Georgina Somerset: Ever a lady but not quite a gentleman

Her father’s funeral posed a problem, since the rest of the family were expecting George, the youngest son, to be present

1923-2013

GEORGINA Somerset, who has died aged 90, lived the first 34 years of her life as a man, having been wrongly registered at birth as a boy.

A high-profile “intersexual” (a person born with both male and female characteristics), in 1962 she became the first woman in the UK known to have legally married in a church after officially changing sex.

Her earliest recollections were of wanting to be a girl though she had been brought up as George Turtle, the youngest son of a Surrey dentist.

George grew up asexual, attended boys’ schools, went to college and joined the Royal Navy in the dying days of World War 2.

By the mid-1950s, practising as a dentist, Turtle had recognised that he was an intersexual and had started to develop breasts while being treated with oestrogen hormones. In November 1957, while trying to live as a woman, he was dragged into a field and raped.

In 1960 Turtle’s birth certificate was finally corrected to show “him” as a girl named Georgina Carol Turtle. Two years later, she married Christopher Somerset, a design engineer, and settled at Hove, where she ran a busy dental practice until her retirement in 1985.

The youngest of three children, Georgina was born on March 23 1923 at Purley, Surrey, and christened George Edwin Turtle. Educated at Croydon High School for Boys, and later Reigate Grammar School for Boys, he studied dentistry at King’s College Hospital in London, qualifying in 1944. After being called up as the war in Europe ended, he served as a pipe-smoking surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy until 1948, at which point he established a dental practice in Croydon.

During the 1950s Turtle undertook a traumatic quest for medical and legal acceptance as a woman. As he put it in his book Over the Sex Border (1963), society’s attitude was that “one was either wholly male with a short back and sides, or wholly female”.

There were few aspects of his life that remained untouched by the rigid distinctions of the day: in 1945 his father, a prominent Freemason, had initiated both his sons into the organisation, but George felt compelled to resign in 1953 after being advanced to the rank of “worshipful master”.

Obstetricians of the 1920s worked mainly on the evidence of their eyes, though Turtle believed that, in his case, there must have been some confusion, because his birth was registered later than the legal time limit. In the days before genetic testing and other more rigorous checks, what Turtle described as a “malformed penis” decided his sexual destiny.

His parents never referred to the possibility of confusion and Turtle remembered longing to wear pink dresses. He always regarded himself as a girl. He found ways to change for games out of sight of his schoolmates, and was accepted into the navy after the most cursory of medical examinations.

After the war, however, though insisting that he had been neither homosexual nor effeminate, “I found it increasingly difficult to pretend to be the ‘man’ that my upbringing demanded of me.”

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 he was told that he was an hermaphrodite, unable to function as a man and with dominant female characteristics.

Turtle was told what he had known all along: that biologically he was female, his body possessed female receptors, and he needed oestrogen “like a baby needs milk”.

As a boy, a tiny, nonfunctioning testicle had been removed but the sexologist detected signs of a second, “failed” gonad that, he warned, would almost certainly turn out to be an ovary.

Later, during an appendectomy, Turtle was also found to have a rudimentary womb. The answer, he was told, was a sex change. After taking one look at Turtle, fresh from his dental surgery clad in black morning coat and pinstripe trousers, the eminent plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies waved him away, explaining later: “I do not really think you look or could be made to look like a woman.”

In January 1957, after minor corrective surgery, Georgina Turtle finally felt she had become herself, leaving the clinic in her first outfit of women’s clothes. She moved to a rented bungalow near Bognor Regis to let her hair grow and to establish herself as a female.

But her rape ordeal the following November confined her to bed for several weeks with pneumonia and, after contemplating suicide, Turtle cut off her long hair and went back to living like a man.

Other men mocked her in the street and it was only when she retreated to a rented cottage near Brighton that she felt able to revert to her female persona.

Her father’s funeral in July 1959 posed a problem, since the rest of the family were expecting George, the youngest son, to be present. Georgina had her hair shorn again, her manicured nails trimmed, and went to the funeral wearing a man’s dark suit. She lived as a man again for nine months while her father’s affairs were wound up.

Early in 1960 Turtle sold her dental practice. He left Croydon as a man and arrived at her new home in Hove as a woman.

This time the metamorphosis was final and irrevocable and, after sworn medical testimony from her doctors and surgeons, she was issued with a corrected birth certificate that registered her as Georgina Carol Turtle.

The sex-change of Gina Turtle, as she preferred to be called, caused a Fleet Street frenzy, as did her engagement, announced on the court and social page of The Daily Telegraph in June 1962.

At her wedding to Somerset, at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in October, Gina asked her brother to give her away, then two uncles and finally her family doctor — all declined. Her Plumpton landlord stepped in and what The People newspaper billed as the “strangest fashionable wedding on record” went ahead without a hitch.

Though re-registered as a woman, Gina Somerset was nearly 40 when a genetic test revealed a rare mosaic of chromosomes: a Y male chromosome (accounting for her deep contralto voice) coupled with the female chromosomal makeup of Turner’s syndrome, a disorder that, without oestrogen treatment, can stunt growth and lead to infertility and retarded breast development.

Georgina Somerset’s birth registration mistake returned to haunt her at the age of 60 when, on applying for her state pension, she was told that she would have to work for another five years. In the UK at that time, women qualified at age 60 and men at 65. In 30 years the social security authorities had not changed her status, but agreed to do so when it was pointed out that the applicant was now, legally, a woman.

She published a memoir, A Girl Called Georgina, in 1992 when she was 68, having lived for 34 years as a man and 34 as a woman, reporting that she was in better health than ever, even though she had not taken oestrogen for about 20 years.

She declared herself to be a regular size 12, weighing 59kg, 1.73m tall, slim, with an 86cm bust, long slender fingers, brown eyes, blonde hair and a very fair complexion — on account, perhaps, of the fact that she had never shaved in her life. —