In 1942, he convinced a surgeon to perform a double mastectomy, and by 1944 he had had his birth certificate amended to reflect his new status as male. Given the British media’s recent pained wrangling with the very idea of gender affirmation as a potential ‘slippery slope’, the fact that more straightforward access to medical transition and legal gender recognition was available during the Second World War than is often the case today is astonishing. The mainstream media’s presumption that strict ‘controls’ on transition are and have always been necessary relies on the suppression, and
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