Reaching out to people who are strangers within their own bodies

THE email was welcome, because emails from this individual are always welcome.

I’ve worked with him for perhaps 30 years, because he’s always technologically ahead of the posse, easy to do a project with, even under deadline pressure, and a perfectionist without being a pain in the ass.

Accordingly, I assumed the email from Philip, although that’s not his real name, would be about business.

It wasn’t. It came straight to the point.

It said that for his whole life, he had believed he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. Now his two sons were grown up, and with the agreement of his wife, he had started down the road to a gender change. But before he took the more advanced surgical steps, he wanted to know, first of all, what my reaction was, and secondly, what the reactions of people within the media business would be. It was — unlike previous emails — signed off with a unisex version of the usual signature: “Phil.”

Up to that point, the only transgender person I’d heard of was Jan Morris, this historian and writer, who began life as James Morris. Having served with the Lancers in the Second World War, Morris went on to have an adventurous life. He was part of the team that covered the first successful attempt on Everest, transmitting the news of the climbers reaching the peak so it appeared in newspapers on the same day Elizabeth was crowned Britain’s queen.

Morris’s books were so wonderfully written that my mother always had her name down in the local library so she’d be first in line to read whatever he next produced. When it became public, in the early 1970s, that Morris had changed sex through surgery in Morocco — no British surgeon being prepared, back then, to undertake such an operation — it was global news, because he was such a major literary figure. The reports said he had divorced his wife, although it was never clear why that happened, since he continued to live with her and much later, in 2008, registered the relationship in Britain as a civil partnership.

“Transsexualism is not a sexual mode or preference,” Morris wrote. “It is not an act of sex at all. It is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it.”

Jan Morris wrote two books in the ’70s about her experience, and, having read both, my mother was braced for combat. The first time anybody said anything negative about Jan Morris, she was ready to take them on. The only problem was that nobody in her circle had heard of Jan Morris, so defence was never called for.

Now, 40 years later, my friend Philip was looking to become Phil and asking questions about possible reactions, the answers to which were simple. It was none of my business what gender she was or believed herself to be. Our friendship and working relationship were untouched by it. And Phil was lucky, if someone with such a long experience of unhappiness could be described as lucky, insofar as she worked in an industry which was one of the most liberal when it comes to sexual orientation. Phil responded happily, and the assumption was that pretty soon, when we met, her appearance would conform with the gender she believed she belonged to, as opposed to the one she’d been assigned to at birth.

It didn’t work out in that way. Nothing much changed, other than the continuing use of “Phil” in correspondence, and an unspoken but clearly shared assumption that I regarded her as female. Whether she went through any surgery is a moot point. The only certainties are that she didn’t change in any obvious physical ways, she didn’t dress differently and nobody mentioned the name in the context of a sex change.

I never referred to it again, never asked anything about it, until two unrelated factors coincided this January. The first was encountering a life-changing book, a great doorstopper of a volume about identity by psychiatrist Andrew Solomon. The book is called Far from the Tree, and is based on years of practical research. Solomon set out to find out how particular groups within wider society define themselves and are defined by others. Parents. Children. Dwarfs. Prodigies. And transgender people. He reviewed all of the literature on each group and then went to meet and live with them. For example, he spent a long period of time with the parents of the Columbine killers, seeking clues as to what unleashed their murderous venom.

Solomon looked at the issue of “gender dissonance”; Jan Morris’s “passionate, lifelong, ineradicable” conviction that, throughout all the years when she functioned with apparent success as a man, she was really a woman. What he found was that it can manifest itself extremely early.

“By age three or four, sometimes even younger, children may notice an incongruity between who they are told they are and who they sense they are,” he writes. “In early childhood, gender nonconformity is often tolerated, but by seven or so, children are pushed hard into gender stereotypes. Trans children respond to such pressure by becoming anxious and depressed. Telling their parents is usually terrifying for them.”

And rightly so. Because of education, media and sheer numbers, gay teenagers have a hard but not usually impossible time coming out to their parents. But for parents to be told by their child, not that they’re gay, but that they belong in the opposite sex, is a shocking challenge. Parents seek out every method possible to jam the genie back into the bottle, with no success whatever.

Solomon recounts the story of one agonised father reaching some sort of accommodation with the issue when a counsellor pointed out that since his young son had told him on the changing table as a toddler that he was a girl, and had said the same thing unremittingly for 12 solid years, maybe it was time to accept that it was more than a passing notion.

VARIOUS explanations for transgenderism have been suggested, many of them psychological, although recent research establishes that almost half the offspring of women treated with DES, an anti-miscarriage drug discontinued decades ago because of adverse effects it had on males and females exposed to it in utero, are transgender.

Just as I finished the transgender section of Solomon’s book, British controversialist Julie Burchill delivered herself of one of the rants with which she regularly revives her fame, this time about transsexuals. Even mentioning it bothers me, since it will send readers of this column to find what she said. It was nasty, cruel and pointless.

The book and the rant made me realise that I need to apologise. And seek to remedy, if that’s possible. What I offered Phil made me feel good, while abandoning a friend to perhaps impossible choices in a context where hostility and hurt are constant threats to people who are strangers within their own body.

* Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon is published by Scribner