The Transformation of Tula

They May have always been with us, these individuals who feel at odds with the bodies in which they were born. Outwardly, they appear to be male; inwardly, they are convinced that they're female. (In rarer cases, the mismatch is reversed.) Historians speak of such persons as being more or less accepted members of society in ancient Anatolia, Scythia, Alexandria and elsewhere. Not until the latter half of this century, however, was a name--transsexualism--given the condition, and surgical means devised to reshape the shell of the body to conform to the patient's inner perception. The drive that compels the true transsexual to take such a drastic step is one of the diagnostic clues that separate him/her from the transvestite, who identifies himself as male--and wants to remain one--but gets a sexual frisson from dressing in women's clothing.

In 1953, an American ex-GI named George Jorgensen, Jr., underwent the first highly publicized sex-change surgery, emerging from a Copenhagen hospital as Christine Jorgensen. Thousands have followed, among the better known being tennis star Renée Richards, born Richard Raskind; British travel writer Jan Morris, who as newspaperman James Morris accompanied the 1953 expedition that conquered Mount Everest; and composer Walter Carlos, who pioneered music for the synthesizer before becoming Wendy Carlos--and coming out of the transsexual closet in a trail-blazing May 1979 "Playboy Interview."

No longer taboo, the topic of transsexualism today turns up everywhere, from an episode of "L.A. Law" to "Donahue," from a public-television documentary to a nationwide contest for an Oprah Winfrey look-alike, whose sponsors red-facedly discovered that the winner was a male in the process of gender reassignment.

Although scientists now recognize the existence of the phenomenon of transsexualism, they aren't in agreement about its causes. In yet another replay of the nature-us.-nurture debate, some authorities cite psychological influences exerted by parents, while others are coming to the conclusion that transsexuals are born, not made. Chromosomal abnormalities are sometimes found. Other studies have revealed that, in the normal course of events, a male fetus is exposed to massive doses of male hormone at the time his brain is taking shape. If something, possibly stress or medication taken by the mother--hormonal therapy and barbiturates have been implicated--interferes with that process, the baby can be born with outwardly masculine sexual characteristics but a feminine brain. He/she is a transsexual--a human being who feels trapped in the wrong body.

This is the story of such a person and of her metamorphosis from man to woman.

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Barry Cossey hated school in Brooke, the little village in England's county of Norfolk where he was born. He didn't enjoy the rough-and-tumble of the other boys' games; the bigger ones bullied him and called him sissy. His closest companion was his sister, Pam, with whom he played dolls and dressed up in their mum's clothes. As he grew into adolescence and began to experience the budding of sexual feelings, he feared that he might be homosexual.

It turned out to be much more complicated than that.

Today, the former Barry Cossey is Caroline Cossey--or, to her friends in the modeling field, Tula--and a crusader for the rights of her fellow transsexuals.

If I hadn't been aware of Tula's history before we met over lunch in a trendy restaurant in London's Holland Park district, it never would have occurred to me that she was anything other than 100 percent female. She's tall (six feet), graceful, well proportioned (37-25-37) and drop-dead gorgeous; her voice has just a trace of huskiness and her gestures, even her choice of conversational topics, are completely feminine. Obviously, this woman thinks like a woman.

The fact that some see her as a freak, a victim of mutilation, a seeker of publicity still takes her by surprise. "I can't understand why people don't realize that my predicament had nothing to do with choice," she says. "I never was a man. I always felt I was a woman. I just needed my body changed to fit my self-image. I had to do what I did. I know that I would have finished up with my life if I hadn't got medical help. But I never meant to go public with my story. My secret would have gone to the grave with me if the tabloids hadn't come out with it. I spoke up to set the record straight, and now I'm speaking out for the rights of transsexuals everywhere."

Tula's transformation didn't happen overnight. She started taking female hormones in her late teens, while working as a dancer; next came breast-augmentation surgery, "which helped me earn more money, because I could dance topless." Her career as a showgirl took her to many parts of the world, but all the time, she lived with the fear that someone would discover the truth behind her masquerade. As camouflage, she made herself a special G string "with the strongest elastic I could find. It was painful, but I got used to it." Particularly awkward was the time in Paris when she had to wash off body make-up in communal facilities backstage: "I would shower in my G string, and the other dancers put my apparent shyness down to the fact that I was English." Finally, after years of hormone treatments and psychological counseling, Tula was ready for the irrevocable step: sex-change surgery, or, to use the current euphemism, gender reassignment. Before she could be accepted as a suitable candidate, doctors administered various tests, including one that revealed that she had been born with a chromosomal abnormality. Tula has three X and one Y chromosomes, instead of the normal patterns: XY for males, XX for females.

"So I could never have been a normal man. I could never have fathered a child, for instance. Chromosomally, my body seemed to be at war with itself."

The operation took place in London's Charing Cross Hospital on New Year's Eve, 1974, and Tula went back to Norfolk to convalesce at the home of her parents--who, after their initial shock at learning their son wanted to become their (continued on page 158)Tula(continued from page 105) daughter, had been warmly supportive.

During the next few years, Tula's career--by then as a model and an actress--blossomed, as did her personal life. "Now that I could enjoy sex as a woman, I'm afraid I went a little wild," she says. "Fortunately, that was all before AIDS."

In answer to the obvious question, yes, Tula is orgasmic. That's more easily understood when one realizes that some of the sensitive tissues of her original sexual apparatus were retained in the surgical reconstruction.

"I suppose my sex life now is like any other woman's," she says. "Sometimes you can't relax and reach a climax; other times you do."

Modeling job followed modeling job, leading to what looked to be a big break: Tula was offered a role as one of the Bond Girls in the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. The part led to a nude photo in a June 1981 Playboy pictorial about the movie (she fooled us)--and, eventually, to exposure of a different sort. One Sunday in 1982, a headline in the tabloid News of the World blared, "James Bond Girl was a Boy."

"I was devastated," Tula recalls. "There, I thought, went all my hopes of leading a normal life. I was hounded by journalists everywhere I went, and their lack of understanding--the kinds of ignorant questions they asked--made me determined to tell my side of the story."

The result was her first book, the paperback Tula: I Am a Woman. After the attendant hoopla died down, a psychologically wearied Tula decided to accept only low-key modeling assignments. On one such, a skiwear shoot in Italy, she met an Italian advertising executive who was knowledgeable about transsexualism. "His name was Count Glauco Lasinio, and he was the first man I'd been out with who knew from the beginning all about my past. Eventually, we fell in love, and to my surprise, he asked me to marry him."

It was the count who urged Tula to seek changes in British law regarding transsexuals, law that is full of inconsistencies. Although Tula's British passport says she's female, her birth certificate says she's male. Britain's National Health program pays for sex-change surgery, but the government refuses to treat the postsurgery patient as female if she wants to marry. To complicate matters further, Tula contributes to her health insurance at the rate charged a woman, but she won't be able to collect a pension until she's 65 (woman are eligible at 60). If she were to commit a crime, she'd be sent to a men's prison, with all the images of assault that that entails.

So, with encouragement from her Italian fiancé, Tula began the seven-year process that would take her petition, challenging the British government's refusal to treat her as a woman, to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. The case was to outlast her engagement to Glauco, which she broke off over an episode of infidelity, and would even outlive her marriage to a wealthy Jewish businessman, Elias Fattal, whom she still calls the love of her life.

Elias and Tula met in 1985. Seeking a career change, she had studied acupressure at the Oriental School of Medicine in London and was accepting private clients. Elias was looking for relief from a painful condition called polymyalgia rheumatica. Eventually, they became lovers and, on Valentine's Day, 1988, he proposed.

This left Tula with a problem. Although she had told Elias that medical problems made her unable to bear children, she had not actually told him about her sex change. Terrified of his possible reaction, she gave him a copy of her book and asked him to go away and read it. He refused, sat down and read it in her presence.

"When he got to the last page, he squeezed my hand and said, 'Well, you've certainly got balls, pet!'"

Not anymore, Elias, not anymore.

"I thought he'd change his mind about the proposal, but all he asked was that I consider converting to Judaism," Tula says. And she did, enrolling in a nine-month course in Jewish history and tradition and the elements of the Hebrew language.

This went part way toward mollifying Elias' parents, well-to-do orthodox Sephardic Jews who had come to England from Iraq and were none too pleased that their son was courting a gentile.

"That was bad enough, so I felt it wouldn't be wise to tell them I was a transsexual right away," Tula explains. "We had planned to tell them eventually, of course, after they had a chance to get to know me. We had even planned to give them grandchildren. Both my sister and a girlfriend had expressed willingness to become surrogate mothers and bear Elias' child."

After an initial coolness--Mrs. Fattal refused for three months to meet her son's fiancée--the senior Fattals seemed to accept their prospective daughter-in-law, to the point of taking over the wedding plans. Tula had wanted a quiet ceremony for family and friends, but Mrs. Fattal insisted on a lavish reception at London's Savoy Hotel.

The first hurdle, getting a marriage license, was surmounted when nobody asked Tula to produce a birth certificate. Meanwhile, a decision in Strasbourg was handed down in Tula's favor, ten votes to six, on May 9, 1989 (though the British government appealed), and on May 21, Elias and Tula were married at a liberal synagogue in St. Johns Wood, London.

The couple set out on a three-week honeymoon in Acapulco and Jamaica, which Tula still recalls with fondness.

"We were like a couple of teenagers. At Las Brisas, we had a private pool and we just wandered around naked and made love morning, noon and night. It was lovely. But on our return, my mother and sister were there at the airport to greet us [her father had died a year and a half earlier], and they looked upset. I said, 'What on earth is it? Have you crashed my car?' And my sister said, 'No,' and my mum started to cry, and then she showed me the paper. The News of the World had done it again. There it was on the front page: 'Sex change page Three Girl Weds.'

"So Elias called his mother, hoping she hadn't seen the papers. But she had. And he asked me to go with him to speak with his family, but I felt I couldn't face them just then--if they said the wrong thing, I'd just feel so hurt and rejected. In retrospect, that was my biggest mistake, letting Elias go to his family alone--because from that point on, he was gone.

"In the end, I guess he just couldn't stand up to his family. The sad thing is, I think he still does love me. You can't just stop loving somebody in five minutes."

For the first few months after Elias' departure, Tula could barely cope. There was a telephoned death threat, an attempt to sabotage the brakes of her Mercedes. "But after I reported that to the police, the threats stopped." As therapy, she began to write another book--just published in Britain under the title My Story, by Caroline Cossey--and went back to modeling. "Elias hadn't wanted me to work, so my career had been pretty much on hold for four years."

One of the things her agent, Yvonne Paul, suggested was posing for Playboy.

"As I said to Mr. Hefner when I finally met him, 'I want to do Playboy because it would help change people's attitudes. I would like readers to look at me as a woman, to see that transsexuals can be attractive, that we can look sexy and we don't have hairy chests and all the things that one conjures up about transsexuals--confusing them with transvestites, who are so different.' In other words, I wanted to make a statement."

Playboy was interested. As one editor put it, "If Playboy can't provide a tasteful forum in which a person can express his or her own sexuality, who can?" We commissioned Contributing Photographer Byron Newman to create the pictures you see here.

While waiting for her story to be published, Tula threw herself into the appeals process at Strasbourg. She visited the States, appearing on Donahue and giving interviews, always hopeful she'd win the case.

But on September 27, 1990, the court announced its decision: ten votes to eight against her right to change her birth certificate, 14 votes to four against her right to marry, leaving her and other British transsexuals in a no man's--or no woman's--land.

"I can only believe that when we join the European Community next year, that's going to raise some questions," Tula told me this past April, when we had lunch and talked in London. "Because in other European countries, transsexuals are entitled to rights, and we're supposed to be part of a common Europe. So I'll have another stab at changing the law then."

As she toyed with her cheese omelet, a young Asian man approached. Obviously recognizing Tula, he asked shyly whether or not she'd won her case in Strasbourg.

"No? You lost it? That's a shame."

"Well, I'll have another go next year."

"Good luck," said the man. "I wish you the best."

So do we.