‘My father said I should take rat poison’
As Germany recognises the ‘third sex’, Julia Llewellyn Smith talks to controversial British socialite Lady Colin Campbell, who was brought up as a boy
LADY Colin Campbell is best known for her royal biographies, in particular her book Diana in Private (“One of my closest friends was one of her closest friends”), which caused a sensation when it was published because of its revelations about Diana’s eating disorders, affair with James Hewitt and tales of marital strife. She was dismissed as a fantasist only to be later vindicated.
But royal scandals are nothing in comparison with the roller coaster that has been the 64-year-old’s own life. Born into Jamaica’s prominent Ziadie family, she gained her aristocratic title on marrying Colin Campbell, younger brother of Britain’s 12th Duke of Argyll, in 1974. But when they broke up acrimoniously, she claims, he sold the tabloids the — inaccurate — story that she had been born a boy.
Her outrage at his betrayal is undimmed with time. “I bitterly resent it. I resented it then, I resent it now and I will resent it until my dying day,” she said in her endearing half-Jamaican, half-upper-crust accent. “It was wildly inappropriate.”
We are sitting in the living room of Campbell’s flat in an unglamorous corner of south London, surrounded by oil paintings and antiques that would not look out of place in Buckingham Palace. We are meeting to discuss the news that Germany now legally recognises a “third gender”. Babies born with ambiguous genitalia — as happens to one in 2 000 children — will no longer have to be defined by parents as boys or girls because birth certificates in that country will allow a third option: “undetermined”.
Germany will be the first European country to pass such a law, which is also on the statutes in Australia and Nepal. “I think it’s a sensible law,” said Campbell. “It will stop children from being pigeonholed inappropriately from an early age, with all the attendant difficulties of having legal documents that then have to be amended.”
She “would have been one who would have qualified for the German remedy”. She was born with genital deformities, which led to her being registered as a boy and christened George William Ziadie, even though doctors would later confirm she was biologically female.
“The international protocol in those days was to do what they did; it was perfectly standard. In 1949, the feeling was that it was infinitely better to give a handicapped child a little plus, and male was much better than female.”
From around the age of three, however, it was clear to everyone who knew her that Georgie, as she has always been known, was a girl. She dressed in shorts and T-shirts — “but that’s what all children in Jamaica wear, so it made no difference” — but played with dolls and loved sewing. “Cousins would say to my mother: ‘Why is Georgie being brought up as a boy?’ Still, my gender wasn’t that big a deal until I hit puberty. Then it became a real issue.”
From 11 to 18, she was made to attend her father’s old school, an all-boys’ Catholic seminary, where she was bullied relentlessly. “It was horrendous, like a glimpse into the bowels of hell.”
At 13, with her body developing obvious female traits and realising she was attracted to boys, she secretly consulted her mother’s gynaecologist, who was sympathetic to her plight. But when her parents found out, they placed her in the hands of a sadistic husband-and-wife medical team. They hospitalised her “for the most terrifying three weeks of my life”, injecting her with male hormones that made her voice drop and her nipples shrink and caused hair to develop on her upper lip.
She put her foot down and treatment ceased. But for the next five years her father continued to refuse to help her. “He used everything in his power to prevent the inevitable denouement”— in other words, allow his son to live as a daughter.
“The only way out he could conceive was that I should commit suicide. He told me: ‘ The one solution to your problem is a dose of rat poison.’ ”
By her late teens, Campbell was living openly as a girl. “My friends could not have been more agreeable. They thought my situation was quite exotic.”
She moved to New York to study fashion design, holding her head high and disguising “acute embarrassment” as puzzled tutors repeatedly asked why she was registered as a boy. She began modelling and dating men, making her even more desperate to claim “my true identity”.
Eventually, her grandmother, “ballistic” on having learnt the truth, offered the $5 000 needed for surgery. It was performed in New York. “No one ever faced the knife more eagerly than I — you would have thought I was going on a wonderful cruise.” When she was 21, all mention of gender was removed from her first birth certificate and a second was issued with the name Georgia Ziadie — and sex: female.
The story was far from over, however. At 24, she agreed to marry Colin Campbell after knowing him for just five days, telling him about her past before the wedding. He quickly revealed himself to be a violent alcoholic and drug addict. When she left him after nine months, stories emerged that her husband had not known her physical history before the wedding and that people in his circle thought he had married a transvestite.
She successfully sued the papers that claimed she had had a sex change, but salacious rumours have dogged her ever since. There have been several love affairs (“There’s something about me; even without makeup, men always made a beeline for me”), but she suspects the scandal is one of the reasons she never remarried.
Campbell is hugely eccentric, with a tendency to bang on about her beauty — an understandable retort to decades of prurient gossip about one’s gender. But she is also clever, kind and fun.
“I’m living proof that whatever happens to you in life, you can turn base metal into gold,” she said. “I’ve always been loving and outgoing, and wanted to be happy. Just because you’re born disabled, it doesn’t mean you have to end up having a terrible life. You make choices and you can choose to embrace life. Bloody hell, it’s up to you.”— © The Sunday Telegraph, London