Our puppy is cloned from dog who saved mum’s life
Nicole Gibson spent years feeling trapped in the wrong body before changing sex. Now she’s the stunning face of a positive new TV campaign for more inclusivity…
A FAMILY has paid £44,000 have their heroic dog cloned.
Labrador-retriever Marley died months after saving pregnant Alicia Tschirhart from a venomous snake.
She and husband David, both lawyers, had DNA frozen until children Madeleine, five, and Colette, three, were old enough to appreciate a pet.
The family, from San Diego, California, welcomed Ziggy,
now four months, in December. David, 40, who got Marley in 2002 to when studying at the University of Michigan, said: “He was a constant part of our lives for 12 years. Now I feel like his presence is here again.” Marley came to the rescue of Alicia, 37, on a hike on San Diego’s Battle Mountain. He clawed at the ground to warn her as she reached for a stick near a coiled rattlesnake. David added: “We were so thankful.” Their dog was cloned by Texas firm ViaGen Pets, which had famously cloned actress Barbra Streisand’s pooch Samantha.
NICOLE Gibson is something of a chameleon. “One minute I’m walking the dog, kneedeep in mud, the next I’m raiding my best friend’s wardrobe for something to wear to a casting or black-tie do,” she laughs.
“Today, I’m helping a mate paint their new café. I’ve just had my hair done, so I need a 1940s scarf and lipstick. I do like a red lip – I could take on the world with it.”
Now, as one of the faces of a new ad campaign by coffee chain Starbucks celebrating LGTB+ inclusivity and calling for greater tolerance, the 39-year-old is doing just that.
The What’s Your Name? campaign, which has won Channel 4’s diversity award and will receive £1million-worth of advertising with the broadcaster, focuses on the significance of a person of any gender being able to refer to themselves in a way that feels right to them.
“As a transgender woman, choosing my own name was so important. It felt like something I had control over,” explains Nicole.
“One day I opened the paper, telling myself that I’d take the first female name I saw. There were a few stories about various Nicoles, so that was it.
“I was so chuffed that in the Starbucks campaign I get the opportunity to share a positive.”
Nicole’s journey from the child she was – Glenn – to the woman she is now is one she’s keen to share.
“I hope it might help someone. When I was going through it, I had absolutely no idea what was going on.”
BORN in Horsham, West Sussex, where she still lives, Nicole played with dolls and adored female cartoon characters. “As I pranced around the garden being She-Ra instead of He-Man, I began to sense that I might be a little bit different,” she chuckles.
As a child, she felt profound unease at her body. “It was as if it didn’t really belong to me. It’s a classic symptom of someone with gender dysphoria, but obviously I didn’t know that at the time,” Nicole explains.
“When people ask me now about my physical transition, I can’t ever tell them I was a born with a…” she trails off, laughing. “My goodness, I just can’t say it! I tell them I wasn’t born with a vagina, but have one now!”
Happily, all that unspoken childhood uneasiness was unfolding in a loving family atmosphere. “I was so lucky that my parents just let me get on with it.
They just wanted their children to be happy, and me playing with Sindy wasn’t hurting anyone.
“Looking back, after hearing horror stories from trans friends who have been ostracised by their families, I am so grateful.” .
Things changed, however,
‘As a child I felt as if my body didn’t belong to me. A classic case of gender dysphoria’
when Nicole went to the local secondary school.
“No one had batted an eyelid all through infant and middle school, because puberty hadn’t hit. But from then on, it was hell. I don’t think anyone had seen anything quite like me, really,” she muses, in a typically cheery understatement. “I didn’t look like a girl, but my voice and my mannerisms were very, very feminine.