Cowell RobertaF

British racing driver and Second World War fighter pilot, nicknamed Betty, she was the first known British trans woman to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Cowell was one of three children of Major-General Sir Ernest Marshall Cowell KBE CB (1886–1971), a prominent surgeon, and Dorothy Elizabeth Miller (1886–1962), a fine pianist and singer. On 28 December 1940, Robert Bob Cowell was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as second lieutenant. By June 1944, Cowell was flying with No. 4 Squadron RAF, a squadron assigned to the task of aerial reconnaissance. On 18 November 1944, Cowell was piloting one of a pair of Typhoons on a low-level sortie near Bocholt, Germany. South east of Kessel, Cowell attacked targets on the ground, but the aircrafts engine was knocked out and its wing holed by German anti-aircraft fire. Cowell was flying too low to bail-out and instead jettisoned the cockpit canopy and glided the Typhoon to a successful deadstick crash-landing. Cowell was captured by German troops, and made two failed escape attempts, and was taken to the prisoner–of–war camp Stalag Luft I. Cowell remained a prisoner for around five months, occupying the time by teaching classes in automotive-engineering to fellow inmates. Between 12 and 14 May 1945, Cowell was one of the Commonwealth personnel flown back to the United Kingdom by aircraft of the U.S. Army Air Forces. After demobilization, Cowell was engaged in a number of business ventures, founding a motor-racing team in 1946 and competing in events across Europe. In 1948, Cowell, suffering from depression, consulted a Freudian psychiatrist who gradually revealed, in her own words, that her "unconscious mind was predominantly female" and 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." By 1950, Cowell was taking large doses of estrogen, but was still living as a man. She had become acquainted with Michael Dillon, a physician who was the first British trans man, after reading his 1946 volume Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics. This work proposed that individuals should have the right to change gender, to have the kind of body they desired. Dillon subsequently carried out an inguinal orchiectomy (surgical removal of testicle/s and the full spermatic cord) on Cowell in secret, as the procedure was then illegal. Cowell then presented herself to a private Harley Street gynaecologist and was able to obtain from him a document stating she was intersex. She had a vaginoplasty on 15 May 1951. The operation was carried out by Sir Harold Gillies, widely considered the father of plastic surgery, with the assistance of American surgeon Ralph Millard. Gillies had operated on Michael Dillon, but vaginoplasty was then an entirely novel procedure, which Gillies had only performed experimentally on a cadaver. This allowed her to have a new birth certificate issued on 17 May 1951, with her recorded sex changed to female, and her name, Roberta Elizabeth Cowell. As Roberta, she still loved speed, sports and racing. By 1954, her two business ventures, a racing car engineering company (Leacroft of Egham) and a clothing company had both ceased trading and her change of legal gender had made it impossible for her to continue Grand Prix motor racing. However, in March 1954, news of her gender reassignment broke, gaining public interest around the world. In the United Kingdom, her story was p Read less