Wales - M2F gender variant writer Jan Morris CBE is now married

Wales - M2F gender variant writer Jan Morris CBE is now married to the
woman she married as James Morris... [2008-06-03 Mail on Sunday]

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1023991/Writer-Jan-Morris-remarries-wife-wed-man.html

Writer Jan Morris remarries wife she wed as a man

By TOM KELLY

Last updated: 03rd June 2008

It is one couple's touching love story for our times: marriage,
children, sex-change, divorce, cohabitation and, finally, civil union.

The writer Jan Morris yesterday revealed she has remarried the woman
she first wed nearly sixty years ago, when she was a man.

James Humphrey Morris, as she then was, originally tied the knot with
Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949 and the couple had five children together.

Then he had a sex change and they got divorced, but continued to live together.

Now Morris has made an honest woman of his ex-wife at a civil
partnership near their home in North Wales.

The 81-year-old, who was the first journalist to report the conquest
of Everest, made the surprise announcement on BBC Radio 4's Bookclub.

She said: 'I haven't told this to anybody before.

'I've lived with the same person for 58 years. I married her when I
was young and then this sex-change thing - so-called - happened and so
we naturally had to divorce but we've always lived together anyway.

'So I wanted to round this off nicely so last week Elizabeth and I
went to have a civil union.'

The couple first met on an Arabic course in London, after Morris had
finished his military service as an intelligence officer in Italy and
Palestine following graduation from Oxford.

They had five children born between the early 50s and early 60s, one
of whom, Virginia, died aged only two months.

Friends have said that Elizabeth, the daughter of a Sri Lankan tea
planter, accepted that Morris would have a sex change operation
before her husband did.

The surgery was carried out in Morocco in 1972 after several years of
hormone treatment.

They had to divorce after the switch, but continued to share a
converted stables with a cat called Ibsen in the small north Wales
village of Llanystumdwy, with Morris describing Elizabeth as her
'sister in law.'

Morris described her transformation from male to female in two
autobiographical works, Pleasures of a Tangled Life and The Conundrum.

She described how, as a man, he never felt homosexual but always
regarded himself as 'wrongly equipped'.

Morris is also the author of Pax Britannica, a three part history of
the rise and fall of the British Empire, which she started writing as
a man and concluded when she was a woman.

Other works include portraits of cities including Oxford, Venice and
New York.

Elizabeth said yesterday: 'I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and
still have them.

'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.'

She said the ceremony was carried out at council offices in Pwllheli
on May 14.

'It was just us and a couple of friends of ours. It was quite private.
It was very nice indeed.

''We were offered biscuits and coffee. You had to sing your name and
read a thing out, and that was it.'

The couple have already planned to be buried on a small island on the
River Dwyfor behind their house, with the inscription on the headstone
to read: 'Here are two friends, at the end of one life.'

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© 2008 Associated Newspapers Ltd