Chancellors! How happy the old clergymen’s faces looked as, breathlessly piping our grati­tude—’Thank you very much indeed, Sir!’ ‘It was jolly nice of you, Sir! ‘—we last saw them nodding their goodbyes, a little exhausted around the eyes, through the narrowing gaps of their front doors!

I did not really know the purposes of Oxford, nor did I think it necessary to enquire. It was sufficient in its presence, not something that must be defined or explained, but simply part of life itself. It seemed to me a kind of country, where people were apparently encouraged to pursue their own interests and pleasures in their own time and in their own way: and this view of a university as an ideal landscape, through whose thickets, hills and meadows the privileged may briefly wander, is one that I hold to this day.

All these were heady influences upon a child in my state of awareness. They encouraged me in my sense of difference, and of purity. The school itself was sensible and un-hearty: nobody called me cissy for my poetic poses, or thought me silly when I blushed to expose my private parts. I detested sports, except cross-country running, but nobody held it against me, and the more sensitive of the staff, I think, recognized some ambiguity in me, and did their best to temper it. One moment of empathy I remember still with a pang. I was in the matron’s room one day, reporting for a dose of Angler’s Emulsion, per­haps, or collecting some darned socks, when she suddenly took me by both hands and asked if she could show me something. She said it with a sweet but serious smile, and I expected to see a family trinket from a jewel-box, or the photograph of some beloved. Instead she walked to the window, drew the curtains and took off her dress. I can see her rather scrawny figure now, in a pink satiny slip, and hear her voice with its trace of rustic Oxfordshire to it—’There’s no need to be embarrassed, dear, you’ve often seen your mother undressed, haven’t you?’

I did not know what to expect when, taking my hand in hers, she slid it round her slithery waist to the small of the back.

‘There,’ she said, ‘feel there.’ I felt, and there beneath the satin was a small hard lump. ‘Did you feel it?’ she whispered, kneel­ing on the floor in front of me, and taking my face between her hands. ‘What can it be, Morris? What do you think it is?’ I was touched, and frightened, and proud to have been asked, all at the same time, and did my small best to comfort her. It was nothing, I boldly said, nothing to worry about at all. Why, it was only a little lump. You could hardly feel it. My mother often had lumps like that.

The headiest influence of all, though, was the influence of life within the cathedral. I have never been a true Christian, and even now wish the great churches of Europe were devoted to some less preposterous exercise than worship. I except, though, from my iconoclasm your true-blue English cathedrals, if there are any left, where the Book of Common Prayer survives un­tampered, where the Bible is still King James’s version, where fiery brides keep their fingers crossed as they promise to obey, where the smell is of must and candles, where the hassocks have been embroidered by the Diocesan Mothers’ Guild, where the clergymen’s vowels are as pure as their musical intonation is shaky, where gold plate gleams beneath rose windows, where organists lean genially from their organ-lofts during the ser­mon, where Stanford in C, The Wilderness or Zadoc the Priest thunder through the arches on feast days and where at the end of evensong the words of the Benediction come frail, half ­inaudible but wonderfully moving from the distant coped figure raising his hand in blessing before the high altar. All these conditions were satisfied to perfection during my child­hood attendance at the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford, and beneath the orison of their mysteries I brooded and wondered, day after day, about the mystery of myself.

Investigators into trans-sexuality often comment upon the mystic trappings in which it is likely to be clothed. The ancients frequently saw something holy in a being that trancended the sexes, and sympathetic friends have detected, in the heart of my own quandary, some sort of inspiration. I first felt it myself, profane or ludicrous though it may appear to sceptics, during my years in that cathedral. Every day for five years, holidays apart, I went to service there, and its combination of architecture, music, pageantry, literature, suggestion, association and sanctity powerfully affected my introspections. I knew that building almost as I knew my own home: or rather I knew part of it, for out of sight beyond the choir stalls were chantries and chancels we seldom had cause to penetrate, alcoves which sprang into life only on particular days of ceremony, and were be usually obscured in shadow, dimly hung with the gossamer ensigns of disbanded regiments, and sometimes shuffled into, of as into anonymity, by lonely bowed figures in search of soli­tude. But the bright-lit circle around the choir stalls became as lit it were my own, and it was there more than anywhere that I moulded my conundrum into an intent.

 An ancient holy building is conducive to secrets, and my secret became so intermingled with the shapes, sounds and patterns of the cathedral that to this day, when I go back there  to evensong, I feel an air of complicity. I found a passing fulfilment in the building, in a kind of dedication. Over at the choir school I increasingly felt myself an impostor among my friends, and winced, silently but in pain, when people in their ignorant kindness expected me to be as the others. Even the matron, if I had returned her confidence with one of my own, would doubtless have sent me to bed early or prescribed of Syrup of Figs—more or less the reaction, I may say, which I would find in medical circles for another couple of decades. I wondered sometimes if it were all a punishment. Could I per­haps have done something fearful in a previous incarnation, to be condemned in this way? Or would I be compensated in an existence to come, by rebirth as Sonja Henie or Deanna Durbin? At other times I thought it might all be resolved by suffering, and when I sat in the dentist’s chair, or lay miserable in the sickroom, or was being urged to be first off the diving­board into the cold pool, I called into play arcane formulae of my own: often I was told how brave I was, and this told me something about the meaning of courage, for I was really ticking off each moment of unhappiness as a contribution towards my release—truly storing up treasures in heaven.

But during our daily hours at the cathedral, I could be myself. There I achieved some childish nirvana. Pink, white and scarlet in my vestments, genuinely inspired by the music, the words and the setting, I was not exactly a boy anyway, but had undergone some apotheosis of innocence to which I aspire even now—an enchantment less direct than my abandonment beneath the chestnuts, but more complete in its liberation. Perhaps it is how nuns feel. Certainly I felt sure that the spirits the place approved of it, and perfectly understood my desi­res. How could they do otherwise? The noblest aspects of the liturgy aspired to what I conceived as the female principle. Our very vestments seemed intended to deny our manhood, and the most beautiful of all the characters of the Christian story, I thought, far more perfect and mysterious than Christ himself, was the Virgin Mary, whose presence drifted so strangely and elegantly through the Gospels, an enigma her­self.

Elevated in this guileless if soppy way, I began to dream of ways in which I might throw off the hide of my body and reveal myself pristine within—for ever emancipated into the ate of simplicity. I prayed for it every evening. A moment of silence followed each day the words of the Grace—’The Grace Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellow-tip of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore.’ Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: ‘And please God let me be a girl. Amen.’

How He could achieve it, I had no idea, and I was doubtless as ague as ever myself about the details of my desire. I still hardly knew the difference between the sexes anyway, having seldom if ever seen a female body in the nude, and I prayed without reason, purely out of instinct. But the compulsion was absolute, and irrepressible, and those cathedral days seemed to give it a sacred encouragement. I felt that there were Powers waiting to help me, some day. I did not despair, and being by temperament a cheerful child, and by circumstance a lucky one, I conditioned myself to cherish my secret more as a promise than a burden. ‘I make myself laugh at everything,’ as Beaumarchais’ Barber has it, ‘for fear of having to cry.’ I do not wish to imply that I imagined some Godly purpose working itself out in me: it is merely that those influences of my child­hood, those English tolerances, those attitudes and sensations of Oxford, those consolations of Christian form, wove their own spell around my perplexities, softening them and giving them grace. I suppose there may seem to you something gro­tesque in the trans-sexual impulse, but it has never seemed ignoble or even unnatural to me. I agree with Goethe.

3

Sex and my conundrum—in the hayloft—gender and Bolsover Ma.

I wondered occasionally if others might be in the same pre­dicament, and once, choosing a particular friend at school, I tentatively began to explore the subject. It had occurred to me that perhaps mine was a perfectly normal condition, and that every boy wished to become a girL It seemed a logical enough aspiration, if Woman was so elevated and admirable a being as history, religion and good manners combined to assure us.

I was soon disillusioned, though, for my friend deftly diverted the conversation into a dirty joke, and I withdrew hastily giggling and askew.

That my dilemma actually emanated from my sexual organs did not cross my mind then, and seems unlikely to me even now. Almost as soon as I reached my public school, Lancing, I learned very accurately the facts of human reproduction, and they seemed to me essentially prosaic. They still do. I was not in the least surprised that Mary had been invested with the beauty of virgin birth, for nothing could seem to me more matter-of-fact than the mechanics of copulation, which every living creature manages without difficulty, and which can easily be reproduced artificially too. That my inchoate yearnings, born from wind and sunshine, music and imagination—that my conundrum might simply be a matter of penis or vagina, testicle or womb, seems tome still a contradiction in terms, for it concerned not my apparatus, but my self.

If any institution could have persuaded me that maleness was preferable to femaleness, it was not Lancing College. The second world war had begun now, and the school had been re­moved from its magnificent Sussex home to a congeries of country houses in Shropshire. I expect it had lost much of its confidence and cohesion in the process: certainly after the glories of Oxford and the volatile generosity of home it was disappointingly unstylish, and nothing about the school ex­cited me, or ever renewed my sense of sacrament.

I was not really unhappy there, but I was habitually frightened. The masters were invariably kind, but the iniquitous prefectorial system could be very crueL I was constantly in trouble, usually for squalid faults of my own, and was beaten more often than any other boy in my house. A silly and wicked ritual surrounded a beating by the house captain. The basement room was shrouded in blankets or curtains, giving it a true ambiance of torture-chamber, and all the house prefects attended. I used to be sick with fear, and feel a little queasy even now, thinking about it Thirty Years On. Nor was any discipline I was later to experience in the British Army, no bawling of sergeants or sarcasms of adjutants, anything like as terrifying as the regimen of the Lancing College Officers Training Corps, whose compulsory parades were held every Thursday afternoon. We wore uniforms from the first world war, and drilled with 19th-century rifles lately captured from the Italians in North Africa, and the slightest tarnish of a button, or the crooked wrap of a puttee, could bring savagery upon us. For twenty years or more I dreamt about the horror of those parades, and of the burning pale blue eyes of the cadet sergeant, approaching me expectant and mocking down the ranks (for if I was actually present, having failed to convince the authorities that I had sprained my ankle or developed a feverish cold, I was exceedingly unlikely to be correct).

I wanted no share in this establishment. I left Lancing as soon as I could, volunteering for the Army when I was 17, and contemplating my years there I remember only two positive pleasures. One was the pleasure of roaming the Welsh border country on my bicycle: the other was the pleasure of sex. When I wandered off among the brackeny hills, or explored the castles that guarded that long-embattled frontier, I was retreating into a truer and more private role than anything Lancing permitted: and when I thrilled to the touch of a prefect’s strong hand surreptitiously under the teashop table, I was able to forget that he had flogged me the week before, and could be my true self with him, not the poor hangdog child crying over the packing-case, but somebody much more adult, confident and self-controlled.

I hope I will not be thought narcissist if I claim that I was rather an attractive boy, not beautiful perhaps, but healthy and slim. Inevitably, the English school system being what it is, I was the object of advances, and thus my inner convictions were thrown into an altogether new relief. It seemed perfectly natural to me to play the girl’s role in these transient and generally light-hearted romances, and in their platonic aspects I greatly enjoyed them. It was fun to be pursued, gratifying to be admired, and useful to have protectors in the sixth form. I enjoyed being kissed on the back stairs, and was distinctly flattered when the best-looking senior boy in the house made elaborate arrangements to meet me in the holidays.

When it came, nevertheless, to more elemental pursuits of pederasty, then I found myself not exactly repelled, but em­barrassed. Aesthetically it seemed wrong to me. Nothing fitted.

Our bodies did not cleave, and moreover I felt that, though promiscuity in flirtation was harmlessly entertaining, this in­timacy of the body with mere acquaintances was inelegant. It was not what the fan-vaulting expected of me. It was not what my girl friends had in mind, when they spoke in breathless undertones of their wedding night. It was a very far cry from Virgin Birth. It was also worrying for me, for though my body often yearned to give, to yield, to open itself, the machine was wrong. It was made for another function, and I felt myself to be wrongly equipped.

I fear my suitors thought me frigid, even the ones I liked the best, but I did not mean to be ungrateful. I was not in the least shocked by their intentions, but I simply could not respond in kind. We indulged our illicit pleasures generally in the haylofts of farms, or the loose field-ricks they still built in those days, and I think it a telling fact that of those first sexual experiences I remember most vividly, and most voluptuously, not the clumsy embraces of Bolsover Major, not the heavy breathing of his passion or his sinuous techniques of trouser-removal, but the warm slightly rotted sensation of the hay beneath my body, and the smell of fermenting apples from the barn below.

So this was sex! I knew it at once to be a different thing from gender—or rather, a different thing from that inner factor which I identified in myself as femaleness. This seemed to me, while germane indeed to human relationships, almost inci­dental to Bolsover’s cavortings in the hay-rick—I was right too, for if Bolsover could not at that moment have cavorted with some nubile junior, he would undoubtedly have gone up there to cavort with himself.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether in-substantial. 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 a spring in one’s step or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries and hormones. It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity. Male and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though the concep­tions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous. As C. S. Lewis once wrote, gender is not a mere imaginative ex­tension of sex. ‘Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.

Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless.’

Lewis likened the difference between Masculine and Feminine to the difference between rhythm and melody, or between the clasped hand and the open palm. Certainly it was a melody that I heard within myself,  not a drum-beat or a fan­fare, and if my mind was sometimes clenched, my heart was all too open. It became fashionable later to talk of my condition as ‘gender confusion’, but I think it a philistine misnomer: I have had no doubt about my gender since that moment of self-realization beneath the piano. Nothing in the world would make me abandon my gender, concealed from everyone though it remained: but my body, my organs, my paraphernalia, seemed to me much less sacrosanct, and far less interesting too.

Yet I was not indifferent to magnetisms of the body. Some of the nameless craving that haunted me still was a desire for an earthier involvement in life. I felt that the grand constants of the human cycle, birth to death, were somehow shut off from me, so that I had no part in them, and could look at them only from a distance, or through glass. The lives of other people seemed more real because they were closer to those great fundamentals, and formed a homely entity with them. In short, I see now, I wished very much that I could one day be a mother, and perhaps my preoccupation with virgin birth was only a recognition that I could never be one. I have loved babies always, with the sort of involuntary covetousness, I suppose, that drives unhappy spinsters of a certain age to kid­nap: and when later in life I reached the putative age of maternity, finding myself still incapable of the role, I did the next best thing and became a father instead.

What would Bolsover have said if, extracting myself from his loins, I had excused myself with these sophistries? But it all seemed plain enough to me. I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex, and I could achieve completeness only when the one was adjusted to the other. I have thought about it for four decades since then, and though I know now that such an absolute fulfilment can never be achieved—for no man ever became a mother, even miracu­lously—still I have reached no other conclusion.

4

The colonel’s greeting—as to soldiering—impostor in the mess—Otto—non-persons

I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in bus­kins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was. Stranger and impostor though I was, I was kindly treated in the Army: and far from making a man of me, it only made me feel more proudly feminine at heart.

The 9th Lancers had been famous for their glitter and club-like exclusivity ever since their foundation as Owen Wynn’s Dragoons in 1715, and by the end of the second world war they were at the peak of their form. They were a very model of a mechanized cavalry regiment, successfully blending tradition and technique, and when I joined them they were still riding the tide of victory, tensed, fit and properly pleased with them­selves after chasing the Germans from Alaniein to the Po. I liked them from the start, and short though my stay was with their ornate and swanky organism, retained an affection for it to the end—in 1960, when it was amalgamated at last with the 12th. After Italy I sailed with the 9th to Egypt and then, be­coming the regimental intelligence officer, went with them to Palestine in the last years of the British mandate. They never treated me as one of themselves, and for this I was grateful: I was welcomed as a transient visitor from across some unmarked frontier, and this seemed apposite to me.

Soldiering has always paradoxically attracted me. Later I was to know militarism in very different circumstances, as I fol­lowed the armies of the west through the long rearguard action of imperialism, but miserable though this experience was, it did not quench in me a perverse respect for the profession of arms. I have always admired the military virtues, courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline, and I like the look of soldiering. I like the lean humped silhouettes of infantrymen, and the swagger of paratroops, and all the martial consequence of em­barkation or parade. Tanks in particular, which I used to know too well, have always fascinated me. They are, so I was taught at Sandhurst, no more than mobile guns: all their elaborate mechanisms of propulsion and control, all their tubes, brackets and hatches, fulfil one purpose only, to get the gun to the right place, and shoot it straight.

Perhaps it is this very singleness of purpose that appeals to me, and I respond to soldiering because, being thinly plated myself, and lightly armed, I relish its brutal thrust. But in any case life with the 9th Lancers, in the years immediately after the second world war, was soldiering in a less barbarous kind, and the insight it afforded me of life in an entirely male adult world was curiously gentle and considerate. The retreat from empire was only beginning then, unconsciously at that, and though we were inevitably drawn into one or two of the petty conflicts that were the imperial metier, still we had plenty of time, in Italy, Egypt or Palestine, for the domestic side of military life.

For thoroughly domestic it was, in many ways, and there was an intimate beguilement to the affairs of such a corps. It was small—30 officers, perhaps, and 700 men. It was young. It was catty. Its members knew each other very well, and did not invariably like each other. The gulf between officers and men was deep and well defined: when years later I went back to write about the disbandment of the 9th Lancers, a sergeant told me that he thought the English class system to have been one of the secrets of such a regiment’s long success—’it meant there was no envy, you see, it was all in the nature of things’. I felt myself, though, to stand apart from this little hierarchy, and bore towards my own particular soldiers a responsibility less official than neighbourly, perhaps: in return they entrusted me with tasks and intimacies which, I flatter myself, they would not have confided to all my colleagues (most of whom, I need hardly say, would have suffered at least as much for their troopers as they would for themselves).

Among the officers there was a powerful sense of family. It was hardly like being in an Army at all. Age was disregarded and rank was tacit. Nobody called anybody ‘Sir’. The colonel was Colonel Jack, or Colonel Tony. Everybody else was known by his Christian name. Courtesy towards each other was not a deliberate form, it was merely a matter of habit, or convenience. This was a very professional regiment. Wartime soldiers like me were a small minority, and many of them, too, had family connections with the 9th. A sense of heritage accordingly bound the officers one to another, and made us all conscious of lance and plume, saddle-carbine and cuirass. These were the Delhi Spearmen: and though the details of the regimental history were less than vivid to most of us, still there hung al­ways around our mess a general suggestion of glory (not that anyone would have been so insensitive as to mention it, for if there was one attribute the 9th Lancers were not anxious to display, it was keenness).

Assumptions of taste and behaviour, too, could still in those days sustain such a company of men. The English world had not yet come apart, and a modicum of conformity was taken for granted. ‘Who was Jorrocks?’ asked some ingenuous new­corner one day, during a pause in the 9th Lancers’ favourite literary conversation—in those days every riding man knew the novels of Robert Surtees. There was a short staggered pause. ‘Who was Jorrocks?’ an answering voice echoed in­credulously. ‘Where were you brought up, boy?’ Nobody minded if you pursued interests altogether your own; but it was generally understood that if you did not read Surtees, did not care much for horses, had not been to an acceptable school and would rather be in the Royal Tank Regiment anyway, then at least you would have the sense and taste to keep quiet about it. Physical exhibitionism was tolerated, mental display was unpopular: the regiment was full of highly intelligent men, but the casual visitor might not have guessed it, for their conversa­tion was deliberately muffled, and it was only in the seclusion of private talk that one tasted its real quality. This had always been so: among 9th Lancers of the past had been one officer who took his cello with him in order to play string quartets during the invasion of China in 1840, and another, upon his death in the 1950s, was said by The Times to have taken part in a cavalry charge, discovered a new species of Himalayan poppy and translated the odes of Horace into excellent idio­matic English.

I invite my women readers to imagine how they would them­selves have felt if, successfully disguised as a young man, they had been admitted to this closed and idiosyncratic male society in their late teens. For this is how I conceived my condition. The Army had confirmed my intuition that I was fundamen­tally different from my male contemporaries. Though I very much enjoyed the company of girls, I certainly had no desire to sleep with them, and the sexual ambitions which so preoccu­pied the minds of my colleagues simply did not enter my head at all. My own libidinous fancies were far vaguer, and were concerned more with caress than copulation. I suppose I was really pining for a man’s love. If so I suppressed the instinct:

but as to my sense of gender, I knew it to be as different from that of my friends as cheese from chalk, or thump from sere­nade. I could not share the urgency of the male impulse, or the unquestioning sense of manhood which bound these sol­diers together, and had carried them so bravely through so many ordeals.

You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation your­self, that it was extraordinarily interesting. Like a spy in a courteous enemy camp, or perhaps a dinner guest at one of the more traditional London clubs, you would find yourself caught up in the fascination of observing how the other side worked. For myself, I think I learnt my trade largely in the 9th Lancers, for I developed in that regiment an almost anthropological in­terest in the forms and attitudes of its society: and sitting there undetected, so to speak, I evolved the techniques of analysis and observation that I would later adapt to the writer’s craft. I felt myself to be, as you would, totally separate and distinct; for I realized by now how deeply a male sexuality lay beneath their conduct, and how profoundly I lacked it.

You would also feel a sense of privilege. It was like eaves­dropping by licence. I am beginning to forget now what it was like to be able to sit as a man among men, and I shall never be in that position again: but even then I felt that I was lucky to have the experience. I was surprised that they should share their attitudes with me. In a curious way I was flattered that they accepted me. Sometimes nowadays I hear a party of men sharing a joke or an experience which, though not necessarily prurient, they would not think of sharing with a woman: and I think to myself not without a wry nostalgia that once long ago, in the tented mess of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, they would have unhesitatingly shared it with me.

But most of all you would have felt plain pleasure at having handsome and high-spirited young men all around you. I did not realize it very consciously at the time, but this is un­deniably what I felt myself. Cherishing my secret still, never­theless I was encouraged often with indulgences, for by now, I discovered, both men and women sometimes instinctively felt the femininity within me. With women this gave me a new sense of ease, for it was always hard work pretending to be gallant; with men it gave me unexpected advantages. In the Army as at Lancing, I was never short of protectors. If my books were stolen, somebody would get them back for me. If I was losing an argument, somebody would back me up. If, at the training camp of the Royal Armoured Corps, I could not start my blessed motor-bike, I never had to kick for long. At Sandhurst I shared a room with a fellow-cadet who was willing, it seems to me now in wistful retrospect, to do for me any chore I wished, the more tedious, the more eagerly. The worst would never quite happen, I came rather smugly to think:

somebody would always intervene, take the brunt, or forgive me. You know the feeling, I’m sure.

Such kindnesses were seldom exactly homosexual. I still did not look effeminate, and certainly did not feel myself to be homosexual. But the whole of English upper-class life, as I was later to discover more explicitly, was shot through with bi­sexual instinct. The public school system, the inhibitions of English manners, the happy tolerance accorded to originals and mavericks of every kind—all these traits meant that male relationships were full of emotional nuance and undertone. The great cavalry regiments of the old Army were no excep­tions, and on the whole they preferred their young officers fresh and good looking. It was a harmless quixotry, part a game, part I suppose a compensation, and if it ever went be­yond the platonic I never experienced it myself.

Still it was there, even in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, the Delhi Spearmen, and it added to the warmth and piquancy of regimental life. I remember one officer complaining to me about the thickness of a subordinate’s neck, an unfair aestheti­cism I thought to level at a perfectly competent tank com­mander, and once some of the subalterns had a quiz among themselves to rate their own order of good looks. Sometimes of course they womanized. I once escorted a nervous brother­officer to the doorstep of a brothel in Trieste, on his first cx­cursion into the demi-monde—how pale he stood there in the street-light, looking back at me almost desperately, waiting for the door to open, as I drove away into the night I Sometimes they obeyed convention, flirted with rich Greek wives in Alexandria or sat aghast through the exhibitions of Port Said. Generally, though, they took their pleasures together, lived with a surprising abstemiousness, and seem to me in hindsight to have been engagingly naïve young men.

It was fun for me, it really was, to enter the wider world in such company. Would you not agree? In Italy we first learnt the delights of wine, as of opera. In Egypt we sampled the society of cosmopolitans—that shifting, glittering companion­ship of the Levant which still set the tone of Alexandria, with its pashas and its panderers, its cotton knights and its Maltese entrepreneurs. In Austria we first encountered the central European culture of which my mother, who had been educated in Leipzig, was herself truly a product, and whose poems and music had filled our house at home. In Palestine we consorted with clever Arabs of Jerusalem, and were entertained to tea by embittered patriots. It was a far Grander Tour than ever the milords experienced, and we were still scarcely more than adolescents. Arriving at Port Said off our troopship from Italy, a friend and I went out to dine at a restaurant in the town. ‘Good Heavens!’ he cried, inspecting the wine list, ‘Rhine wines! How lovely it will be to taste them again after all these years!’ I accepted his enthusiasm with respect at the time, but considering it now I realize that he must have been about 16 years old when he had tasted them last.

Some of those evenings I remember with just the happiness, I suppose, with which a woman remembers her first evenings out with men, in the delicious gaiety of her girlhood. I remem­ber for example the moment when,sitting with a brother officer beside the window of a restaurant in Trieste, I saw two little urchin boys addressing themselves to us through the plate glass with the mummery of self-pity and appeal that was common then all over Europe—rubbing their little bellies to express hunger, wiping their eyes to simulate tears, holding hands to illustrate orphanhood, lifting their feet to display their broken shoes. They cannot have expected much from the well­- fed young officers within, accustomed as they were to tips of a lira or two from the back of the hand, but on a sudden corn­- passionate whim, which endeared him to me ever after, my companion took from his wallet some really valuable note, ten or perhaps twenty thousand lira in the inflated currency of the day, and sent it out to them by the waiter. They received it dumbly. They could not believe their eyes. They stared at it. They turned it over. They gazed at each other and at us. Then, suddenly realizing the full splendour of their windfall, as one boy they turned and leapt hilariously away down the street, dancing, skipping, flying almost, two little untidy blobs of legs, flapping clothes and tangled hair, laughing away out of sight towards the harbour.

And I relish still, as you may relish some intimate retreat of chelsea or Greenwich Village, the duck-hunter’s house at Grado into which the officers of the 9th had gained some privi­lege of access. It was the warmest, snuggest place imaginable. We would sit by the fire in the kitchen while the lady of the house prepared our meal, drinking grappa or red wine and practising our Italian upon the duck man, and all round us the game-birds hung upside-down from their hooks, giving the room a still-life look, and making one feel deliciously insulated against the dank marsh outside. There were only oil-lamps in the house, and when our soup was ready we would take the light with us to the table in the sitting-room, and squeeze our­selves in at the white-clothed table against the wall. Our host would sit backwards on a chair beside us, to see us properly settled, and later sometimes his wife came in too, wiping her hands on her apron, to wish us buon appetito: but presently they left us with our roast duck, our wine and ourselves, so that we sat there drinking, talking and eating until the night was half gone, the lamp began to gutter and smell, and we must reluctantly tumble out of that best of clubs, that Pratts of the Veneto, into our truck and back to camp.

Best of all I remember my journeys and evenings with Otto, for I loved him. Half the Army knew Otto. He was one of the grand originals. His origins were mysterious, for he was fluent in German, had been briefly at Potsdam Military Academy, and claimed a maternal uncle who had been a German Field-Marshal on the Russian front. Certainly he had access to a fiat in Vienna, which he freely lent to his friends, and through whose keyhole, he pretended, elderly Hapsburg princesses used to peer to see the slim young Englishmen in their baths. Otto stuttered slightly, and was very brave: he had won a Mili­tary Cross for early exploits in flail tanks, devices which, daemonically advancing through minefields whirling chains of steel in front of them, cleared a path for the armour and in­fantry behind. He was a small, slight man who walked in a stooped lopsided way, as though there were some maladjust­ment of his locomotion, and his expression was above all quiz­zical. I have a picture of him before me now, in a photograph of 9th Lancer officers taken on May 6th, 1945, the last day of their long war: among all those tanned and vigorous English faces, smiling in success, his is thrust out pugnaciously, charac­teristically half in shadow, and his shoulders are hunched as though part-way through a shrug.

Otto did not stay long in the 9th Lancers after the war, drifting off to extra-regimental soldiering more to his taste. I heard of him from time to time—commanding a force of muleteers somewhere, accepting an improbable wager in Malaya—and finally he turned up as an officer of the Trucial Oman Scouts in the Persian Gulf: where, untypically pushing a captured Arab dissident into the back of a truck, he was stabbed for his discourtesy, and died of the wound. He died as he had lived, distinctively, but though I often meet people who remember him, still nobody seems to know much about his life, and he is spoken of still with a vague and half-cynical affection.

When I knew him he was young and full of saturnine charm.

I loved the hint of wickedness that lay hooded and probably specious behind his fun. I loved his flaunted taste for the dis­solute and the disreputable, which led some of our more proper colleagues, confronted by some appalling revelation over the dinner table, to respond with a stifled ‘Otto—really!’ Otto was like an emissary from other existences outside, a foretaste of life as it might be when, freed from the military restraints, I could evolve styles and manners of my own. As regimental intelligence officer I had a jeep, and licence to wander far and wide through the countries of the Fertile Crescent, Cairo to Kurdestan: on many of these long journeys Otto came with me, bringing his whisky and his repertoire of quotations from Oxnar Khayyain, and teaching me, from his long fighting experience in Africa, tricks of the desert trade.

At the same time he exemplified for me, more than anyone else in the regiment, the club-like brotherhood of men, which tantalized me, repelled me and attracted me, all at once: for though his prejudices were brazen and his manners altogether his own, yet whether he was talking to general or corporal, Jewish scholar or Arab serf, a patrician in the Palazzo Grimani or a duck-hunter in the Grado marshes, he spoke to them in a vocabulary they instantly understood and accepted. He knew they would be on his wavelength, the cycle of maleness. I used to watch him with a sad admiration, and sometimes I caught from his eye, as he exchanged badinage with the waiter or insults with the Cairo policeman, a flicker of understanding. Once late at night in the Suez Canal Zone, then a British mili­tary enclave, we were being driven cross-country back to camp at Qassassin. It was one of those stunning star-lit nights of an Egyptian winter, when the air smells only of sand and dryness, the sky looks so crisp you could cut it, and a brilliant chill makes your body shiver and your spirits soar. Otto and I stood in the back of the open truck, for the pleasure of the ride, leaning on the roof of the cab, and as we bumped across the open desert we stood closer together for warmth, and he threw a greatcoat over both our shoulders. We travelled for a time in silence, as the truck shuddered and jolted on, and then Otto spoke. ‘G-G-God,’ he said, ‘I w-wish you were a woman.’

Reply came there none, as the night swept by: but dear God, I would answer him now.

Such was my substitute for girlhood, inadequate but rich in compensations, and this was the clash of sensibilities, inside and outside myself, which was to govern my emotions ever after. I loved the Army, but I could never be truly of it. I en­joyed my excursions into that male society, but I knew I could not stay. And while, as I say, in some ways I liked this ob­server’s role, and came indeed to make a profession of it, still I pined sometimes to be a member somewhere. Just as, in pos­sessing these two landscapes of my childhood, I had felt myself to belong to neither, so I felt now that I belonged to no seg­ment of humanity. It is a fine thing to be independent in life, and a proud sensation to know yourself unique: but a person who stands all on his own, utterly detached from his fellows, may come to feel that reality itself is an illusion—just as the poor convicts of the 19th-century silence system, so isolated from their comrades that they were never allowed to see or hear another soul for years at a time, sometimes lost all grasp of their own existences, and became non-persons even to them­selves.

5

Identity—precedents of sorts—Dr. Benlamin—’to alter the body!’

It is only in hindsight that I compare myself with those numbed and alienated prisoners. I was so blithe in many ways in my youth, and enjoyed so many advantages, that the conflict with­in me did not rage, but rather festered. I was subject to periods of melancholic depression, which grew fiercer as I grew older, but I looked on the bright side generally, and adhered to the belief, which I hold to this day, that self-analysis is often a mistake, and leads one only down endless and unprofitable paths of speculation. I did not query my condition, or seek reasons for it. I knew very well that it was an irrational con­viction—I was in no way psychotic, and perhaps not much more neurotic than most of us: but there it was, I knew it to be true, and if it was impossible then the definition of possi­bility was inadequate.

I see now that, like the silent prisoners, I was really deprived of an identity. This is a trendy word I long distrusted, masking as it so often does befuddled ideas and lazy thinking. It is a nebulous word—even the Oxford Dictionary is uncertain of its derivation, and pragmatic about its meaning. I was recon­ciled to it, however, by a passage in Eothen, the masterpiece of my literary exemplar Alexander Kinglake, in which he dis­cusses the effect upon the traveller of a journey in the east. When Kinglake thought of identity, I would guess, he thought of the whole corpus of personality, how others saw him, what he considered himself to be, his status in the world, his back­ground, his taste, his profession, his purposes. He thought of it, I am sure, as an entity—the fact of what one is. The dictionary collates it also with oneness, and with ‘the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and is not something else’.

Many people, when I tell them I am writing this book, ex­press the hope that it will throw light on ‘the mystery of identity’, or ‘the search for identity’, envisioning the human condition as a microcosm of universal truths. I do not think, though, in such cosmic terms. I conceive identity as Kinglake would have conceived it, and I realize now that the chief cause of my disquiet was the fact I had none. I was not to others what I was to myself. I did not conform to the dictionary’s definition—’itself and not something else’.

The certainty of my conviction only raised more questions. How could I be so sure of my predicament? If I thought I felt like a woman, how could I know what a woman felt? What did I mean, when I said I was feminine? Was it really a personal matter at all, or were there confusions of identity that lay far outside the Freudian or the pathological, and had their roots in the state of the world? We were living in a twilight time. Old forces were dying and new energies emerging. Patterns that bad seemed permanent were falling into chaos. Strange ideas sprouted everywhere. Could it be that I was merely a symptom of the times, a forerunner perhaps of a race in which the sexes would be blended amoeba-like into one? The world was con­tracting fast, and its political and social divisions would in­evitably fade. Confronted at last with its insignificance in the universal scale, might not mankind discard its sexual divisions too? Was this what I was all about? Or was there some chemic nostrum which, dispensed at the corner chemist under the National Health, and taken if possible with a glass of water, would in no time make me like everyone else?

When I left the Army I resolved to explore myself more deeply. Myth and history alike, I discovered, were full if not of precedents, at least of parallels—men who lived as women, women who lived as men, hermaphrodites, transvestites, nar­cissists, not to speak of homosexuals or bisexuals. There is no norm of sexual constitution, and almost nobody has ever con­formed absolutely to the conventional criteria of male and female. Through all the ages the idea of sexual overlap has fascinated poets and myth-makers, and it has also played its part in the great religions. God, said the Jewish chronicler, created man in his own androgynous image—’male and female created he them’, for in him both were united. Mohammed on his second coming, says the Islamic legend, will be born of a male. Among Christians, Paul assured the erring Galatians, there was no such thing as male or female—’all one person in Christ Jesus’. The Hindu pantheon is frequented by male female divinities, and Greek mythology too is full of sexual equivocations, expressed in those divine figures who, embrac­ing in themselves strength and tenderness, pride and softness, violence and grace, magnificently combine all that we think of as masculine or feminine.

It was, I think, the 18th century which first imposed upon western civilization rigid conceptions of maleness and female­ness, and made the idea of sexual fluidity in some way horrific. Perhaps it developed out of Protestantism, whose devotion to the patriarchal principle even forbade the cult of the Virgin Mary. Certainly earlier centuries did not require the male to be unyieldingly virile, or the female unremittingly demure, as Shakespeare’s comedies happily demonstrate. There was more give and take in those days, it seems, the sexes mingled freely and easily, and the word ‘manly’ had not acquired that in­tolerant connotation, that hint of cold bath and smoking-room caucus, which the Victorians were to give it (in older forms they made obsolete, it meant simply ‘human’, or even ‘humane’).

Other cultures too, ancient and contemporary, have freely recognized a no-man’s-land between male and female, and have allowed people to inhabit it without ignominy. The Phrygians of Anatolia, for example, castrated men who felt themselves to be female, allowing them henceforth to live in the female role, and Juvenal, surveying some of his own fellow-citizens, thought the same plan might be adopted in Rome—Why are they waiting? Isn’t it time for them to try the Phrygian fashion, and make the job complete—take a knife and lop off that superfluous piece of meat? Hippocrates reported the existence of ‘un-men’ among the Scythians: they bore themselves as women, did women’s work, and were generally believed to have been feminized by divine intervention. In ancient Alexandria we read of men ‘not ashamed to employ every device to change artificially their male nature into female’—even to amputation of their male parts.

Among more primitive peoples, so Sir James Frazer re­corded in The Golden Bough, ‘there is a custom widely spread ... in accordance with which some men dress as women and act as women throughout their lives. Often they are dedicated and trained to their vocation from childhood.’ The Sarom­bavy of Madagascar, for example, altogether forgot their origi­nal sex, and regarded themselves as entirely female. The ‘soft-men’ of the Chukchee Eskimo were ordered into their assumed sex by the elders at childhood, married husbands, and lived as women for the rest of their lives. We hear of Andean sorcerers obliged by tribal custom to change their sexual roles, of Mohave Indian boys publicly initiated into girlhood, of young Tabitians encouraged in infancy to think of themselves as members of the opposite sex. If to modern westerners the idea of changing sex has seemed, at least until recently, mon­strous, absurd or un-Godly, among simpler peoples it has more often been regarded as a process of divine omniscience, a mark of specialness. To stand astride the sexes was not a disgrace but a privilege, and it went often with supernatural powers and priestly functions. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx???????

I read of these antique and remote exotica, as you may imagine, with envy and approval, and I read with sympathy too of characters nearer home who found themselves torn be­tween the sexes. There was the poor Abbe de Choisy, a well-known literary cleric and diplomat of 18th-century France, who used to receive visitors to his bedroom seductively be­decked in feathers and satins, and who became as the years wore on, his body thickened and his face hardened, ever more preposterous. Or there was the celebrated Chevalier d’Eon, who, acquiring a taste for the feminine life during a mas­querade in Russia, eventually found himself ordered by his King and Government to live as a woman for the rest of his days—a soldier too, which further endeared him to me, and a person of charming sensibility. Such people probably did not actually believe themselves to be feminine, as I did, or really wish to change their bodies—they merely found it pleasant, convenient or necessary to act the female role: but still, I felt, as I groped towards their presence in the memoirs and the history footnotes, if they did not quite share my riddle, at least they would have understood it.

The first confirmation I found that there were others in the world in precisely my own condition came to me one day in Ludlow, that epitome of the English market town, that picture of castle and parish church, half-timber and boatered butcher. There on a winter evening I espied, reduced to half-price and displayed with a proper obscurity on a high back shelf, a book called Man Into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. With what agonies of embarrassment did I edge my way towards that volume I Everything seemed so wholesome in that little shop. The cheeks were so rosy, the shoes were so clean, the chat in the corner was about dancing classes, ‘flu or the shortage of broccoli. Country Life and The Autocar were the most daring things upon the magazine counter, and I would guess that the bookshelves were dominated by Howard Spring. Good Heavens, I was all wholesomeness myself, still in my British Warm, diffident in the English manner, and fresh as it happened from visiting an old family friend at Richard’s Castle. But I steeled myself, sidled alongside, shakily grabbed the volume and presented it to the saleswoman—who, as I would now foresee, took and wrapped it without a glance, for if there is one thing bookshop assistants decline as a matter of professional principle to take the slightest interest in, it is books.

Man Into Woman told the agOnizing story of a young Danish painter, Einar Wegener, who came to think of himself as two people, male and female: not quite like myself, for I believed myself to be one person clad in an alien form, but still a good deal nearer the poor old powdered Abbé de Choisy, or the cross-sexed wizards of Peru. Haunted and later obsessed by this idea, after years of confusion and misery Wegener found his way, in 1930, to the clinic of a pioneer Dresden sexologist, and there in a series of operations his male physique was stripped from him, and an attempt was made to substitute female organs. They knew nothing of hormones then, and tried to transplant ovaries into his body: but though for a time he was able to live happily enough in his new guise, and aban­don altogether his male role, his moment of release was brief. ‘It is so lovely,’ he wrote from the women’s clinic at Dresden, ‘to be a woman here among women, to be a female creature exactly like all the others’: but in the very next year he died, and was buried at Dresden as Lili Elbe. There was never a sadder tale. Not only did Wegener lose his health and in the end his life, but after the surgery in the Dresden clinic he never painted another picture until the day he died.

Yet astonishingly, you many think, the story gave me hope. I was not alone. Please God make me a girl, I had prayed on those innumerable evenings, and I still made the same wish whenever I saw a shooting star, won a wishbone contest, or visited a Blarney Well. Perhaps it could happen yet. With Einar Wegener it failed, with me it might succeed: and even if it meant for me, as it did for him, only a few months or years of fulfilment, would it not be worth it? For I was in my early twenties now, and the older I grew, the more abjectly I realized, when I allowed myself the melancholy thought, that I would rather die young than live a long life of falsehood.

A falsehood to whom, you may ask, since I was to all appear­ances unequivocally a man? A falsehood to me.

I trod the long, well-beaten, expensive and fruitless path of the Harley Street psychiatrists and sexologists, one after the other, getting their names from their published works, or being passed from one to the other. None of them in those days, I now realize, knew anything about the matter at all, though none of them admitted it. Some palmed me off with avuncular advice. Some gave me blood or urine tests. Some assured me I would grow out of it. One kindly suggested that I join him for a complete analysis, lasting several months—a proposition I wisely declined, for in fact no single soul in my predicament has ever, in the whole history of psychiatry, been ‘cured’ by science.

I can see that in the state of medical awareness then, it must have been baffling to have been confronted by a patently healthy and evidently sane young man declaring himself to be, despite all apparent physical evidence, actually a woman— especially as I did not for a moment wish to be disabused of this belief, only confirmed in it. British psychiatry has tradi­tionally leant towards physical explanations for mental distur­bances, only falling back reluctantly upon purely psychological interpretations. But I went a stage further still, and insisted that my own dilemma sprang from sources that neither couch nor drug could isolate, let alone remove. I was insisting that my fantasies were true—that fantasy, in fact, could be a reality in itself. Even now British practitioners seldom seem to grasp the meaning of this idea, and regard the treatment of transsexuals simply as a means of ‘enabling them to live with their delusions’~ In those days they were more rigid still, and I can see some of the doctors’ faces now, playing helplessly for time and fee as they asked me to describe the symptoms.

Could it not be, they sometimes asked, that I was merely a transvestite, a person who gained a sexual pleasure from wear­ing the clothes of the opposite sex, and would not a little harm­less indulgence in that practice satisfy my, er, somewhat in­determinate compulsions? Alternatively, was I sure that I was not just a suppressed homosexual, like so many others? Nobody would blame me nowadays, surely, if I let my hair down a bit—’wear something a bit gayer, you know, let your true personality emerge, don’t hide it!’ Somebody even ar­ranged a tête-a-tête with a highly civilized homosexual, owner of a London art gallery, whose company it was thought might reconcile me to the condition: we had a difficult lunch to­gether and he made eyes at the wine waiter over the fruit salad.

But none of it fitted. I did not consider myself a homosexual. I envied women their clothes only as the outward sign of their femininity. The first person I met who really seemed to under­stand something of the predicament was Dr. Harry Benjamin of New York, to whose clinic in Park Avenue, wearied by the struggle, I eventually found my way. Dr. Benjamin was then in his sixties, I suppose, and looked like a white gnome—white-haired, white-jacketed, white-faced. He seemed too small for his desk, and he talked with a scholarly Viennese accent, like a psychiatrist in a film. ‘Sit down, sit down—tell me all about yourself. You believe yourself to be a woman? Of course, I perfectly understand. Tell me something about it—take it easy, take it easy—now, tell me, tell me ...‘ I told him everything, and it was from him that I learnt what my future would be.

Dr. Benjamin, an endocrinologist, had come later in life to the study of sexual anxieties, and by the 1950s was deep in the problem of gender identity. He it was who first formally recognized the existence, within the inner keep of sex, of people like me—people whose problems lay deeper than physical medicine, deeper even than curative psychiatry, and seemed beyond diagnosis or treatment. It was Dr. Benjamin who first called us trans-sexuals, and to him more than anyone we owe the unveiling of our predicament. In the past twenty years specialists in many countries have applied their minds to the problem, but nobody I think has defined it, let alone re­solved it, any more clearly than he did. He had explored every aspect of the condition, and he frankly did not know its cause: what he did know was that no true trans-sexual had yet been persuaded, bullied, drugged, analysed, shamed, ridiculed or electrically shocked into an acceptance of his physique. It was an immutable state. ‘And so I ask myself, in mercy, or in com­mon sense, if we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction?’

Alter the body! Of course this is what I had hoped, prayed and thrown three-penny bits into wishing wells for all my life: yet to hear it actually suggested, by a man in a white coat in a medical surgery, seemed to me like a miracle, for the idea of it held for me then, as it holds for me now, a suggestion of sorcery. To alter the body! To expunge those superfluities, like the Phrygians of old, to scour myself of that mistake, to start again, to recapture some of that white freshness I used to feel, singing the psalms at Oxford! To alter the body! To match my sex to my gender at last, and make a whole of me!

I had reached the conclusion myself that sex was not a division but a continuum, that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another, and that the infinite subtlety of the shading from one extreme to the other was one of the most beautiful of nature’s phenomena. Sex was like a biological pointer, but the gauge upon which it flickered was that very different device, gender. If sex was a matter of glands or valves, gender was psychological, cultural or in my own view spiritual. If one’s sex, I reasoned, fell into the right place along the scale of gender, well and good; if it fell anomalously, too far one way or the other, then there came conundrum. But if one could not shift the scale, one could surely move the pointer. Gender might be beyond definition: sex science could understand.

To alter the body! So it really was a possibility for me, as it had been for poor Einar thirty odd years before. A more practical possibility too, for now the sex hormones had been identified, and even without surgery the secondary sexual characteristics could be induced—beards in women, breasts in men, delicacy on the one side, muscles on the other. But a change of the body must be a last resort, Dr. Benjamin counselled me. If it sounded like magic to me, to the world at large it would seem a fearful denouement. Try working out life as a man, he suggested. ‘Stick it out. Do your best. Try to achieve an equilibrium, that’s the best way. Take it easy!’ This advice I accepted, for I thought there might be layers to my conundrum which even he could not perceive. Perhaps I depended upon that very clash between sex and gender, so that to tamper with it would be gambling with my very per­sonality? Perhaps it was a condition of my gifts? Perhaps, if as I sometimes thought I was no more than a living parable of the times, to change myself would be to abort the truth—to abort, in a double sense, reality itself? For while I had no doubt at all which was my essential self, I could see that to most people an opposite reality was just as true.

Heavens, I was a jumble, I used wryly to think—two people in one, two truths, the times sublimated, reality aborted! Yet how easily the rest of life seemed to come to me, how fluent if superficial was my pen, how few my mundane worries, so that people used to say I was born with that silver spoon in my mouth, and ask me for advice! My grandfather used to main­tain that the essayist B. V. Lucas, a connection of ours, would have been a good writer if he had ever had a care in the world, and some people thought the same of me. In fact I was dark with indecision and anxiety. Sometimes I considered suicide, or to be more accurate, hoped that some unforseen and pain­less accident would do it for me, gently wiping the slate clean. And once in desperation I raised with a London doctor the possibility of immediate treatment by female hormones. I thought it might calm my conflicts by feminizing my body to some degree without the finality of surgery—a half-way solu­tion, I thought, better than nothing if less than enough.

A meeting was arranged for me with an endocrinologist in London, and came home for the appointment from Italy. Since I supose the event was a fateful one for me, I can remember it with a particular clarity. London was in that heightened version of itself that one always discovers when one returns from abroad—the buses redder than usual, the taxi­drivers more Cockney, and everything more thickly infused with the pungency that is London’s own. Even the light that came through the consultancy window was more than reason­ably London, much creamier than the Italian light, and charged with the dustflakes of W1. Against it, looking through the window, the gland man stood, and when I entered the room he turned towards me gravely, and rather shyly. He looked, it seemed to me, like an Anglo-Indian colonel, tall and gingery and exceptionally clean. He did not sit down. ‘You do realize,’ he asked, ‘what we can and cannot do for you? We can counter your male hormones with female hormones, but we cannot stop their production. We can feminize your body to a considerable extent, but of course the genitals will remain, and there is al­ways the risk of atrophying your male organs. What it would do to your personality or your talent, we cannot say. It is a- grave decision to take, but it must be your own. You do know what you are doing?’

I did not, but I went home with a box of oestrogen tablets, and for a few nights took one when I got to bed. They left me with a dry taste in the mouth, besides giving me disturbing dreams. I had taken a first timid and tentative step on a long, strange path, but I decided after all to obey Dr Benjamin’s advice a little longer, and put the pills away—in my bottom drawer so to speak, or stored in my heart like Mary’s secret (though actually, mistrusting my own resolve, I flushed them down a Venetian lavatory).

6