Jan Morris by Paul Clements

Author:Paul Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO007000, BIO006000, BIO022000, HIS054000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Despite Morris’s extensive travel and the central role that the Arab world had played in her life, she had only ever glimpsed Morocco from the hills above Gibraltar.23 She arrived in the busy commercial port city of Casablanca, known to locals as ‘Casa’, the day before the planned operation and was told to come to the clinic the next afternoon. With time to kill, she set about exploring the steamy streets and markets, describing the town as ‘mostly modern, noisy and ugly in a pompous French colonial way’. It seemed a fitting backdrop to her transformation: ‘I sometimes heard the limpid Arab music, and smelt the pungent Arab smells, that had for so long pervaded my life, and I could suppose it to be some city of fable, of phoenix and fantasy, in which transubstantiations were regularly effected.’24 The next morning, Morris casually called into the office of the British Consul because it occurred to her that she might die in the course of changing sex, and she wanted to let the Consul, who was, it transpired, a phlegmatic man, know: ‘He did not seem surprised,’ Morris wrote. ‘Always best, he said, to be on the safe side.’25

The clinic was in a modern part of the city, with one entrance on a wide boulevard and another on a quiet residential backstreet. It was alluded to uncharitably by some as ‘Villa Frankenstein’.26 There, Morris met the staff and the surgeon, whom she referred to only as ‘Dr B’ — later identified as Georges Burou, an eminent French gynaecologist, who managed the clinic. A debonair, nattily dressed figure, Burou had spent his youth in Algiers and had served in the Free French Army from 1943 to 1945. Although he had trained in obstetrics and gynaecology, he came up with a revolutionary new technique for surgically altering the sex organs. He developed a reputation for carrying out successful surgery on trans individuals, mostly trans women. While these were at first only a small group, one of his most illustrious patients was the English model and restaurant hostess April Ashley, who had been born in Liverpool in 1935. At the time of her operation in Casablanca in 1960, Ashley was one of the first Britons to undergo gender surgery and was thought to be only the ninth person in the world. Her Times obituary described how Burou’s last words to George Jamieson on the operating table before administering the anaesthetic were ‘Au revoir, monsieur’, and, seven hours later, Ashley was greeted with the words ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle.’27 Aside from some medical and golfing terms, the doctor did not speak much English. Morris wrote that he had ‘rescued hundreds, perhaps even thousands of transsexuals from their wandering fate’.28

Burou required all his patients to have undergone psychiatric care and hormonal therapy. He examined Morris’s organs and breasts, and asked her if she was an athlete. They discussed the fee, and she paid in advance, signing a form absolving the doctor from any responsibility if the operation went wrong.

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