Cowell had obtained sexual reassignment surgery on a technicality, by managing to get herself inaccurately diagnosed as intersex. Medical support for trans people, however, was still rare. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, individual trans patients continued to use the ambiguous and contested link between physical intersex traits and the psychological experience of gender dysphoria to get certain doctors to treat them – though, even then, few doctors would. A 1966 study in the British Medical Journal found that only ‘9% of psychiatrists, 6% of GPs, and 3% of surgeons’ would agree to actively
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