Morris could hardly have seen so many of us coming. She believed she was one of “at least 600 people … in the United States,” “perhaps another 150 … in Britain,” to have had gender-affirming surgery (she said nothing about how many people might want it). She predated by decades today’s galaxy of trans books for trans readers (some from queer or trans publishing houses), books like Imogen Binnie’s Nevada or Rachel Gold’s Being Emily or Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull or the anthology We Want It All. Nobody knows how many trans people there are—it depends how you count us—but a UCLA law school study from 2016 guessed over a million in the United States alone.

Mostly from people who go to Trieste or Venice and read my books, and say ‘What did you mean by that’? To be honest I’m not always sure.” Jan Morris wrote more than fifty books but also constructed her life to a degree rarely seen in one individual. She created a glittering career, invented a writing style, chose her nationality and most famously, transitioned. Horatio talks to Michael Palin, travel writer Sara Wheeler, and Jan's biographer Paul Clements, and visits Jan's home in North Wales to meet her son Twm Morys. Hearing interviews she recorded throughout her long life, he attempts to find out who Jan Morris really was. This is a beautiful book. I found it to be melancholic, courageous, and wise. That it’s subject matter is Jan Morris’s transsexual journey almost seems secondary to her incredible prose and the clarity of her honesty and introspection. Beyond the issue of gender, she searches for an answer to that most elusive of questions: who am I?” This book is a very well-written account of some of the emotional factors which eventually led the author, by then in his forties, to submit to expensive surgery in Casablanca.If there is anything typical about Miss Morris's experience, however, she has successfully disguised it.

Morris was a prolific and accomplished author and journalist who wrote dozens of books in a variety of genres and was a first-hand witness to history. As a young reporter for the Times, she accompanied a 1953 expedition to Asia led by Sir Edmund Hillary and, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, broke the news that Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers to scale Mount Everest. NEW YORK (AP) — Jan Morris, the celebrated journalist, historian, world traveler and fiction writer who in middle age became a pioneer of the transgender movement, has died at 94.The Press battle to report Everest climb". BBC News. 29 May 2013. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020 . Retrieved 27 March 2020. 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 (AS: I don't share that part of her feelings fully). I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” Johns, Derek (2 October 2016). "Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 March 2018.

Italie, Hillel (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, author and transgender pioneer, dies at 94". Associated Press. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. The pictures are fascinating because they show Morris in the act not simply of gender reassignment but of transition out of the mainstream. As O'Rourke points out, 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," he says. "And succeeding so tremendously in all of those. Later Morris forfeited a promised job on the Observer after telling its anti-colonial editor, David Astor, that the British empire “is on the whole a force for good in the world, and ... fighting a rearguard action is the right and honourable thing to do”. He was anyway an outrageously successful journalist, moving with his family to live in the French Alps, flush with flash magazine commissions (a single piece – not one for the Guardian – paid for a car) and contracts for more books, including Sultan in Oman (1957) and The Hashemite Kings (1959). Kandell, Jonathan (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94 – The New York Times". The New York Times . Retrieved 23 November 2021. Propped against one wall is a photograph of the summit of Everest taken by the Indian air force who flew over the expedition as it made its last assault on the summit. Morris points out the place she climbed to at 22,000 feet. “That wasn’t a bad story was it?”The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man's man. He slipped into journalism at 16 on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. Colour blindness prevented him from joining the navy during the second world war, so he signed for the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers and a commission as intelligence officer, celebrating his 21st birthday onboard a troop train from Egypt to Palestine. “I knew life was going to be OK. At last, in the army of all places, I felt I was free.” After demob, he worked in Cairo for a news agency, read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and edited Cherwell magazine.