Georgina Somerset (1923 - 2013) Part I: dentist and surgeon-lieutenant.

(Original May 2008; expanded February 2015 – all pages references to A Girl Called Georgina unless otherwise noted)

Part I: dentist and surgeon-lieutenant
Part II: wife and author
Part III:  Turtle’s typology

George Turtle, the youngest child of three of a self-made man and dentist, and a musician mother, was born in Purley, south of London. Somerset would later claim that she had an underdeveloped penis and some female organs, and this is why the parents were late in registering the birth – however the parents never referred to any possible confusion.

George went to Croydon High School for Boys. He did not go through puberty, and grew neither breasts nor facial hair. In 1938, anticipating the coming war, the family relocated to Lower Kingswood, Surrey, and he completed his education at Reigate Grammar School for Boys (which was until 1944 a fee-paying school).

Turtle passed the pre-medical exams in 1940 and trained in dentistry at King's College Hospital. After qualifying in 1944 he joined the Royal Navy as a dentist, which due to the exigencies of war he was able to do without a physical examination.

In 1945 the pipe-smoking surgeon-lieutenant and his elder brother were initiated by their father into the Freemasons. Turtle saw service in Ceylon as well as in England. In 1948 Turtle left the Navy and established a dental practice in Croydon. His mother died in 1952. In his 30s Turtle resigned from his Lodge even after being advanced to the rank of Worshipful Master.

Turtle sought professional help, and had mixed feelings when the Christine Jorgensen story broke:

"it immensely distressed me as I felt no one would believe that my own case had not been influenced by hers and that I might be different"(p33).

He was prescribed male hormones for a while, but all they did was make him more irritable. Turtle was introduced to the urologist and Gurdjieffian Kenneth Walker. A psychiatrist proposed that Turtle enter a mental hospital and be treated with electro-convulsive therapy. Turtle Senior strenuously objected, and an appointment was arranged with the Greek-born Professor Alexander Panagioti Cawadias, the prominent sexologist who is credited with coining the word 'intersex' (Hermaphoditus the Human Intersex, Heinemann Medical Books, 1943) who conducted a proper examination and declared Turtle to be a hermaphrodite, prescribed oestrogen and advised a change of sexual role.
Kenneth Walker arranged an appointment with eminent surgeon Harold Gillies, but it went badly as Turtle came directly from dental work clad in a black morning coat and pinstripe trousers. Gillies, who was already on the carpet with the General Medical Council for having operated on Michael Dillon and Betty Cowell, was dismissive: “I do not really think you look or could be made to look like a woman".

A 'corrective procedure' was performed by Mr Patrick Clarkson, a New-Zealand-born Harley-Street consultant plastic surgeon and colleague of Harold Gillies, in January 1957.

"It was not the so-called 'sex change operation' of common knowledge to-day, and I even had to to go out a week before and buy my very first outfit of female clothes in which to leave the clinic. Indeed, I knew little of what a woman wore under her dress or skirt" (p35).

Georgina now moved to Bognor Regis and began living alone as a woman. Late one freezing November night Georgina was assaulted, dragged into a field and raped. This resulted in being bedridden for weeks with pneumonia and thoughts of suicide. What it did lead to was the cutting short of her hair and a return to the male role, regretted immediately, and locum dental work while she waited for her hair to regrow. She found a cottage in Plumpton, near Brighton, and slowly regained the female role.

In June 1959, Georgina's father died, and as 'an act of love, duty and loyalty' (p40) Turtle again cut his hair and donned a suit to appear at the funeral as expected, and stayed in the male role for nine months working at his old practice in Croydon and sorting out his father's affairs and selling up.

This done Georgina moved to Hove, Sussex in April 1960. She finally obtained a revised birth certificate in July that year, but had to supply medical reports along with affidavits from Kenneth Walker, A.P. Cawadias and her father (the last having been signed before his death). Mr Clarkson was also obliged to provide a report of her anatomy and Georgina had to provide written assurances that she had never been married or been capable of functioning as a male.

The press discovered Georgina, her home was besieged and the phone never stopped ringing. She agreed to an 'exclusive' with The News of the World, and was paid £100. A local paper gave the name of her road and stated that she intended to start a practice. This led to difficulties with the General Dental Council, which in those days was very strict against advertising. Turtle threatened to sue the newspapers, apologised to the Council, and was given a reprimand.

Letters started to come from all over the world, from transsexuals and those who might be. Georgina sat up long hours answering them, and at weekends received the writers personally. However

"It was not long before I realised that, as far as I could make out, all were, within a reasonable scale of variation, really physically normal people, and not like me at all. … It must, nevertheless, be said that most of all those I saw and heard from were basically sincere, nice people, who were so very happy for me and so very grateful that I was even prepared to listen to and understand their own troubles.(p50)"

Turtle knew most of the London consultants, especially John Randell and Kenneth Walker, and they referred patients to each other.

At Christmas 1961, Georgina was struck down with pulmonary tuberculosis and had to spend seven months in a sanatorium.

By then she had met Christopher Somerset, a design engineer and a distant kinsman of the Dukes of Beaufort. He cared for her while she regained her health. Their engagement was announced in the Court and Social Page of the Daily Telegraph, and they were married in a church wedding in Westminster in 1962. Photographs of their wedding appeared on the front page of all editions of the Evening Standard. They were also featured in most of the Sunday newspapers and when they arrived in Paris for their honeymoon, they found that they were on the front page of Le Journal du Dimanche.
_______________

Many of the early transsexuals, Lili Elvenes (Elbe), Betty Cowell, Dawn Langley Simmons, maintained that they were intersex. In all cases the only 'proof' is the claim in the autobiography. Understandably doctors and clinics maintain client confidentiality and so do not naysay the claim with the exception of Dawn who claimed to have given birth when she was 49 years old. Milton Edgerton explained to Dawn's biographer, Edward Ball, that it could not be possible. Georgina claims to be mosaic XO/XY (see Part II) and therefore not transsexual. Unless somebody examines the papers of Alexander Panagioti Cawadias and Patrick Clarkson, we will not have confirmation nor refutation of the claim that she was XO/XY. The link that I have provided is the best that I could find, but it does not discuss the likelihood of transsexuality in male phenotype XO/XY persons. I cannot find any clear statement that such persons are generally inclined to change gender. In the comments to Part II we will see Georgina pooh-poohing the idea that XXY chromosomes give justification for a desire to change sex. If anyone can point me to a medical article that shows male phenotype XO/XY persons changing gender in significant numbers, please let us know.

Alexander Panagioti Cawadias was a prominent sexologist, with a seminal book to his name, but is now largely forgotten.

Georgina says of the trans persons who contacted her that they were 'sincere, nice people' but 'not like me at all'. Her 340-page book is an expansion of this dialectic.

Georgina carefully says that she was "the first woman who had officially changed her sex ever to be married in a church under English law" (p52). For some reason the Wikipedia article drops the last three words thereby invalidating the claim in that Coccinelle (Jacqueline Dufesnoy) had married in church under French law two years earlier (1960). There were also several marriages in the US that had taken place earlier – of particular note is Georgia Black who married twice. There were also trans men who had married under English law: Wynsley Swan in 1927 and Mark Weston, in 1936.

Wikipedia also claims that Georgina was the first openly intersex person in the UK. Again one says, what about Mark Weston? Or Betty Cowell?

Betty Cowell (1918 - 2011) motor racer, pilot.

++Updated October 2013 in incorporate the IOS article on her death.

Robert Marshall Cowell was born in Croydon, the middle child of three. His father was Ernest Cowell, the prominent surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps and at Croydon General Infirmary (now closed), and who would be Director of Medical Services for the Allied Forces in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War.

Robert had an aptitude for mechanical things. From the age of twelve he spent his holidays in engineering workshops in Croydon. His public school had a motor club where under-aged members drove motorcycles and cars on the school grounds. John Cunningham, the future RAF night fighter ace was a member of the same club. Robert also joined the Officers’ Training Corps while at school, and became a non-commissioned officer. In the early 1930s, Robert and a friend spent a summer holiday in Belgium, Austria and Germany, and picked up some German.

He left school at sixteen and entered a series of tennis tournaments, which led to his first homosexual proposal, which he quickly ran from.

He worked in both aircraft and racing car service shops. At seventeen he drove in the London-Land’s-End trial run. Later in 1935 he joined the RAF as a pupil pilot. He gained a commission but found that flying made him feel extremely ill. He was invalided out of the RAF, and declared as permanently unfit for flying duties.

He studied engineering at University College, London, where he met his future wife, Diana, who was also a racing driver. He drove in motor races and speed trials, including the 1939 Grand Prix in Antwerp. Later that year, he almost ran down Neville Chamberlain who was crossing Parliament Square.

With the outbreak of war, Cowell thought that the best job to have was that of a fighter pilot. He pestered the Air Ministry, but they wouldn’t take him back. He was offered a position in the Royal Army Service Corps with a promise of a fast-track commissioning. In January 1941 he was commissioned as a captain.

In May he married his girlfriend, who by then had a degree in engineering. They spent the war apart but did manage to have two daughters, born in 1942 and 1944.

After a few months in Iceland (which had decriminalized homosexuality while under British occupation) Robert managed to get transferred to the RAF. By this time he knew how to fake a military medical exam.

He was trained to fly various fighter planes and bombers. He mainly saw action supporting the Invasion of France in the summer of 1944, until his plane was hit by flak, and he became a prisoner of the Germans.

He spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft 1, between Lübeck and Rostock. He vehemently refused to play a female role in the camp theatricals, as he felt that ‘would have been a public declaration of homosexuality’. The gay cliques in the camp constantly annoyed him by assuming that he was one of them. On 30 April 1945 the prisoners refused German orders to evacuate in the face of the advancing Soviet Army.  After negotiations, the Germans left leaving the POWs behind.  Two weeks later Captain Cowell and the other British prisoners were flown home.

Back in England, with a business partner, Cowell set up a specialist auto engineering company. They built cars for motor racing, and he competed as a driver. He also renovated houses and sold them at a profit.

His marriage fell apart as Diana was not happy about his wearing her clothes, and suspected him of seeing other women. They separated in 1948.  Cowell never saw his daughters again.  His wife re-married and had three more children.  The two girls were brought up by their grandparents, Sir Ernest and his wife.

Robert continued to be depressed, and saw a couple of Freudian analysts. The outcome was:

“The feminine side of my nature, which all my life I had known of and severely repressed, was very much more fundamental and deep-rooted than I had supposed (p96)”.

He secured a consultation with a Harley Street sexologist who referred him to a woman endocrinologist, who put him on oestrogens. Feeling that he should counterbalance the heavily masculine nature of his business interests, he invested in a small company which designed and manufactured women’s clothes, both theatrical and haute couture, and proceeded to learn that business. He also struck up a friendship with a woman, Lisa, whom he met in a London hotel, who later lived with him and helped him transition.

Cowell came across the 1946 book Self: a study in ethics and endocrinology, by Michael Dillon, which contains a section discussing sex changes as possible. Cowell wrote to him via the publisher, and after several lengthy letters, they met in London. Dillon admitted that he had been a woman until a few years previously. More meetings followed. Michael convinced himself that fate had put them together, and they should be a couple. Cowell needed an orchiectomy if she were to proceed to being a woman, but no doctor in the UK would do the operation because of the mayhem laws. Michael, who was nearing the completion of his medical degree at Trinity College, Dublin, used his new skills to do so. He also introduced Roberta to Arthur Millbourn, Canon at Bristol Cathedral, and to his surgeon Harold Gillies.   However he finally had to concede that Roberta was not returning his passion.

Roberta had a consultation with Dr George Dusseau on Wimpole Street. Given her orchiectomy, he agreed to write a letter that was “in the nature of a working certificate to enable the plastic surgeons to carry out their operations”. That done, Roberta was able to change her name by deed poll to Roberta Elizabeth Cowell and to get her birth certificate amended. From then on she would be Betty to her friends.

Sir Harold Gillies was now willing to proceed with surgery. He had never done a vaginoplasty before. He practiced the previous evening on the torso of a male cadaver. The operation was successful and medical affidavits were sworn. Cowell then persuaded Gillies to feminize her face.

The Cowells’ divorce decree was made absolute later in 1952. Betty was now deeply in debt after medical bills, the closure of her engineering firm and the failure of her dress-making firm.

In 1953 the news story broke about another pioneering transsexual, Christine Jorgensen. By early 1954, Betty knew that she herself was about to be a front-page story. She negotiated with the Picture Post that she would write an exclusive for them. It was said by the Sunday Pictorial that they paid £20,000 (according to this calculator, equivalent to £440,000 today), an enormous sum that allowed her to clear all her debts.

A ‘disclosure’ in the form of a Press Association statement was issued on 6 March 1954. With the notable exception of The Times, most British papers carried it on the front page with different headlines, but with almost the same text:

“This amazing change of sex is believed to be the first case in Britain where an adult male has so fully taken on the physical and mental characteristics of a woman. It may well be the most complete change of sex in the medical history of the entire world”.

The Daily Herald’s doctor commented that

“cases of women becoming men are increasing but the change from male to female is rare”.

Cowell wisely left for the continent, pursued as she was by a pack of journalists. The Sunday Pictorial, which would become the Sunday Mirror in 1963 and which had published an homophobic three-part series, “Evil Men” in 1952, and had serialized the Jorgensen story in 1953, gave scant attention to Cowell on the first weekend, but a week later was saying that she was a transvestist and expressed concern for the

“startling legal and medical tangle which arises” and said that: doctors who deal with these change of sex cases.......”.are anxious for their position in the eyes of the law and the community to be clarified. This is a matter for the law makers.”

The Sunday People, the same week, ran the headline 'ROBERTA IS NO REAL WOMAN'. However it accepted Cowell’s claim that the operation was largely to speed up changes taking place naturally. The next day Roberta’s father, Ernest Cowell was quoted saying:

“I am told that it is quite on the cards for her to bear children”.

However by the next weekend, he had retracted:

“this is not a case of hermaphroditism” and he agreed that Roberta was a transvestist.

Betty in 1958

The Picture Post series ran for seven weeks from 13th March. It was then revised and published as Roberta Cowell's Story with a Preface by Canon Milbourn. The publisher was Heinemann, which had published Dillon’s Self, eight years earlier. The publication had two benefits other than money. By ‘disclosing’ herself, she was able to return to motor racing once the fuss died down. It also allowed her to claim that she was not a transvestist like Christine Jorgensen. Despite the two daughters that she had fathered, and the fact that Robert had passed an RAF medical, she claimed to have XX chromosomes and ovaries, and that the stress of being in Stalag Luft 1 had brought out her underlying female biology, and that Dr Dusseau’s letter had certified her as a woman.

Betty in the 1970s

After the media fuss died down, Betty did  continue both motor racing and flying. She won a hill climb in 1957. In 1972 she was interviewed by Michael Bateman for the Sunday Times. He noted that her house was

“cluttered with pilots’ helmets, high-frequency radios, models of planes and racing cars. She’s logged 1,600 hours as a pilot (recently she flew at Mach 2 twice the speed of sound )... She doesn’t approve of the Permissive Society and she doesn’t welcome Women’s Lib. She certainly hopes the trend towards Unisex has stopped. It’s unhealthy, unnatural. ‘My experience shows that men and women are so completely different as to be almost different species.’”

She also disapproved of other transsexuals:

“I was a freak. I had an operation and I’m not a freak any more. I had female chromosome make-up, XX. The people who have followed me have often been those with male chromosomes, XY. So they’ve been normal people who’ve turned themselves into freaks by means of the operation.”

In the 1970s Betty worked with Liz Hodgkinson on a second book which however was never completed.

Betty and Lisa continued to live together on and off until the latter died at the end of the 1980s.  Betty then moved into a flat in Hampton.  She was reclusive and private, but always had an expensive car.  However she used it less as she aged.   Her spine became bent and  swollen legs made walking impossible.

Diana died in 2006.  Betty's last years were spent alone in sheltered accomodation.  She died aged 93.  Only a few friends attended the cremation, and no news of her death was published in any newspaper until an article in The Independent on Sunday in October 2013.  Her daughters were not informed until contacted by the newspaper prior to publication

• Roberta Cowell. Roberta Cowell's Story. British Book Centre, 1954. With a preface by Canon Millbourn. Online  and also. 
• “Former British Fighter Pilot Changes Sex”. Reprinted in Lewiston Evening Journal, Mar 6, 1954. Online 
• “Wife’s Story of Man Who Changed Sex”. AAP, March 7, 1954, reprinted in The Sydney Morning Herald. Online 
• “Ex-War Flier Now ‘Completely Female’. Doctor-Father Confirms ‘Son Robert is now Daughter Roberta’ “ The Vancouver Sun, March 15, 1954. Online
• “The Real Story of Sex Change: Here’s Medical Proof of Father of Two Who Turned Into a Woman”. PIC: The Magazine for Young Men, 26,1, March 1955. Online 
• “Roberta Wins Hill Climb”. British Pathé, 1957.  Online  
• Harold D. Gillies & D. Ralph Millard. The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery.  Butterworth, 1957: II,384-7.
• Auriol Stevens. “The sexual misfits”. The Guardian, 7 Jan 1970, reprinted 7 Jan 2012. Online. 
• Michael Bateman interviews Roberta Cowell. Atticus, The Sunday Times, 12 March 1972. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. Bodyshock: The Truth About Changing Sex. Columbus Books 1987: 21-2.
• Liz Hodgkinson. Michael née Laura. Columbus Books. 1989: chp 6.
• Dave King. The Transvestite and the Transsexual: Public Categories and Private Identities.  Avebury, 1993: 51-55, 86, 103, 110-115, 118, 119, 125, 128, 130, 132, 141, 162, 169.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing.  Routledge. 2002: 87-91. 135-7, 141, 146.
• Pagan Kennedy. The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution. Bloomsbury. 2007: 3-4, 10-14, 55-7, 76-8, 85-99, 103-5, 109-113, 119-120, 136.
• Jean-François Bouzanquet. Fast Ladies: Female Racing Drivers, 1888-1970. Veloce, 2009: 99-103. 
•  Matthew Bell.  "'It's easier to change a body than to change a mind': The extraordinary life and lonely death of Roberta Cowell ".  The Independent on Sunday, 27 October 2013. Online   

  TRANSGENDERZONE      EN.Wikipedia     

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Page references are to the 1954 edition.   The PDF edition has been repaginated.

Some online articles say that Cowell was born in 1921.  However this is not compatible with dates in her autobiography.  For example Cowell is 17 in 1935 (p17), 20 in 1939 (p23).  The newspaper story, “Wife’s Story of Man Who Changed Sex’, 1954, says that Roberta was then 36.  Therefore Cowell must have been born in 1918.

Wikipedia actually has a Cowell (surname) disambiguation page that at this date includes neither Roberta Cowell nor Ernest Cowell nor Robert Cowell, the US swimmer.

For those of you who are into titles, Ernest’s full moniker is Major General Sir Ernest Cowell K.B.E., C.B., D.S.O., T.D. (1886-1971).  He was doctor to Winston Churchill, General Eisenhower, and Director of Medical Services for the Allied Forces in North Africa and Italy during 1942-1944.  Being of such low significance, there is no Wikipedia or other web page about him.

Why did Canon Arthur Millbourn write the Preface to Betty’s autobiography?  There is no mention of him in her autobiography, nor in Kennedy’s book.  Cowell was not a church goer, and is proud to have resisted early religious indoctrination, and not to have succumbed to prayer as his plane crashed in Germany.   Millbourn does appear in Hodgkinson’s biography of Dillon.

Cowell says quite clearly that it was the Russians who liberated Stalag Luft 1, as we would expect as it was clearly in the future East Germany.  Why does Kennedy go from precise to vague and say "freedom came in the form of Allied bombers, a phalanx of B19s that peeled out of the sky and landed near the German camp (p76)"?

While Drs Dusseau, Dillon & Gillies appear in Cowell’s autobiography, none of them are named. The two Freudian analysts, the Harley Street sexologist and the female endocrinologist have not been identified.

The statement that Michael Dillon performed Betty’s orchiectomy appears only in Kennedy (p91-2).  It is based on a release that she signed: “I desire that he be absolved from all responsibility in this this operation, due to possible hemorrhage or sepsis, which I am desirous to undergo being fully aware that either might, per fortunam, be fatal”.  This paper is in Hodgkinson’s collection.  She did not use it in her biography of Michael, but did pass it on to Kennedy.

There is no suggestion or admission by Cowell, Hodgkinson or Kennedy, that Roberta was able to use her father’s contacts to get appointments with top doctors.

Hodgkinson explains why Michael fell for Roberta: “although he did not want to be considered a snob [he] was far more comfortable with people of his own kind of background.  Roberta fitted the bill here.  Her father was one of the leading surgeons of his day, her background was upper-middle-class, and she spoke with the correct vowel sounds, which was always vitally important to Dillon. (p87)”.  However their interests were radically different.  Michael’s idea of taking out a woman was to go to a play in ancient Greek, and he enjoyed cycling/camping in Ireland.  Roberta, of course, liked to race cars and fly planes.  This did not bode well as a traditional relationship.   There was one more thing.  As Betty admitted to Hodgkinson years later, “But as far as I was concerned, it would have been two females getting married (p87)”.

Which brings us to Betty’s most aggravating trait: that no transsexual but she is the real thing.  Michael Dillon is a female;  Christine Jorgensen is a transvestist.  And see her comment for the Sunday Times in 1972 quoted above.

This is possibly related to something neither Hodgkinson nor Kennedy mention: Cowell’s homophobia:  

“I was not a homosexual; my inclinations, as they developed, were entirely heterosexual.  I was horrified and repelled by homosexual overtures, and this loathing included any boy who showed the slightest sign of being a ‘sissy.’ I  could be friendly with other men, but I could not bear any form of physical contact with them.  It was impossible for me to stand having someone link his arm in mine, and even shaking hands was unpleasant. (p1)”

“One thing was certain.  I had not the slightest desire to swell the ranks of the gentlemen of no particular gender.  It is true that I had become a little more tolerant in this direction than I had been in the past; this meant, however, that had I met one I would have refrained from actually kicking his spine up through the top of his head. (p101).”

“There is strong anthropological evidence that the basis of transvestism is, in the main, a homosexual one.  It can hardly be considered a manifestation of heterosexuality.  But the homosexual element is nearly always entirely unconscious, and often very deeply buried.  When a transvestite strenuously denies that he has the slightest tendency in this direction, it is entirely likely that he is telling what he believes to be the truth. (p175)“  --- Cowell fails to connect this statement to his own strenuous denials.

The claim of being intersex, the non-acceptance of other transsexuals, the homophobia.  Betty had much in common with the HBS movement of the early 21st century.

Lisa, who according to the autobiography was a major factor in helping Roberta to emerge, is not even mentioned in Kennedy’s retelling.  She is not named as such in Hodgkinson’s biography but is presumably the flatmate whom Michael ended up taking to see Greek plays when Betty made a point of avoiding him.

How did the press get onto Roberta in 1954?  Cowell tells (p159) of a journalist friend phoning up excitedly as the Jorgenson story broke to get her opinion because of her medical knowledge.  Medical knowledge?!  Kennedy suggests (p103) “It’s not clear who had tattled on her.  Cowell herself may have been the one who leaked it.”  There is another possibility.  While Roberta wrote her book asserting that she passed 100% and no one would ever guess her past, she certainly would not be the last transsexual to overestimate her passing.  It is quite likely that her transition was a ‘secret all over the block’, and by common consent it was not mentioned to her.   The journalist phoned her on that topic precisely because he knew that she had been through the same experience.

I found Roberta’s autobiography a much better read than Kennedy’s paraphrase.  She has a wry style that is quite funny at times, and has lots of good anecdotes about people she meets.  That is all removed in Kennedy’s book.  What Kennedy adds is that she deflates the illusion that Roberta was an XX and did not do the usual transsexual change things.

Harold Delf Gillies (1882 - 1960) pioneer surgeon

Harold Delf Gillies (1882 - 1960) was born and raised in Dunedin, New Zealand. He trained at Cambridge University, where he was a rowing and golfing blue, and St Bartholomew's Hospital.  He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS) in 1910.  He married in London in 1911. He and his wife had four children.

In 1914 he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and pioneered a facial injury ward, and later hospital for wounded soldiers. At The Queen’s Hospital which opened in June 1917, he and his colleagues developed much plastic surgery and performed over 11,000 operations on over 5,000 men. He was knighted in 1930.

In the Second World War, he consulted with the Ministry of Health, and organized plastic surgery units, and trained other doctors. He had developed ‘flap surgery’ where a flap of skin is moved to another part of the body to help healing. Flaps were later rolled into tubes, from which a penis could be fashioned.

The first transsexual surgeries had been performed in the 1920s in Berlin by Ludwig Lenz and Felix Abraham at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and in Moscow by Il’ia Golianitskii, The rise of the Nazis traumatically interrupted the evolution of this knowledge.  Arlette-Irène Leber had vaginoplasty in Switzerland in late 1941.

The next operations were by performed by Harold Gillies. A series of operations from 1942-6 on female-to-male Michael Dillon, who himself later qualified as a doctor. This was the first ever operation anywhere to change a woman into man. Gillies also performed the first UK male-to-female operation on Betty Cowell in 1951.  These operations resulting in his having to appear before the General Medical Council.  

Following this, urologist Kenneth Walker arranged an appointment for Georgina Turtle.  It was probably a mistake for Turtle to have come straight from his job as a male dentist clad in a black morning coat and pinstrip trousers.  Gillies waved him away: “I do not really think you look or could be made to look like a woman".  Subsequently Turtle's operation was performed by Gillies' colleague and compatriot Patrick Clarkson. Four years later, after Turtle had obtained a revised birth certificate, Gillies wrote to say that he was sorry for what he had said, and request help in getting one of his 'very deserving cases' a correction of birth certificate.  


Gillies is not known to have done any other sex-change operations after the two pioneering cases.

Harold Gillies is referred to as the father of plastic surgery. He was also a noted painter, a champion golfer and practical joker. His paintings were exhibited at Foyale's Art Gallery in 1948.

Mrs Gillies died in 1957, and Harold married a woman who had been his surgical assistant some months later.

In 1960, Gillies suffered a cerebral thrombosis while operating.   He died in hospital a month later.

• Harold D. Gillies. Plastic Surgery of the Face. London: Henry Frowde, 1920;
• Roberta Cowell. Roberta Cowell's Story. London: Heinemann. New York: British Book Centre, 1954.
• Harold D. Gillies & Ralph Millard. The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. London and New York: Butterworth, 1957.
• Reginald Pound. Gillies: Surgeon Extraordinary. London: Michael Joseph, 1964.
• Craig Williams. “Harold Gillies: Aesthetic Reconstructor”. The New Zealand Edge. www.nzedge.com/heroes/gillies.html.
  
• Liz Hodgkinson. Michael née Laura. Columbus Books. 1989.
• Pagan Kennedy. The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007: 7-8, 60-67, 70-3, 78-81, 97-9.

Plarr's Lives   EN.Wikipedia