The sex changes that made history

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This is the gripping story of three extraordinary people - the world's first woman to become a man through surgery, the former Spitfire pilot who became Britain's first man to become a woman and the daring advanced plastic surgeon who carried out their sex change operations in the 1940s. Surgical gender reassignment is now almost a commonplace procedure, but then it was seen as 'science fiction surgery' and when the news broke it was a sensation. Michael Dillon, originally called Laura, had persuaded the brilliant Sir Harold Gillies - the founding father of plastic surgery thanks to his pioneering work with badly injured soldiers from both World Wars - to carry out the female-to-male operation that no surgeon in the world had ever attempted. Both men then helped former racing car driver and wartime pilot Robert Cowell change his own gender and become a woman.