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Terminology Across this site, you will encounter terminology that you might be unfamiliar with. This guide is here to shed light on these words/phrases. This index will continue to be updated regularly. Transgender/trans - denoting or relating to a person whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex registered for them at birth. Gender-affirming surgery/care/treatment/healthcare - refers to a variety of procedures that some people may use to affirm their gender. This may help a patient's physical appearance and function and can include surgery and hormones. Gender dysphoria - a state of severe distress or unhappiness caused by feeling that one’s gender identity does not match one’s sex as registered at birth. Gender transition - a process by which an individual comes to live in accordance with their gender identity through changes to their appearance and presentation. Nonbinary - an individual who identifies with or expresses a gender identity that is neither entirely male nor entirely female Hormone Therapy (HRT) - a form of gender-affirming treatment, involving taking either oestrogen or testosterone which can cause physical changes to an individual's body, voice and suppresses the release of ‘unwanted’ hormones. Gender diverse people - an inclusive term used to refer to multiple types of gender identities that fall outside cisgender and/or binary understandings of gender. The trans community - an umbrella term for a community of people who identity as transgender Birth assigned sex/assigned sex at birth - classification of an individual as male, female or intersex based on physical attributes observed at the time of birth, often by medical professionals. LGBTQIA+ - an umbrella term for individuals who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual/Aromantic. Gender identity - one's innermost concept of how they perceive their gender. This can be the same or different to the gender assigned to them at birth. Cisgender - an individual whose gender identity corresponds with the gender assigned to them at birth. Biological sex - the classification of an individual as male, female or intersex based on factors such as chromosomes, reproductive organs and hormones Transsexual - an outdated term replaced by transgender Mayhem law - an offense against a person in which the offender deprives the victim of a member of their body. This was historically used to prevent gender-affirming surgery.

This website contains two detailed timelines: the transgender history in Britain and Michael & Roberta's history.​ Timelines This website contains two detailed timelines: the transgender history in Britain and Michael & Roberta's history. Michael & Roberta Click here to see a timeline of Michael & Roberta's individual timelines and shared history. Britain's Transgender History Click here to see a timeline of Britain's Transgender history.

Laurence Michael Dillon Early life Michael Dillon was born in Ladbroke Grove, London on May 1st 1915, and assigned female at birth. He was the second of two children born to Robert Arthur Dillon, heir to the Dillon baronetcy of Lismullen, and Laura Maude McLiver, a young Australian widow. Their first child Robert, known as Bobby, was born in 1914, seven months after their wedding, and Michael was born just fifteen months later on May 1st 1915. Laura, after whom Michael was named, died of puerperal fever when he was ten days old. His grief-stricken father refused to have anything to do with him. The newborn Michael and his one-year-old brother Bobby were sent to the family house in Folkestone to be raised by his father’s sisters. Although their father sent money to support them and pay for a nanny, he played very little part in their lives and saw them on only a few occasions before his death ten years later. There were six aunts in total, three of whom were in residence in the house when the children arrived. The primary responsibility for their care was taken on by the third and fourth daughters, Melita (known as Toto) and Minna (known as Daisy). In his autobiography Out of the Ordinary Michael described the atmosphere in which he was raised as Victorian. Toto, who Michael wrote ‘took precedence’ both among the aunts and in their upbringing, was 48 when the children came to Folkestone. ‘I was brought up to believe in the superiority of the Englishman, and of Englishmen, of the superiority of the aristocracy of which, apparently, the Dillons formed no small part. What the English aristocracy did was “done”, what it did not do was “not done”, and this was as irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians!’ From a very young age, Michael chafed at the rigid gender expectations of the upbringing provided by his conservative, old-fashioned aunts. 'One morning we were being dressed to go to the barber when I inadvisedly said: "I want my hair cut like Bobby's." Nanny only laughed and said: "Don't be silly, you can't, you're a little girl and he's a little boy." When we were at the hairdressers, some devil prompted her to say: "Tell the barber what you said in the nursery." Embarrassed, I tried to pretend I had forgotten, but she persisted so at last I came out with it defiantly: "I want my hair cut like Bobby's." They both laughed uproariously, as I knew they would, and it remained as a bob with either a slide or a ribbon.' Michael’s father died of pneumonia in 1925 when he was ten. A few weeks later a distant family member, Sir John Fox Dillon, also died, making the eleven-year-old Bobby the eighth baronet. Bobby was sent to public school, while Michael was left alone with the aunts. Toto became increasingly controlling and emotionally manipulative, frequently trying to prevent Michael from leaving the house and discouraging him from forming friendships with other young people. His discomfort with his gender was brought to a head by an incident in his late teens. While out for a walk with the vicar’s nephew, they passed through a gate which he opened for Michael and stood aside to let him walk through first. ‘Suddenly I was struck with an awful thought, for no-one had done this for me before. “He thinks I’m a woman.” It was a horrible moment and I felt stunned. I had never thought of myself as such despite being technically a girl…Life could never be the same again. People thought I was a woman. But I wasn’t. I was just me. How could one live like that?’ His longing to get away from Folkestone intensified and he eventually persuaded his aunts to allow him to take the Oxford entrance exam. In 1934 he was accepted into St Anne’s College, then a women’s college known as the Society of Oxford Home-Students, to study theology. Oxford Michael loved Oxford, and remembered it with longing for his whole life. He joined the women’s rowing team and in his second year was elected president. In the 1930s, Oxford still discouraged women from rowing on the grounds that it might damage their reproductive capacity. The womens’ team was only allowed to row a very short and easy course, did not have uniforms, and was generally regarded with mockery. Michael worked tirelessly to improve the team’s reputation, commissioning uniforms, hiring a prestigious coach and successfully fighting to allow the team to row a proper course. He won a rowing blue, the highest honour granted to individual sportspeople at Oxford. Although his rowing career gave him a deep sense of fulfilment, it also led to his first unwanted brush with the press and further tension in his family relationships. Unbeknownst to him, a journalist took a photograph of him in his cox’s uniform of trousers, blazer and cap. The photo was published in the Daily Mirror with the caption ‘Man or Woman?’ Aunt Toto wrote angrily demanding that he stop making a freak of himself, and his relationship with his brother Robert, who was already embarrassed by Michael’s gender non-conformity, was further damaged. Away from Toto’s direct influence, however, Michael was able for the first time in his life to form relationships with his peers without interference. He confided in a friend about his feelings about his gender, who told him that he must be a homosexual and advised him to ‘take a woman’. Michael accepted this label, but never took the advice: ‘Somehow it seemed wrong.’ He did decide to tell one of his aunts, Aunt Evie, but she was dismissive. ‘I went over to tea with her one afternoon and began to tell her about my apparently being homosexual but before I had finished, she had burst out into a contemptuous laugh and said I had been reading something and the sooner I got married the better.’ Michael’s first inkling that he was not alone in his feelings came in one of his friendships at Oxford, a ‘brother-relationship’ with an unnamed person he described only as ‘a girl who was in many respects similar to myself’. He and his ‘brother’ developed an intense friendship, rowing from Oxford to Putney together and taking boxing lessons from an ex-Army sergeant. This person’s identity remains unknown. At Oxford, Michael was able to find ways of expressing his gender non-conformity that toed the line of social acceptability. He wore his hair in a short Eton crop, dressed in increasingly masculine styles, and bought a motorcycle. People who looked like him, although still unusual, were not completely unheard of, and he could be grouped in with more daring and forward-thinking women who were pushing gender boundaries. But the wider world was less tolerant, and he experienced constant street harassment and speculation about his gender from strangers. Early transition Michael graduated in 1938 and went to work in a laboratory in Gloucestershire conducting brain research, and when war broke out in 1939 he joined the W.A.A.F territorials. When he learned of a doctor who specialised in ‘sex problems’, he saw an opportunity to do something about his struggles with his gender. Testosterone had only recently been chemically isolated, and doctors were experimenting with using it to treat a wide range of issues. Dr George Foss was using it to treat women with excessive menstrual bleeding. Michael went to see Dr Foss, who initially agreed to help but insisted that he see a psychiatrist first. When he returned, however, Dr Foss had become wary of treating him. He gave him some testosterone pills, but would have no further involvement in his treatment. Michael began taking testosterone in 1939, making him the first trans person known to do so, but he quickly discovered that his secret was out. The psychiatrist had told his story to one of the doctors at the lab where he worked; the story spread quickly through the workplace and he was mocked by his colleagues for ‘wanting to be a man’. Deeply humiliated, he quit his job at the laboratory and after a brief stint in the F.A.N.Y.’s (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), began working at a garage in Bristol. The testosterone made him look increasingly masculine, but because of his female documents his birth sex was known to the other garage workers, who wasted no time in spreading it amongst themselves. Only one of his fellow employees refused to participate in this mockery. A teenager who had grown up in an orphanage, Gilbert Barrow’s background was a stark contrast to Michael’s, but the two nevertheless struck up a lifelong friendship. They didn’t discuss Michael’s history until Gilbert was called up for the Navy, when Michael finally asked him if he knew. ‘Oh yes’ , he said, ‘They told me the first day, but I told them I would knock the block off anyone who tried to be funny about you.’ Michael and Gilbert worked together as firewatchers during the blitz on Bristol, a dangerous job which Michael took on with a complete lack of concern for his own safety. Gilbert had to persuade him to wear a protective hat, as he felt that being killed in an air raid would give him an escape from a life he struggled to see as worth living. Gilbert’s friendship was a bright spot in a period he would later describe as the worst of his life, and Michael felt a deep lifelong debt of gratitude to him. Later in life he paid for Gilbert’s son to go to public school. Mastectomy and legal sex change Michael might have remained in this painful limbo indefinitely if not for a stroke of chance. He passed out in the street from a hypoglycaemic attack and was taken to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, where he confided his history to the house surgeon. The house surgeon introduced him to a plastic surgeon who would give him a double mastectomy, and then refer him to another surgeon to whom he had been a student to construct male genitalia- plastic surgery pioneer Sir Harold Gillies. This unknown surgeon also suggested that Michael re-register as male and have his legal documents changed. Michael had resigned himself to a lifetime of being trapped and constricted by identity cards, driving licences and documents in the wrong name and gender, and it had not occurred to him that it was possible to change these things. The suggestion was an unexpected glimmer of hope. He underwent a double mastectomy in 1942 and set about getting his documents changed the following year. He also decided that he would finally have to tell his aunts, which he did with the help of Dr Alison Macbeth, a doctor who was a friend of the family. ‘Toto’s reaction was that God made them male and female, she had never heard of His making them intersex as well. Daisy said she had never heard of it either but if it could happen then I would be the most likely person it could happen to, and Maudie merely snorted. But the hurdle was past.’ Although the aunts came to grudgingly accept Michael as a man, his brother was a different story. Robert had always been self-conscious that his ‘sister’ was more masculine than he was, and Michael’s transition only compounded his insecurity. He refused to acknowledge Michael as a brother, or as any kind of relation at all. The next step was to change his legal identity. When he went to get his documents changed, there were further hints that other people like him might be out there. ‘With the poker face back on and on the defensive I went to get a new identity card at the Labor Exchange, prepared for grins and curiosity. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the man behind the counter, ‘we have had quite a lot of these applications’, and made me out a new card without batting an eyelid! How common was it? I am none the wiser on that point now. Then I automatically received my call-up papers for the Army although I was told that the medical examination would be a mere formality. ‘Yes’, said the Army doctor, ‘we’ve turned down a lot like you.’ Although there was no official process for trans people to change their legal documents in the mid-twentieth century, there is evidence that a number of trans people did so via unofficial routes. An unofficial procedure at the Ministry of Pensions amended some trans people’s legal sex by recording that a ‘mistake’ had been made in identifying their sex at birth. By the 1960s they had a secret record of hundreds of trans people. These loopholes were closed by the case of Corbett vs. Corbett in 1971, and no official avenue for trans people to change their legal sex was opened until the passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2003. In 1943 Michael had his first meeting with renowned plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies in Basingstoke, who would perform a series of operations on him unprecedented in transgender medicine. While the standard medical view at the time was that gender-affirming surgery amounted to mutilation of a healthy body, Gillies felt that such surgeries were justified if they brought a person happiness and ended their distress. In his time at the garage, Michael had begun working on a book making similar arguments, which would be published in 1946. Gillies agreed to operate on him, although he would have to wait until after the war. To shield himself from potential scrutiny, Gillies put Michael down in his records as suffering from hypospadias, an intersex condition which causes urethral malformation of the penis. With a new sense of hope for the future, Michael decided to go back to university, where at last nobody would know about his history and he could be seen as an ordinary young man. At Alison Macbeth’s encouragement, he decided to go to medical school. There was one final bureaucratic hurdle: he would need to show evidence of his Oxford M.A., which was in his old name and showed his attendance at a women’s college. He wrote to his old Oxford tutor Jimmy McKie for help. McKie had Michael’s name transferred from St Anne’s College to Brasenose, arranged for his M.A. certificate to be re-issued with only the initials ‘L.M. Dillon’, and wrote Michael a reference that avoided using any gendered pronouns. Michael’s academic skills were rusty after years at the garage, and he was rejected by several universities, but he was eventually accepted by Trinity College, Dublin, for their pre-medical year. As his brother lived near Dublin, Michael made an attempt to reconcile with him. They met for lunch and Michael suggested they present themselves as cousins, but Robert refused to have anything to do with him and told him never to mention any connection between them. Publication of Self Michael’s first book was eventually published by Heinemann in 1946. In Self: A Study In Ethics and Endocrinology, he argued for better treatment of homosexual, intersex and trans people. The word ‘transsexual’ was not yet in use, so he used vague language like ‘these people’ and ‘these types’ to describe trans people. The book is written as though from an impartial medical perspective, and there is no indication that the author is one of the people described. Nonetheless, it is one of the earliest known instances of a trans person arguing for the right of trans people to gender-affirming care. Michael argues that since a person’s innate gender identity cannot be changed, the only effective course of treatment for trans people is to change the external body to match the innate gender identity. He writes that trans patients should have the autonomy to choose their course of treatment (‘Is it not for the individual to judge whether he be "mutilated", experimented on or left alone?’ ), and that the treatment should be free, before the creation of the NHS made free healthcare the standard in Britain. ‘The psychologist's only suggestion is to make the mind fit the body, to which course such a patient will never accede. Thus a rift occurs between him and the would-be helper who cannot understand why, being really a man (or a woman as the case may be) he does not wish to be helped towards achieving the personality of such. The patient's answer is simple. He does not feel himself to be a man, and how would any woman like to be turned into a man? So they arrive at a deadlock. The question therefore arises, which is the most important to sex, the mind or the body? [...] ‘Now there is, for these people, no recognized form of treatment other than that offered by the psychologists; for what the patient asks, namely, that his body be made to fit his mind, is refused him. This, according to the psychologists, would be mere mutilation and, since it leads to non-productivity, therefore useless. But we have seen the latter objection of non-productivity is invalid since whether treated or left alone, such persons will not reproduce. Moreover recent researches have shown that possibly treatment by hormone injection might make a change, incomplete, it is true, and unproductive save in one respect (and that respect is after all the important one) namely, the achievement of a tolerably happy life for the individual concerned. But is not this an end worth striving after? Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind…’ The book did not sell particularly well and gained little general notice, but it made a powerful impression on a small number of readers. One of those people would be Roberta Cowell. Trinity College and surgeries Michael began his medical studies at Trinity College in the autumn of 1945, at the age of thirty. To his overwhelming relief, for the first time in his life, he was surrounded by people who knew nothing about his past and had no reason to believe he was anything but an ordinary man. But the final stage of his medical transition was not yet over. On the last day of every term, he flew from Dublin to Rooksdown Hospital near Basingstoke to be operated on by Dr Gillies, often arriving late at night and going into surgery the next morning. The whole vacation would be spent recovering, and he regularly flew back to Trinity still bandaged and not fully healed. This gruelling pattern continued for four years, with Gillies operating on him a total of thirteen times. Gillies had performed phalloplasties on cisgender men who had congenital deformities or lost their genitals in combat, but no-one had constructed a penis on a transgender man before. Gillies invented his own technique, which required taking large grafts of skin from Michael’s legs and stomach. He spent three months in hospital when one operation went wrong, missing a whole term, and walked with a cane when he was able to return to Trinity, telling his classmates that the scars and the cane were the result of wounds sustained in the bombing of Bristol. Nevertheless he returned to rowing and won a second rowing blue, making him likely the first person in history to do so on both a mens’ and womens’ team. Michael struggled to make friends at Trinity, being significantly older than his classmates and with a unique life experience he could not share with them. Throughout his life he was a shy person who struggled to connect with others, and the people he did connect with tended to be those he saw as fellow outsiders. He became friendly with Tolani Asuni, the only Black medical student in his year, who would go on to become one of the first indigenous psychiatrists in Nigeria. But he was particularly wary of interaction with women. Although he craved romantic connection, he felt it would be wrong to become romantically involved with a woman. He was also terrified by the prospect of telling potential partners about his history, in case they told others. ‘With girls one had to be careful. No-one seemed to suspect anything and I developed something of a reputation of being a woman-hater, since I made a point of treating them in a rather rough brotherly fashion, and sheered off if any showed any signs of being interested. One must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children. That was the basis of my ethics. An evening’s flirting at a dance was one thing and a relief- but no more.’ Roberta It was during his time at Trinity that Michael received his first letter from Roberta, who was then still going by her birth name and living publicly as a man. She had identified with the people he described in Self, and got in touch via his publisher. Although he was initially hesitant to meet her, when they met at a restaurant in London he was immediately smitten. Within an hour and a half of meeting her, he blurted out his secret: ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you, but five years ago I was a woman.’ Roberta was looking for help with her transition, particularly with obtaining surgery and legally changing her gender, and Michael agreed to help. His initially formal letters to Roberta quickly became friendly and then romantic. He decorated his letters with hearts and kisses, writing ‘I love you’ over and over in English and Latin and addressing her as ‘My own dear Bobbie’ and ‘my best beloved’. Roberta later claimed that she was never romantically interested in Michael, but it is clear that at the very least she allowed him to believe his feelings were reciprocated, and Michael fell deeply in love. Although Michael introduced Roberta to Dr Gillies, Gillies was unwilling to perform the orchidectomy (removal of the testicles), as this would be illegal due to mayhem law- a centuries old law that forbade the amputation of a healthy body part from a ‘male’ who might serve as a soldier. Without this initial surgery, Roberta could not have a vaginoplasty (the surgical construction of a vagina), and would not be able to legally change her sex. This was perhaps the most important factor from Michael’s perspective, as he was intent on marrying Roberta, but until she was legally female, no marriage would be possible. Unable to find a legal avenue for her surgery, she eventually asked Michael- by then a fifth-year medical student- to operate on her himself. Michael was horrified by this request, but when it became clear that they couldn’t find an alternative, he agreed. They drew up a handwritten document in an attempt to protect Michael from legal consequences if the operation went wrong. ‘I, R.C. have, of my own free will asked and persuaded LMD, who I am aware is an unqualified man, a fifth year medical student, to perform an orchidectomy upon me. I am also aware that his operating experience has been confined solely to assisting at operations as a resident pupil in hospital and to one appendectomy in the presence of a surgeon and that he has neither seen nor practised this particular operation and is aware of his deficiencies. I desire that he be absolved from all responsibility in this operation, due to possible haemorrhage or sepsis, which I am desirous to undergo being fully aware that either might, per fortunam, be fatal.’ The surgery took place in secret in the house of Alison Macbeth, the doctor who had helped him come out to his family. Although he had never performed or even seen it before, it was successful. Roberta legally re-registered as a woman in May 1951. Michael’s letters became increasingly filled with plans for their wedding and fantasies about their married life. He spoke frequently about potential wedding arrangements such as hymn selections and possible venues, about collecting furniture and other things for their future home, and even about the possibility of having children together. He wrote to friends and family informing them of the engagement, and sent Roberta an engagement ring in an empty cigarette packet which he informed her not to open until he had passed his final exams. But Roberta rejected him. What exactly she said to end the relationship is unknown. Michael never gave anyone any details, but when his friend Gilbert Barrow asked about Roberta he was told ‘It’s all over’. He never entered into a romantic relationship again. After Roberta Although Michael passed his final medical exams and qualified as a doctor in 1951, he did not get the grades he had hoped for, and missed out on one of the prestigious jobs at the City of Dublin hospital that went to the students with the highest marks. With no professional prospects and his hopes of a happy married life destroyed, he found himself once again unsure of his future. He took a job for a year at a small hospital in the north of Dublin on a salary of just £1 a week, less than he had earned working at the garage. Michael knew what it was like to spend weeks as a bedridden patient, so he resolved to help the long-stay patients keep active. During his many recuperations at Rooksdown he had learned handicrafts such as leatherwork, knitting and embroidery, and he passed these skills on to the long-stay patients. The resulting products were then sold on visiting days and the proceeds were used to benefit the patients, organising an outing to a pantomime at Christmas and fitting the beds with headphones so that they could listen to the radio. He took his first steps down the path that would lead him to Buddhism when he read In Search of the Miraculous by Russian philosopher and esotericist P.D. Ouspensky. He went on to read every book he could find by or about Ouspensky and his teacher George Gurdjieff, and began to work on improving his own personality. Ouspensky wrote that most people revel in their self-pity, instead of choosing not to augment their negative emotions by feeling any self-pity at all. Michael resolved to eliminate his own self-pity, which he had struggled with all his life. Gurdjieff wrote ‘Nothing in life can hurt you if only you can learn not to react’, which he would use as a mantra when his secret eventually got out. Merchant Navy When his year at the hospital ended, Michael joined the Merchant Navy as a ship’s doctor. He had a lifelong love for uniforms and the sense of belonging that they gave, from his Girl Guide days as a child to his rowing uniforms at Oxford and Trinity. The Merchant Navy uniform with its brass buttons and gold braid was the grandest he had ever had: ‘Never had I dreamed I would one day be adorned in such glad rags!’ His first job was on a P&O cargo vessel, a short trip of three weeks visiting Antwerp, Hamburg and Rotterdam. He took to naval life immediately, and felt an intense sense of gratitude to everyone who had helped make his situation possible. While on leave in England between assignments, Michael turned his attention to one last trace of his former life. Members of aristocratic families were recorded from birth in two separate volumes, Debrett’s Peerage and Burke’s Peerage, and he was still listed in both under his birth name as Robert’s sister. Michael visited C.F. Hankison, editor of Debrett’s, explained his history, and asked for his entry to be updated. Hankison agreed to do this, and also promised to support Michael’s claim to the Dillon baronetcy. As Robert had no children, the change from sister to brother made him, at least in theory, the heir to the title. Hankison assured Michael that any changes made in Debrett’s would automatically be copied in Burke’s, but unbeknownst to them his entry in Burke’s remained unchanged. This oversight would have devastating consequences years later. In 1954, Michael signed a four-year contract with P&O cruises on a ship transporting Muslim pilgrims undergoing hajj back and forth from Singapore and Penang to Mecca. This period of Michael’s life allowed him to satisfy an urge he had had since childhood to travel the world, and he wrote about it with great enthusiasm both in his autobiography and in his correspondence with Dr Gillies, with whom he continued to exchange regular letters. Michael continued to pursue his spiritual development, and while back in England between jobs he joined a discussion group for people interested in discussing Ouspensky’s ideas. He made a conscious effort to let go of the worldview in which he had been raised, with its emphasis on English aristocratic supremacy. He was never fully successful in this, although his quest for self-improvement became a driving force in the last few years of his life; his writing about his travels betray a typically colonial attitude towards the people and cultures he encountered, with broad and frequently disparaging stereotyping. But when docked in South Africa, he was happy to discover that apartheid was not enforced at the Mission to Seamen: ‘We were in Durban a week and there saw the colour bar in action for the first time. But there was one place where it could not be exerted, as a result of its constitution, and that was in the Mission to Seamen, and on filmshow nights negroes, Indians, Chinese and Europeans, all Seamen sat together. May it long continue!’ ‘Lobsang Rampa’, aka Cyril Henry Hoskins In 1956, Michael decided to try and settle on dry land. He broke his contract with P&O two years early and took temporary work at a hospital in London while he decided what to do next. He came across a book called The Third Eye, which purported to be the autobiography of a Tibetan mystic named Lobsang Rampa. Rampa claimed that he was born in Lhasa, Tibet, trained at a monastery, and at the age of eight was selected by the lamas to undergo surgery to open his ‘third eye’, granting him psychic powers and the ability to read others’ auras. In actuality, Rampa (born Cyril Henry Hoskins) was a plumber’s son from Plympton, Devon who had never been to Tibet. But in the 1950s most Westerners knew very little about Tibet, and The Third Eye became a global best-seller. One newspaper wrote ‘This is probably the first time such an account has been written from the inside of a way of life and a society utterly foreign and well-nigh incredible to Western minds.’ Michael, along with most of Rampa’s readers, was unsuspecting. He found the book revelatory, and wrote to Rampa, who wrote back and suggested a meeting. Michael was immediately drawn in by Rampa, and after their first meeting accepted an invitation from him to visit him at his home in Howth, a village near Dublin. Michael saw in Rampa a fellow outsider and misfit, and someone who he could talk to about his search for self-improvement and truth. By the end of his two-week visit, Michael was completely convinced of Rampa’s powers. He experienced strange dreams at night where he felt Rampa’s presence guiding him through what he came to think of as his ‘astral travels’. Even when Rampa’s background was later unmasked in the press Michael stood by him, and continued to believe most of what he had written. At the end of his visit, Rampa told him that he had intuited how Michael ought to spend the rest of his life. He told him to do one more sea voyage and then go to India and look for a monastery where he could learn meditation. Exposure by the press Seeking to follow Rampa’s instructions, Michael signed up as the doctor on the City of Bath, a ship transporting cargo back and forth between the United States and India. On board the ship in May 1958, he received a telegram which read: Do you intend to claim the title since your change-over? Kindly cable Daily Express. Michael realised that his greatest fear had come to pass. Somehow the press had found out about his transition, and about his claim to the baronetcy. A crew member informed him that two reporters were waiting for him on the wharf. Knowing that he could not prevent the story from being published, he decided to co-operate. He spoke to the reporters as briefly as possible, allowed them to take his picture, and then retreated back to the ship, where he faced the task of telling the captain before he found out from the newspapers. The captain was sympathetic, and, anticipating that the ship would be besieged by reporters when they reached New York, cabled ahead to arrange a police guard for the gangway. Faced with an agonising wait of eight hours before the evening papers arrived and the crew would find out, Michael fell back on the mantra he had learned from Gurdjieff, ‘Nothing in life can hurt you if only you can learn not to react’, which he recited over and over. But by the next morning, when the papers had come out, he could no longer tolerate not knowing who knew and who didn’t. 'Next day I could stand it no longer and I took the bull by the horns and went up to the Second’s cabin at twelve o’clock, the hour for drinks and social converse. He and Sparks were in there and I was at once invited in for a drink. I made a direct attack by asking if they had seen the papers and what was their attitude going to be. The Second poured me out a gin, raised his glass and knocked mine and then said that they had discussed it at length over beer the night before and had come to the conclusion that I had had a raw deal and since they had liked me before and I had not changed overnight they saw no reason for letting it make any difference.' As his story began to appear in more newspapers, letters of support poured in from old friends, including Dr Gillies and Rampa, who was suffering his own exposure by the press. A letter from Gilbert Barrow, enclosing a copy of the Sunday Express, shed some light on how his story had gotten out. Somehow a reporter had spotted the difference between his entry in Burke’s Peerage and his entry in Debrett’s. Reporters then flocked to his brother’s house, demanding to know whether he had a sister or a brother. Bobby told them he had a sister who was a doctor, and initially refused to say more, but after two days he gave them the name of Michael’s ship, allowing them to look him up as the ship’s doctor. It is not clear how a reporter came across the obscure discrepancy between the Burke’s and Debrett’s entries. Roberta, whose story had been made public several years earlier, had declared bankruptcy the previous year in September of 1957, and was known to sell stories to the press when in need of money, but there is no direct evidence of her involvement. In her autobiography Roberta Cowell’s Story, published in 1954, she described her first meeting with Michael, but did not name him, and made no reference to their relationship. As he had promised, C.F. Hankison, editor of Debrett’s, publicly defended Michael's claim as heir to the baronetcy, and was quoted in TIME magazine: "I have always been of the opinion that a person has all rights and privileges of the sex that is, at a given moment, recognized." The version of Michael’s story published in the newspapers presented his transition as something that had begun naturally and was later completed with surgical intervention. In his reluctant Sunday Express interview, he claims that he began to grow facial hair as an adolescent (which is not mentioned in his autobiography), and does not mention that he took testosterone. Several American newspapers described him as a ‘victim of a sex mix-up’ and claimed he had hypospadias- the condition Dr Gillies had put in his records as a legal cover for Michael’s operation. In the 1950s the distinction between intersex and trans people was still poorly understood. Many trans and intersex people who entered the public eye in the mid-twentieth century presented their ‘change of sex’ as something that had happened, or at least started, on its own, because of biological factors that had been present from birth. In some of these cases, such as that of British athlete Mark Weston who was born with an intersex condition, this was the truth. In others, including Michael’s, there may have been some element of truth to this, but it’s impossible to know for sure. By downplaying the role of medical intervention or framing hormonal treatment and surgeries as helping along a process that had already started, trans people were able to get more sympathetic press treatment than they would have if they had presented their transition as something they chose of their own free will. This is borne out by press coverage of Roberta’s case, which became much more hostile when reporters began to suspect that her transition had not happened organically. When his ship reached New York Michael was told he should not go ashore for his own safety, as the journalists might try and tear his clothes off to get a picture, and indeed, the wharf was full of people brandishing cameras. For ten days he remained holed up on the ship, thinking about his future. What to do now was the question. I could never set foot ashore in America with safety again. Probably the company would allow me to change ships in India, but then if I arrived back in England would my advent be heralded and reporters once more be waiting? In fact press coverage of Michael’s story in the UK was fairly limited, especially compared to Roberta’s a few years earlier. But any amount of scrutiny was painful to Michael, and he could not stand the thought, after years of anonymity, of once more becoming a ‘museum piece’, the subject of whispers and gossip. He attempted to resign from his gentleman’s club in London and his job with the Ellerman Lines, but the company urged him to stay on as ship’s doctor, and his club refused his resignation, telling him that he remained a member in good standing. Despite this support, he believed he had no choice but to disappear, at least for a few years. He requested his release from Ellerman Lines in India, deciding that now was the time to follow Rampa’s instructions to join a monastery and learn meditation. He wrote to his friends telling them that he planned to stay in India for a couple of years, and asked them not to try and find him, telling them that he planned on returning to England some time in the summer of 1961. Monastic life Michael left the City of Bath in Calcutta in the summer of 1958. Although he was seeking to live in a monastery, he knew very little about Buddhism or meditation. ‘It never occurred to me to study Buddhism at all or to look for books on it while we were in Bombay or Colombo. I had no ideas about changing my religion whatsoever.’ Rather, he saw it as a next step in his quest for self-improvement, to ‘get away from the world for a while and fit myself for coping with it better’. He travelled to a monastery in Kalimpong he had visited a year previously, but was turned away. Since his last visit, the monastery had undergone a scandal involving a French former Catholic nun who had arrived and persuaded them to make her a Buddhist nun (getsulma). She had gone on to accuse various of the monks of rape and sexual assault, and was later found to be a Communist agent. The monastery was therefore wary of Westerners claiming that they wanted to become Buddhists, particularly if, as Michael did, they showed up unannounced. He was refused entry and told he would have to go to another monastery in Kalimpong which was run by an Englishman. Michael made his way to the Kalimpong monastery, where he was to stay for four months. Believing that in a holy place his confidences would be kept, he told the English monk (the bhikshu) his whole life story. As it was run by an Englishman, the monastery was frequently visited by Westerners, and Michael made it clear to the bhikshu that he did not want his true identity revealed to anyone. The bhikshu gave him the name Jivaka, meaning ‘doctor’. He went by this name for the remainder of his life. Jivaka was keen to learn about Buddhism, but the bhikshu refused to teach him formally or to allow him full access to his library, giving him access only to books that he selected himself. A visiting Tibetan lama took Jivaka to the dharmsala (pilgrim’s resting place) in the town of Sarnath, where he could stay for a while for free, only having to provide his own food, would have access to the large library, and could attend the nearby Sanskrit University. His serious interest in Buddhism began at Sarnath, and he began not only to read everything about it he could but to write extensively about it. He went on to publish several books about Buddhism, mainly for English-speakers. Although he had only planned to stay in India for a few years to allow press attention to die down, Jivaka began to consider permanently renouncing his former life in a world which he felt had let him down. He felt he had done everything he could to live a respectable life and leave his past behind, and yet the press had thought nothing of digging up his secret and exposing it to the general public, turning his life upside-down in the process. Jivaka was ordained as a sramenera, or novice monk, of the Theravin Order of the Hinayana school, and decided to cut off ties with his former life by writing to his lawyer and instructing him to dispose of his estate. He still had a substantial sum of money from bequests left to him by relatives, which he now gave up. In his book Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery, he wrote: ‘In Buddhism monastic vows do not bind for life, as they do in Christianity. A man may lay aside the robes at any time if he feels he has made a mistake. But it was not my intention merely to give it a trial, as it were; I meant, having once given up the world, never to return to that mode of life. I would not put my hand to the plough and then look back. With this end in view I wrote to my stockbroker and solicitor, enclosing a 'will' distributing my private property to those of my friends and acquaintances who were most in need… But even as there are no vows for life in Buddhism, so also there are no closed orders. Accommodation was free, but if the monk has no family and no supporter, he must somehow find the means to feed himself. And the only possible source of income for me was writing...’ For the remainder of his life, his writing would indeed be his sole, often insufficient source of income. He gave up the last of his possessions when he returned to Kalimpong, giving the bhikshu the remainder of his pay-off from the Navy, about £130, as well as a signet ring his cousin had given him on his 21st birthday. He was determined to renounce all ties to his former life, including his aristocratic background. Giving up the ring, he wrote: 'was a marked wrench, which was why I made myself part with it. Despite other values being different, this one worldly value still had some hold on me and even now I think of the ring wistfully and despise myself for so doing.’ In the course of his reading about Buddhism he found a reference to a ‘third sex’, referring to people who were not fully male nor female, and discovered that anyone belonging to this ‘third sex’ would be automatically denied Higher Ordination, the next step after the initial ordination he had already undergone. He also found out that anyone who had suffered any form of bodily mutilation would be banned from Higher Ordination. This greatly concerned him, as he seemed to belong to this ‘third sex’ category, and had undergone many surgeries over the course of his life that might be categorised as ‘bodily mutilation’. Jivaka quickly became frustrated with the way things were run at Kalimpong, where food was often very scarce, and returned to Sarnath, where after a few months he was offered Higher Ordination. He admitted to the bhikshu that he was in the ‘third sex’ category which was barred from Higher Ordination. They allowed him to stay while they came to a decision, during which time he began working on an updated translation of a book called The Life of Milarepa (an eleventh-century Tibetan yogi), Although he finished the book in 1959, it would not be published until 1962, a month before his death. After months of deliberation, the bhikshu ultimately decided that he could not be ordained. Jivaka became disillusioned with the form of Buddhism he had thus far encountered (Hinayana), and became more attracted to the Tibetan form of Buddhism described in The Life of Milarepa (the Mahayana sect). He met (and later befriended) a Tibetan monk named Lama Lobzang, who agreed to re-ordain him into this form of Buddhism. Jivaka now experienced yet another betrayal. He invited the English monk from Kalimpong, in whom he had confided his life story, to his re-ordination. Rather than reply to the invitation, the English monk wrote to Lama Lobzang to inform him of Jivaka’s past, breaking what Jivaka had believed to be a sacred trust. He told the Tibetan lama that Jivaka was of the ‘third sex’, and therefore unsuitable for ordination. About a month later the Dalai Lama visited Sarnath, and Jivaka was able to meet with a member of his senior staff, who told him that his ordination was not impossible. Jivaka was eventually re-ordained as a novice monk in the Tibetan order in 1960, making him the first known Westerner to do this. The name ‘Lobzang’ (ordained monk) was added to his name. Jivaka increasingly felt that rather than the temporary retreat from the Western world he had intended, he wanted to remain in India for the rest of his life. He spent three months at the Rizong monastery in Ladakh, then a disputed territory between India and China, during which he felt that many of the vestiges of his ‘sahib’ personality- the tendency instilled in him by his upbringing to judge people based on their appearance or manner of speaking- were at last beginning to break down. He left Rizong reluctantly, hoping to return the next spring, by which time he hoped to have become a gelong- no longer a novice, but a fully-fledged monk. But Jivaka was struggling to make enough money from writing to sustain himself and becoming increasingly emaciated. He struggled with the mandatory vegetarian diet, and was unable to banish fantasies of the familiar foods he had left in England. One morning while seated on the floor of the kitchen with the other getsuls and genyens, using a bit of twig for cutlery to spear the tiny lumps of dough out of their watery environment, I had a sudden vision of my London club — the bed with its Dunlopillo mattress, the tail-coated waiter wheeling a breakfast trolley into my room and handing me the morning paper. As I look at the trolley I see the cornflakes and milk, creamy from the cow, not from water buffaloes as in India, and sugar, as much as one wants; under the silver cover is crisp brown bacon and scrambled eggs on fried bread, and a rack of toast and marmalade. - Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery Illness and death Shortly after finishing the manuscript for Imji Getsul in late 1960, Jivaka became seriously ill with typhoid fever in addition to liver damage and jaundice and was hospitalised. Even after his discharge he was considerably weakened. Jivaka attempted to get a permit to return to Ladakh, but ran into further difficulties. A Communist local newspaper had written a column accusing him of being a spy for British Intelligence, and although Jivaka thought that this idea was too far-fetched to be believed, it escalated to the point that two Communist MPs suggested that his intention in returning to Ladakh was to gather information. One Hindi-language newspaper published an account of him having been a ‘lady-doctor’ who had changed sex, but to his relief this story was not taken up by any other papers. He was, however, unable to return to Ladakh, which disappointed him deeply. His books Imji Getsul and The Life of Milarepa were both published in April 1962. His publishers and friends with whom he had been in regular correspondence were concerned when his letters abruptly stopped, without any acknowledgement of the exciting news that two of his books had been published. Their fears were confirmed when a notice appeared in The Times on the 20th of May: DELHI. Lobzang Jivaka, formerly Dr Laurence M. Dillon, of Britain, who became a Buddhist, is reported to have died in the Himalayan town of Dalhousie after a short illness. Ten days later, Jivaka’s publisher Simon Young received a letter from someone named Sister Vajira informing him of Jivaka’s death at the Civil Hospital, Dalhousie, on May 15th. No cause of death was specified. A story that appeared a few weeks later in a Buddhist journal called The Middle Way recounted that Jivaka had collapsed while travelling, been taken to Dalhousie Hospital and died within two days. He had just turned forty-seven. His body was cremated, in accordance with Mahayana rites. Although his health had been worsening for some time, the exact cause and circumstances of his death are still unknown. Weeks later, his publishers received a final manuscript- his autobiography, detailing his full life story including his transition. Unlike his other books, this manuscript was signed with both his names- Michael Dillon and Lobsang Jivaka- indicating that he was at last ready for his full identity to be revealed. His literary agent John Johnson was quoted in a Sunday Telegraph article about Jivaka’s life. ‘Dr Dillon felt there was no reason why, finally, his story should not be told. He wanted to tell it in his own way, in his own time.’ Johnson was unable to find a publisher who would take the manuscript. Several publishers considered the manuscript ‘boring’- despite the sensational content of his life story, Jivaka’s writing style tended to be somewhat dry. There was also interference from Jivaka’s brother Robert, who attempted to intervene and have the manuscript burned, and publishers may have feared legal action from his family. It remained unpublished for decades, until it was eventually published in 2017 under the title Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions. Both of his chosen names, Michael Dillon and Lobsang Jivaka, appear on the cover. " People thought I was a woman. But I wasn’t. I was just me. How could one live like that? "

This timeline presents transgender history within Great Britain and Northern Ireland, dating from 4 AD to present day. We have collected key events and individuals, however this is not a complete history and we encourage you to use this timeline as an initial source for further research. This timeline includes historical references to ‘female-husbands’, transgender societies, film and television, as well as legal impacts on transgender identities.​​ Historical Trans Britain Timeline This timeline presents transgender history within Great Britain and Northern Ireland, dating from 4 AD to present day. We have collected key events and individuals, however this is not a complete history and we encourage you to use this timeline as an initial source for further research. This timeline includes historical references to ‘female-husbands’, transgender societies, film and television, as well as legal impacts on transgender identities. First Official Pride March, London, 1972 Search our timeline for key phrases or dates with ease by pressing CTRL F on your keyboard. Alternatively, click on the bullet points below to go to a particular time period. Terms that are underlined and pink are linked to the terminology page. This timeline is broken down into the following periods: 4AD to 1900 1900 - 1930 1930 - 1970 1970 - 1990 1990 - 2000 2000 - 2010 2010 - 2020 2020 + Timeline themes include: Female-husbands Legal framework/acts of parliament Transgender Pioneers Medical Organisations/societies/events TV/Film FTM/MTF 4A - 1900 Eleanor/ John Rykener (December 1395) Eleanor/ John Rykener arrested in Soper's Lane, Cheapside, London for having sex with John Britby while dressed in women's clothing. Once found to be assigned male at birth, they were accused of 'committing that detestable unmentionable and ignominious vice' (anal sex). The outcome of the trail is unknown. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/ Buggery Act (December 1533 - 1967) Henry VIII criminalised homosexual activity under the Buggery Act of 1533. The first person to be executed under the act was Walter Hungerford in 1540 for the crimes of treason, witchcraft and buggery. The final execution under the Buggery Act happened in 1835, with it being repealed in England and Wales in 1967. https://www.hrp.org.uk/blog/walter-hungerford-and-the-buggery-act/ Chevalier d'Eon (1728 - 1810) D'Eon was a French spy, diplomat and soldier who spent her early years living as a man and later years as a woman, living in Soho and dressing in women's clothing. In 1787, she won a fencing match against the Chevalier de Saint-George in Carlton House, London. This match was depicted in art, engravings and satire. d'Eon is the most 'widely known gender transgressor in modern history' and the dual presentation of her gender identity (her claim that her initial years living as a man was solely due to inheritance reasons and she had been born a woman), became a hot debate in British society. After her death she was found to have been assigned male at birth. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/ Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Charles Hamilton 'The Female Husband' (1746) Hamilton married several women, earning the nickname of ‘female husband ’. As Dr Charles Hamilton he married his landlady's niece, Mary Price, in Wells, Somerset. However, Price later discovered Hamilton’s biological sex and Hamilton was sentenced to public whippings in four Somerset towns plus six months imprisonment. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/ Eliza Edwards (1790 - 1833) An actress and sex worker, Eliza (who also went by Lavinia) worked mainly in Tewkesbury, Norwich and other theatres. Eliza was supported by various gentlemen, however had fallen on hard times close to her death and had sold her piano, jewels and stage dresses. After her death, her body was sent for dissection where it was discovered that she was assigned male at birth. https://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/edwards.htm Mary Ann Talbot (1790 - 1804) Talbot took part in battles during the French Revolutionary Wars during the 1790s as John Taylor, of which she later released a memoir about. When her biological sex was revealed, she was sent to a lodging in Shoe Lane, London to try and break 'masculine habit[s]'. Talbot/Taylor continued to dress as a sailor and drink with former messmates however. Helen Oliver/John Oliver (1822) Oliver was brought up in Saltcoat, Scotland and assigned female at birth. While still living as a woman and working as a servant, Oliver started a relationship with a ploughman, who was discovered to have been assigned female at birth. In 1818, aged 23, Oliver left his job, took a suit from his brother John's room and left. He took on his brother's identity and travelled across Scotland before finding trade as a plasterer. John then met a woman and they were about to be wed, but not much is known after. https://www.lovebritishhistory.co.uk/2025/02/lgbtq-georgians-helen-oliver-of-scotland.html Harry Stokes (1859) Harry Stokes, a 50-year-old labourer who had worked as a bricksetter for 30 to 40 years and had married a woman, died by suicide and was discovered at his autopsy to have been assigned female at birth. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 (Accessed: 29 July 2025). Boulton and Park Trail (1870) While exiting the Strand Theatre London, Boulton and Park (known as Stella and Fanny) were arrested for outraging public decency for wearing women's clothes in public. They were theatre performers, but often dressed as women off-stage. They were also charged with committing buggery. They were found not guilty of the felony charges against them, possibly because Victorian law struggled to make sense of their identities in a way that allowed the police to prove their case. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/history/blog/2025/gender-diversity-history-boulton-park/ Hulme Drag Ball (1880) In September 1880, police raided a Temperance Hall which had been hired under the guise of an annual 'Pawnbrokers Assistants Party' but was actually a drag ball. 47 were arrested for 'grotesque dancing' and their personal details wee published in the media to humiliate. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ypx35klyro Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. II - Sexual Inversion (1897) Physician Havelock Ellis published the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex which looks at 'sexual inversion' through a biological, psychological and social lens. Ellis conducts interviews with a number of anonymous individuals who provide first hand accounts of their sexuality and gender , with some accounts describing experiences of gender dysphoria or incongruence, and highlights the need for scientific and scholarly attention to the topic. ‘"Ever since I can remember anything at all I could never think of myself as a girl and I was in perpetual trouble, with this as the real reason. When I was 5 or 6 years old I began to say to myself that, whatever anyone said, if I was not a boy at any rate I was not a girl. This has been my unchanged conviction all through my life" - ‘Miss D.’, anonymous interviewee of Havelock Ellis https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13611 Magnus Hirschfeld Coins 'Transvetites' (1910) Hirschfeld, a Berlin-based clinician publishes 'Transvestites : The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress', coining the term. The Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science, founded in 1919 would go on to develop surgical techniques that would go on to help transgender individuals receive gender confirmation surgery . In 1928 Hirschfeld founded the World League for Sexual Reform, an international organisation that aimed to coordinate policy reforms to increase sexual freedom. British physician Havelock Ellis was elected as one of its first presidents, along with Hirschfeld and Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel. However, in 1933, the Institute was pillaged by the Nazis and its library was burned, destroying much of the Institute’s records and the then-largest existing collection of writing by and about trans people. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Michael Dillon (1915 - 1962) First trans man to have a penis constructed via phalloplasty . He succeeded in getting his birth certificate changed to reflect his gender in 1944. His genital reconstruction surgery was carried out by pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, and required a total of thirteen surgeries. Dillon trained and qualified as a doctor. He was outed by the Sunday Express 1958. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/trans-pioneers/ Sex Change Term (1920 - 1930) From the late 1920s into the 1930s, the term 'sex change' was used by the British press. This included both medical aid in changing sex, as well as cases where bodily changes happened or appeared to happen naturally. The distinction was not well-understood, and some trans people who had had medical intervention publicly claimed that their transition happened naturally, including Roberta Cowell. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/20th-century-trans-histories/ Jan Morris (1926 - 2020) Born in Somerset, Jan Morris was an award-winning journalist, novelist and staunch Welsh nationalist. Jan documented feelings of gender dysphoria at aged three or four. Jan trained as a newspaper reporter in Bristol at the height of WW2 before completing a fellowship at the University of Chicago and marrying Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949. After a successful career, Morris left journalism in 1960 to be a travel writer and in the same year started taking female hormones with the support of Elizabeth, despite the requirement for the couple to divorce due to same-sex marriage being illegal. Morris published Conundrum in 1974 which was a worldwide bestseller, and documents her surgery in Casablanca and her adjustment to life as a woman. Jan passed away in 2020 at the age of 94. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26924906 Mark Weston (1928) Born with an intersex condition, Weston competed as Mary Weston at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. However, after the games Weston felt unable to continue living as a woman and eventually had two operations performed by Lennox Boster at Charing Cross Hospital, London. His transition made headlines in 1936 with the News of the World reporting on the "Girl" Athlete's New Life after Change of Sex”. He went on to marry his childhood friend, Alberta Bray, without any legal injecture. His younger brother Harry was also intersex and transitioned, however died by suicide in 1942 https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/20th-century-trans-histories/ Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 April Ashley (1935 - 2021) Ashley, born in 1935, was a transgender model who underwent gender-affirming surgery in Casablanca in 1960. She met aristocrat Arthur Corbett in 1960 and was outed by the Sunday People in 1961. However, her marriage to Arthur Corbett in 1971 was annulled by the Court due to Ashley being determined as male. This set a precedent in that transgender people's legal identity was the gender they were born at birth. Ashley continued to fight for recognition of transgender identities and in 2012 was awarded an MBE by Buckingham Palace. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/trans-pioneers/ Mark and David Ferrow (1939) Mark and David Ferrow, born in Yarmouth, were brothers who transitioned in their mid-teens becoming some of the first trans men in the UK to medically transition . Mark transitioned first at age 13 and David followed two years later. Their parents sent them to an art school in Maidstone that was paid for by an anonymous local woman. They received some media attention between 1939 and 1940 during the time they started hormones and were potentially the first trans minors to transition with the then-newly developed synthetic hormones. The media coverage was generally supportive and the brothers were well supported throughout their lives and both brothers lived long, happy lives relatively under the radar. Erlick, E. (2025) Before Gender. pp. 37-42. Manchester University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/5037567 Mark Rees (1942 - 2023) Mark Rees autobiography 'Dear Sir or Madam' documents his journey and transition into his masculine identity. In 1971, after his transition, he attempted to be ordained into the Church of England but was ultimately rejected due to his legal sex remaining female. This prompted Rees to fight for legal recognition in 1972 in the European Court of Human Rights, but he ultimately lost his court case in 1986. While Rees faced negative media attention, he was encouraged to join the Liberal Democrat party and was elected as a Member of Tunbridge Wells Borough Council from 1994-98. Rees also founded the trans right campaign 'Press for Change' which saw him speak at local, regional and national conferences between 1986-2001. Rees continued to engage and challenge the Church, especially after some of the bishops in the House of Lords opposed the Gender Recognition Bill. https://transgendermediaportal.org/person/PERS_000439.html The First International Symposium on Gender Identity (July 25th 1969 - July 27th 1969) The First International Symposium on Gender Identity : Aims, Functions and Clinical Problems of a Gender Identity Unit was a medical conference which took place in Piccadilly Hotel in London. Erickson Educational Foundation and the Albany Trust of London sponsored the event. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/trans-pioneers/ Corbett vs Corbett (1971) April Ashley met aristocrat Captain Arthur Corbett, six months after her sex change. Corbett was a cross-dresser and unhappily married and Corbett and Ashley began an off-again, on-again relationship over the next three years. They eventually married in 1963, however after 14 days they called off the marriage, with Corbett claiming it was invalid due to Ashley's biological sex being male. This was the first time that an English Court had been asked to rule on the sex of an individual, which they decided that 'birth chromosomes, gonads, and genitals establish sex regardless of any psychological condition. https://sex-matters.org/posts/the-legal-system/corbett-v-corbett/ First Official Pride March in London (1972) The first pride march in the UK, organised as close to the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York, saw all LGBT individuals included. The first march was heavily politicised and policed, with an attendance of between 1000-2000 people. https://www.lgbthero.org.uk/the-history-of-uk-pride Open Door 'Transex Liberation Group' (1973) TV programme 'Open Door', pushed for by David Attenborough, allowed minority groups to have a place in mainstream media. The first episode featured the Transex Liberation Group and saw four trans women discuss topics such as their transition, healthcare, relationships and employment. https://www.gaytimes.com/culture/watch-a-historical-bbc-documentary-about-trans-women-from-45-years-ago/ Judy Cousins Creates SHAFT (1979) SHAFT (Self Help Association for Transsexuals) was founded by Judy cousins in 1979, becoming the major UK group for transsexuals at the time. Richard Ekins became SHAFT librarian and Alice Purnell edited the Shaft Newsletter from 1984, with Cousins teaching sculpture. In 1989, SHAFT reorganised as The Gender (Dysphoria) Trust with Judy as non-executive President. https://zagria.blogspot.com/2011/07/judy-cousins-1917-1993-soldier-sculpter.html LSE holds SHAFT newsletters and other prints: https://archives.lse.ac.uk/records/WHITTLE/5/2 Sex Change-Shock! Horror Probe! (1988) A documentary by Kris Clarke that premiered on Channel 4 in Spring 1989, it marks the first ever programme broadcast in the UK by a transgender filmmaker about 'transsexualism '. Interviewing transgender people such as Mark Rees, Rachel Webb, Adele Anderson and Stephanie Anne Lloyd, the documentary provided a more positive and personal account of transgenderism that wasn't overly sensationalised or demonised (as often was in UK media). https://www.transgendermediaportal.org/media/WORK_000361.html The Mermaid Charity Founded (1995) Founded by a group of parents who all had children with gender issues, the charity offers resources to young people, families, carers and professionals working with gender diverse young people. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality Character Hayley Cooper - Coronation Street (1997 - 2014) The long running British soap featured a transgender character since 1997, however she was played by Julie Hesmondhalgh (below), a cisgender woman. In an effort to improve the representation of trans people in the media, following similar actions in the United States and through the lobbying of groups like All About Trans, the character had a fictional death in 2014 to make way for trans actors playing trans characters. This could be seen through the introduction of Riley Carter Millington, a trans man, on EastEnders at the end of 2015 and the permanent role of trans actress Annie Wallace in Hollyoaks. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Grave of 'gallus' uncovered (4 AD) Earliest LGBTQ location: Cataractonium (present day Catterick in North Yorkshire). Uncovered grave of a ‘gallus’ - assigned male at birth but dedicated themselves to the goddess Cybele through self-castrating, cross-dressing and taking a woman’s role. Cross-dressing included jewellery and other female accessories. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/ Mary East/James How(e) (1716 - 1780) 'Mary East, the Female Husband' was reported in the London Chronicle in 1766 and retold by Bram Stoker (author of Dracula) in 1910. The London Chronicle reported that Mary East and her friend decided to dress as man and woman and be married after they both experienced unhappy affairs with men. East assumed the name James How and they lived together for three decades and ran successful taverns in Epping, Limehouse and finally the White Horse on Poplar High Street where 'James Howes' is recorded as the landlord in 1745. During their marriage, they were subjected to blackmail and robbery which led to a court case where James How(e) appeared as Mary East and caused a stir within the audience. Mary East lived as a woman for the rest of her life and died in June 1780, leaving money to friends, relatives and the poor people of Poplar. https://eastendwomensmuseum.org/blog/2017/6/23/mary-east-aka-james-how-and-mrs-how-of-the-white-horse-poplar Samuel Bundy (1739) Samuel Bundy and Mary Parlour married in 1759. After being searched by their neighbours, Bundy was discovered to be assigned female at birth . Samuel stated that after being taken away from his mother at 13, he was seduced by a male artist who then dressed him in boys' clothing to avoid pursuit. Samuel continued living as a man and was eventually imprisoned for the 'fraud', however Mary continued to visit often. After Samuel was released, he lived life as a woman, however not much is known after this. https://www.lovebritishhistory.co.uk/2024/11/lgbtq-georgian-britain-samuel-bundy-and.html James Allen (1787 - 1829) Allen’s assigned sex was discovered upon his death in 1829, where he was struck by a piece of timber. He was noted to be a hard, industrious worker. His wife insisted she was unaware of his birth assigned sex, although some articles claimed that she did know, and had made plans to prepare his body for burial herself to avoid examination during a previous illness. At his funeral, due to his assigned sex having been reported in the newspapers, extra precautions had to be taken so that his body was not taken by doctors for dissection. An inquest was later held. Another similar case was John Coulter, which you can read about here: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004160/18840122/041/0004 https://www.geriwalton.com/a-regency-era-female-husband-james-allen/ James Barry (1795 - 1865) The first doctor known to have been assigned female at birth, Barry studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1809-1812. Barry worked at St Thomas' Hospital in London before becoming a medical officer and being sent to South Africa, where he performed the first successful Caesarean section in which both mother and baby survived in 1826. Barry was not popular with his colleagues, and in particular did not get on with Florence Nightingale. After Barry's death from dysentery in 1865, his assigned sex was discovered, which caused much scandal. In 1905, historian Isobel Rae and doctor Michael du Preez retraced Barry's family history and life. https://medicine-vet-medicine.ed.ac.uk/about/history/historic-alumni/james-barry Harry Lloyd (1836 - 1910) Born in Brussels, France, Lloyd (then known as Mary Le Roy) moved to England in the 1860s. He worked as a governess and was involved with a freethinking circle in the 1870s associated with Charles Bradlaugh, Austin Holyoake and John Stuart Mill. He wore his hair short and was regarded as a ‘new woman’. He also lectured at the Freethinkers hall teaching and translating French, German and Flemish. He eventually transitioned to become Harry Lloyd Le Roy and married Eliza Condoit. Eliza gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth in 1884, whom Harry raised as his own. Harry worked as a linguist, an auctioneer, manager of a boarding house and newsagent and after Eliza’s death in 1890 raised Elizabeth alone. When Harry died in 1910, the physical examination established that Harry was assigned female at birth, astonishing Elizabeth. https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/11/harry-lloyd-1836-1910-translator.html#.W2C91X4naYU John Smith/Sophia Locke (1838) A 'cooper and tinker' from Macclesfield, Smith died of dysentery. Smith and his wife had been living in occupation together, while Smith worked, although the wife later denied marriage. According to press reports, Smith’s father was a travelling tinker and scissor-grinder. Smith had started wearing boy’s clothes from the age of three and while local people were aware of his assigned sex, they kept his secret. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/59768670# Wynsley Michael Swan (1874 - 1949) Swan transitioned in 1927, where he married a woman and changed his name. Previously, Swan had served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Women's Army Corps during the First World War. After Swan's death in 1949, a case came to court about a residue in trust under his birth name, and whether his wife could inherit it. The judge ruled that the name in the trust was the same person as Wynsley, and that as his widow was his lawful wife, she could inherit it. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/275362971# https://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/02/wynsley-michael-swan-1949-lieutenant.html A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) John Addington Symonds published A Problem in Modern Ethics, which describes people who might now be called trans women: ‘In their boyhood they exhibited a marked disinclination for the games of their school-fellows, and preferred to consort with girls. They helped their mothers in the household, learned to sew and knit, caught at every opportunity of dressing up in female clothes. Later on, they began to call themselves by names of women, avoided the society of normal comrades, hated sport and physical exercise, were averse to smoking and drinking, could not whistle. Whether they refrained from swearing is not recorded. Many of them developed a taste for music, and prided themselves upon their culture. Eventually, when they became unclassed, they occupied themselves with toilette, scandal, tea, and talk about their lovers--dressed as far as possible in female clothes, painted, perfumed and curled their hair--addressed each other in the feminine gender, adopted pseudonyms of Countess or of Princess, and lived the life of women of a dubious demi-monde.’ This book investigates 'sexual inversion', a conception of homosexuality that also encompasses many elements of what we might now call trans identity. As a gay man himself, Symonds challenges attitudes to homosexuality in Victorian Britain and argues that sexual inversion is not a choice but a natural inclination. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13264620-a-problem-in-modern-ethics 1900 Paul Downing (1905) Downing, a Black farm labourer from Kent was arrested on Blackfriars Bridge, London for chasing and shouting at buses alleging he was looking for his wife. Downing was discovered to be assigned female at birth. He was sent to the City of London Asylum and died within a year of being incarcerated. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/20th-century-trans-histories/ Ewan Forbes-Sempill (1912 - 1991) In September 1952, Time magazine reported that Dr E. Forbes-Sempill wished to be known going forward as Dr Ewan Forbes-Sempill, but did not report that the 'E' initially stood for Elizabeth, known as the second daughter of the 18th Baron Sempill. Due to Scotland officials sealing the records, the media didn't manage to report the story- therefore, such as in the case of April Ashley, she could not use Forbes-Sempill's story as a legal precedent. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Roberta Cowell (1918 - 2011) Cowell was a Spitfire pilot during WW2 and a racing car driver in the 1930s. Cowell consulted psychiatrists in the late 1940s and began living as a woman. Dillon assisted Cowell in 1949 to undergo an orchidectomy (removal of the testicles), which was both an unofficial procedure and an illegal one. Dr Harold Gillies then performed a vaginoplasty on Cowell in 1951. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/trans-pioneers/ Read more about Roberta here. Colonel Victor Barker (1923 - 1950) Barker, who was assigned female at birth, lived as a man and was a restaurateur and boxer who masqueraded as a war hero. In 1923, he married Elfrida Haward at St Peter's Church in Brighton, but she left him after she discovered his infidelity. In 1926 he joined the National Fascisti, a splinter group from the British Fascists. Barker was arrested in 1929 for non-payment of debts and his assigned sex was discovered. He was eventually prosecuted for making a false statement in order to marry Haward. Barker was convicted at the Old Bailey in 1929 and moved to a woman's prison in Holloway. He was eventually released and made money through appearing in a Blackpool seafront show in 1937 called 'Strange Honeymoon', in which Barker and his ‘wife’ occupied two beds. The public were invited to guess whether Barker was a man or a woman. Barker refused to align with either transsexual or homosexual identities in interviews in the 1950s, protecting his privacy instead. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/20th-century-trans-histories/ 'Enoism' coined by Havelock Ellis (1928) 'Enoism' refers to the adoption of traditionally female dress and behaviour by a man. Ellis first wrote about enoism in Studies in the psychology of sex. Vol. VII in 1928. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/eonism https://wellcomecollection.org/works/njv7bbq7 1930 - 70 Charing Cross Hospital (1930 - 1950) Lennox Broster's work at Charing Cross made the hospital a centre for gender-related medical practice and patients were generally given a choice about which gender they wished to present as. The ability to prescribe hormone treatment or undergo plastic surgery became available in the 1950s. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/20th-century-trans-histories/ Rachel Webb (1940 - 2009) Webb was the first (currently known) elected trans person, who became a Labour councillor in Lambeth during the early 1980s. She was also a feminist and former lorry driver. https://www.transgendermediaportal.org/person/PERS_000438.html Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Caroline Cossey (1954 - present) Cossey, also known as 'Tula' is an actress, dancer and model who appeared as an extra in the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. She fought to challenge discriminatory UK laws by taking them to the European Court of Human Rights in the 1990s. She was outed by the News of the World in 1981. Her marriage was annulled due to her birth certificate being amended to reflect her biological sex . https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/06/02/transgender-james-bond-girl-caroline-cossey/ Beaumont Society (1966) Taking inspiration from Chevalier d'Eon's full birth name, the society was established as a support group for male-to-female cross-dressers . For many years it accepted heterosexual male cross-dressers only, excluding both gay and trans people. They held an annual dinner at Broadcasting House in the 1970s and 80s before moving to New Kensington Town Hall. They helped organise the first conference by and for trans and gender-diverse people at the University of Leeds in 1974, called 'Transvestism and Transsexualism in Modern Society'. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/trans-pioneers/ 1970 - 80 Trans Activism Increases Post-Stonewall 1970 The raiding of popular gay venue 'Stonewall Inn' on the 28th June 1969 led to a week of protests against the police. Lesbians and trans women of colour were at the forefront of the movement. This inspired many organisations such as the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) in 1969, the Gay Liberation Front in 1970- 1973 and eventually London Pride. https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/how-london-pride-began/ Carol Riddell presented the paper 'Transvestism and the Tyranny of Gender' (1972) "In the paper, Riddell called for transvestite and transsexuals to join "with other sexually persecuted minorities, particularly, homosexuals, in confrontation with the police, the legal profession, the psychiatrists, the capitalist nuclear family, capitalist gender roles, capitalist attitudes, and fundamentally the capitalist system itself"(Wikipedia) The UK's First National Trans Conference (1974) The conference was held at the University of Leeds over the weekend of the 16-17 March 1974 and was organised by the Beaumont Society. The conference featured a range of talks, discussions, offered support, film screenings, disco dances and stalls. It was a brilliant networking opportunity and allowed for legal and medical options to be discussed freely. Although, the Beaumont society was restricted to people assigned male at birth, ignoring trans-men and non-binary people . https://wyqs.co.uk/stories/the-uks-first-national-trans-conference/ Transcript: https://transphilez.netlify.app/events/firsttransconferenceleeds/ A 'Change of Sex' Documentary (1980) British documentary aired on BBC which follows Julia Grant on her social and medical transition . The documentary also looked at the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London.. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality 1990 Press for Change Campaign Group (1992) Formed in 1992, Press For Change helped pass the GRA. They continue to provide legal and support to transgender and gender-diverse individuals. P vs S and Cornwall County Council (1996) Landmark case law which saw that an employee who was about to undergo gender reassignment surgery was unlawfully dismissed. This set a precedent to prevent discrimination within employment or vocational education on the ground of being trans. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality Transgender Day of Remembrance (UK) November 20, 1999 TDOR was started by transgender advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honour Rita Hester, a transgender woman who was killed in 1998. TDOR is held yearly as a vigil to remember transgender individuals who have been killed due to anti-trans violence. https://glaad.org/tdor/#:~:text=Transgender%20Day%20of%20Remembrance%20(TDOR)%20is%20an%20annual%20observance%20on,acts%20of%20anti%2Dtransgender%20violence . 2000 1900 - 1930 1930 1970 1990 2000 Gay Liberation Front (GLF) Transvestite, Transsexual, and Drag Queen Group (1972) Started by Rachel Pollack in 1971, the GLF TV/TS Group met weekly, creating a, "social, political and affective space for trans expression and consciousness raising, rooted in a feminist principle of 'trust[ing] one's own experience'.". The 1972 issue of the UK GLF newspaper titled 'Lesbians Come Together' represented a space for both cis and trans women to unite. This also marked the women of the London GLF to split away from the gay men of the organisation in February 1972. chrome-extension: https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/8922/1/Queer_memory_in_re_constituting_the_tran.pdf Corbett vs Corbett Gender Recognition Act (2004) Gives trans people full legal recognition of their chosen gender. They allow trans people to acquire a new birth certificate. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality Godwin vs the United Kingdom (2002) The ECHR ruled in the case of Christine Goodwin, a transgender woman, who had undergone gender-reassignment surgery . She started to experience harassment at work due to her identity as a trans woman and was refused the right to a state pension at the age of 60, being told she had to wait until 65 (the age for a man). She was also labelled as 'sensitive' so could not handle queries over the phone and her record continued to be displayed as a man. She therefore took the matter to court who ruled in her favour, stating that the state should issue new birth certificates and permit marriage of the opposite gender. https://www.globalhealthrights.org/christine-goodwin-v-united-kingdom/ Nadia Almada wins Big Brother (2004) At age 27, Nadia won Big Brother with the highest margin to date, with 4 million votes despite starting as a 50-1 outsider. Her win coincided with the Gender Recognition Act and demonstrated the public recognition of trans identity. Now, Nadia lives in Woking, outside of the spotlight. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/17/i-felt-invincible-nadia-almada-on-strength-glamour-and-trans-rights-20-years-after-winning-big-brother Grant vs The United Kingdom (2006) In this case, the ECHR held that denying a transgender woman her state pension at age 60 violated her right to respect for private life. https://exhibitions.london.ac.uk/s/ials-trans-people/item/395 Transgender Visibility Day in the UK (2009) Celebrated on March 31st annually, it is used to recognise trans individuals and their stories and journeys. It is a day of pride, uplifting trans voices and affirming their existence through visibility, as well as a day of education. https://nationalcentrefordiversity.com/transgender-day-of-visibility-2025-celebrating-the-trans-community-and-raising-awareness/#:~:text=Transgender%20Day%20of%20Visibility%20(TDOV,shape%20societal%20views%20and%20policies . 2010 2010 Equality Act (2010) Officially adds gender reassignment as a protected characteristic. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality 'A Transgender Journey' (2010) In 2010, the Guardian became the first national newspaper in the UK to feature a series written by a trans person about trans issues. The story was featured in their Life and Style section, written by writer and historian Juliet Jacques, on her journey to womanhood. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Channel 4 signs memorandum of understanding with Trans Media Watch (2011) Marked a turn in British media organisations thinking about how they represent trans people actively. This led to the ground breaking documentary 'My Transsexual Summer'. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 First Trans Pride in Brighton (2013) The first and largest trans pride event outside of America. Hosted annually, the event sees up to 10,000 people in attendance. Ran by volunteers, it is a grass-roots, community-led organisation which aims to uplift and celebrate gender variant, intersex, trans and queer people . https://transpridebrighton.org/about/ Independent on Sunday's Annual 'Pink List' (2013) In their list of the country's leading LGBT figures, they placed trans journalist Paris Lees in the top spot. The list featured an increase in the amount of trans people present in the other positions than previous years. Lees went on to guest political debate show Question Time and Newsnight as well as other oppotunities. Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain. [edition unavailable]. Unbound. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1437931 Transgender Equality Inquiry (2015) The Women and Equalities Committee report calls for over 30 recommendations for changes in a range of policy areas such as better services, especially in the NHS and improved confidence in the criminal justice system, as well as asking the government to ensure full equality for trans people. https://committees.parliament.uk/work/6033/transgender-equality-inquiry/ Boy Meets Girl (2015 - 2016) BBC2 introduced the first transgender sitcom on TV, starring trans actress Rebecca Root as the main character Judy, also trans. Rebecca Root has continued to act in TV shows, film, radio shows and theatre. https://www.transgendermediaportal.org/person/PERS_000953.html Katie Wallis (2019 - 2024) The first openly transgender MP. Katie Wallis was a Conservative MP for Bridgend, who revealed in 2022 that she was transgender and had been blackmailed in 2020 and nearly outed. The blackmailer was eventually arrested and sentence the prison. Wallis was commended by her own party and the opposition for being so open about her identity. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/30/tory-mp-jamie-wallis-trans-reveals-rape-ordeal Consultation on Reform of the Gender Recognition Act (2018) The consultation received over 108,000 responses, which saw the fee for gender recognition certificates reduced, three new gender clinics opened and increased funding for the first national LGBT Health Advisor to improve trans people's experience. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/response-to-gender-recognition-act-2004-consultation 2020 2020 Cass Review (2024) The Cass Review is published, documenting a 4 year study into the efficacy of trans healthcare for under 18s. The government stops the routine prescription of puberty blocker treatments to under 18s in March 2024 and in December introduced a permenant ban on the sale and supply of puberty-supressing hormones. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/news/cass-review UK Gov Blocks the Gender Recognition Act (Scotland) 2023 Controversial blocking of this bill which challenged Scottish sovereignty. The bill aimed to make it easier for trans people to change their legal change. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/resources/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality Supreme Court Ruling on the Definition of Sex (2025) The Supreme Court has ruled that the only acceptable legal definition of 'sex' is the biological sex assigned at birth. The rights of trans people are seperately protected from discrimination under the Equalities Act, however how this happens is unclear. This has resulted in the enforcement of single-sex places. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/09/uk-court-ruling-threatens-trans-people "Quote..." Up

Michael and Roberta were in correspondence between approximately 1949 and 1951. Only Michael’s side of the correspondence has survived, having been given by Roberta to her biographer and friend Liz Hodgkinson. It is not known what became of Roberta’s letters to Michael, but given the way in which their relationship ended he may have destroyed them.  Michael & Roberta: a shared history Michael Click here for Michael's Bio Roberta Click here for Roberta's Bio Michael and Roberta were in correspondence between approximately 1949 and 1951. Only Michael’s side of the correspondence has survived, having been given by Roberta to her biographer and friend Liz Hodgkinson. It is not known what became of Roberta’s letters to Michael, but given the way in which their relationship ended he may have destroyed them. Roberta first became aware of Michael by reading his book Self: a Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, and got in touch via his publisher. He was initially hesitant about her request for a meeting, as his only previous meeting with a reader had turned out to be a gay man who asked him for the names of other homosexuals in London. However, he was immediately enamoured by Roberta at their first meeting, and told her about his transition only an hour after meeting her. His subsequent letters develop from friendly to romantic. As Roberta’s letters to Michael have not survived, her own feelings about the relationship are unknown. She later denied that she had ever had any feelings for him, and said that she would have considered a marriage between them ‘two females getting married’. From Michael’s letters, however, it is obvious that he believed they were in a romantic relationship, and that she gave him reasons to believe this. She sent him photos of herself to display in his flat and show off to friends, and was introduced to his aunts in Folkestone as his prospective future wife. He wrote frequently about potential wedding arrangements, such as hymn selections and possible venues, and about collecting furniture and other things for their future home, and even about the possibility of having children together. (Roberta’s two existing children from her previous marriage are never mentioned.) The obstacle to their marriage was Roberta’s legal status, as she was still legally considered male, and in order to remedy this she would need surgery. An orchiectomy - removal of the teste s- was a necessary step for Roberta to be able to obtain a female birth certificate, and thus for them to be able to marry. Because of an archaic law known as mayhem law (definition here ) , it was illegal for a surgeon to remove healthy testicles. Michael’s own surgeon, Dr Harold Gillies, was unwilling to operate on Roberta, as by doing so he risked losing his license and potential criminal charges. Faced with this double-bind, a drastic solution had to be found. A handwritten document testifies to the agreement they eventually reached - that Michael, a fourth year medical student, would perform the operation himself. In the document, which is clearly intended to protect Michael from legal consequences if Roberta died during the operation, she gave her consent to the procedure in the full knowledge that he was still a medical student and had never performed it before. One of his later letters quotes a line from the hymn ‘Father, hear the prayer we offer’, which he apparently recited while performing the operation, and which he said he wanted played at their wedding: ‘Be our strength in hours of weakness, in our wanderings be our guide, in endeavour, failure, danger, Father be thou at our side' Michael performed the surgery on the kitchen table of Alison Macbeth, a doctor who had helped both of them with their respective transitions. Despite his lack of qualifications or experience, the operation was successful. Roberta was able to obtain a female birth certificate in May 1951, eliminating the legal obstacle to their marriage. He sent Roberta an engagement ring in a cigarette package, and told her to wait to open it until after he had passed his final exams, although by this point he already considered them to be engaged and wrote to his family and friends to inform them. Michael passed his final exams and became Dr Laurence Michael Dillon in July 1951. The collection of his letters to Roberta ends after about April 1951 (many of them are undated), so how exactly their relationship ended is unknown. His friend Gilbert Barrow asked what had happened with the relationship and was told ‘It’s all over’. Neither Michael nor Roberta acknowledged their relationship in their respective autobiographies. Michael never mentions Roberta at all, while Roberta briefly describes their first meeting but does not name Michael or mention any further relationship. " Be our strength in hours of weakness, in our wanderings be our guide, in endeavour, failure, danger, Father be thou at our side..."

Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell Early life Roberta Cowell was born in Croydon, London, on the 8th of April 1918, and assigned male at birth. She was one of three children of Major-General Sir Ernest Marshall Cowell and Dorothy Elizabeth Miller Cowell, Lady Cowell. Sir Ernest was a well-known and respected surgeon who had served as the director of medical services for the Allied Forces in North Africa during the Second World War, and was appointed Honorary Surgeon to King George VI in 1944. She attended Whitgift School, a boys’ public school in Croydon, where she was bullied for her weight and ‘feminine’ body type, and given the nicknames ‘Circumference’ and ‘Bottom’. In her autobiography, Roberta Cowell’s Story, she described her antipathy at school towards anyone perceived as homosexual, and any form of male contact: ‘My inclinations, as they developed, were entirely heterosexual. I hated and loathed any boy who showed the slightest sign of being a ‘sissy’. I treated any homosexual overtures made to me with complete horror and dislike. Although I made friends with other boys, I could not bear any form of physical contact with a male. Even shaking hands was unpleasant, and it was quite impossible for me to stand having someone link his arm in mine.’ Roberta became interested in mechanics and spent an increasing amount of time in engineering workshops. She joined her school’s Motor Club, and decided that she wanted to become a racing motorist and designer of racing cars. In 1931, at the age of 13, she suffered from a burst appendix and needed emergency surgery. This was carried out by her father, Sir Ernest. As a teenager, Roberta increased her knowledge of motor racing by sneaking into the area where cars were serviced at the Brooklands Race Circuit in Surrey dressed as a mechanic and offering her help to any driver or mechanic who would accept it. She began competing as a driver as soon as she turned seventeen and became legally old enough to drive on the road, and quickly became successful as a racing driver, winning her class at the Land's End Speed Trial. She competed in the 1939 Antwerp Grand Prix. University, marriage and war In 1936 she began studying engineering at University College London, and joined the RAF as a pupil pilot. Although she was the youngest officer in the service at the time, she suffered from persistent nausea due to airsickness and was quickly discharged. When war broke out in 1939, she attempted to become a fighter pilot, ‘bombarding the Air Ministry with applications, requests for interview, and telephone calls’. Her efforts were unsuccessful, and in 1940 she instead enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps. While studying at UCL, she met Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter, who was also studying engineering and shared her interest in motor racing. Diana would be the first woman to graduate UCL with an engineering degree. They married in 1941 and had two daughters- Anne, born 1942, and Diana, born 1944. The marriage was not a success, and Roberta rarely mentioned it in her writing, calling it ‘an episode in my life which is best forgotten’. ‘My marriage had been unhappy; in spite of our two little girls…there had been an underlying air of falseness about it. It is difficult and painful for me to say much about this marriage. But it must be clear from the way we lived— our house was at Hove, in Sussex, and I worked 53 miles away, commuting by car seven days a week, with a weekly trip to Manchester, 290 miles away, thrown in—that the two paths of marriage never joined for very long in our case, and that the rocks between them were very high indeed.' Despite her airsickness, in 1942 she was transferred from the Army to the RAF and served a tour in a front-line Spitfire squadron. In 1944, while flying over Fruges, France, the oxygen system of her plane suffered a malfunction, causing her to pass out. The plane flew on its own over occupied France while being subjected to anti-aircraft fire until Roberta regained semi-consciousness and managed to fly the plane back to base. A few months later, however, her plane was hit near Bocholt, Germany. She was able to guide it to a crash landing, but was captured by German troops. While being transported to an interrogation centre in Frankfurt she made two unsuccessful escape attempts, first by diving through a viaduct tunnel while crossing a railway embankment and then jumping out of a train. She spent six weeks in the interrogation centre, three of which were in solitary confinement, before being officially designated a prisoner of war. Roberta was crammed onto a single train coach with a hundred and fifty men for five days before arriving at the Stalag Luft I prisoner-of-war camp in north-eastern Germany. Roberta occupied her time in the camp teaching classes in automotive engineering to other prisoners. There was also a camp theatre where, due to the all-male environment, the female parts were played by men, but Roberta refused to get involved in this. ‘As always, the homosexuals took it for granted that I was one of their number… I was asked to play a female part in the camp theatre, but I refused without hesitation. I was still clinging to my masculinity. It had been quite different for the school play, where I had been virtually ordered to put on skirts. Here it would have been a public admission.’ Conditions in the camp were harsh, and worsened as the end of the war drew nearer. On one occasion the baker added shards of broken glass into the bread in retaliation for the death of his relatives in the Allied bombing of Hamburg. During a period where no Red Cross parcels came, the prisoners were forced to kill all the camp’s cats and eat them raw. ‘There is very little that you cannot eat if you are hungry enough’, she wrote. Stalag Luft I was liberated by the Red Army on the 30th of April, 1945, by which time Roberta had been in the camp for five months. She was suffering from scabies and had lost three and a half stone. Post-war and early transition Once back in England Roberta quickly returned to racing, competing in ‘every possible event’. During her time in the prison camp, she had fantasised about what she would do after the war. Her goal was to design a car engine that would win the Grand Prix. In 1947 she and a partner started an automobile engineering firm, Cowell & Watson, borrowing thousands of pounds from her parents to do so. ‘Afterwards I was made to realise clearly that what was actually happening in this period was an attempt to compensate for the fact that I knew, deep down inside me, that I had a feminine nature. Outwardly I made frantic efforts to show the world at large how masculine and assertive I could be.’ Although she was following her dream, she found herself restless and unhappy. She began to secretly experiment with wigs, makeup and women’s clothing, eventually venturing out in public dressed as a woman. This put a strain on her already unhappy marriage, and she and Diana separated in 1948. Roberta sought out psychiatric help from several different Freudian analysts, the last of whom gave her a series of tests including word association and ink-blot tests. These tests revealed, according to the analyst, that her unconscious mind was female. ‘The biggest shock my personal esteem got was when I discovered that my unconscious mind was predominantly female. Not only was it clearly shown by the tests, and the evidence was far too obvious to be denied, but as the analysis proceeded it became quite obvious that 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. I had confidently expected that the result of the analysis would be a discovery of the fact that I had an unconscious fear of losing my masculinity. I expected to find traces of the Oedipus complex and signs of repressed conflict between animal instincts and moral upbringing. I did not expect to find that, free of repressions, I was psychologically a woman!’ Roberta had spent her life striving to fit the masculine ideal and disdaining any male who showed any signs of femininity. To find these tendencies within herself horrified her, and led her to contemplate suicide. Her horror was both personal and moral. She held eugenicist principles, which dictated that a clear distinction between men and women was a sign of racial superiority, whereas in ‘lesser’ races the line was blurred. It seemed to her that her own existence violated this racial ideal. ‘According to [Russian philosopher and esotericist] Ouspensky one of the chief signs of racial degeneration is a weakening of the distinguishing marks of the male and female. In my own case my secondary sex-characteristics were poorly developed, and I had some female characteristics. It seemed to me that here was a strong moral argument for putting an end to my life. The only argument in favour of continuing my existence seemed to be that as time went on I might become better adapted to life, and might become a useful member of the community. There was also the possibility that my intense death-wish was due to some residual psychological trouble which might resolve itself in time. I decided that I would leave it for a year, during which time I would do everything possible to make a go of things. If at the end of twelve months I still felt the same, then I considered I should be justified in taking my own life.’ Having decided to ‘make a go of things’, Roberta underwent a thorough physical examination by a famous sexologist in Harley Street. The sexologist, according to Roberta, found that her body showed ‘quite prominent feminine sex characteristics’. He told her that ‘there seemed to be some degree of hermaphroditism present’, and that she might have female internal organs. This would form the basis of Roberta’s lifelong assertions that she was ‘biologically female’, which became a core part of her self-identity. ‘I found that this knowledge raised my morale very considerably. The intense shame I had felt began to disappear. Once I realised that my femininity had a substantial physical basis I did not despise myself so much. True, I now knew I was physically abnormal, but at least I could accept a degree of femininity without losing self-respect.’ Although she was beginning to envision the prospect of one day living as a woman, Roberta was still apprehensive about the stages in between. In particular, she was repulsed by the prospect that more people might perceive her as a homosexual. ‘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, and had I met one I would have refrained from actually kicking his spine up through the top of his head, but only with an effort. It was most desirable that I should allow some of my innate femininity to express itself, but I had not the slightest desire to become effeminate, which was an entirely different thing.’ In order to make her transition a success she felt she needed more understanding of the world of women, which she would not find in the very male-dominated environment of racing and engineering. Once again borrowing a large sum of money from her parents, she became a stakeholder in Sheridan of London Designs, which made haute couture dresses for films and celebrities. This allowed her to become, at least in name, the company’s managing director, and to apprentice with a ‘celebrated woman designer’ to learn all she could about women’s fashion. Moving from the world of engineering to haute couture forced her into proximity with the people she had tried all her life to avoid. ‘There were, of course, a lot of effeminate men and mannish women in our world. I rather liked most of the women, but could never get over an instinctive dislike of the “pansies”’ In November 1948 Roberta met Lisa Morrell, who would become a lifelong friend, partner, and confidante. Within a few days of meeting her, Roberta told her about the transition she was about to undertake. They decided to move in together, and for the sake of propriety, since Roberta was still publicly presenting as a man, Lisa adopted the identity of her wife. The exact nature of their relationship is not known, although a close friend of Roberta’s has claimed that they were romantically involved during this time. Lisa later described her experience living with Roberta during the turbulent period of her early transition in a two-part article for the Sunday Dispatch. ‘To those people who knew nothing of his inner struggle, Bob must have seemed moody and difficult to get on with, and I often wished I could explain this but it was impossible. How could I tell them what he was like when we were alone together; how he was when he no longer considered it necessary to “put up a front” in order to hide his fading masculinity? With me he was bewildered and uncertain. Often he suffered a lot of pain which was in itself frightening. It is one thing to suffer a known pain– that is bearable– but his was unknown and unexplored.’ Around 1949 or 1950 Roberta began treatment under Alison Macbeth, the same ‘lady doctor’ who had helped Michael Dillon break the news of his transition to his family. Roberta described Macbeth as ‘a brilliant woman doctor, a specialist in glands’, and for some time she and Lisa moved into Macbeth’s house, to allow Roberta to be under constant observation. She was examined by a series of gynaecologists, endocrinologists and a professor of anatomy, who, she wrote, pronounced her case as ‘very unusual indeed, apparently unique of its type, certainly as far as British medical history went’. Under Macbeth’s care Roberta began taking oestrogen, which rapidly changed her appearance. Although she still dressed as a man in public, people nevertheless treated her differently. Strangers began to openly speculate about her gender, and she estimated that about half the people she encountered would ‘go out of their way to treat me as though I were an unpleasant, perverted freak.’ ‘It was necessary to resign myself to the fact that, whether I liked it or not, I was now midway between the two sexes. I could not be completely convincing as a male, but would have been equally unconvincing had I tried to live as a female.’ Michael Although Roberta regarded her case as ‘almost unique’, she was nevertheless drawn in when she came across a book that described people with similar experiences. She wrote to Michael Dillon, author of Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology via his publishers, asking to meet. He was initially reluctant but eventually agreed to meet her for lunch. Michael makes only one appearance in Roberta’s autobiography, in an account of their first meeting that takes up little more than a page. She makes no acknowledgment of any kind of romantic relationship between them, or even that their relationship continued beyond this one meeting. ‘He was a good deal younger than I had expected, and wore a full beard. His hair was beginning to thin and had receded at the temples. Not bad looking, he was a very masculine type. He was apparently a misogynist, and appeared to have a low opinion of women. After lunch we sat talking over coffee, and he lit his pipe. We were discussing the connection between sex and intelligence, I, of course, maintaining that, given equal opportunities, women can be the mental equal of men. He disagreed violently. Then came the surprise, a surprise so shattering that the scene will be crystal clear in my memory for the rest of my life. He sat there, sucking at his pipe and toying with his coffee cup. He was silent for a minute or two, and I was idly wondering how long that beard of his had taken to grow. Suddenly, “I don’t really see why I shouldn’t tell you,“ he said, “but five years ago I was a woman.” Roberta begged Michael for help with the next stages of her transition. She had found herself trapped in a legal and medical limbo. Although she could no longer ‘pass’ as a man, she had been unable to find a surgeon willing to operate on her. She faced a legal hurdle in obtaining surgery, and thus being able to legally change her sex, that Michael had not. The misogyny of the medical and legal system had, ironically, worked to Michael’s advantage. There was no legal obstacle for him to surgically alter a body which was classified as ‘female’- indeed, the modification and removal of women’s sexual organs, sometimes non-consensually, formed much of the basis of the field of gynaecology. But the alteration of a body classified as ‘male’ carried serious legal consequences. No British doctor would consent to perform an orchidectomy (removal of the testicles), because a centuries-old law known as ‘mayhem law’ banned the removal of any healthy body part from a man who had the potential to become a soldier. This left Roberta in a double-bind. As long as she was still considered male, she could not legally have her testicles removed, but she could not change her legal sex until she had had the operation. She presented this quandary to Michael, who, immediately enamoured with her, agreed to help. He was studying medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, while Roberta lived in London, but they began exchanging frequent letters, sometimes two or three a day. Only Michael’s side of this correspondence survives. Later in life, Roberta denied that she had ever been romantically interested in Michael, and described his infatuation with her as entirely one-sided. Since only Michael’s letters have survived, the truth of this is impossible to verify. From his letters it is clear that he sincerely believed they were in a romantic relationship that was destined for marriage, and she gave him reason to believe this. She sent him photos of herself to display on his mantelpiece, and even met his family as his prospective future wife. Whatever Roberta’s real feelings towards Michael were, it seems clear that, at the least, she allowed him to believe that his feelings were reciprocated, and she apparently made no objection when in March 1951 Michael announced their engagement to his friends and family. Aside from his sincere desire to help Roberta, the question of her orchidectomy took on personal stakes for Michael. He had already legally changed his sex, but their marriage could not take place until Roberta had changed hers. Michael’s own surgeries had been performed by pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies. He tried to persuade Gillies to perform Roberta’s orchidectomy, but although he was very sympathetic, Gillies was unwilling to take on the legal risk. Nor could they find another surgeon who would. In desperation, Roberta asked Michael to perform the orchidectomy himself. Her hope was that once Michael had removed her testicles she could have her sex legally changed and then return to Gillies, who could confirm that she had never been a ‘proper man’, and would then be willing to perform the more complicated surgery of vaginoplasty (constructing a vagina). Michael was horrified by this request. He was in his fifth year of medical school, but his only surgical experience was one appendectomy performed under the supervision of a surgeon, and he had never even seen an orchidectomy performed. But unable to find an alternative, he eventually allowed himself to be persuaded. ‘If you have a qualified man who could do the job so much the better’, he wrote, ‘but if it is a choice between myself and the family butcher I would rather do it’. They drew up a handwritten document in an attempt to protect Michael from legal consequences if the operation went wrong and Roberta was injured or died. ‘I, R.C. have, of my own free will asked and persuaded LMD, who I am aware is an unqualified man, a fifth year medical student, to perform an orchidectomy upon me. I am also aware that his operating experience has been confined solely to assisting at operations as a resident pupil in hospital and to one appendectomy in the presence of a surgeon and that he has neither seen nor practised this particular operation and is aware of his deficiencies. I desire that he be absolved from all responsibility in this operation, due to possible haemorrhage or sepsis, which I am desirous to undergo being fully aware that either might, per fortunam, be fatal.’ The orchidectomy, which occurred some time in 1950, was carried out in Dr Macbeth’s house, apparently on her kitchen table. In a later letter Michael quoted a line from a hymn, Father, hear the prayer we offer, which he apparently recited while performing the operation, and which he wanted played at their wedding: ‘Be our strength in hours of weakness, in our wanderings be our guide, in endeavour, failure, danger, Father be thou at our side.’ Despite Michael’s inexperience, the surgery was a success. Once recovered, Roberta visited Dr George Dusseau, an eminent gynaecologist, to once again be examined. Her hope was that Dusseau would discover her lack of testicles and write a statement that she had been born intersex, allowing her to legally change her sex. This risky strategy succeeded. Dusseau agreed to write the statement, and on May 17th, 1951, she became legally female. The legal barrier to Michael and Roberta’s marriage was now eliminated. Michael was nearing the end of his last year at Trinity College. He had sent Roberta a ring wrapped up in a Players cigarette package, and instructed her not to open it until he had passed his final exams. He was afraid that he might fail, and he didn’t want to put the official seal on their engagement until he knew that he had qualified as a doctor and could provide for a wife. In July 1951 Michael found out that he had passed his final exams and qualified as a doctor. He wrote to Roberta and told her to open the package containing the ring. But Roberta rejected him. They met and she explained her reasons. The details of what she said are unknown- Roberta never revealed them, and Michael never wrote about her at all. Although in her own autobiography she called him ‘as genuine a man as any I had ever met’, she later told her biographer Liz Hodgkinson that ‘as far as I was concerned it [marrying Michael] would have been two females getting married, and I was certainly not interested in him in that kind of way’. Her relationship with Lisa, whatever its nature, may have played a role in her rejection of Michael. In his letters, he refers to Lisa as the ‘TQ’, short for ‘tertium quid’, a Latin phrase meaning ‘third thing’- i.e. a third wheel. On several occasions he urged Roberta to cut off her relationship with Lisa. If Roberta felt that she had to choose between them, her choice is evident. Lisa remained her closest companion until her death in the late 1980s. Vaginoplasty and publicity With the orchidectomy complete and her sex legally changed, Roberta’s vaginoplasty was carried out by Dr Gillies in 1952. It was the first time this operation had ever been carried out in Britain, and there was almost no medical literature available, so Gillies developed his own technique, which he practiced on medical cadavers. Lisa cared for her after the operation and filled her hospital room with flowers. When she had recovered from the vaginoplasty, Roberta returned to Gillies for further plastic surgery, this time on her face- giving her a ‘slightly retroussé’ nose and fuller lips. The purpose of this, she claimed, was to prevent herself from being recognised by people who had known her before her transition. ‘Although my body had changed completely…my face was still fundamentally the same. It was certainly a lot younger-looking, and far softer than before, with a definite feminine aspect, but it was still quite recognisable, particularly in profile. There was an ever present fear that I might meet someone I had known previously who would recognise me. The plan, therefore, was to have my face drastically altered. Then I should not have to fear recognition, residual traces of masculinity could be removed, and, incidentally, I could be made better-looking.’ The same year as she underwent her vaginoplasty, Roberta’s divorce from her wife Diana was made final. She had cut off all contact with her two young daughters, Anne and Diana, who had no idea what had become of the person they had known as their father. She would never have any communication with either of them again. The story of Roberta’s transition became public on March 6th, 1954. It is not known who leaked the story to the press- it may have been Roberta herself. She released a press statement emphasising that her change of sex had come about as the result of an intersex condition, and claiming that she had always had ovaries. The surgeries and hormone treatment were presented as ‘expediting’ a change of sex that was already naturally occurring. Michael’s illegal role as her surgeon was, of course, never mentioned. Roberta became a well-known public figure almost overnight. She and Lisa travelled to France and Italy, but were pursued by journalists wherever they went. She made a deal with the Picture Post to publish her story in installments for which, according to a rival tabloid, she was paid £20,000. The money was sorely needed, as she still owed thousands of pounds from the collapse of her engineering firm. Newspaper coverage emphasised the uniqueness of her story, particularly the fact that she had fathered two children. Her ex-wife Diana had remarried quickly after the divorce, and her daughters were being cared for by their maternal grandmother. She told their elder daughter Anne, aged 11, about Roberta’s transition, but her younger daughter Diana was told nothing until she found out from a newspaper several years later. As an adult, Diana attempted to contact Roberta, but received no reply. Roberta publicly emphasised the complete change in her personality and the newfound femininity of her nature, while also denying that in her life as a man she had ever been effeminate. She stressed this distinction on the very first page of her autobiography. ‘I was not an effeminate male. I knew that my body had certain feminine characteristics, but no one ever suspected this because I compensated for it by endeavouring to be as aggressively masculine as possible. It was only after the war, when a violent emotional shock upset my glandular system and my feminine characteristics became more marked, that I realised the extent of my physical abnormalities. I ceased to fight against my femininity and accepted it. I became a feminist male, then a boyish woman, and finally a feminine woman. The change has been so great that it is extremely difficult for me to realise that I was once a Spitfire pilot with a liking for pretty girls, that I once hated children, that I violently shunned anything which could possibly be classified as ‘sissy’. She often spoke about her desire to marry and have children, describing herself as having a strong maternal instinct. Her existing children were almost never mentioned. Although initial press coverage took Roberta’s story at face value, some articles began to express skepticism. On March 14th, The People published an article titled ‘Roberta is no real woman’, emphasising that ‘just as Roberta had never been a full-blooded male, so she will never be a hundred percent female capable of motherhood.’ Her father, Sir Ernest, issued a statement supporting Roberta’s version of events. ‘I had a son Robert who is now Roberta, my daughter. Her mother and I had noticed her personality changing over the past few years. Now her skin is white, her hands delicate and her bust has fully developed. I can say, not only as her father, but as a doctor, that she is recognisable in every way as a woman, and her mother and I are both satisfied that she is now completely female. It is obvious, of course, that the change must still be a gradual one. She cannot alter overnight from being a “tough young man” into a “pretty girl” at the age of 34. But her mental outlook is essentially feminine.’ He also told the Daily Herald that he believed it was ‘quite on the cards’ for Roberta to bear children, but was forced to retract this in an interview a week later. In this interview, the Daily Herald challenged his statement that Roberta was ‘completely female’ (implying the presence of a womb and ovaries), and forced him to agree that she was a ‘transvestist’. On March 21st, the Weekly Dispatch published an article entitled ‘A Challenge to Roberta Cowell’. ‘Millions of people all over the world are asking: ‘Is Roberta Cowell really a woman in the complete sense– or is she just an effeminate man who has convinced himself he has changed sex?' The mystery grew deeper last week as doctors, friends of Cowell’s, and people who knew this person well expressed doubts about the alleged changes. The mystery of Cowell’s sex can only be solved medically. The Sunday Dispatch therefore issues this challenge to Roberta Cowell: SUBMIT YOURSELF TO A FULL EXAMINATION BY MEDICAL EXPERTS SELECTED BY US, WE WILL PAY ALL EXPENSES AND WILL PUBLISH THE RESULT. IF THEY AGREE THAT THE MAN WHO WAS ROBERT COWELL IS INDEED A WOMAN IN THE FULL SENSE OF THE WORD WE WILL TELL OUR READERS THAT YOUR CHANGE IS GENUINE.’ There is no indication that Roberta ever responded to this challenge. The People was particularly hostile in its coverage of Roberta. On the 11th of April, they published an article titled ‘Roberta: the ghastly truth at last’, which claimed that ‘the public has been misled’ about her case, denying that any physical changes had taken place naturally or that Roberta had ‘a single feminine organ’. 'There was no physical condition that called for the operations...They were done purely to meet Cowell's abnormal craving and because the psychiatrists thought his mental condition justified them.' The article concluded by calling on an MP to challenge the alteration of Roberta’s birth certificate in Parliament, and for her to be re-registered as male. Another article expressed revulsion at Roberta ‘posing for ‘glamour’ shots’, and reported with horror on her stated desire to marry a man. The backlash was never universal, and most press coverage more or less accepted her version of the story. Roberta’s autobiography was published in the spring of 1954, and was serialised in forty countries. Later life After the first intense burst of coverage, the press attention began to die down. Roberta faded from public view until she re-entered the public eye two years later when she attempted to return to flying. The Daily Herald reported that she was now flying jet planes for experimental medical research. Although she initially claimed that her transition had caused her to lose interest in her former masculine pursuits, she made many attempts to return to flying and racing over the course of her life. She went back on her previously expressed desire to marry and have children, telling reporters in 1956 ‘I have no intention of getting married and I intend to devote myself to flying’. In 1957 she returned to racing, setting the record of fastest woman driver in the Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb, and appearing in a British Pathe news reel. She had won the same race prior to her transition in 1948. She told the Daily Mirror: ‘If I married I would have to chuck up flying and racing…you can’t compromise. After winning my first car race as a woman I’m hardly likely to throw it all away’. Her second attempt at a racing career failed to fully take off. In June 1958 she appeared in court for bankruptcy proceedings, with debts of £12,800 and no assets. £8616 of the money was owed to her father, Sir Ernest. She told the Daily Express that she was unable to find a job which wasn’t linked to her transition, and she didn’t want to make money out of ‘being a freak’. ‘I can get a job, playing the piano, at £1000 a week– provided the label of sex-change goes along with it. I could always get my hands onto good money. But that would be debasing myself.’ She described future plans to race in the Grand Prix, and to break jet flight records, but none of these materialised. The second volume of her autobiography which she was working on was never published. In 1969, she brought a libel action against author and journalist Ursula Bloom for her book ‘The Mightier Sword’, which disparaged Roberta’s driving and cast doubts on her claims about the nature of her transition. Bloom apologised, and unpublished copies of the book were withdrawn. The following year she was quoted in The Guardian stating her opposition to gender-affirming care for trans people being provided by the then newly set up Gender Identity Unit, and describing discomfort with people who had written to her asking for help with their own transitions. “It is extremely distressing that so many people think they can change sex just like that. Sex is fixed at conception and cannot be changed.” In an interview with the Sunday Times in 1972, promoting the unpublished second volume of her autobiography, she expressed further disdain for trans people, claiming that she had XX chromosomes, and further underlined that she had nothing in common with trans people. She also expressed her opposition to the Women’s Lib movement. “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. At Hammersmith hospital the surgeons carry out about two operations a month. Many of those people will regret the operation later. There have been attempted suicides. They don’t change sex, as everyone knows, because the operation doesn’t alter the chromosomes. Many people thought they could copy me. But it’s like admiring someone without legs, like Bader, and having your legs off to be the same. Or it’s more like seeing a thalidomide child, and having an operation to be the same.” The article also alludes to her sexuality, in contrast to the stringently heterosexual image she had presented in the 1950s. ‘She’s never sought the company of men, though she’s found they’ve sought hers. “When the story first broke I received 400 proposals. Some of them of marriage. I could have had titles, money, the lot.” She’s always preferred women, but this isn’t something she’d write about, out of consideration to friends.’ The same year, at the age of 53, Roberta made yet another attempt to return to racing. This was cut short when she was charged with dangerous driving for driving the wrong way on the M1 motorway. She was fined £100 and banned from driving for a year. Lisa Morrell, who had remained Roberta’s closest companion, died in the late 1980s. For decades they had lived in neighbouring houses and seen each other every day. After Lisa’s death Roberta took over caring for her dozens of foster cats. She moved into sheltered housing in the 1990s. Roberta died in 2011 at the age of 93, in her flat in Hampton, West London. Only six people attended her cremation, and her death was not reported on until two years later. In 2013 the Independent interviewed her two daughters, then aged 69 and 71. Both expressed their sadness that they had never gotten to know her in later life. "I just think it's sad we could never be friends," says Anne, "especially now we know that at the end she died alone in sheltered housing." "She was an extraordinary woman," says Diana. " I would have loved to have been with her before she died, and said, we are your family, and whatever happens there is a bond that nothing can change." "QUOTE"

Michael and Roberta were in correspondence between approximately 1949 and 1951. Only Michael’s side of the correspondence has survived, having been given by Roberta to her biographer and friend Liz Hodgkinson. The Michael & Roberta Letters Michael and Roberta were in correspondence between approximately 1949 and 1951. Only Michael’s side of the correspondence has survived, having been given by Roberta to her biographer and friend Liz Hodgkinson. It is not known what became of Roberta’s letters to Michael, but given the way in which their relationship ended he may have destroyed them. Roberta first became aware of Michael by reading his book Self: a Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, and got in touch via his publisher. He was initially hesitant about her request for a meeting, as his only previous meeting with a reader had turned out to be a gay man who asked him for the names of other homosexuals in London. However, he was immediately enamoured by Roberta at their first meeting, and told her about his transition only an hour after meeting her. His subsequent letters develop from friendly to romantic. As Roberta’s letters to Michael have not survived, her own feelings about the relationship are unknown. She later denied that she had ever had any feelings for him, and said that she would have considered a marriage between them ‘two females getting married’. From Michael’s letters, however, it is obvious that he believed they were in a romantic relationship, and that she gave him reasons to believe this. She sent him photos of herself to display in his flat and show off to friends, and was introduced to his aunts in Folkestone as his prospective future wife. He wrote frequently about potential wedding arrangements, such as hymn selections and possible venues, and about collecting furniture and other things for their future home, and even about the possibility of having children together. (Roberta’s two existing children from her previous marriage are never mentioned.) The obstacle to their marriage was Roberta’s legal status, as she was still legally considered male, and in order to remedy this she would need surgery. An orchiectomy- removal of the testes- was a necessary step for Roberta to be able to obtain a female birth certificate, and thus for them to be able to marry. Because of an archaic law known as mayhem law , however, it was illegal for a surgeon to remove healthy testicles. Michael’s own surgeon, Dr Harold Gillies, was unwilling to operate on Roberta, as by doing so he risked losing his license and potential criminal charges. Faced with this double-bind, a drastic solution had to be found. A handwritten document testifies to the agreement they eventually reached- that Michael, a fourth year medical student, would perform the operation himself. In the document, which is clearly intended to protect Michael from legal consequences if Roberta died during the operation, she gave her consent to the procedure in the full knowledge that he was still a medical student and had never performed it before. One of his later letters quotes a line from the hymn ‘Father, hear the prayer we offer’, which he apparently recited while performing the operation, and which he said he wanted played at their wedding: ‘Be our strength in hours of weakness, in our wanderings be our guide, in endeavour, failure, danger, Father be thou at our side.’ Michael performed the surgery on the kitchen table of Alison Macbeth, a doctor who had helped both of them with their respective transitions. Despite his lack of qualifications or experience, the operation was successful. Roberta was able to obtain a female birth certificate, eliminating the legal obstacle to their marriage. He sent Roberta an engagement ring in a cigarette package, and told her to wait to open it until after he had passed his final exams, although by this point he already considered them to be engaged and wrote to his family and friends to inform them. Michael passed his final exams and became Dr Laurence Michael Dillon in the spring of 1951. The collection of his letters to Roberta ends after about April 1951 (many of them are undated), so how exactly their relationship ended is unknown. His friend Gilbert Barrow asked what had happened with the relationship and was simply told ‘It’s all over’. Neither Michael nor Roberta acknowledged their relationship in their respective autobiographies. Michael never mentions Roberta at all, while Roberta briefly describes their first meeting but does not name Michael or mention any further relationship. The letters that survived are available to view below. Each letter contains a scanned version of the original and a transcribed PDF version that can be searched for key phrase by pressing CTRL F on your keyboard. Michael to Roberta (1951) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta (1951) (2) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Consent Statement (1950) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta (08/10/1950) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta (05/01/1951) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta (20/02/1951) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta Poem (20/02/1951) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta (1951) (3) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter Michael to Roberta (1951) (4) Scanned Original Transcribed Letter

The year is 1949. Roberta Cowell and Michael Dillon meet. Together they will change the course of British transgender history. The year is 1949. Roberta Cowell and Michael Dillon meet. Together they will change the course of British transgender history. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? That we should find each other” The year is 1949, and Roberta Cowell; racing driver, RAF pilot and ‘It’ girl, meets Michael Dillon; a ship’s doctor who pursued Buddhism into the high Himalayas. Together they will change the course of British transgender history. Yet after just three short years, they never speak again. Separated by time and space, Michael and Roberta meet for one last impossible encounter, to find out if the thing that brought them together was the same thing that broke them apart – The Law of Mayhem. Joyful, uplifting and full of heart, Award-winning Basingstoke theatre company Proteus, and acclaimed writer Tabby Lamb bring the extraordinary lives of trans-trailblazers Michel Dillon and Roberta Cowell to the stage for the first time. Using circus as a physical vocabulary, The Law Of Mayhem tells the story of two lives, inextricably entwined, that made their mark in history and forged a path for generations to come. The Law of Mayhem premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke in 2025 and will be touring nationally in 2026. Cast Kit Green Pete MacHale Mos Bain Oran Longmuir Milton Lopes Creative team Writer: Tabby Lamb Director: Amber Sinclair-Case Developed by: Jo Tyabji Creative Director: Mary Swan Movement Director: Daniela Essart Scenographer: Miriam Nabarro Costume Supervisor: Sam Pine Lighting Design: Jodie Underwood Sound Design: Mwen Production Manager: Nick Ash Company Stage Manager: Theodor Spiridon Producer: Nick Sweeting Proteus website

This timeline below shows Michael & Roberta's share history, important dates, and events. We have collected key events but this is not a complete history and we encourage you to use this timeline as an initial source for further research. Michael & Roberta Joint Timeline This timeline below shows Michael & Roberta's share history, important dates, and events. We have collected key events but this is not a complete history and we encourage you to use this timeline as an initial source for further research. Roberta Cowell participating in the Shelsley Walsh hill climb, September, 1957 Search our timeline for key phrases or dates with ease by pressing CTRL F on your keyboard. Alternatively, click on the bullet points below to go to a particular time period. This timeline is broken down into the following periods: 1915 - 1940 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970 - 2000 2000s Michael Roberta 1915 - 1940 Michael Dillon is born (1st May 1915) Michael is born in Ladbroke Grove, London. Roberta Cowell is born (8th April 1918) Roberta is born in Croydon to Major-General Sir Ernest Marshall Cowell (1886–1971) and Dorothy Elizabeth Miller (1886–1962). 1940 1940's Laura McCliver dies (11th May 1915) Michael's mother, Laura Maude McCliver, nee Reese, dies from sepsis. Sent to live with aunts (July 1915) Michael and older brother Bobby, aged 15 months, are brought to live with their father’s maiden sisters in Folkestone, Toto and Daisy. Hair cut incident (1920) 'I want my hair cut like Bobby's': Out of the Ordinary, p. 46 'One morning we were being dressed to go to the barber when I inadvisedly said: "I want my hair cut like Bobby's." Nanny only laughed and said: "Don't be silly, you can't, you're a little girl and he's a little boy." When we were at the hairdressers, some devil prompted her to say: "Tell the barber what you said in the nursery." Embarrassed, I tried to pretend I had forgotten, but she persisted so at last I came out with it defiantly: "I want my hair cut like Bobby's." They both laughed uproariously, as I knew they would, and it remained as a bob with either a slide or a ribbon' Robert Dillon dies (6th October 1925) Michael's father, Robert Arthur Dillon, dies of pneumonia complicated by alcoholism. Bobby becomes 8th Baronet of Lismullen. Aunt Toto and Mrs Hearne, a friend of his father's, are appointed joint guardians of Michael and Bobby. 'No two worse choices could possibly have been made' Public School (1928 - 1936) Roberta attends Whitgift School, a boys' public school in Croydon. She is teased for her weight and perceived feminine body type, and is nicknamed 'Circumference' and later 'Bottom'. As a teenager, Roberta is interested in mechanics and spends most of her spare time in engineering workshops. She wants to become a racing motorist and design her own cars, and is an enthusiastic member of her school's Motor Club. A fellow member of the club, John Cunningham, will go on to be a famous RAF night fighter ace and test pilot. Ruptured Appendix (1931) Roberta suffers from acute appendicitis and a ruptured appendix, and is given emergency surgery by her father. Gate Incident (1933) 'He thinks I'm a women': Out of the Ordinary, p. 73 'One afternoon I was out for a walk with the eighteen year old nephew of the Vicar who had gone up to Oxford the term before. We came up the cliff from the sea and somewhere there was a gate which he opened and stood aside to let me pass through first. Suddenly I was struck with an awful thought, for no one had done this for me before. "He thinks I'm a woman." It was a horrible moment and I felt stunned. I had never thought of myself as such despite being technically a girl. I finished the walk in silence, the silence of despair, and he never knew what he had done to upset me. But life could never be the same again. People thought I was a woman. But I wasn't. I was just me. How could one live like that? With no one to ask I brooded long on this at nights in bed' Employed at Gloucestershire Lab (1939) After graduating from Oxford, Michael works at a lab in Gloucestershire. Begins motor-racing (1935) Roberta gains initial experience of motor-racing by sneaking into the area where cars are serviced at the Brooklands Race Circuit dressed in a mechanic's overalls and offering help to any driver or mechanic who wants it. She begins competition work as a driver as soon as she is legally old enough to drive on the road, after her seventeenth birthday. She quickly gains success as a racing driver. In her autobiography, Roberta claims that her transition caused her to lose all interest in racing. She writes that her psycho-analysis revealed that 'to me racing was a symbol of courage, power and virility', and that 'when I finally knew the full truth about myself, the tremendous and all-powerful enthusiasm for motor-racing vanished completely'. However, she will return to racing only a few years after her transition, and make another attempt to stage a comeback as a driver in the 1970s. European travels (1935) Towards the end of her school years, Roberta visits Belgium, Germany and Austria with a friend from school. She is briefly arrested in Germany for filming Nazi drills, and is released when she promises to destroy the film- however, she manages to substitute the film with unused film stock, and gets away with the footage intact. Begins studying at UCL (1936) Roberta studies engineering at University College London. Becomes RAF acting pilot officer (4th August 1936) Roberta joins the R.A.F. as a pupil pilot. Her initial training is at Desford, near Leicester, and she is the youngest officer in the Service at the time. However, she struggles with nausea while flying and is discharged due to airsickness. Competes in Antwerp Grand Prix (1939) Enlists in the Royal Army Service Corps (1940) Begins writing 'Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology (1st January 1939) Michael begins working on the book that would become Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. TFMMM p53-54 (1941) OFTV 14:30 ‘He writes for gender self-determination, the idea that we can only know a person’s gender by asking them. The book also argues for better treatment for intersex children.’ TFMMM p. 53 'Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind, despite the prejudices of those who have not suffered these things, yet to suffer which they so readily condemn others.’ p. 53 Michael sees Dr Foss and begins taking testosterone. Moves to Bristol (approx. 1st January 1939) Michael seeks treatment for gender dysphoria with Dr George Foss, a Bristol GP. Morgan M. Page, One From The Vaults: 'Foss had been experimenting with testosterone on women for the past two years, in hopes of curing menstrual problems... he had some success. The lowered voices and body hair and increased clitoral size he chalked up as easy side effects that shouldn’t concern anyone. But here was Michael Dillon, demanding to use the drug to effect a sex change. He was intrigued, but required Michael to go see a psychiatrist friend before he would prescribe the hormones.' Michael did, and when he returned to the office a few days later, he found Dr. Foss nervous. Suddenly the doctor didn’t want to help. But he handed over a bottle of testosterone pills and said that Michael could try dosing himself.’ ‘Michael Dillon kept a meticulous log of doses and associated changes as he self-administered testosterone, providing the very first medical research into FTM testosterone usage. He was well-equipped to do this, working in a medical lab and with an Oxford education' Michael works at a garage and begins fire watching (1940 - 1945) Now taking testosterone but still with female identity papers, Michael begins to work at a Bristol garage. While working there he meets Gilbert Barrow, who defends him from harassment by other employees and tells him: ‘You’re a bloke as far as I’m concerned' They become lifelong friends. In his autobiography he describes this period as: 'the nadir of mental suffering' a crossed-out note in pencil reads: 'It [working in the garage] was the worst period of my life' Hospitalised due to hypoglycaemic blackout and fall (June 1942) Baedeker Blitz on Weston-Super-Mare unfolds while Michael is in the hospital there recovering from a hypoglycaemic blackout and fall. Second blackout and fall (approx. December 1942) Michael suffers a second blackout and fall, and is taken to the Royal Infirmary. There is confusion over what ward to put him in, as he still has female documents. When he wakes up, an unnamed Quaker surgeon tells him he will help take care of his problem - he introduces him to a plastic surgeon to remove his breast tissue, and says he will put him in touch with Sir Harold Gillies for further surgery. He also suggests 'getting reregistered', i.e. having his documents changed to male. Bilateral mastectomy (approx. December 1st 1942) Michael undergoes a double mastectomy Marries Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter (29th May 1941) Roberta marries Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter, known as Zelma, who had also been an engineering student at UCL and is interested in motor racing. Zelma is the first woman to graduate from UCL with an engineering degree. She describes the marriage as unhappy, and makes only infrequent reference to it in her writings, calling it: 'an episode in my life which is best forgotten' First daughter Anne is born (July 1942) Roberta had two daughters with her wife, Anne and Diana. In her autobiography, Roberta Cowell's Story, she suggests that the fact that both her children were female supports her claim to have an underlying intersex condition. She otherwise mentions her children very little in her writing, and after her transition never saw or spoke to either of them again, although she claimed to have a 'very strong maternal instinct' after her transition and frequently spoke of the possibility of having children as a woman. 'My marriage had been unhappy; in spite of our two little girls (the elder born in July, 1942 and the younger in August, 1944) there had been an underlying air of falseness about it. It is difficult and painful for me to say much about this marriage. But it must be clear from the way we lived— our house was at Hove, in Sussex, and I worked 53 miles away, commuting by car seven days a week, with a weekly trip to Manchester, 290 miles away, thrown in—that the two paths of marriage never joined for very long in our case, and that the rocks between them were very high indeed' Joins the RAF (24th January 1942) Roberta transfers from the Army to the RAF with the rank of pilot officer (temporary). She had obtained a private pilot's licence before the war and completed RAF flying training at RAF Ansty. She serves a tour with a front–line Spitfire squadron and then briefly as an instructor. Second daughter Diana is born (August 1944) First visit to Dr. Harold Gillies at Rooksdown (1943) Michael travels to Basingstoke to meet Harold Gillies, who agrees to operate on him after the war. Re-registration as male (1943) Michael goes to the Labor Exchange to have his identity card re-issued in his new name and gender. Out Of The Ordinary extract: 'With the poker face back on and on the defensive I went to get a new identity card at the Labor Exchange, prepared for grins and curiosity' ‘Oh, yes,’ said the man behind the counter, ‘we have had quite a lot of these applications’, and made me out a new card without batting an eyelid! How common was it? I am none the wiser on that point now' 'Then I automatically received my call-up papers for the Army although I was told that the medical examination would be a mere formality. ‘Yes’, said the Army doctor, ‘we’ve turned down a lot like you’ Birth certificate amended (14th April 1944) A doctor in Bath, John Cooper, signs a medical certificate saying Michael is 'far more male than female' and wished to adopt that sex permanently. A certificate from a member of the family was needed for re-registration at the registrar of births, marriages and deaths- Michael writes to a cousin, Maude Eileen 'Minnie' Beauchamp, who agrees to sign the certificate. Michael sends the application to Somerset House and is accepted. Michael's birth certificate is amended by a marginal note which reads: 'In entry no 54 col 2, for Laura Maud read Laurence Michael and in col 3 for 'girl' read 'boy'. Corrected on 14th April 1944 by C. E. Weston, Supt Registrar on production of a statutory declaration' Informs aunts and brother of transition (approx. 14th April 1944) Michael tells his aunts about his transition with help from a 'woman doctor' friend of the aunts, Alison Macbeth (who would later help with Roberta Cowell's transition). They grudgingly accept it. Michael meets his brother in the restaurant of the Savoy cinema in Dublin. He refuses to accept him as his brother or to acknowledge him in any way, and forbids any further contact (although Michael did have a somewhat friendly relationship with his wife Lady Synolda Dillon.) Michael proposes that they pass him off as Robert's 'cousin', in order to continue having a relationship, but Robert rejects this. University records amended (8th September 1944) With help from Jimmy McKie, Michael's name is moved from the records of St Anne's (then a women's college) to Brasenose (a men's). His degree certificate is re-issued with just his initials, 'L.M. Dillon'. Out Of The Ordinary extract: 'It was due to the kindness and common-sense of my ex-tutor that my name was transferred to the books of Brasenose College where I had learned all my philosophy, and also that the Oxford University Registrar was persuaded to issue me an M.A. certificate with only my initials in place of my first names. Jimmy McKie then composed a masterpiece of a reference, which did not use any pronoun whatsoever and yet was perfectly grammatical and readable.' Spitfire malfunctions (4th June 1944) Flying with No. 4 Squadron RAF, a squadron assigned to aerial reconnaissance, the oxygen system of her Spitfire malfunctions at 31,000 feet over Fruges, France. Roberta passes out, but the aircraft continues to fly on its own over German-occupied France while being subjected to anti-aircraft fire. She regains semi-consciousness and is able to fly back to base. Spitfire crash and capture (18th November 1944) Roberta's plane is hit by anti-aircraft fire near Bocholt, Germany. She is able to glide it to a crash-landing and radios her companion to confirm she is unhurt before being captured by German troops. She tries and fails twice to escape, but is taken further into Germany, spends several weeks in solitary confinement at an interrogation centre for captured Allied air crew, and is then taken to the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft I. Time as a POW at Stalag Luft I (December 1944 - May 1945) Roberta is a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft I for around five months; during this time, she runs automotive-engineering classes for fellow prisoners. She witnesses homosexual behaviour between fellow prisoners, and refuses with horror when she is propositioned herself. Her autobiography stresses many times her antipathy towards homosexuals and anything perceived as 'sissy'. At one point she is asked to play a female role in the camp theatre, but refuses without hesitation. Towards the end of the war, food becomes very scarce in the camp. Roberta loses fifty pounds, and later describes killing cats and eating them raw in desperation. Stalag Luft I is liberated by the Red Army on 30th April 1945. Commonwealth personnel are flown back to the United Kingdom between the 12th and 14th of May. Medical student at Trinity College, Dublin (1945 - 1951) In Autumn 1945 Michael begins medical school at Trinity College, Dublin. He once again takes up rowing, this time on the men's team. https://heartheboatsing.com/2025/02/13/dr-dillon-making-history-part-ii-michael-dillon-revisited/ Out Of The Ordinary extract: ‘The world began to seem worth living in after all...It was the first time I was able to start among people who knew nothing whatever about me and accepted me as an ordinary man. The relief was indescribable.’ ‘With girls one had to be careful...I developed something of a reputation of being a woman-hater, since I made a point of treating them in a rather rough brotherly fashion, and sheered off if any showed any signs of being interested. One must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children. That was the basis of my ethics. An evening’s flirting at a dance was one thing and a relief- but no more.’ Added by hand: ‘Yet often I felt resentful that I should always be alone, and never have [several words crossed out and illegible]’ Michael's book 'Self' is published by Heinemann (1946) https://archive.org/details/self-a-study-in-ethics-and-endocrinology-by-michael-dillon/mode/2up Series of at least 13 phalloplasty surgeries (1946 - 1949) Between 1946 and 1949, Michael undergoes a series of at least thirteen phalloplasty surgeries by Dr. Gillies at Rooksdown, in his vacations between terms at Trinity. Out Of The Ordinary extract: 'Every vacation for my first four years was spent in hospital. On the evening of the last day of term I would fly over to London and take the train to Basingstoke, arriving at midnight and as often as not my operation would have been scheduled for the morning' Returns to racing (1946) Roberta returns to racing and competes in as many events as possible Starts engine prototypes firm (1947) Following a dream of designing an engine that would win the Grand Prix, Roberta starts an automobile engineering firm called Cowell and Watson with a friend, putting in thousands of pounds borrowed from her parents. Separation from Zelma (1948) Roberta and Zelma separate; Roberta never sees either of her daughters again. Seeks psychiatric help (approx. 1948) Although she has thrown herself back into racing, Roberta feels that her life is 'pointless and empty'. She becomes depressed, loses weight, and eventually decides to go to a psychiatrist. After working with several different analysts, she eventually sees one who gives her a series of tests, including word association and ink-blot tests. These tests, according to her autobiography, demonstrate that her 'unconscious mind' is female: 'The biggest shock my personal esteem got was when I discovered that my unconscious mind was predominantly female. Not only was it clearly shown by the tests, and the evidence was far too obvious to be denied, but as the analysis proceeded it became quite obvious that 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.’ Seeks psychiatric help (approx. 1948) Roberta visits a famous sexologist in Harley Street, who, she claims: 'gave it as his considered opinion that my body showed quite prominent feminine sex characteristics' and 'there was a possibility that I had some feminine organs inside my body' She briefly considers ending her life, in part for eugenicist reasons: 'According to [P. D.] Ouspensky one of the chief signs of racial degeneration is a weakening of the distinguishing marks of the male and female. In my own case my secondary sex characteristics were poorly developed and I had some female characteristics. It seemed to me that here was a strong moral argument for putting an end to my life' However, the understanding that her femininity has some biological basis also alleviates Roberta's feelings of shame: 'I found that this knowledge raised my morale very considerably. The intense shame I had felt began to disappear. Once I realised that my femininity had a substantial physical basis I did not despise myself so much. True, I now knew I was physically abnormal, but at least I could accept a degree of femininity without losing self-respect’ She begins to consider transition, although she is determined not to 'swell the ranks of the gentlemen of no particular gender' (i.e. homosexuals). Roberta meets Lisa Morrell (November 1948) Roberta meets Lisa Morrell, who will become a lifelong companion. They quickly become close and Roberta tells Lisa about her struggles with her gender only a few days after their first meeting. They decide to move in together, and because Roberta is still presenting as a man, Lisa adopts the identity of Roberta's 'wife'. She appears as 'Elizabeth Cowell' on the 1952 voters' list. The exact nature of their relationship is not fully known, although a friend of Roberta's will later claim that they were romantically involved before Roberta's physical transition. (Michael Dillon as a scout, 1931 (approx.). Credit: Liz Hodgkinson) (Michael Dillon pre-transition, in his hometown of Folkestone, 1931. Credit: Liz Hodgkinson) (Michael Dillon pursuing qualifications to become a doctor, 1944. Credit: Liz Hodgkinson) (Michael Dillon in Neptune Rowing Club racing kit, 1949. Credit: The Bristol Magazine (Roberta in WWII. Date unknown) Begins taking oestrogen (approx. 1949 - 1950) Around 1949 - 1950, Roberta begins taking oestrogen, although she is still living as a man. She begins to be treated by Alison Macbeth, the doctor who helped Michael explain his transition to his aunts, who she describes as 'a brilliant woman doctor, a specialist in glands'. She undergoes repeated examinations by gynaecologists and endocrinologists, and writes that: 'my case was a very unusual one indeed, apparently unique of its type, certainly as far as British medical history went' (Roberta Cowell pre-transition, posing for a photo when she worked as a WW2 Spitfire pilot, 1947. Credit: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/p8418n42m) Initial correspondence between Michael and Roberta (approx. 1949) Michael receives a letter via his publisher from someone who has read his book Self and identifies herself as having the 'condition' Michael wrote about. This person, Roberta Cowell, expresses interest in meeting Michael. Although initially cautious, Michael agrees. A lunch is set up in London. 1950s 1950 First in-person meeting between Michael and Roberta (approx. 1st Jan 1950) Michael and Roberta meet at a restaurant for the first time. Although Michael doesn't initially intend to tell Roberta about his trans history, he is smitten by her and ends up blurting it out after an hour. She tells him about her struggles to transition and he promises to help her access surgery and legally change gender. Further correspondence (throughout 1950) Michael and Roberta begin exchanging frequent letters, with him sometimes sending multiple letters a day. Although her letters have not survived, it is clear from Michael's side of the letters that, at the very least, she allows him to believe they were in a romantic relationship. She sends him glamorous photos of herself, which he displays proudly in his flat and showed to friends. He brings Roberta to Folkestone and introduced her to his aunts as his soon-to-be fiancée. Michael's letters to Roberta show an entirely different side of him to the rather stiff, reserved tone of his published writings. Many of the letters are signed with rows of kisses- one has a doodled heart with 'Michael loves Bobbie' written around it. He talks about wedding plans, including potential venues. Although they were not yet officially engaged, he clearly believes there is an understanding between them that this will happen. He plans to propose officially once he has passed his final exams and qualified as a doctor. "No inhibitions are going to stop me saying, I love you. I love you with the whole of me. Te amo, ergo habebo te, Q.E.D?' Dr Gillies declines to operate on Roberta (approx. 1950) Although Dr Gillies wanted to help, he felt unable to operate on Roberta because to do so would have been illegal and he would have risked losing his license. A centuries-old law known as mayhem law forbade amputating the testicles, or any other healthy body part, of any 'man' who might become a soldier. Michael had had no such issues with his medical transition, because there were no laws against operating on, changing, or removing parts of the 'female' sexual organs. Without the orchidectomy (removal of the testicles), Roberta could not legally change her sex, which made it impossible for Michael and Roberta to legally marry. Agreement for Michael to operate on Roberta (approx. 1950) Unable to find a surgeon who would remove Roberta's testicles, Michael and Roberta finally decided that Michael, still a medical student, would perform the operation himself. They drew up a written agreement, in the hope of giving Michael some legal protection if Roberta died during or as a consequence of the surgery: 'I, R.C. have, of my own free will asked and persuaded L.M.D., who I am aware is an unqualified man, a 5th year medical student, to perform an orchidectomy upon me. I am also aware that his operating experience has been confined solely to assisting at operations as a resident pupil in the hospital and to one appendectomy in the presence of a surgeon and that he has neither seen nor practiced this particular operation. I desire that he be absolved from all responsibility in this operation, due to possible hemorrhage or sepsis, which I am desirous to undergo being fully aware that either might, per fortunam, be fatal.' Michael operates on Roberta (1950) Michael performs an orchidectomy on Roberta on the kitchen table of Alison Macbeth, the doctor who had helped him explain his transition to his aunts years previously, and who had helped Roberta in her transition. In one of his letters to Roberta he mentions quoting a hymn, 'Father, hear the prayer we offer', during 'The Op': 'Be our strength in hours of weakness, In our wanderings be our guide, In endeavour, failure, danger, Father be thou at our side.' Michael places the amputated testicles in a jar of formaldehyde, probably at the behest of Gillies, who will later examine them. The First Man-Made Man extract: 'Dillon placed the amputated testicles in a jar of formaldehyde for further study. He may have done this at the behest of Sir Harold Gillies, who would later examine the sample; in Gillies's case study of Roberta Cowell, he suggests that he knew full well that Cowell had been castrated in England, in violation of the law. When Gillies studied the testicles many months later, he declared them atrophied- not surprising, since Cowell had been taking high doses of estrogen for two years. Because the testicles would not have been functional, Gillies argued that "had the castration been performed in Great Britain, the law of mayhem in reference to mutilation would not have applied." The fact that Gillies dropped this sentence into his study of Cowell indicates that he knew exactly how and where she'd lost her testicles, and that he thought it necessary to protect Dillon and himself from prosecution under the law.' Birth certificate changed (18th May 1951 ) Roberta is examined by Dr Georges Dusseau, who determines she is female and agrees to write the note declaring her to be intersex which will allow her to legally change her sex. On the 18th of May 1951, Roberta is able to have her birth certificate re-issued as a female. Michael sends Roberta a ring in a cigarette package (approx. 1st June 1951) With Roberta now able to legally change her sex, Michael sends Roberta a ring in an empty Players' cigarette package. He instructs her to put it in a drawer and not to open it until he has passed his final medical exams, which he is worried he might fail. Qualifies as doctor and obstetrician (approx. 1st July 1951) Michael passes his final exams at Trinity College. He writes to Roberta and tells her to open the package with the ring. Roberta rejects Michael's proposal (approx. 1st July 1951) After a period of not responding to his letters and seeming to avoid him, Roberta rejects Michael's proposal. They meet one last time and she explains her reasons. Years later, she says that she never regarded him as a real man: "As far as I was concerned, it would have been two females getting married, and I was certainly not interested in him in that kind of way"' Accepts 1yr residency in Dublin hospital (1st July 1951) Having not done as well in his exams as he had hoped, Michael accepts a year's residency in a Dublin hospital. Signs up for 1yr tour as doctor on merchant-navy ship (1952) Michael signs up for a tour as a doctor on a merchant-navy ship sailing across the Red Sea Visits editor of Debrett's Peerage (1953) Michael visits the editor of Debrett's Peerage in London, shows him his birth certificate and asks for his entry to be amended- i.e. for him to be listed as Bobby's brother (and therefore heir to the baronetcy), rather than his sister. The editor, C. F. Hankison, agrees not only to correct the entry, but also to back Michael as the next baronet if Bobby dies first. He assures Michael that once the change appeared in Debrett's, Burke's Peerage would do the same however, this did not happen. The discrepancy would go unnoticed for five years. Signs 4yr ship contract (1954) Michael signs a four year contract with a ship ferrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. Signs 4yr ship contract (1954) In his correspondence with Dr. Gillies, Michael and Gillies make a series of references to someone who seems to be another trans person Michael has introduced to Gillies, and whom Gillies is treating. Outside of Roberta and his friend from university, this is the only other known example of Michael being in contact with another trans person. 22/06/54 Michael to Gillies: 'Can you try and remember to let me know about that girl --> man I saw- what the progress is?' 12/11/54 Gillies to Michael: 'I thoroughly agree that it would be a good plan to remove the remains of that uterus, and I will ask our general surgeon whether he is willing to co-operate with us in the matter. If he gibs, then I shall have to arrange for you to be handled by somebody else and I think I should first approach one Cook of Bristol. He has just removed the breast of Robertson whom I am 'changing' 11/12/54 Michael to Gillies: 'I think a gynaecologist is essential though it will probably tickle him pink to do such a job on such a patient. As I don't believe any uterus has been subjected to about 13 years of methyl testosterone 20 milligrams per day before, it will be interesting to see Harrison cut it up and see what effects have been made, if any. Have at last solved the problem I think of why these hypo-glycaemic attacks are prone to occur between breakfast and lunch. Whereas I can go from 12.30 to 7p.m. with no function, food. There must be a 12 hour delayed action as I take them at night at 10p.m. with the result that these [blank] depressent[sic] effect on the adrenal medulla occur in the morning. I have now in the past week changed the time to 2pm and apear to be much safer, although it will be a bit of time before the cyclic effects wear off as it has gone on for so long, But these present tablets are far more depressant than the ......Robertson ought to be warned of the possibility of attacks and to carry glucose tablets about with her' [sic] 28/12/54 Gillies to Michael: 'I note what you say about Robertson' References to another trans person in correspondence with Dr. Gillies (22nd June 1954 - 28th December 1954) In his correspondence with Dr. Gillies, Michael and Gillies make a series of references to someone who seems to be another trans person Michael has introduced to Gillies, and whom Gillies is treating. Outside of Roberta and his friend from university, this is the only other known example of Michael being in contact with another trans person. 22/06/54 Michael to Gillies: 'Can you try and remember to let me know about that girl --> man I saw- what the progress is?' 12/11/54 Gillies to Michael: 'I thoroughly agree that it would be a good plan to remove the remains of that uterus, and I will ask our general surgeon whether he is willing to co-operate with us in the matter. If he gibs, then I shall have to arrange for you to be handled by somebody else and I think I should first approach one Cook of Bristol. He has just removed the breast of Robertson whom I am 'changing.' 11/12/54 Michael to Gillies: 'I think a gynaecologist is essential though it will probably tickle him pink to do such a job on such a patient. As I don't believe any uterus has been subjected to about 13 years of methyl testosterone 20 milligrams per day before, it will be interesting to see Harrison cut it up and see what effects have been made, if any. Have at last solved the problem I think of why these hypo-glycaemic attacks are prone to occur between breakfast and lunch. Whereas I can go from 12.30 to 7p.m. with no function, food. There must be a 12 hour delayed action as I take them at night at 10p.m. with the result that these [blank] depressent[sic] effect on the adrenal medulla occur in the morning. I have now in the past week changed the time to 2pm and apear to be much safer, although it will be a bit of time before the cyclic effects wear off as it has gone on for so long, But these present tablets are far more depressant than the ......Robertson ought to be warned of the possibility of attacks and to carry glucose tablets about with her' [sic] 28/12/54 Gillies to Michael: 'I note what you say about Robertson.' Leaves ship contract two years early (1956) With a growing interest in the spiritual ideas taught by mystics like G.I. Gurdjieff, Michael breaks his contract two years early and returns temporarily to life on land. Leaves ship contract two years early (1956) Michael comes across the book 'The Third Eye' by 'Lobsang Rampa', a British man born Cyril Henry Hoskin who claimed to be a Tibetan lama. He begins a friendship/mentorship with Rampa, who tells him to do one more sea voyage and then look for a monastery where he can learn meditation. Photo of Dillon with Hoskin here: https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/life-here/library/blog/michael-dillon/ Publishes 'Poems of Truth' (1957) Michael's book of poetry, 'Poems of Truth', is published by Linden Press. Available online here: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/8g84mm48m Michael is outed by British Press (May 1958) While on board his ship, Michael receives a cable which reads: 'Do you intend to claim the title since your change-over? Kindly cable Daily Express.' He realises immediately that his secret is out. He is told two reporters are waiting for him on the wharf. Knowing that they would publish the article regardless, Michael gives them a brief interview and allows them to take a picture of him. He tells the Captain of his ship, who is sympathetic. When the rest of the crew find out from the newspapers, they are almost all supportive. Out of the Ordinary: 'Next day I could stand it no longer and I took the bull by the horns and went up to the Second's cabin at twelve o'clock...He and Sparks were in there and I was at once invited in for a drink. I made a direct attack by asking if they had seen the papers and what was their attitude going to be. The Second poured me out a gin, raised his glass and knocked mine and then said that they had discussed it at length over beer the night before and had come to the conclusion that I had had a raw deal and since they had liked me before and I had not changed overnight they saw no reason for letting it make any difference' The articles point out the discrepancy between Michael's entry in Debrett's Peerage, where he is listed as male (and thus heir to his brother's baronetcy), and Burke's Peerage, where he is listed as female. Much of the coverage is focused on the question of whether or not Michael will inherit the baronetcy in the event of his brother's death. The editor of Debrett's, C.F. Hankison, who Michael met with to change his entry, is quoted in Time magazine supporting Michael's claim: "I have always been of the opinion that a person has all rights and privileges of the sex that is, at a given moment, recognized" https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,936913,00.html When Michael's ship reaches New York, the ship is surrounded by press and he is told he cannot safely go ashore and that photographers might tear his clothes off in order to get a picture. In British newspapers only a small handful of articles are ever actually published about Michael (some clippings of which are sent to him by friends and family), but being at sea, he has no way of knowing the extent of the coverage. Furthermore, his upbringing has instilled in him a deep horror of being written about in the press. Feeling that he cannot return to England, and with a desire to pursue his spiritual growth, Michael decides to leave the ship in India and disappear for a few years until any press coverage has subsided. It is not known how the press became aware of Michael's story. Someone may have stumbled across the discrepancy by accident- however, Roberta was known to leak stories to the press when in need of money, and it's possible the tip came from her. Sunday Express, 11-05-1958: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVPF_WUrFe5hXSE2ZEcN9jL391CaD3J2/view?usp=sharing Daily Express, 12-05-1958: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mPNdgp_nIquT_ITaZw8Qmk5s32wMfuQP/view?usp=sharing Daily Express, 13-05-1958: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G491AjQFqEm6hC5cYohacdU6mIfGEYjW/view?usp=sharing Arrival in India (approx. July 1958) Michael leaves his ship in India and begins living the community of Sangharakshita, a British-born teacher, in Kalimpong, the Triyana Vardhana Vihara. He is given the name Jivaka by Sangharakshita, and begins his serious study of Buddhism. Michael, now Jivaka, assumes a life of poverty and gives away his inheritance and savings 'to those of my friends and acquaintances who were most in need'. He will live the rest of his life in poverty, surviving on the proceeds of his writing, and often malnourished. Writing about Buddhism (1959 - 1962) Jivaka begins writing articles about Buddhism for English-speaking audiences. He goes on to publish a number of books, never mentioning his trans history, including Practicing the Dhammapada (1959), Growing up into Buddhism (1960), and 'Imji Getsul - An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery' (1962). Interference by Sangharakshita (1959) Jivaka attempts to be ordained as a bhikkhu. However, his former teacher Sangharakshita intervenes, disclosing Michael's trans history and ultimately leading to the monks forbidding his ordination. In 1960, Jivaka writes an essay entitled A Critical Study of the Vinaya. Without making reference to his own history, the essay argues for greater acceptance of “deformed people”, “hermaphrodites” and eunuchs, who are forbidden from being ordained at this time. Michael/Jivaka dies in Dalhousie, India (15th May 1962) Jivaka collapses while travelling and is taken to the Civil Hospital of Dalhousie. He dies on May 15th 1962, aged 47. The exact cause of death is not known but malnourishment and typhoid fever are likely factors. His body is cremated. Vaginoplasty carried out by Dr. Gillies (Approx. February 1952) With the orchidectomy complete, and Roberta legally reclassified as a woman, there is no longer a legal impediment to Gillies operating on her. He performs a vaginoplasty on her, the first one attempted in Britain. Roberta later returns to Gillies for plastic surgery on her nose and lips, which in her autobiography she claims is to prevent people to recognise her from before her transition: 'There was an ever present fear that I might meet someone I had known previously who would recognise me. The plan, therefore, was to have my face drastically altered. Then I should not have to fear recognition, residual traces of masculinity could be removed, and, incidentally, I could be made better-looking' Divorce from Zelma (29th April 1952) After four years of separation, Roberta and Zelma finally divorce. When Roberta's story becomes public in 1954, Zelma informs their older daughter Anne (aged 11) about it, but not the younger Diana, who finds out about Roberta's transition from a newspaper. Roberta's story is made public (March 1954) Newspapers begin publishing stories about Roberta's transition, with the majority of initial headlines focusing on either her fatherhood or her war record, e.g. 'Father of two is now a woman', 'Former fighter pilot changes sex', etc. It is not clear whether somebody else leaks her story, or Roberta herself. Subsequently she negotiates with the Picture Post to publish her story in a series of instalments - according to a rival tabloid, she is paid twenty thousand pounds. Daily Express: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVkpmf9X7aC2tx6DwHgZXLGMbV50o2TE/view?usp=sharing Daily Herald: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C77QBUUkTSoIDZyeXf-fOC2paGlb6tpz/view?usp=sharing Daily Record https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n9Y2FOypT8Xv66iYwIDeQHkaLW-u44fI/view?usp=sharing Picture Post https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QGruBQuK3nMHJHZR5GDHAiV-L4ozIMqX/view?usp=sharing Roberta releases a press statement emphasising that her change of sex was natural and spontaneous, and claiming that she had always had ovaries. Almost every major British newspaper runs a story about her, echoing her version of events. Roberta travels to Europe with Lisa to try and evade the press, but they follow her there. Mixed Press (March - April 1954) Some newspapers cast doubt on Roberta's version of events, with The People publishing a story on March 14th titled 'Roberta is no real woman'. The article states that 'just as Roberta had never been a full-blooded male, so she will never be a hundred percent female capable of motherhood'. The People: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rm0UroCzmlwh2SskAWLQynrgh5A5r0co/view?usp=sharing Roberta's father, Sir Ernest Cowell, is quoted in the Daily Herald on March 15th fully supporting her story and claiming to have been told that Roberta having children is 'quite on the cards.' However, in a Sunday Mirror interview on March 21st he is forced to retract this. Daily Herald: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YCqaosvQuj-YMdUiIZy5Kjy70_XbKt7N/view?usp=sharing Sunday Mirror: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WInAAPVep-wu5AN-OQWsc6KOB_jZez-B/view?usp=sharing The Sunday Dispatch issues a challenge to Roberta on March 21st: 'Submit yourself to a full examination by medical experts selected by us, we will pay all expenses and will publish the result. If they agree that the man who was Robert Cowell is indeed a woman in the full sense of the word, we will tell our readers that your claim is genuine' There is no indication that Roberta ever takes them up on this. Sunday Dispatch: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jk7sCJ_6ujqIbSts841ldU-3VS4iccpF/view?usp=sharing The People becomes very hostile in its coverage, claiming in an article titled 'Roberta: the ghastly truth at last' that: 'There was no physical condition that called for the operations...They were done purely to meet Cowell's abnormal craving and because the psychiatrists thought his [sic] mental condition justified them' The People https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A8cXbtyAgOf327VmeZ4chYzzX1-Anz5h/view?usp=sharing A later article, titled 'Now he [sic] poses for "glamour" shots'', asks: 'Could there be anything more revolting than this person pretending he [sic] is a "glamour girl", when in fact he is merely a man who has been emasculated and has none of the vital feminine organs' It reports with horror on Roberta's stated desire to marry a man, and says that she should 'go into a home' The People https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E_SPNFC2KqxTK84lCkQnAD6Fhs6pFfP6/view?usp=sharing Ex-wife Diana publishes article 'My life with the man who became a woman' (7th March 1954) Roberta's ex-wife Diana's story is published by the Weekly Dispatch. By this time Diana has remarried and is living with her new husband under his name. She describes telling their older daughter Diana about Roberta's transition. She also says that Roberta had written to her asking to be sent the letters Roberta had written her during their engagement and marriage: “As the sole method of earning money left open to me is writing, I am certain there must be a mass of material which I could use. It would also help to lessen the financial strain on my parents. I suppose you know that every penny you have received from the Cowell family during the last five years has come from my parents. So, for that matter, has every penny I received or very nearly. If you can manage to find some or all of the mass of stuff I wrote, especially when I was in the Army, it would help a lot, and would enable me to ease the financial burden on my parents far more quickly” Weekly Dispatch 07-03-1954: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aHSdSR2rKOytsVfbFpY0VlzXICvFX_Ut/view?usp=sharing Lisa publishes her story (4th April 1954) Lisa publishes a two-part article in the Sunday Dispatch, describing her relationship with Roberta and how she is 'teaching' her to be a woman. Sunday Dispatch 04-04-1954 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19Wfedr9oFlLYCmgGjnP8tc3hSDuUCQ96 Sunday Dispatch 11-04-1954 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f-AIJd84Gl92Jq6otscMWZpLIGZENB0s/view?usp=sharing Returns to racing, setting record as fastest woman driver in Shelsley Walsh Hill climb (31st August 1957) Roberta makes her return to racing in the Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb, a race she won prior to her transition in 1948. She is again victorious, setting the record for fastest woman driver, and appearing in a British Pathe film reel. Appears in court for bankruptcy (19th June 1958) Roberta appears in bankruptcy court with debts of £12,580 and no assets. £8,618 of that money is said to have been advanced to her by her father. 1960 Roberta's mother dies (approx. October 1962) Roberta's mother Dorothie Cowell dies. Roberta's father remarries (31st October 1963) Roberta's father Sir Ernest, aged 77, marries his second wife Mary Ebeling. Roberta is not at the wedding and is reported to be living in Paris. Helps Judy Cousins with transition (approx. 1969) In 1987 another trans woman, Judy Cousins, claims that Roberta reluctantly helped her with her transition in the late 60s, giving her the name of a GP who gave her hormones. Judy establishes SHAFT, the Self Help Association For Transsexuals, in 1980. Brings libel action (approx. April 1969) Roberta brings libel action against author Ursula Bloom for her book 'The Mightier Sword', for describing Roberta as a bad driver and casting doubts on her sexual status. Bloom apologised and unpublished copies of the book were withdrawn. 1970 Opposition to care for trans people (7th July 1970) Roberta is quoted in The Guardian stating her opposition to gender-affirming care being provided by the then-new Gender Identity Unit, and describing discomfort with people who write to her asking for help with transition. 'It is extremely distressing that so many people think they can change sex just like that. Sex is fixed at conception and cannot be changed' 'Is it ever right to give hormones to, and even to operate on, a normal man or woman to make them into what can only be at best an ersatz member of the opposite sex? To this last question Roberta Cowell and many psychiatrists would say 'no', the members of the Gender Identity Unit would say 'perhaps'- occasionally' Attempts to return to racing (approx. May 1972) At age 53, Roberta makes one of many attempts to return to racing. Fined £100 for dangerous driving (15th October 1973) Roberta is fined £100 for dangerous driving after driving the wrong way on the M1. She is disqualified from driving for a year and loses her competition licence. Lisa Morrell dies (approx. 1989) Roberta's long-time friend and possibly former partner Lisa dies in the late 1980s 2000 Roberta's ex-wife Diana dies (2006) Roberta dies aged 93 (11th October 2011) Roberta dies, by this time living alone in sheltered housing. 1960s 1970s 2000s (Michael Dillon as a Merchant Navy Seal. 1950-1958 approx. Credit: Fordham University Press) (Roberta Cowell participating in Shelsey Hill Climb, 1957. Credit: https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2022/06/13/roberta-cowell-in-our-newspapers/ ) (MIchael Dillon becomes Lobzang Jivanka, an ordained Buddhist Monk, early 1960s. Credit: Liz Hodgkinson) (Roberta Cowell on the cover of Picture Post Magazine, 1954. Credit: Maurice Ambler/Picture Post and IPC Magazines, via Getty Images) (Roberta Cowell giving an interview in preparation to return to racing, 1972. Credit: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/z890rt45j) (Roberta Cowell in her racing car uniform, 1957 (approx.). Credit: https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/roberta-cowell_ ) (Roberta Cowell participating in a women's race car competition near Sussex, 1957' Credit: PA Images/ Alamy Stock Photo) Up

​This website has been commissioned to serve as an archive where extensive information on the lives of Roberta Cowell and Michael Dillon has been collated to demonstrate the depth of their lives, capturing their struggles, joys and personal impacts on society. Michael & Roberta | A Chronicle of British Transgender History enter here - Transgender - Transgender History - Michael and Roberta - Transgender Britain