Claire Elgin (1905 - 1976) – Part II: business woman

Part I: beginnings
Part II: business woman
Part III: bibliography and comments

In 1962 Claire encountered Yugoslavian immigrant Franz Kolterer who founded Micro Science Associates, a precision etching firm. Claire provided skill in micro-photography, and was manager of the art and photo department and a director of the company until 1967.

Claire in Benjamin's book, 1977

October 3rd, 1963 Claire was admitted to Stanford Hospital with an incarcerated hernia. Her doctor there was Donald Laub (1935-2024), then an intern but who later became known for transgender surgery. She told him that she herself had removed her penis. She also gave him an alternate autobiography:

“She explained it to me. She told me further that she was born in Arabia, the son of a Scottish trader who ran a ship between Arabia and England, and was educated aboard ship by specialized tutors. She was genetically XY, a male born with a grade 3 hypospadias, a birth defect in which the urine comes out just above the scrotum. The mistake was made that Clair was a female because the genitalia resembled a clitoris and labia in appearance. The diagnosis was plausible, since no genetic karyotype was available in Arabia in 1900. When puberty came along she developed an ample penis, which was upsetting to her, having been raised for 15 years as a female. For many years, she sought medical advice but there was no one who would help her. Unable to live as the woman she felt she was, she removed the penis and the rest of the male apparatus with a sharp knife and presented herself at the University of California emergency room. She was taken care of there by urologist Dr. Goodwin, who was sympathetic to her plight and fixed her up as well as possible at the time.” … “I asked her about her body art, and she told me she’d once traveled with a circus as a tattooed lady and sword swallower.”

The surgery to fix the hernia went well. However follow-up tests revealed adenocarcinoma of the kidney cells, and the left kidney had to be removed. Again the surgery went well.

Dr Laub got to know Claire as a person:

“Well, Clair had some idiosyncrasies, as you might have suspected by now. Having been raised Muslim, she had good habits; she abstained from drinking coffee or alcohol. Despite being female, Clair had retained some of her male spirit, owning a motorcycle, a gull-wing Mercedes, and a 300 Savage telescopic rifle. She had a fondness for Japanese architecture. Her profession was photography, which she had been taught on the ship during her schooling years, and during the birth of Silicon Valley she was able to make microphotography negatives of the plans for a computer chip; the manufacturing process utilized silver salts in the negatives of her microphotos to etch silicon into chips.

“Clair was rewarded for her efforts and gained a large number of shares in one of the more prominent laser and computer companies in the Silicon Valley. With her money she built a Japanese home, a five-sided pagoda on the top of one of the highest hills in a most exclusive suburb, Los Altos Hills. She included koi fish tanks where the fish were able to swim from outside the home into the inside for Clair’s pleasure. The five alcoves of the pagoda each had a wind-generated musical organ, insulated so that there was no sound of blowing air during the playing of the pipes.”

Harry Benjamin’s seminal book on Transsexuals came out in 1966. He condensed his three years of meetings and correspondence 1953-5 and described Claire in three paragraphs, but, as she requested, without giving a reference name. No photographs were included in the book, but medical and other professionals could request them if they wrote in on medical stationary. Black stripes were placed over Claire’s face to prevent recognition.

“One patient who is now, several years after the operation, a decidedly masculine-looking 'woman,' with tattoos all over her body, is getting along well in an active business and is unrecognized as a former male. She is merely considered eccentric by her associates.

“Under no circumstances, she assured me repeatedly, would she ever go back to living as a man. 'This way I am at least myself and can relax,' were her own words.

“A couple of times she was arrested under the suspicion of 'impersonating.' When she was taken to a police station, examined and declared to be a woman, the arresting officers apologized and in one instance, bought her a dinner. Not all patients in such situations fared equally well”.

In his introduction to the 1969 anthology, Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment edited by Richard Green and John Money, Benjamin wrote, probably with Claire in mind:

“These few instances of attempted self-castration by definitely non psychotic individuals impressed me greatly. Their desperation as well as the entire clinical history with their vain search for help, often from childhood on, made me realize that the medical profession truly treated these patients as ‘stepchildren’. Educational and medical lectures and scientific publications were urgently needed.”

In 1967 Micro Science had merged with Alloys Unlimited. That was the year that one of the company’s acid tanks sprang a leak in March, and a fire captain had to be rushed to hospital. There was a further incident in October 1971 when there was fire in a tank of nitric acid.

The firm was sold to the British Plessey Group and became Plessey Micro Science Inc in 1974, and then Kolterer set up Koltron Corp. By now Claire was no longer involved, but she had invested in shares of Micro Science Associates, Alloys Unlimited and then Plessey Micro Science Inc, and had become a millionairess.

However, by the end of the 1960s, with age, the many lines in her face made her look more male than female. Laub and his team did a face-lift, which went very well. By this time, Dr Laub had started doing transgender surgeries – his first trans patient (other than Claire) was Ella in 1968. In 1969 Donald Laub founded Interplast to provide necessary reconstructive surgery for persons in developing countries. Claire became the official Interplast photographer, and travelled to central and south America and chronicled surgeries for cleft lip, cleft palate, and burn scar deformities. She was greatly appreciated for the excellence of her photography and her compassion toward patients, even though she was not passing that well. The patients – affectionately – referred to her as “Señor Clair”.

Vernon Gregory, an organist who played the mighty Wurlitzer organ, took over the Avenue cinema in Oakland to install the Wurlitzer that his son had found in Chicago. They moved it to Oakland, installed it and started a program of films accompanied by the organ, but were deeper and deeper in debt until Claire – who played a smaller organ at home – came in to rescue the project in 1972. She also bought a plane that year and learned to fly.

Claire lost most of her money in the recession of the 1970s, and was for a while bankrupt. She developed a working 3-D television and patented it, but it was the alternate model by Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic) that was more successful.

Claire in later years

In 1976, Claire called Dr Laub complaining of severe pain in the rib when she coughed. After a preliminary examination, Claire was admitted to the Stanford Hospital oncology medical service. X-rays showed that her lung cancer had metastasized to the rib. Claire asked how long she had left and was told about six weeks. She asked for a glass of water, and took one of the cyanide pills that she had in her purse.

The next year Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon was reprinted as a Warner Books Paperback. This time the photographs were included within the book, and the black strips hiding Clair’s face were removed.

Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, 2002, included 5 short mentions of Claire disguised under the pseudonym of Caren Ecker. These mentions were based solely on documents in the Kinsey archives, mention her auto-castration and surgery in 1953, her contact with Louise Lawrence and with Worden and Marsh, but say nothing about Claire’s subsequent career as a business woman and photographer.

Both Claire’s only son, age 82, and her business partner, Frank Kolterer, age 76, died in 2007.

Tamara Rees (1924-2000) Part I: Parachutist, soldier, pilot

Part I: Parachutist, soldier, pilot

Part II: performer, wife, property investor

Original version: February 2010

Robert Rees was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Montgomery, Alabama and then Los Angeles.  Rees usually played with the girls and was bullied by the boys, and in high school was a loner, sometimes secretly dressing in his sister’s clothes.   By age 14 Rees was unable to discuss his problems with his parents.  They took him to a psychiatrist to no avail, and his father badly beat him in an attempt to induce conformity.

Rees then ran away with only $3 in his pocket.  He managed to reach his grandparents in Kansas, who took him in and put him in a local school where he was able to advance a grade.   Rees returned to his parents in Summer 1939, by which time they were living in Oakland, California.  To escape from home Rees volunteered for the Civilian Conservation Service, and then the Navy, in both of which he was harassed for not being conventionally masculine.  He was discharged from the Navy as “physically unfit” after a conflict over a loan not repaid.   

In December 1942 Rees enlisted in the US Paratroopers, and underwent their rigorous training - although he was still ridiculed for his demeanour.  While stationed in North Carolina Rees dated and married:

“This girl was cognizant of my desires and the problem in general and was anxious to leave her own home because of family problems. After some discussion with her, it was agreed that we would marry, solely for the benefit of society.”  

He was by now considered an instructor, and promoted to Sergeant.  In Spring 1944 Rees participated in the invasions of Sicily and then Anzio, for which he later received a Bronze Star and a Presidential Unit Citation.  In September 1944 he was part of the jump into the Netherlands to create a bridgehead invasion route into northern Germany and participated in the ensuing fighting, until injured in late January.  

After being repatriated and then discharged, Rees filed for divorce as previously agreed with his wife. In March 1946 Rees developed a mastoid condition, an outgrowth of his war injury.  During surgery one of the facial nerves was severed resulting in facial paralysis and loss of hearing.  This was almost corrected in a second operation a few months later.

In 1947 Rees became a parachute instructor, at first for the Government, and then privately. He also obtained a pilot’s license.  In March 1949, he opened the air show for the all Western States Air Meet, held in Red Bluff, California, and on his 527^th jump was injured when his parachute did not open properly.  A week later he was emceeing at a air show outside Sacramento, when his business partner misjudged a jump and died.  Rees then sold the business and never jumped again.  

More on Maurice Wilson

In 2008 I wrote about Maurice Wilson, who in 1934 decided to climb Mt Everest/Chomolungma.   With no flying experience and no climbing experience he bought a plane and flew to India, and then set to climb the mountain. He died on the mountain and mountaineering forums are still debating whether he died on the way up or on the way down.   

There were and are persistent rumours that he was trans.  If so he was the first known European trans person to climb Mount Everest, nineteen years before Jan Morris. 

His first biographer

• Dennis Roberts. I'll climb Mount Everest alone; the story of Maurice Wilson. R. Hale 1957.
  

did not discuss whether he was trans.

The Wikipedia entry has not a single word on the topic.

There is a new biography, just out. 

• Ed Caesar.  The Moth and the Mountain: A true Story of Love, War, and Everest.  Avid Reader Press, 2020.

Caesar does discuss the issue on p172-4.  

"There have long been rumours in the climbing community and beyond that Maurice Wilson was a private transvestite, that he carried with him items of women’s clothing to Everest, and that he wrote a secret, second diary, detailing many kinds of niche sexual predilections. You want to know what to do with such stories. His tale is remarkable however he was clad."

Wilson took an unusual choice of book up the mountain with him,  Hans Licht’s Sexual Life in Ancient Greece,  published 1931.

His great-nephew took a secret about Wilson to the grave - but he insisted that "He weren't queer".  So if not gay, then what?

Caesar concludes: "The evidence is not conclusive, and in any case you are not trying Wilson for a crime. But you think of how happy he was, dressed as someone else, and you wonder whether his whole story—the broken relationships, the spiritual mania, the purging fasts, the demented mission to Everest—was born out of an unsettled sense of his true self."  

Here is a summary of the new book - that is without mentioning transvestite rumours. 

Case of Sheffield and Horsham v. The United Kingdom, 1998

Rachel Horsham (1946 - )

Horsham was raised in a small village in Surrey, with a father who had been born in India, and a mother from Ireland. Horsham knew from an early age that she was not really male. As Rachel she emigrated to the Netherlands in 1974 because that country recognised trans women as women at a time when the UK did not.

She became a patient of Professor Dr Louis Gooren at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) of Amsterdam, wrote the first version of her autobiography in 1991, and completed transition in 1992.

She applied to the UK Consulate for a re-issued UK passport in her new name and gender:

“During an interview with the Consul, I was informed that it was not possible to be issued with a new passport reflecting my current status, at the time. Nor would they accept a letter of Deed Poll from a Solicitor for a change of forenames. Their reasoning: that the issuing of passports to transsexuals in the United Kingdom, showing their female status, on production of a letter of Deed Poll from a Solicitor, and a letter of acknowledgement from a qualified doctor, that the bearer was a transsexual, was not legal outside of the United Kingdom.” (Plaintiff’s Observations)

She was told that she needed an order from a Dutch Court. This was obtained and the passport re-issued. She became a Dutch citizen in 1993, and obtained a ruling in a Dutch court that her UK birth certificate should be amended. As this did not happen she initiated legal proceedings in the UK. This was appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1994.

Kristina Sheffield (also born 1946)

Sheffield was a pilot with Brittania Airways, and had 34 years experience when she transitioned in 1986.

Kristina divorced from her wife as was almost always required in the 1990s (in retrospect she felt that she had been coerced into it underhandedly), and a judge also granted an injunction banning Kristina from seeing her daughter as “transsexuals are not suitable company for children”.

She applied to every UK airline, but was always obliged to show her birth certificate which said that she was born male, which resulted in her not getting employment.

While her passport was re-issued in her new name, she was still unable to obtain a US visa, and twice in court to stand surety for a friend, was obliged to reveal her previous name. A misunderstanding with the police with regards to a replica firearm indicated that they were aware of her gender change although the topic had not come up. A request under the Data Protection Act 1984 would have required her to state all previous names.

She also appealed through the UK court system and then to the ECHR.
 

And then

 
Both cases were initially accepted by the ECHR in 1994. Kristina met with Rachel in Amsterdam. Following advice from Rachel, Kristina revised the statement of her case. This made the two cases rather similar although the circumstances were different, in that Rachel wanted to marry and Kristina to find employment. The ECHR decided to couple both appeals.

Rachel, with Kristina’s assistance researched the Ewan Forbes-Sempill case and the Corbett divorce case. They obtained the birth certificates for April Ashley, Roberta Cowell, Michael Dillon and Georgina Turtle, and the marriage certificates for Georgina Turtle and April Ashley. Only April had not had her birth certificate amended re her name and sex. From this they were able to conclude that the Corbetts’ divorce trial could have been quickly concluded in that April was still legally male and thus the marriage was invalid according to the law at that time. There was no need for the detailed medical examinations that were done. Unless, of course, something other than an annulment of marriage was being enacted.

The original birth certificate for Ewan Forbes-Sempill proved impossible to obtain, however a copy specifying his male sex and name was available. The Sempill and Corbett cases had been more about establishing the boundaries of aristocratic privilege than of determining the best governance of transsexuals.

“It was also found, that there had been prior knowledge of these birth certificates by the plaintiffs of former cases that had gone to the ECHR. They were the cases of Rees and later Cossey. None of the fact that it was possible to amend a birth certificate, within existing statute law, was ever presented to the ECHR in those cases. They were based on a demand that the UK government must change the law. The court in those cases was not prepared to demand that a government must restructure its laws. Both cases lost and this created a case law in the ECHR upon which any further cases from the UK would be accepted and judged. The ECHR works on the basis of creating its own case law upon which to judge a case presented to them and where they have none they create it. If a case challenges existing case law, then the court can examine the situation.” (Rachel Horsham .4)

In May 1996, Rachel wrote an anonymous article that was published in The Independent, "Trapped in a man's body with a woman's mind". She detailed the then lack of human rights for transsexuals in the UK; explained how HRT and reconstructive surgery have a 97% success rate and attributed the condition to an incongruence of pre-natal hormones (a theory that was accepted in the late 1990s). She rightly points to the 1970 Corbett v Corbett divorce case as the point where things went wrong.

“All that is required is for government to accept a return to the pre-1970 status quo, a move that is supported by medicine, a large section of legal opinion and many parliamentarians. There is no need for new legislation or new administrative systems; the Birth Certificate still contains a column where errors at registration can be corrected as they were before 1970. Time has shown that there were no practical complications with those corrections, and thus there is no realistic argument for not reinstating the practice. Indeed, there is every reason for regarding it as an urgent necessity.”

The ECHR gave its judgement 30 July 1998. By 11 to 9 it voted that the Article 8 right to respect for a private life was not violated (although the court noted “no steps taken by respondent State to keep need for appropriate legal measures in this area under review despite Court’s view to that effect in Rees and Cossey judgments — Court reiterates that view”). By 18 votes to 2 it voted that the Article 12 right to contract lawful marriage was not violated. Unanimously it voted that Article 14, the right not to be subjected to difference in treatment was not violated. The judgment does not address Horsham’s argument that Corbett vs Corbett was a bad judgment and a simple reversal would solve the problems.

As Rachel summarises the result on her home page:

“The United Kingdom rejected [the plaintiffs’ plea] on the grounds that under British law a person’s sex is fixed at birth and cannot be amended or changed and argued that the Court of Human Rights had given two Judgments in their favour upholding this contention in two previous cases, Rees and Cossey. The plaintiff, in her submissions, proved that the government had lied to the court in those previous cases, and that English Statute law did have the required legislation to amend a person's birth certificate, in such cases. In 1998 the court decided to uphold its case law based on Rees and Cossey and the case of Rachel Horsham was never judged on the facts presented to them.”

Rachel expanded her autobiography to include the appeal to ECHR, and published it, also in 1998.
Kristina won an employment discrimination case in 1998 at an industrial tribunal in that she was unable to obtain even an interview with Easyjet to be a pilot despite her 34 years’ experience.

Context

In 1997, after 18 years of homophobic Conservative misrule, the Labour Party became the new government. Initially it continued the Conservatives’ homophobic policies, one of which was to oppose appeals such as that by Horsham & Sheffield. The GLBT censorship known as Section 28 was not repealed until 2003.

While government lawyers were in Strasburg arguing against the petitions of Horsham and Sheffield, Petra Henderson, British but resident in Germany, had completed surgical transition and wished to be recognised legally as female, which the government quietly permitted. She had threatened to go to the ECHR and the Government wished to keep her out of the newspapers. It was insisted that this was a one-off exemption and did not set a precedent. There were some other similar one-offs, such as the UK citizen in Paris who was able to obtain a similar result with Petra's assistance. Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of ‘joined-up government’, but this was one area where it was definitely not so.

Press for Change had been founded in 1992. It engaged with lawyers and Members of Parliament. Inevitably a slow process. A private member's bill was introduced in 1996, but as the then Conservative Government refused to endorse it, it was without success. In 2002, another appeal to the ECHR finally met with success, and two years after that the Labour Government passed the Gender Recognition Act – not perfect, but the best in the world at that time.

Comments

Rachel’s book is not listed in either Amazon or Abebooks. It is on the Dwarf Empire web page.












In recent years Rachel has self-identified as HBS, although independently of the two major strands thereof.   In 1998 the only Benjamin Syndrome movement was the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin in Paris run by Tom Reucher, Diane Potiron, Hugues Cariou, and which was inclusive unlike the HBS movement which developed after 2005.

• "Trapped in a man's body with a woman's mind", The Independent, 1 May 1996. Online.
• Rosa Prince. “Transsexuals in test case”. The Independent, 22 February 1998. Online.
• “British Pilot Wins Discrimination Case”. NewsPlanet, June 1, 1998. Online.
• Case of Sheffield and Horsham v. The United Kingdom. European Court of Human Rights, 30 July 1998. Online.
• “UK Transsexuals lose court case”. BBC News, July 30, 1998. Online.
• Christine Burns. “Court Judgement Criticises UK Government's Lack of Action”. PFC, 9^th August 1998. Online.
• Rachel Horsham. Release of the Dove. Dwarf Empire, 1991 and 1998.

Rachel Horsham’s Home Page

Jonathan Ferguson (1915 - 1974) pilot, engineer, civil servant

Joy Ferguson was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, and attended Lurgan College, a Christian instition which had admitted girls since 1918.

In 1939 while working as an electrical appliances demonstrator in the local electricity showrooms, Ferguson gained a Royal Aeronautical Club pilot’s licence. With this Ferguson was able to join the Women’s Air Transport Auxiliary (more), which moved planes around, especially from factories to airfields (the men pilots were all needed in combat). Ferguson flew as a 2^nd officer and racked up over 1,000 flying hours, and continued with this commission after the war.

Ferguson was then employed by the Ministry of Supply working probably in aircraft research. She was also involved in the Air Rangers section of the Girl Guides, and was elected to the council of the Women’s Engineering Society.

Ferguson 1950s.  No post-transition photographs available

In 1958 Ferguson quit the WES. Shortly afterwards he announced that he had had a sex-change operation and was now Jonathan. He was even able to get his North Ireland birth certificate re-issued and the entry in the register of births changed. A spokesman for the civil service was quoted that “the alteration to the birth certificate will not affect his employment in the Ministry”, and he was upgraded to the male pay-scale.

Jonathan Ferguson died at age 59 after falling from a ladder while doing maintenance at home.

• Cheryl Morgan. “A Little Trans History”. Cheryl’s Mewsings, July 13, 2015. www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=21187.

• “Joy Ferguson and Jonathan Ferguson”. Women Engineers’ History, December 21, 2016. https://womenengineerssite.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/joy-ferguson-and-jonathan-ferguson.

LGBTHistory

Barbara Dayton (1926 – 2002) Part II: librarian, pilot

Continued from Part I.

On November 24, 1971, Thanksgiving Eve, a man using the name Dan Cooper purchased a walk-on ticket for a 727 flight from Portland, Oregon to Seattle. He handed a note to a stewardess to the effect that he had a bomb. He demanded $200,000 in unmarked twenty-dollar bills and two sets of sports parachutes. These being provided, he allowed the passengers to disembark at Seattle. Cooper demanded that the plane, now refueled, take off for Mexico City via Reno, no faster than 170 knots at 10,000 feet, and that the cabin be left unpressurized. He sent all the crew into the cockpit. He then opened the back door and after a while jumped. Due to a miscommunication with the media, the perpetrator came to be referred to as DB Cooper. The FBI was unable to find the parachute, a body or the money. Until September 2001 this is the only unsolved hijacking of a US aircraft. As a result metal detectors were introduced at commercial airports, and 727 aircraft were altered to ensure that the rear door could not be opened in flight. Bill Dayton, watching the news reports about the hijacking thought that he recognized his brother.

In December 1971, at a follow-up interview, the doctors noted that Barbara had a much more positive attitude to things, and shortly afterwards she was able to get a job at the Suzzallo Library at the University. She came out to her son, Dennis.

In 1973 Barbara bought a surplus airplane. Dennis and his new wife accepted Barbara, but Dennis  died of a drug overdose in May 1975. The funeral led to a reconciliation with daughter Rena whom Barb had not seen for ten years.

In 1977 Pat and Ron Forman met Barb at the Thun Field airstrip. Some months later Barb accepted invitations and became a regular dinner guest at the Furmans on Sunday nights. In February 1978 she told them that she had been a transsexual.

In Summer 1979 a group of pilots were discussing the DB Cooper affair when Barb surprisingly denied that Cooper was a fool and revealed detailed knowledge of the case. Ron joked that Barb must be DB Cooper. Later Barb admitted that she – in reverse drag - really had been DB Cooper, although she subsequently denied it.

On February 10, 1980 an eight-year-old boy found $5,800 of the DB Cooper money on the banks of the Columbia river (while the money was not marked, the serial numbers had been recorded).

In June 1980 Barb lost her pilot's license due to medical problems, but kept flying anyway. In 1988 Barb retired from her library job, and opened an aircraft restoration shop at Thun Field airstrip with Bob Birch who had been flirting with her for some time. She lived in a room at the shop. The business lasted for 4 years.  When they sold it, Barb moved in with Bob in Tacoma, Washington, and as he deteriorated with age, she became his full-time carer despite family antagonism to her presence. Bob died in December 1997 and Barb disappeared within hours.

She settled in a mobile home near Carson City, Nevada living sparsely on social security and gambling whatever she could in nearby casinos. Barbara Dayton died aged 76.

Her friends, Pat and Ron Forman, contacted Barbara's family, were given diaries and letters, and wrote up their experience with her as a book, published in 2008. They contacted the FBI and showed the evidence that Barbara was DB Cooper, but never heard back from the FBI.

The National Geographic cable channel broadcast a special on the DB Cooper case in July 2009. They filmed material re Barb Dayton, interviewed the Formans and hired a female pilot to wear a wig and fly a Cessna 140. However all Dayton material was pulled when sent to senior management: "executives at National Geographic cited three reasons for pulling the Dayton footage: one, Barb Dayton’s sex-change was too controversial; two, the story line was too complex for a one-hour broadcast; and three, the FBI did not consider Dayton to be a credible suspect".

• Pat & Ron Forman. The Legend of D. B. Cooper - Death by Natural Causes. Lulu, 2008
  
• James Olszewski. Under Suspicion: The Legend of D.B. Cooper. Createspace, 2008.
  
• Danny Westneat. "A twist in high-flying mystery". The Seattle Times, July 16, 2008. http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2008053882_danny16.html.
  
• “The Skyjacker Who Got Away". National Geographic, July 26, 2009.
  
• Ron & Pat Forman. The legend of DB Cooper. http://legendofdbcooper.com/SymposiumSlides.pdf.  No Longer Available.
  
• Kay Melchisedech Olson. The D.B. Cooper Hijacking: Vanishing Act. Capstone Press, 2010: 68-75.
  
• "The Barb Dayton confession: as told by Ron and Pat Forman". The Mountain News, February 11, 2011. http://themountainnewswa.net/2011/02/11/continuing-the-hunt-for-db-cooper-pierce-county-involvement-in-the-case.
  
• Geoffrey Gray. Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper. Broadway, 2012: 35-8, 94-8, 126-8, 185-8, 241-2.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA(DBCOOPER)  
____________________________________________________________

Of the several books on DB Cooper, most at least mention Barbara Dayton.    I know of no book on LGBT or trans Seattle that mentions the city's first surgical transsexual. Anne Lawrence, also of Seattle, in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism discusses several published biographies of those she considers to be autogynephilic but chose not to include Dayton, despite writing five years after the Formans' book.

There are several other candidates for being DB Cooper.  Dayton certainly had an appropriate skill set: flying planes, parachuting, handling dynamite.   It certainly seems that Dayton either did or experienced something in November 1971.  The doctors at the University clinic noted a distinct change.   Her motivation would be resentment about having to pass theory and algebra tests to become a commercial pilot although it was not needed for the actual job.   Certainly there is no evidence that she ever spent the ransom money.  Here is a photograph of Dayton just before transition next to the FBI picture based on witness statements.

Virginia Prince: Part III – Femmiphilic activist

Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments

Virginia Prince was an adviser to Harry Benjamin for his 1966 seminal The Transsexual Phenomenon, consulted on the transvestite types, but not on Benjamin’s type IV, nonsurgical transsexual, a role that Prince did not adopt until 1968. The three types of transvestite in Benjamin's schema: pseudo, fetishistic and true were a direct reflection of what Prince had been advocating, and left nowhere for gay transvestites, female impersonators nor for female cross dressers. Benjamin proposed a scale or typology divided into six types: Transvestite (Pseudo), Transvestite (Fetishistic), Transvestite (True), Transsexual (Nonsurgical), Transsexual (Moderate intensity),Transsexual (High intensity).

Prince responded with a seven-type scale (Benjamin: 40):

1. Fetishist
2. Low intensity TV
3. True femmiphile TV
4. Asexual type
5. Gender type TS
6. Intensive sexual type TS
7. Operated TS

As the book came out, Mr Lowman was being divorced by Doreen, and was selling his share of Cardinal Industries. He said that he sold it for 10 times his initial investment. Doreen retained more than half of the assets including the house in Nichols Canyon. Arnold moved to a small rented house in Laurel Canyon.¹ Harry Benjamin wrote to the US Passport Bureau in support of Prince's application for a passport in her female name. Without comment the request was granted. (Benjamin:169-170)

The same year Agnes confessed to Dr Stoller that she had indeed taken external estrogens, and that she was not intersex.

Early that year Prince urged FPE members to remember that homophile advances rebounded in their interest:

"The homophile community is on the march AND on the way to gaining acceptance…. Some of the more narrow minded of our sister TVs see nothing good in anything that homosexuals do, but we ought to remember that their persecution is our persecution and their victory will be our victory too…. So, personally I am all for their success and would cooperate in helping them to achieve it where I could out of pure self interest for our group if nothing else fails. There is, however, the broader interest of helping all minorities toward acceptance." (Transvestia #37, February 1966; Hill: 321)

The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) held its founding convention in San Francisco in August 1966. Prince attended as an observer. “I think it is in order that we keep an observer status in this field and stand by to aid their cause when it will aid ours and to extract from their experiences and their contacts with authorities and influential groups any contacts and opportunities that may be to our advantage."

Lavender Los Angeles p 65

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) adopted a national policy very similar to the one that Vern Bullough had drafted for the San Fernando Valley chapter, and following the amicus curiae brief that they had filed in the Felicity Chandelle case, that homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals should be protected.

Prince and several FPE members attended a drag ball. Prince took an informal survey of sixteen drag queens, asking each ten questions that she had pre-devised. She hypothesized that the answers to these questions would distinguish homosexual queens from transvestites. However one of the 16 answered as if a femmiphilic. Prince informed him of that and introduced him to the FPE members. He later joined FPE. (Transvestia #41, October 1966; Hill:399-400).

In August there was a riot between trans women and the police at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

Another book that came out that year was Myron Brenton's The American Male, an early work of men's liberation. Prince felt that Brenton's arguments about masculine mystique, the arbitrary construction of gender norms, and the narrow stereotypes that men felt pressured to follow were much the same as she had been writing about in Transvestia for the last six years. She juxtaposed quotes from Brenton with references to her own earlier columns (Hill:390) Prince even spoke up for homosexuals as long as they did not attempt to join FPE: “Nothing is more basic to our insecurities, self-condemnation, and non-acceptance than the problem of homosexuality.”(Transvestia #41, October 1966; Hill:398)

FPE- Northern Europe was set up on the FPE model for the Scandinavian countries, at the initiative of Annette Hall from Sweden who had met Virginia in the US in the Spring of 1966. In later years it split into separate organizations for each country.

Late 1966 Virginia was interviewed for television in Hawai'i: "I was there as Virginia and was interviewed for about twenty minutes before I was asked what personal interest I had in the field—it had all been professional before that—and I dropped to my masculine voice and confessed all…" (Transvestia #42, December 1966; Hill:305-6.

Prince set up meetings with police chiefs and the heads of vice squads.

"I went as Virginia to see the Lt. who was public relations assistant to the Police Chief in San Diego. He then took me to the Lt. in charge of the vice squad. After about 45 minutes with him I left for an appointment with the City Attorney….The reason for my call on them was that San Diego is working on an ordinance which could make the wearing of the clothing of the opposite sex with the intent to commit an illegal act, illegal itself….Both the Lt. and the City Attorney made it clear that if a TV such as myself was just walking the streets, acting like a lady and minding his own business that no law would be being broken because there would be no ‘intent’….I urged them to try to get the ordinance through leaving out the clothing as a means to their ends. I don’t think I succeeded in selling them on this, but they did admit that I had a point." (Transvestia #38, April 1966; Hill:308). She usually started with an inquiry about the city's cross-dressing laws, and then stressed the harmlessness of heterosexual cross-dressers. She was always emphatic that they were different from homosexuals and street queens.²

On the last night of 1966 there was a drag contest at New Faces, a bar on W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. Just before midnight many of the contestants crowded into the Black Cat, just down the street. At the stroke of midnight, as many of the men exchanged a traditional kiss, the LAPD rushed in and beat several customers brutally. They chased two back to the New Faces where they knocked down the woman owner and beat the two bartenders unconscious, one of whom then suffered a ruptured spleen and after recovery was charged with felony assault on a police officer. Six patrons were charged with lewd conduct for kissing, and were all found guilty by a jury. Two of them were later registered as sex offenders. In response, there were organized protests, and the convictions of the two were appealed as far as the US Supreme Court which declined to take the case. This inspired a new periodical, The Advocate, for gay and lesbian (including transvestite) issues. It was at first a Los Angeles publication, and then grew into a national publication. Despite the probability that some of the drag contestants were FPE members, FPE took no notice of the event.

In January 1967 Prince attended a combined party arranged by Theta Chapter (Madison) and Theta Tau (Minneapolis-St Paul). Later that year members of Theta-Tau joined Prince for a visit to the University of Minnesota.

The newly divorced Prince published a new edition of The Transvestite and his Wife later that year, a clear re-statement that Prince’s organizing is only for heterosexual men. The book is dedicated to Karl Bowman and Harry Benjamin, both of whom had helped Prince. "Through his [Benjamin's] education of other doctors, psychologists, and marriage counselors he has helped many hundreds of transvestites."
Prince claimed to have encountered few happier marriages than those in which the wife accepts and participates in the husband's transvestism; fewer more unsatisfactory than those in which the wife rejects it. If a wife should fail to understand, it is an indication of her immaturity stemming from her own unresolved emotional problems. Prince grades wives A-F on how well they understand and accept. "The femmiphile adopts feminine garb as a matter of personal internal expression – the homosexual 'Queen' does so for external effect – to attract males for sexual purposes and to ease the guilt of both." ³ "Females can and do wear masculine type clothing so openly and without social disapproval that the desire to do so is not frustrated and does not therefore present a problem."⁴

The British FPE offshoot, The Beaumont Society was founded with an initial membership of 7.

In August Prince appeared on the Irv Kupcinet show in Chicago in a panel with Paul Gebhard, director of the Kinsey Institute who had continued Kinsey's research into transvestites, the black novelist Richard Wright and a psychiatrist. "'For the first time over the air,' she proudly wrote 'a TV was treated as the intellectual equal of other persons with some stature and not as a sort of curiosity to be taken apart.' (Transvestia #47, October 1967; Hill:306). She received hundreds of letters of inquiry.

Sir Lady Java was fired from her employment as a performer and waitress at the Redd Foxx Club in Los Angeles. The ACLU, having been persuaded to aid transvestites, challenged the LAPD Rule that applied as unconstitutional. But apparently FPE did nothing. In New York, Mauricio Archibald, in female clothing and on his way home from a party, was arrested on a subway platform and charged under the same obscure law that Felicity Chandelle had been charged under. Despite his being heterosexual, and despite his obtaining an appeal hearing, no help was forthcoming from either Prince or Siobhan Fredericks.

The final Nationals Pageant, for professional and amateur drag performers, organized by Jack Doroshow/Flawless Sabrina,was held that year in New York as a fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. This was filmed, and released the next year as The Queen, which became a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. On this basis Doroshow, obviously openly transvestite, was hired as a special adviser on the films Midnight Cowboy, 1969, and Myra Breckinridge, 1970.

Prince informed her readers under the title “Life Begins at 54”:

“Virginia will be a freer soul now even if she has to crossdress as Charles now and then…. I’m going to do everything that will continue to broaden (literally and figuratively) my experience of life in my closing years. Everything with three specific exceptions that is, I draw the line at homosexuality, transsexuality, and a third marriage. (Transvestia #43, 1967)"

The Alpha group had its first open house in November 1967. This became an annual event. City leaders and public officials were invited to a catered dinner and a lecture by Prince. 50 guests turned up the first year. (Hill: 315)

The December 1967 issue of Transvestia was the only one ever to publish a photograph of an east Asian transvestite: Lili, a recent immigrant to New York from Shanghai.⁵

Prince took on a part-time assistant at Transvestia at this time. Mary’s mother had died in 1966, and she started electrolysis and hormones and gave up her male job with the intention of seeking surgery. However Prince gave her a hard time on the question of surgery. She did however start living full time as female. Her story was published in Transvestia, 62, Feb 1970.

From this point on, until 1982, Prince was a full-time activist and lecturer. She traveled across the US, to England, Scandinavia and Australia. She appeared on radio and television, lectured to college classes, gave newspaper interviews, delivered papers at professional conferences, and appeared at local FPE chapter meetings and social functions. Traveling and appearing as a woman in public as this entailed led to her decision in late 1968 to live full time as female. She encouraged members of FPE to contact their local networks to set up potential appearances. Prince appeared on either radio or television shows in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, Houston, and Tulsa, among other cities. On these radio and television programs, she promoted her books, the magazine, and Phi Pi Epsilon. In Transvestia, she published photographs of herself with television and radio personalities and described her trips in extensive travelogues.

A handful of doctors and mental health professionals responded to Prince's growing reputation by referring transvestite patients to FPE and Transvestia. A similar shift had already occurred with homophile patients being referred to gay groups, and as already mentioned, Harry Benjamin had been referring patients to Siobhan Fredericks since 1963.

In 1968, Transvestia columnist Sheila Niles popularized the concept ‘whole girl fetishist (WGF)’ for members who did not pass well enough, particularly if it were for lack of trying. Over the next few years it came to be that those who failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine were fetishistic.⁶ Susanna even estimated that the majority of members were WGFs (Transvestia #55, 1969).

From 1968 Prince wrote more columns about transsexuality than about homosexuality and fetishism combined. He strongly resisted the common assumption (endorsed by Harry Benjamin and others) that there was a continuum from fetishism to transvestism to transsexuality. Susanna Valenti held that many transvestites were incipient transsexuals who with the right circumstances would progress to living as women. Dozens within Transvestia's readership were opting for surgery, and it irked Prince that his advice was being ignored: “…the number of persons asking for and achieving it does not make me happy. I am disturbed”. (Transvestia#50, 1968; Hill, 137) He became quite mean-spirited on the subject, presenting transsexuals as failed individuals: “inadequate, inappropriate, inefficient, and uncomfortable in the masculine gender role and who were also inadequate and unhappy in the male sex role". They had failed at both the sex and the gender of being male. Several times Prince used the crude pun: “While I feel whole, transsexuals feel hole”.

FPE continued its policy of not accepting “bondage or masochistic people, amateur investigators, curiosity seekers, homosexuals, transsexuals or emotionally disturbed people”, Great emphasis was still placed on privacy and secrecy, and also on involving members’ wives.

Annette, whose photograph had been the first cover girl on Transvestia #5, invited FPE, as he did most years, to visit his remote ranch in Idaho. Most of the Seattle Chapter went, and Virginia drove up from Los Angeles. Katherine Cummings was present and observed that Virginia managed to alienate most of the wives by telling them that she was just as female as they were. (Cummings: 185).

WBI Boston 1968 with Dr Leo Wollman.  Presenter Bob Kennedy

Also 1968, Prince's mother, Elizabeth Arnold, died. By this time Prince had had facial hair removed by electrolysis and was taking female hormones again, and had had a legal name change to Virginia Bruce. She took an extensive six-week trip across the US meeting FPE members and even police officers. She emphasized that she took no male clothing with her. On her return she bought a spacious house in the Hollywood Hills. She trained as a glider pilot and purchased an Ultralite aircraft. She also bought a motorhome for her travels in the US.⁷

In August she wrote "My goal achieved" (Transvestia #49) about how she had attended a session of the then new nudist therapy led by psychologist Paul Bindrim, who had previously spoken at an Alpha Chapter meeting. Prince felt that it was an opportunity to present as Virginia while revealing her male anatomy:

"For about 20 hours I was as naked as the day I was born but for those same 20 hours I was still Virginia to myself and to all the rest. Although there could be no doubt as to my maleness (sex), nobody seemed inclined to doubt my femininity (gender), and I was treated in all respects as one of the girls by men and women alike."

This, of course, created a reaction from her readers. The August issue contained the following letter:

"Most of your readers think that you are everything good about TVism and are the ultimate in FPism and pure in all ways. What your article has done is to plant a great deal of doubt in their minds as to just what you are…. When all this is added to your story of running around in the nude, kissing a man, having him hold you and the other things, no matter what the occasion, I think that a lot of people think you have gone off the deep end. I would think that the GG’s who read it would all be set back…because you have given them proof that TVs just don’t want to put on a dress to express feminine feeling inside them but really want to go much further, and this is what they fear most”

In the June issue, Prince went so far as to denounce how male roles are connected to violence.

"The male citizen of our American culture, and to some extent but not to the same degree, the males of other western cultures, have elevated the cult of masculinity to the ultimate….In a world that venerates, honors, and rewards masculinity far above femininity and which at the same time equates strength, courage, determination, aggressiveness, and force with masculinity, what can we expect? Men are so frightened, so ashamed, so fearful of their gentler instincts and feelings that they shove them aside and elevate the current conceptions of masculinity to the dominant and determining place in their life philosophy. In order to deny femininity, a man will exaggerate masculinity well beyond its proper proportion in human life. What is the result in the world? The continued domination of the masculine ethic of force and violence, of solving problems with wars, pistols, or fists instead of with the head and the heart." (Transvestia #51, June 1968; Hill 391-2)

Prince wrote that she completely accepted herself 'genderally'.

‘I was then free to live my life as I wanted having no domestic or business responsibilities. I therefore crossed the line completely and have lived as a woman full time ever since’ ("Charles to Virginia: Sex Research as a Personal Experience” in Vern Bullough (ed), Frontiers of Sex Research: 172).

Despite the no-transsexuals policy, Virginia Prince, as she now was at age 55, was in effect what Harry Benjamin called a non-surgical transsexual, although she would never admit to the term. However Virginia's male persona was resurrected again for a revised version of A Survey of Chemistry for Cosmetologists.
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1. Laurel Canyon in 1968 had more than its share of both celebrities and of murder. There are two books about the neighborhood: , Michael Walker's Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood, 2006. and Dave McGowan's Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation, 2008-2012. Neither has anything to say about Prince. In addition to Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa as neighbors, there was Ramon Navarro who was murdered in his home by two intruders that very year.
   
2. Hill:308 commented: "I have found no evidence that indicates what exactly police officials thought about Prince—whether they took her seriously or as a complete joke or as another urban oddity whose voice they, as public servants, were obligated to listen to. Accompanying her many travelogues are photographs of Prince with prominent psychiatrists, doctors, and radio and television personalities. It may be telling that there is not one photograph of Prince posing with a police chief or law officer."
   
3. However, see footnotes 5 and 6 in Part II. Prince admitted to Stoller that attracting the attention of men was something that she specifically enjoyed.
   
4. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism was written by Patrick Califia before transition. Its section on Prince is based solely on a careful and insightful reading of The Transvestite and His Wife. "But this putative 'difference' between male and female sexuality has more to do with the repression of women's sexuality in general … than a shift in couture. I know what I feel when I am in male drag. My conversations with other women who cross-dress as men make it clear that I am not the only woman who gets a sexual rush out of appropriating a masculine image. A whole book could probably be written about the misogyny and homophobia that has led sexologists and other 'experts' to frequently state, as Prince does, that women can wear men's clothes without being punished, so they have no need to become transvestites. This is patently false. … As any stone butch or passing woman can tell you, the general public continues to be deeply disturbed by a biological female who appears in public in men's clothing. There is no difference between the discrimination, condemnation, and violence that is routinely inflected upon male and female cross-dressers, if they are exposed as such."
   
5. Lili took up with Susanna Valenti, and can be seen several times in Casa Susanna, 2005.
   
6. The FPs felt about the ‘whole girl fetishists’ in much the same way that not-TG persons today feel about those who do not pass, and whom they call ‘transgenders’.
   
7. Perhaps Prince was affluent after selling 50% of Cardinal Industries; or perhaps his mother left a bequest.
   

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.