Cowell, Roberta Elizabeth, 1918-2011

Roberta Cowell (8 April 1918 – 11 October 2011) was a British racing driver and Second World War fighter pilot. She was the first known British trans woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery in 1951.

In 1936, Cowell began studying engineering at University College London. Also in that year, she began motor-racing, winning her class at the Land's End Speed Trial in a Riley.

On 28 December 1940, Cowell was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as second lieutenant. Cowell served a tour with a front-line Spitfire squadron and then briefly as an instructor. On 18 November 1944, Cowell was piloting one of a pair of Typhoons on a low-level sortie near Bocholt, Germany. She was captured by German troops. Cowell made two escape attempts and she was taken further into Germany, spending several weeks in solitary confinement at an interrogation centre for captured Allied aircrew, before being moved to the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft I. Cowell remained a prisoner for around five months. The camp was reached by the Red Army on the night of 30 April 1945.

In June 1941, Cowell married Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter. Diana and Roberta had two daughters before divorcing in 1948.

By 1950, Cowell was taking large doses of oestrogen, but was still living as a man. She had become acquainted with Michael Dillon, a British physician who was the first trans man to get a phalloplasty. Dillon subsequently carried out an inguinal orchiectomy on Cowell. Secrecy was necessary for this as the procedure was then illegal in the United Kingdom under so-called "mayhem" laws and no surgeon would agree to perform it openly. Cowell then presented herself to a private Harley Street gynaecologist and was able to obtain from him a document stating she was intersex. This allowed her to have a new birth certificate issued, with her recorded sex changed to female. 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 developed using his experience of reconstructing penises of soldiers who had endured injuries from explosive blasts. The name on her birth certificate was changed on 17 May of that year, on production of a statutory declarations by Cowell and Charles Eugene Dusseau, who was a Canadian doctor.