Transgender History in the 20th Century

February 01, 2010

 

Roberta Cowell - 1921 – 1962. The UK’s first Transgender individual to undergo Gender Reassignment Surgery.

 

Roberta is well known both for being the first UK trans person to undergo gender confirmation surgery and for her colourful existence as fighter pilot, prisoner of war and motor racing driver.

 

Born on May 21st 1921, in Croydon, Robert Cowell was the son of a famous surgeon, his mother was strongly religious, a social worker and fine pianist . He had an older sister and younger brother.

 

His early instincts were strongly heterosexual , he loved tennis and fencing and played Rugby despite his comparatively slight build. He left school at 16, got a job at the General Aircraft Company at Hanworth and joined the RASC to get a flying commission through the ranks which he achieved at the age of 20.

 

In May of that year Robert married a girl he had known for some years and started a family.

 

During the war he became a Spitfire pilot but after the war, Robert was faced with earning a living, having a wife and two children to support.

 

With a business partner and a couple of helpers he set up a specialist auto engineering company. His thrill of speed and the re-starting of motor racing in '46 encouraged him to enter events in as many different cars as he could and with this experience to design and build his own (BRM influenced) racing cars. 
 

But things were far from well in his personal life. Because of frequent absence during the War and his lost years as a prisoner, his marriage had become acrimonious and unsatisfactory, and ended in divorce. He became unwell, depressed, and moody because of this. 
 

He was not a big man to start with, and lost a lot more weight. Seeking help, he went to three psychiatrists, the last being a dour, patient but understanding Scot, who finally proved to Robert that he was repressing his feminine side, and that the 'woman' in him was very deep-rooted. The reverse of what Robert had expected - he reckoned he had a complex fear of losing his masculinity! Perhaps they were both right? 
 

Roberta was able to change her birth certificate fairly easily in those far flung days and wrote an autobiography: 'Roberta Cowell's Story', which is still available.

 

Roberta Cowell was then able to do what so many trans people wish to be able to do- simply to blend back in and to get on with her life.  

 

Michael Dillon - 1915 -1962.

 

Laura Dillon struggled with her sexuality at Oxford in the 1930s and of the social and legal constraints she faced while making the transition from female to male. She began taking testosterone pills in 1938 and was attending medical school as Michael Dillon when she learned of the revolutionary work being done by plastic surgeons to repair wartime injuries.

However, hormones could only take Dillon so far. If other men happened to catch a glimpse of him in the locker room or public baths, they would know immediately he had been born female. So in the early 1940s, Dillon sought out Sir Harol Gillies, Britain's top plastic surgeon. Gillies had reconstructed the genitals of soldiers who had been bombed or burned, but he had never built a penis from scratch on a woman's body. It would be a gruelling process and Gillies could not guarantee the results. At least the operation would be legal. While an arcane law protected Male genitals from "mutilation" no such bans applied to female genitals and reproductive organs.

Dillon did eventually undergo a series of thirteen operations to construct a penis. He began the treatments in 1946, while he was a student at Dublin's Trinity College medical school and he finished his surgeries in1949, a year before he met Roberta Cowell. Gillies had to harvest skin for the new penis from Dillon's legs and stomach; Dillon suffered from oozing infections where the skin had been flayed, he was so debilitated he had to walk with a cane.

Dillon wanted a penis so badly, it was not necessarily for sex, it was rather that a penis would serve as a membership card into the the world of men, their bathrooms and their gentlemen's clubs in London. It was the lack of a penis that held him back "for without some form of external organ he could hardly undress with the rest of the crew," as Gillies noted. Furthermore, if Dillon fell ill, a penis would allow him to check into a hospital without having to explain why his genitals did not match the rest of his body. A penis, along with a beard and the pipe, would hide his history, keeping his secret that much safer.

Dillon feared above all, the tabloids. If the rumour got out that Michael Dillon, brother to a baronet, had once been a girl, the gossip would surely be trumpeted in every low-class newspaper in Britain. As Dillon saw it, a penis would help safeguard his privacy and his family's honour

In 1951, Michael Dillon (now legally male) proposed marriage to Roberta Cowell, a man-turned-woman who did not return his affection and turned him down. Dillon became a ship's doctor and in 1954, when Cowell's sensational autobiography threatened to out him, he signed up for a four-year stint ferrying pilgrims to Mecca. He eventually fled to India to find anonymity and study meditation.  

 

History in the making....

 

Josie Romero is the eight-year old ‘sex change girl’ who was born a boy.

 

Josie Romero loves the colour pink, braiding her hair and having her fingernails painted.

But life has not always been easy for this sweet and charming eight-year old, who was born in the body of a boy and named Joey.

 

At four she insisted to her parents: “I am really a girl.” At five she was refusing to have her hair cut, and at six she had been diagnosed as transgender.

 

 

 

Now her sex has been legally changed and with the help of drugs and surgery she will grow up to be a woman.

 

Mum Venessia, 42, said: “As a toddler she wrapped up her army figures and rocked them like a baby.

“As she started to talk, she’d say, ‘I’m a girl’. We used to correct her and say, ‘No you’re a boy’.
“By the time she was four she was insisting, ‘No, I really am a girl’.”

 

When Josie was 5½ a paediatrician referred her to a gender specialist and the family began accepting her as a girl.

 

Joseph admitted: “I had mourned the loss of my son. When I came to terms with it, I knew I had gained a daughter.”

 

Josie’s birth certificate, passport and even her social security number have been changed to show her as a girl.

 

She will be given drugs to prevent male adolescence and, at 12, get female hormones. And she understands she will need surgery as an adult to become a full woman.

 

Josie – now a spokesperson for transgender children – said: “I am happy everyone knows I am a real girl, and that I don’t have to pretend to be a boy anymore.”