{"id":5724,"date":"2014-09-30T15:11:38","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T20:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=5724"},"modified":"2014-09-30T15:11:38","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T20:11:38","slug":"a-proper-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2014\/09\/30\/a-proper-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A proper love story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nNow here’s a great soppy love story I ran across when reading Jan Morris’ Wikipedia entry<\/a>, about how she was forced to divorce from her wife after her gender reassignment surgery and how they got remarried again in a civil partnership in 2008<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n. In a touching story of constancy, they stayed together after Morris’s trip to Morocco in 1972. He went as a man, and came back as woman. The law, then, did not allow same-sex marriages, so the couple were obliged to go through an amicable divorce. Morris used to describe her as her “sister-in-law”, but on BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub yesterday, she revealed that the relationship was closer and more enduring than that implied.\n<\/p>\n

\n“I haven’t told this to anybody before,” she said, “I’ve lived with the same person for 58 years, I married her when I was young and then this sex-change thing \u2013 so-called \u2013 happened and so we naturally had to divorce, but we’ve always lived together anyway. I wanted to round this off nicely so last week Elizabeth and I went to have a civil union.”\n<\/p>\n

\nThe ceremony was held at the council office in Pwllheli on 14 May, in the presence of a couple who invited them to tea at their house afterwards.\n<\/p>\n

\n“I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them,” Elizabeth told the Evening Standard. “We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.”\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nI was looking at her Wikipedia entry because I just bought her Pax Brittanica<\/cite> history trilogy, which were still credited to “James Morris” but did have this dedication in them:\n<\/p>\n

\nDuring the writing of the Pax Brittanica trilogy James Morris completed a change of sexual role and now lives and writes as Jan Morris.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nWhich is, changing language aside, a decent thing to do and it goes on to consistently talk about her as female, but the edition I have is from 1980, some eight years after her public gender switch and I wonder why they kept her old name on the books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now here’s a great soppy love story I ran across when reading Jan Morris’ Wikipedia entry, about how she was forced to divorce from her wife after her gender reassignment surgery and how they got remarried again in a civil partnership in 2008: . In a touching story of constancy, they stayed together after Morris’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1802,294],"tags":[2043],"class_list":["post-5724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-lgbt","tag-jan-morris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5725,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions\/5725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}