I very much enjoyed your article, and I recall having heard about Jan, but now I’m much more inclined to read her works myself. I was moved by her willingness to be completely individual, and to express her own individual observations, sentiments, and quandaries. It can be difficult, I think, for any one who is a pioneer and mold-breaker to continue to acknowledge ambivalence, and not try to be a simplistic standard-bearer. How the very Britishness of Jan affects her window on the world is also fascinating to contemplate.
And you in turn, are willing to be both admiring and unsettled, and possibly wish for something a bit more integrated in her account, but entirely in an open-hearted way.
I’ve often thought the great eccentrics evolve and are largely tolerated in and accepted in any societies which also accommodate great hypocrisies and imbalance of power. I think of anecdotes in the book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the man of simple means who would walk with a leash, ostensibly walking, a dog, where no dog existed. The man and the imaginary pet were graciously acknowledged by passers-by, with the common understanding that this man must receive a stipend for so long as he walked the dog of a wealthy man who had included the dog-walker in his will. This classic by John Berendt described the eccentricities of life in Savannah.
Re your observation of fine historians generally being male, and there being few women who write with the same scope and verve re the topics you mentioned, I’m wondering if you have ever read any of the books by Barbara Tuchman? I find her writing, delightful, and remember reading The Distant Mirror a great many decades ago. I’ve been reading and very much enjoying The Proud Tower about life leading up to the First World War, and of course, her most well-known work is the Guns of August. Hilary Mantel is not a historian per se, but certainly I feel her work has great grandeur and fascinating texture and vivacity as well.
At any rate, I very much enjoyed your essay, and look forward to reading more. My apologies for any peculiarities of spelling, word choice, and grammar. I work within the whims of voice recognition this morning.
Morris was almost certainly autogynephilic. By the best empirically supported taxonomy of transsexualism, any male-to-female transsexual not exclusively attracted to men is autogynephilic.
>Current Western transfever seems to be dominated by the rationalist mother-knows-best Anglos of the the Guardian newspaper who growl pronouns at you, not the mystic clan Morris represents.
that's because much of what makes it to the media is a proxy fight between liberals looking for a new pet cause to fawn over vs conservatives who cannot countenance natural variation of human experience because it doesn't fit into their rigid worldview. transsexuality correlates with virtually every mental illness or variation there is, from autism and adhd to schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. the explorers and shamans are still in production, they just don't talk to journalists
The dividing-up of shared human qualities (reason, emotion; vulnerability, courage; public sphere/private sphere, etc.) between "masculine" and "feminine" has caused great pain and at least psychic self-mutilation by both sexes. I am NOT saying there aren't physical and psychological differences between men and women, which cluster around reproductive and protective/competitive roles. I am saying that we parceled out between the sexes many OTHER human characteristics that are NOT naturally exclusive to one or the other—the legacy of eras when populations were small and child mortality high, such that overspecialization served group survival. Crudely put, now that there are more than eight billion of us we need men's hearts and women's brains back in play, and only restricted regions of those "organs" are gendered.
There's a reason Christians have fought against the Gnostic heresy for centuries — because it leads to dark places, which are rooted in its denial of the material world as a place where good things can exist, which devalues human life (Christianity is a fundamentally incarnational faith, the opposite of this).
Your admiration of a pre-Christian pagan world comes off as a bit adolescent. Try reading some René Girard, who acknowledges the enchantment of the pre-Christian world without hiding its dark side, or Charles Taylor on the secular age. Catholics, rather than strangling the pagan world, integrated its mysticism and enchantment — and cast of its more hideous customs.
For example, every single pagan culture practiced child sacrifice or child exposure to some extent. Despite selective examples of ‘gender fluid’ primitive cultures, which trans activists draw on, the great majority of societies had a binary understanding of sex and gender.
And that C.S. Lewis quote is taken out of context. Lewis knew a lot about mythology and is making a point about the masculine and the feminine in culture and religious symbolism, but there is no way he would have endorsed a Gnostic rupturing of gender from sex. He would have found transsexualism abhorrent — and this man ‘Jan’ would have been one of his baddie characters in That Hideous Strength, no doubt a top-level member of N.I.C.E.
Admiration and wonder for neo-pagan gender Gnosticism shines through pretty strong here? As does an assumption that ‘rigid’ Christianity is responsible for suppressing some eternal, magical belief system we'd do well to return to.
The mainstream trans movement is heavily driven by a radical dualism and a refusal to submit to the realities of the physical world, and the ‘they/them’ phenomenon is not so different.
Unfortunately these transsexuals are in a complicated position now that we're dealing with burly males in women's prisons. Their paraphiliac games turned out to have real-world consequences for women and children. Men's rituals often do, whether they're self-involved New Age jibber jabber or ancient blood rituals. For all the enchantment, pagan stuff seems always to end in the cutting off of body parts.
I very much enjoyed your article, and I recall having heard about Jan, but now I’m much more inclined to read her works myself. I was moved by her willingness to be completely individual, and to express her own individual observations, sentiments, and quandaries. It can be difficult, I think, for any one who is a pioneer and mold-breaker to continue to acknowledge ambivalence, and not try to be a simplistic standard-bearer. How the very Britishness of Jan affects her window on the world is also fascinating to contemplate.
And you in turn, are willing to be both admiring and unsettled, and possibly wish for something a bit more integrated in her account, but entirely in an open-hearted way.
I’ve often thought the great eccentrics evolve and are largely tolerated in and accepted in any societies which also accommodate great hypocrisies and imbalance of power. I think of anecdotes in the book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the man of simple means who would walk with a leash, ostensibly walking, a dog, where no dog existed. The man and the imaginary pet were graciously acknowledged by passers-by, with the common understanding that this man must receive a stipend for so long as he walked the dog of a wealthy man who had included the dog-walker in his will. This classic by John Berendt described the eccentricities of life in Savannah.
Re your observation of fine historians generally being male, and there being few women who write with the same scope and verve re the topics you mentioned, I’m wondering if you have ever read any of the books by Barbara Tuchman? I find her writing, delightful, and remember reading The Distant Mirror a great many decades ago. I’ve been reading and very much enjoying The Proud Tower about life leading up to the First World War, and of course, her most well-known work is the Guns of August. Hilary Mantel is not a historian per se, but certainly I feel her work has great grandeur and fascinating texture and vivacity as well.
At any rate, I very much enjoyed your essay, and look forward to reading more. My apologies for any peculiarities of spelling, word choice, and grammar. I work within the whims of voice recognition this morning.
Thanks for reading! I have not read Mantel yet, will check out Tuchman…
I hope you enjoy them, and I look forward to enjoying your future posts…
Morris was almost certainly autogynephilic. By the best empirically supported taxonomy of transsexualism, any male-to-female transsexual not exclusively attracted to men is autogynephilic.
>Current Western transfever seems to be dominated by the rationalist mother-knows-best Anglos of the the Guardian newspaper who growl pronouns at you, not the mystic clan Morris represents.
that's because much of what makes it to the media is a proxy fight between liberals looking for a new pet cause to fawn over vs conservatives who cannot countenance natural variation of human experience because it doesn't fit into their rigid worldview. transsexuality correlates with virtually every mental illness or variation there is, from autism and adhd to schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. the explorers and shamans are still in production, they just don't talk to journalists
Checks out!
The dividing-up of shared human qualities (reason, emotion; vulnerability, courage; public sphere/private sphere, etc.) between "masculine" and "feminine" has caused great pain and at least psychic self-mutilation by both sexes. I am NOT saying there aren't physical and psychological differences between men and women, which cluster around reproductive and protective/competitive roles. I am saying that we parceled out between the sexes many OTHER human characteristics that are NOT naturally exclusive to one or the other—the legacy of eras when populations were small and child mortality high, such that overspecialization served group survival. Crudely put, now that there are more than eight billion of us we need men's hearts and women's brains back in play, and only restricted regions of those "organs" are gendered.
There's a reason Christians have fought against the Gnostic heresy for centuries — because it leads to dark places, which are rooted in its denial of the material world as a place where good things can exist, which devalues human life (Christianity is a fundamentally incarnational faith, the opposite of this).
Your admiration of a pre-Christian pagan world comes off as a bit adolescent. Try reading some René Girard, who acknowledges the enchantment of the pre-Christian world without hiding its dark side, or Charles Taylor on the secular age. Catholics, rather than strangling the pagan world, integrated its mysticism and enchantment — and cast of its more hideous customs.
For example, every single pagan culture practiced child sacrifice or child exposure to some extent. Despite selective examples of ‘gender fluid’ primitive cultures, which trans activists draw on, the great majority of societies had a binary understanding of sex and gender.
And that C.S. Lewis quote is taken out of context. Lewis knew a lot about mythology and is making a point about the masculine and the feminine in culture and religious symbolism, but there is no way he would have endorsed a Gnostic rupturing of gender from sex. He would have found transsexualism abhorrent — and this man ‘Jan’ would have been one of his baddie characters in That Hideous Strength, no doubt a top-level member of N.I.C.E.
I didn’t realise a took a stance on paganism or Christianity in the piece
Admiration and wonder for neo-pagan gender Gnosticism shines through pretty strong here? As does an assumption that ‘rigid’ Christianity is responsible for suppressing some eternal, magical belief system we'd do well to return to.
The mainstream trans movement is heavily driven by a radical dualism and a refusal to submit to the realities of the physical world, and the ‘they/them’ phenomenon is not so different.
Unfortunately these transsexuals are in a complicated position now that we're dealing with burly males in women's prisons. Their paraphiliac games turned out to have real-world consequences for women and children. Men's rituals often do, whether they're self-involved New Age jibber jabber or ancient blood rituals. For all the enchantment, pagan stuff seems always to end in the cutting off of body parts.
I'm agnostic to whether Christianity suppressed, I found it interesting to trace the explicit vestiges of apparent suppression
Dualism seems so far from our world - as does this land of Welsh sprites - I thought it was fun to explore
Morris is a charming writer and whether you accept or reject the universe presented wholesale, I enjoyed the journey through that strange land
How very ... northern