Boundaries To Be Transcended

"The gender reassignment is a big chapter in Jan’s life story, but it’s not the whole life story."

"[James Morris was far from being a rebel]; Jan’s upbringing was at the very heart of the British establishment, first at Oxford, then going into the Times, working in the Arab News Agency in Cairo, working as a spy in Palestine and Italy during the second World War."

"And succeeding so tremendously in all of those."

"I mean, you have to be a very good musician to be a choirboy at Oxford, to be in the intelligence service in the British army, to be the one journalist at the Times to go up Mount Everest."

John O’Rourke, Dublin-born film-maker

The man who was journalist, soldier, adventurer, author is now semi-infirm at 92 years of age, getting about with the help of a cane. His/her home is in Criccieth, Wales. Known as an essayist, historian, the man who before it became fashionable and acceptable in polite circles to transition from male to female, was a British celebrity, an accomplished man of many parts. One of his legendary

roles was as the chronicler of the world's first ascent of its tallest mountain.

James Humphrey Morris, born in 1926 in Somerset, England had been a choral scholar at Christ Church Oxford, that in itself remarkable. During the closing years of World War II, James Morris served in the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers. When he was 23, he married Elizabeth Tuckniss and together they had five children, four whom they raised to adulthood while Mr. Morris worked for The Times of London as a journalist.

He was given the prestigiously improbable assignment by the Times of acquiring an exclusive story in 1953, focusing on the-then 'impossible' ascent of the Himalayas' Mount Everest, an account that brought his name to world recognition, just as the feat of ascending to the top of Everest made Sir Edmund Hilary's and Tenzing Norgay's were made synonymous with one of the world's greatest adventure in an exploit defying human endurance.

As a journalist, Morris was embedded with Edmund Hillary's Everest team in 1953. "It altered my life so much. Now I'm the only surviving member of the expedition, and I miss them all," said Morris, pictured congratulating Hillary after the ascent. Credit: George Lowe/Royal Geographical Society, via Getty Images

"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" wrote Jan Morris in her memoir titled "Conundrum" which detailed the personal struggle to reconcile mind and body; the mind that persisted in thinking female as opposed to the body so clearly defined by biology as male. When, in 1972, James Morris transitioned through a surgical reassignment to female, he hadn't many fans but did not lack critics.

His steadfast fan, however, appeared to be the person with whom he had lived for so many years as man to her wifely role. From whom it appears, he never kept secret his female side. She must have understood his feelings of dislocation of a soul who felt trapped within a body that failed to match the mind that regarded it as a flagrant error in nature's judgement. Even while he consummated his role as a biological male, he floundered mentally, convinced of his female persona.

Elizabeth, who had been James's close companion never ceased being that; post re-assignment they separated, then later re-married. They lived together in perfect harmony, both post-1972 as females; their 70 years together cementing their lifelong relationship as consanguinity never could. As a young couple they settled for life in Wales where Elizabeth became the consummate housewife and James a journalistic gadabout. Now aged 92, as Jan Morris, age has settled her into a housebound role more than a traveller's.

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

Tom Jamieson for The New York Times