It was Jan Morris who transformed the world for transgender people
Newspapers, worldwide, are under pressure, but magazines in the US are doing nicely, thank you, and Vanity Fair showed just why last week. They got the story and, of even more importance, they got the picture. The picture of Caitlyn in the bustier, on the cover, was just one of a number also inside the magazine, but it’s the one that will be remembered and described, with teeth-grinding regularity, as ‘iconic’. Vanity Fair made sure, by comissioning photographic doyenne Annie Liebowitz to take it that it would carry the referred credibility of her name and reputation.
READ NEXT: VIDEO: Caitlyn Jenner behind the scenes of the Vanity Fair shoot
Then, they used social media to market and multiply the effect, so that Caitlyn became definitively famous in a way she never had more than three decades ago when — as a man — she was one of the world’s finest athletes.
Now, in that cover photograph she looked great. Let’s not put a tooth in it. She looked great. The pose helped, because it eliminated her hands. Hands are the great truth-tellers. They announce age with megaphone volume. They announce gender likewise. Even with gender reassignation surgery, there’s not a lot you can do about small, female hands, even if you believe you were really a boy from birth, and there’s even less to be done if you’re transitioning to female if you possess big, weathered male hands. So place hands behind hips, or wear gloves.
But the key learning (to coin a cliche) from transgender folk and from drag queens is that they have redefined how women can look. Instead of doing what every decent social media addict does every day — look at footage of cats falling off couches and babies falling asleep on big dogs — I have spent the last fortnight looking at pictures of Panti, in his pub-running male rendition and in full drag, and I have wondered what brand of make-up he uses and how the hell that waist is achieved. The heels that allow Panti to tower over even Miriam O’Callaghan I know all about.
From experience.
Years ago, I encountered a print catalogue from an American outlet called Sexy Shoes.
Vertiginous shoes in pure plastic. Thigh-high boots in black patent leather, with detachable spurs thrown in. Cheap and cheerful. Cheap, anyway. I never rose to the thigh-high boots, partly because I do not move in circles that are friendly to that kind of item, and partly because I never had the thighs or the shorts, but mostly because they clearly required matching accessories, and I wouldn’t be good at knowing where to buy patent leather whips.
While the deeply uncomfortable, profoundly vulgar, impellingly desirable shoes were available in tiny sizes, as well as the mid-size I required, they also came in gigantic sizes.
Extra-wide, gigantic, high-heeled bling-speckled platforms. Puzzled, I showed the pictures to my son, who favoured me with that look of weary contempt exclusive to 17-year-olds dealing with their parents.
“Ma, the reason for the big sizes is that this is a transgender catalogue,” he said, as if it was obvious. His casual expertise in this area was further developed when, more than 10 years ago, he moved into a house with a couple of other lads, and discovered that their new home had a telephone landline. Not only that, but — as emerged within days — the number of that telephone differed only by a digit from the telephone number of a sex shop on the north side of the city.
The first time my son and his pals got a call asking if they had size-18, PVC French maid outfits, they told the caller that they must have a wrong number and thought no more of it. By the fifth call for similar items, they copped on and decided to turn an irritant into a nightly entertainment.
From then on, instead of redirecting the calls, they engaged with the callers with a warmth that would have got them a customer-care award. The Midlands farmer who wanted pink platform over-the-knee boots would be asked if he’d like the matching PVC bra and pants. And did he know about the week’s special offer, discounted by 20% if the customer wanted it bundled along with the boots? They had great fun and we have to hope that the people whose orders had to be placed a second time got over it.
Getting over transitioning to another sex takes rather more effort and time, although most younger people doing it report that their peers are supportive. This makes somewhat odd the amount of coverage about Caitlyn Jenner which credits her with great courage. No. Not really.
It took enormous courage for James Morris to change gender in 1972. Morris was an historian who had produced a definitive work about the British Empire. He had accompanied Edmund Hillary’s climb of Everest. He was in his mid-40s, and married with children, when he made the same decision that Jenner more recently made: That he could not live the rest of his life as a man. As Jan Morris, she broke down all of the barriers, created all the precedents and re-established herself — in today’s terms — as a respected and celebrated brand.
Nobody at Jan Morris’s level of fame had ever made the gender transition in a public way. She wrote about it. She talked about it. By so doing, and by sustaining the inevitable bigotry, she created a new possibility in the minds of a generation that had never envisaged the possibility of sex change, no matter how grievously mismatched they felt with their assigned gender.
Admittedly, Jan Morris made her transition prior to the invention of the internet, never mind social media. Which gave her advantages and disadvantages. The market for her books was a reasonably elite, educated, literate, and reflective one, likely to continue to accept her offerings because of their intrinsic value. It was also dominated by readers living on this side of the Atlantic.
Caitlyn Jenner’s market is dominated by viewers and social media consumers living in the US, but takes in the rest of the world. Jenner’s audience is unreflective and neophiliac. For them, her athletic past belongs in pre-history. Her saleability derives from whatever she does that differs from what she did yesterday.
Jenner will make millions from wearing a bustier and from sharing her feelings about her most recent (Kardashian) wife. Jan Morris will continue to earn a modest living writing elegantly erudite books about topics indicative of sustained intellectual curiosity. In 2008, 60 years after James Morris and Elizabeth Tuckniss became man and wife, they married again, as Jan and Elizabeth Morris, having quietly lived as a couple for the intervening years.
But let’s be clear on two things. It was Morris who changed the world for trans people. Including for Caitlyn Jenner.
And it was mainstream media that hosted both revelations, more than half a century apart from each other.
VISIT THE VIEWPOINTS HOME PAGE
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
