A random collection of over 1910 books and audiobooks authored by or about my transgender, intersex sisters, and gender-nonconforming persons all over the world. I read some of them, and I was inspired by some of them. I met some of the authors and heroines, some of them are my best friends, and I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing some of them. If you know of any transgender biography that I have not covered yet, please let me know.
1992,
English,
Georgina Somerset,
Georgina Turtle,
UK,
The author of the book, Georgina Carol Somerset, (1923–2013), born George Turtle, a transgender woman who claimed to be intersex, was a British dentist and Royal Navy officer. Her first book was published in 1963, she authored it with the name of Georgina Turtle - "Over the Sex Border"."
She was the first openly intersex person in the United Kingdom and the first intersex woman to be married in the Church of England. Her parents never referred to any possible confusion, and Turtle remembered longing to wear pink dresses and always regarded herself as a girl.
She found ways to change for games out of sight of her schoolmates, and was accepted as a man into the navy after the most cursory of medical examinations. After being called up as the war in Europe ended, she served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy until 1948, at which point she established a dental practice in Croydon.
During the 1950s she undertook a traumatic quest for medical and legal acceptance as a woman. A psychiatrist who believed Turtle's problem to be psychological, suggested electric shock treatment, but when Turtle turned to the leading sexologist of the day, she was told that he was physically a hermaphrodite, unable to function as a man and with dominant female characteristics.
She was told what she had known all along: that biologically she was female, her body possessed female receptors, and that she needed oestrogen “like a baby needs milk”.
In 1957 she decided to undergo gender reassignment surgery, after being rejected by the eminent plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, as she had turned up to her appointment in male clothes. In 1960, she got a new birth certificate with her chosen name of Georgina Carol Turtle and her sex as female. In 1962, she married Christopher Somerset in St Margaret's, Westminster, London, which made her the first known woman to marry in a church after officially changing sex. Georgina died on 30 November 2013.
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