James Dalrymple (1931 - 2014) surgeon

James Dalrymple was born in Cardiff, his father a doctor.   He himself qualified as a doctor at Charing Cross Hospital, London, in 1955, where he became a resident obstetric officer.

He did his national service in the Royal Army Medical Corps January 1957-December 1958.  Afterwards he worked as a surgeon at Prince of Wales Hospital, Royal Masonic Hospital, St Mark's Hospital, all in London, and then at the London Hospital in Bath and Darlington Memorial Hospital, County Durham. 

In 1967 Dalrymple moved to Ontario and did orthopaedic surgery at Oshawa General Hospital, and then at the Port Perry and Uxbridge hospitals.

In 1970, he went to Peru, where he helped establish the surgical department of Hospital Amazónico Albert Schweitzer in Pucallpa, a charity foundation for the poor. In 1975 when the hospital ran out of money, he moved on to South Africa, where from October 1975 to December 1977 he was a principal surgical specialist and later medical superintendent at Umtata Hospital in Transkei.  He briefly returned to Canada, where he was a surgeon at Inuvik General Hospital, North West Territories.

From 1979 he was back in London, and worked at the London Hospital, the Olchurch and Rush Green hospitals in Barking, and then St Andrew's Hospital, Bow.

He then trained for genital surgery under Peter Phillip, and took over his practice when he retired in the early 1980s.  He did operations at Charing Cross Hospital, and also did private work with psychiatrist Russell Reid.

Later, in partnership with surgeon Trevor Crofts, Dalrymple practiced privately at London Bridge Hospital.

He performed over 2000 mtf transgender surgeries before he retired in the early 2000s.

Patients include: Bibíana Fernández, Zagria.

*Not any of the Viscounts of Stair, nor the cricketer, nor the manager of Glasgow Corporation Tramways.

• Russell Reid, Domenico di Ceglie, James Dalrymple, Louis Gooren, Richard Green, John Money. Transsexualism: The Current Medical Viewpoint. Produced for the Parliamentary Forum on Transsexualism, Second Edition, 18^th January 1996. PDF
• "James O. Dalrymple". 11 May 2001.  www.relativelyyours.com/dalrymple/JamesODalrymple.htm. Archive.  

TSRoadmap    Plarr

Patrick Clarkson (1911 – 1969) surgeon

Clarkson was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, the son of a sheep farmer and meat exporter. He was educated at Christ's College and then emigrated to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He won a scholarship to continue at Guy's Hospital in London.

He was also a notable boxer and squash player. He won the Treasurer's Gold Medal in both medicine and surgery and qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1935, becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons the following year and completing his MB, BS London in 1940.

He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940, and in 1942 was attached to Rooksdown House, Basingstoke for training in plastic surgery under his compatriot Harold Gillies. He was Officer Commanding of a maxillo-facial unit in North Africa and Italy from 1942 to 1945. In 1945 he was appointed to the British Army Staff, Washington for liaison with US Army and Navy Plastic Surgery Units. He was awarded the MBE for his war service.

After the war he was appointed to Guy's as surgeon in charge of accident services, and re-joined Gillies at Rooksdown House which was to become a regional plastic surgery centre in the National Health Service. His most notable contributions were probably in hand surgery and in the treatment of burns. He was a founding member of the Hand Club in 1952. He wrote a major book on the topic.

He performed one 'corrective procedure', changing the sex of the XO/XY mosaic dentist Georgina Somerset, in January 1957, no doubt drawing on the experience of his colleague Harold Gillies who had pioneered surgery on Michael Dillon, and Roberta Cowell, eleven and six years previously.

Illness led to premature retirement, and he died at Guy's Hospital at the age of 58.

• Patrick Clarkson & J. Schorstein. Treatment of Denuded External Table of the Skull. 1945.
  
• Patrick Clarkson & Anthony Pelly. The General and Plastic Surgery of the Hand. Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1962.
  
• Patrick Clarkson & Peter Gorer. Development in a burnt child of antibodies following skin homografts. nd.
  
• Patrick Clarkson. Clinical material concerning burns relevant to nuclear warfare. nd
  

Plarr's Lives of the Fellows

Norman Haire (1892 – 1952) sexologist.

Norman was born in Sydney, the eleventh and last child of Henry Zions, né Zajac, a Polish-born Jew and his English wife. Norman studied medicine at the University of Sydney, and gained an MB and Ch.M, in 1915.  After a short spell at a hospital in Brisbane, he was a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps for the duration of the war.

Haire, Hirschfeld on the left

In 1919 he worked his passage to Europe, and changed his surname to Haire (Polish 'zajac' = hare).

In 1920 he visited Berlin, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. He quickly became fluent in German, and introduced German publication on sexual science to English-speaking readers.

Also in 1920 he attended a meeting of the Malthusian League, and was appointed medical officer-in-charge at the Walworth Women's Welfare Centre, one of the earliest birth-control clinics.

He contacted, corresponded with and frequently met Havelock Ellis. He was a member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, the International Medical Group for the Investigation of Birth Control, and the Eugenics Education Society.

In 1925 he opened a private practice in Harley Street, and was notoriously an expensive consultant. He pioneered the Haire vaginal pessary as a form of birth control, and introduced into Britain the Grafenberg 'silver' ring, an intra-uterine device. He followed the methods of Eugen Steinach in attempting male sexual rejuvenation by bilateral vasectomy.

In 1927 Haire published his major book, Hymen. As secretary of the World League for Sexual Reform, he organized its third congress in London in 1929. He edited the proceedings, a massive 670-page volume, and published them a year later. He was president of the league from 1930. In 1931, the league protested that transsexual Norma Jackson had been sentenced to 18 months hard labour. In the mid-1930s he acquired a country estate at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.

In 1933 Haire wrote the introduction to the English translation of Lili Elvenes (Elbe)'s biography. In 1934 he edited The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge, mainly written by Arthur Koestler (as Alfrede Costler). In 1936 he was involved in the publication of Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, based on Hirschfeld's writings. Until the 1991 translation of Die Transvestiten, this is the Hirschfeld book used by most English sexologists.

The World League for Sexual Reform fell apart that same year, the German chapter having been destroyed by the Nazi government, but Haire continued as the president of the British off-shoot, the Sex Education Society.

Although he did not drink alcohol, Haire was known for his appetite and his joy in food. By the late 1930s he had been diagnosed as diabetic and nephritic. In 1940, shorty after war broke out, he returned to Australia. He pleaded health reasons, but was accused of cowardice.

He opened an expensive practice in Sydney, but also lectured for the Workers' Educational Association and the New Education Fellowship, and spoke on the wireless. He took up acting, and was well reviewed for his performance in Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. Using the name Wykeham Terris, he wrote a series of articles for the weekly magazine, Woman, a pioneering series discussing sex-education, pregnancy and childbirth issues, gynaecological disorders and venereal disease.

In 1944 he appeared in a debate on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's 'Nation's Forum of the Air' arguing that population should be limited. Afterwards he was strongly denounced in the House of Representatives. He was soon ready to return to London, and did so in 1946, but not before completing his book on Havelock Ellis.

However many of his old associates were dead, and others avoided him. He tried to revive the Sex Education Society, and founded and partly financed the Journal of Sex Education (1948-52).

On a trip to the US he suffered a heart attack, and never completely recovered. He died of ischaemic cardiac failure in 1952.


He had never married, and left his estate, including his library and papers to the University of Sydney which founded the Norman Haire research fellowship.

• Norman Haire & Margaret Sanger. Hygienic Methods of Family Limitation. London: Printed for the Malthusian League by Geo. Standring, 1920.
• Norman Haire, Eugen Steinach, and Serge Voronoff. Rejuvenation, the Work of Steinach, Voronoff, and Others. London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1924.
• Norman Haire. Marriage. London?: s.n, 1927.
• Norman Haire. Hymen. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927.
• Sexual Reform Congress, and Norman Haire. World League for Sexual Reform, Proceedings of the Third Congress. London: K. Paul, 1930.
• Lili Elbe and Niels Hoyer, translated from the German by H.J. Stenningwith an introduction by Norman Haire. Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex ; The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). New York: Dutton, 1933. London : Jarrold Publisher's, xiii, 287 pp 24 plates 1933.
• Norman Haire, O. Fisher, L. Vander, and A. Willy. The Encyclopedia of Sex Practice. London: Encyclopedia Press, 1934.
• Norman Haire, Alfrède Costler, and A. Willy. Encyclopædia of sexual knowledge. London: F. Aldor, 1934.
• RenéGuyon, J. C. Flugel, Ingeborg Klingberg Flügel & Norman Haire. The Ethics of Sexual Acts. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1934.
• Anthony M. Ludovici, with an Introd. by Norman Haire and 7 Diagrams. The Choice of a Mate. London:The international library of sexology and psychology, 1935.
• Sofie Lazarsfeld with an Introduction by Norman Haire. Woman's Experience of the Male. London: Encyclopaedic Press, 1938.
• Norman Haire. Australia's Population Problem. 1941.
• Norman Haire. Sex Problems of to-Day. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1942.
• Magnus Hirschfeld, edited by Norman Haire. Sexual Anomalies And Perversions: Physical And Psychological Development And Treatment - A Summary Of The Works Of The Late Dr Magnus Hirschfeld. Francis Aldor Publisher, 1936. Emerson Books,1948.
• Norman Haire. Havelock Ellis: Adventurer in Morals. Melbourne: Ratonalist Association of Australia, 1947.
• Frank M.C. Forster. "Haire, Norman (1892 – 1952)". Australian Dictionary of Biography, 2006. http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A140402b.htm.

Lennox Ross Broster (1888 - 1965) pioneering surgeon.

Lennox Broster was the fifth child of eight of a farmer in Molteno, South Africa.  He won a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied medicine at Oxford University.  He met his wife-to-be, Edith, at Oxford.  They later had three daughters. 

Lennox became Head Surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, London, and later a well-known Harley Street surgeon. He did pioneer research and provided hormonal therapy and surgery for intersex patients, especially those with adreno-genital syndrome (now known as Congenital adrenal hyperplasia), at Charing Cross Hospital in the 1930s and 1940s.  Patients included: Mark Weston.

In 1932 he devised an operation which provided heretofore-impossible access to the adrenal gland for removal of tumours.

++An 1938 article in the Daily Mirror about his work was headlined “Doctor Changes Sex of 24: Patients Have Married”.   The article specifically mentioned Donald Purcell who did marry four years later.

Broster's work was reported in The News of the World, in 1943, which attracted male-born patients who would now be regarded as transsexual. However there is no evidence that he operated on any such person, and Clifford Allen, the psychiatrist who worked with him, specifically rejected surgical treatment for ‘transvestites’ (the term then in use).

Unlike the other surgeons who operated on intersex and 'transvestite' patients in the 1930s and 1940s, e.g. Harold Gillies, Kurt Warnekros, Ludwig Levy-Lenz, Erwin Gohrbandt, Milosh Kilcka, he did not do just one or two as an experiment, but did several hundred operations over the years.

He later worked with John Randell.

He died in Wimbledon, London, aged 77.

• Lennox Ross Broster,  Surgical Problems of the War. Lippincott, 1933.
• L. R. Broster, Clifford Allen, H. W. C. Vines, Jocelyn Patterson, Alan W. Greenwood, G. F. Marrian, and G. C. Butler. The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality. London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1938.
• Lennox Ross Broster. The Clinical and Surgical Aspect of the Adreno-Genital Syndrome. 1938.
• L. R. Broster.  Endocrine Man: A Study in the Surgery of Sex. William Heinemann, Medical Books, 1944.
• Lennox Ross Broster & Howard William Copland Vines. The Adrenal Cortex: a surgical and pathological study. H.K. Lewis & Co. Ltd, 1933.
• “Were Once Sisters”. The News of the World. 2 Aug 1943.
• Dave King. “Pioneers of Transgendering: John Randell, 1918-1982”. University of Ulster: Gendys Conference, 2002. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2002/king22.htm. 
• "The Broster Family Connection".  Family Trees, History and Stories.   http://genealogy.amay.co.uk/main.php?p=FF2-broster.

John Randell (1918 – 1982) Psychiatrist.

See also Richard Green, John Randell and ... 

John Randell was born in Penarth, Glamorgan, Wales, and qualified as a doctor at the Welsh National School of Medicine in 1941. From 1942-6 he was a Surgeon Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR), and then worked at Guy's, St George's and St Thomas's, all in London.

In 1950 he was appointed Physician for Psychological Medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. There he worked with Lennox Broster who had been treating intersexuals, since the 1930s, but not transsexuals as such. At the end of the 1950s he wrote a paper on 50 transvestites and transsexuals that he had worked with. In his 1960 MD thesis (Prifysgol Cymru/University of Wales) he discussed 61 mtf and 16 ftm cases. This was one of the first higher degree theses on transsexuality.

B'ham Post 21 Nov 1964 p9

During the 1960s he was seeing 50 cases a year, which rose to nearly 200 in the 1970s. By his own figures, he saw 2438 patients (1768 mtf, 670 ftm). He also spent half his time with general psychiatric patients. In 1969, his name was mentioned several times in press reports about the First International Symposium on Gender Identity, and he testified at the Corbett vs Corbett trial that he ‘considered that the respondent (ie April Ashley) is properly classified as a male homosexual transsexualist', (which contributed to the legal problems of transsexuals and intersex persons in the UK for the next 35 years).

From this time on he was the ‘expert’ sought out by the media and appearing on the occasional radio programs. In 1980 the News of the World claimed that he and his surgeon, Peter Phillip, had made London the ‘sex-change capital of the world’. However Randell had not been in favour of surgery until his patients who had had surgery abroad returned with positive evaluations. Even in the 1960s less than 10% of his patients managed to achieve surgery and only a third of the mtfs of those had vaginoplasty. Even in the 1970s when numbers increased, still only 15% of patients achieved surgery.

However by then he was arguing that surgery could be appropriate and that psychotherapy did not work. Even then he restricted surgery to sane, intelligent, single and passable individuals. Passable implied conforming to Randell’s old-fashioned ideas of being ‘ladylike’, that many women had abandoned by the 1970s. Until the end he continued to refer to patients, including post-operatives, by the pronouns of their birth gender, and would tell an mtf accepted for surgery that ‘you’ll always be a man’.

Most patients describe him as brusque, rude and cold. However Tula found him to be ‘absolutely charming’ (perhaps because she passed so well).  He is the unnamed doctor in the Julia Grant television documentaries who shocked most reviewers by his attitude.

Randall is the doctor who told Christopher Wilson, the author of Dancing With The Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue, that Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) = a woman with XY chromosomes.

Other patients include Mark Rees the town councillor, Rachael Padman the physicist, Alice Purnell the activist.

He died of a heart attack.

*Not the physicist nor the Conservative MP.

• John B. Randell. "The Early Recognition of Psychiatric Disorders in Adults". Medicine Illustrated, vol IV, 215-220, 1950.
• John B. Randell. "Euphoriant Effects Of "Preludin". The British Medical Journal. 2, 5043, 1957: 508-509.
• John B. Randell. "Transvestitism And Trans-Sexualism: A Study Of 50 Cases". The British Medical Journal. 2, 5164, 1959: 1448-1452.
• John B. Randell. Cross Dressing and the Desire to change Sex, MD Thesis, University of Wales, 1960.
• John B. Randell. "Preoperative and Postoperative Status of Male and Female Transsexuals" in Richard Green & John Money (eds), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.
• John B. Randell. "Indications for Sex Reassignment Surgery".  Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1:2, 153-161, 1971.
• John B. Randell. Sexual Variations. London: Priory Press. 1973.
• John B. Randell. Transsexualism and its management, Nursing Mirror, 45-47, 1977.
• David Pearson (dir). A Change of Sex. With Julia Grant. BBC TV. 1980.
• Alice Purnell. "Dr John Randell", Beaumont Bulletin, 14:2, 1982.
• "Dr J.B. Randell",  S.H.A.F.T. Newsletter, 15, 1982.
• Dave King. “Pioneers of Transgendering: John Randell, 1918-1982”. University of Ulster: Gendys Conference, 2002. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2002/king22.htm.

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