Biography and Autobiography

“I have a particular fondness for Jan Morris’s book, because its serialisation in The Sunday Times in the 1970s was the first time I understood that there were others like me … that I was not alone in knowing myself to be female despite the insistence of others that I was male. In my boarding school, I carefully stored the weekly instalments at the bottom of the pile of newspapers I kept as bedding for my pet gerbils … and read and re-read them until fear of discovery led a frightened ten-year-old to carefully destroy them.
    It was a further twenty years before I managed to start my transition, two decades in which I found little to read about trans issues, apart from a brief and furtive foray into the university library when I encountered some of the classic medical texts (dismal reading, all of them). When I finally bought my own copy of Conundrum, and proudly placed it on my bookshelves rather than hiding it in a cupboard, it was eerie to discover how much of the text had remained lodged in my memory from those furtive childhood readings.
    Morris’s account of her life is tenderly written, focusing more on the joys of her varied career than on the pains of being trans. Nonetheless, she describes in detail all-too-familiar for other trans women the long years of secret realisation, of shared secrets, and eventual self-realisation. Her account of surgery in a Casablanca clinic is sparse in detail but wonderfully evocative in atmosphere, and the reason for her trip to Casablanca — the NHS’s requirement that divorce should be a pre-requisite for surgery — is all too familiar to those still facing similar restrictions in some NHS clinics.
    Some may find the prose in Morris’s later works too rich for their taste, but Conundrum is a lovely book, a worthy memoir of a prolific writer.” — CMcN
    — See also a biography of Jan Morris by Christine Burns.

Press For Change founder and former Vice-President Mark Rees was the first trans person to have his case against the UK government heard by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  Although Mark’s case was unsuccessful, like the others which followed it, this pioneer of trans rights has done much to advance public awareness of trans people, and of trans men in particular.