Roberta Cowell, best known as Betty to her friends, was a notable British WWII Fighter Pilot who very publically underwent sex reassignment surgery and legal status as a woman in Post-World War II England.

It is notable that Roberta is a somewhat vilified figure in the wider modern transgender community as her own words (on transgender people) were harshly critical of transgender men and women. In interviews she loudly proclaimed that her own gender transition was due to her being intersex, and that she did not understand nor seem to approve of other people transitioning who were not intersex like her.

Earlier in life, Roberta was married and had two children, later divorcing and remaining single for the rest of her life. She loved racecars and was a volunteer member of the British Armed Forces as a fighter pilot. She suffered at a Nazi Prisoner of War camp for over 5 months following a crash landing in Germany occupied territory and survived during WWII.

Later in life, following her divorce and a long bout of depression, she underwent an orchiectomy by a surgeon, Michael Dillon, who was a transgender man, illegally in secret. This gained her the ability to get her birth certificate changed to intersex, which allowed her to later legally receive plastic surgery for vaginoplasty. This was the first known medical sex/gender-affirming reassignment surgery in England and was highly and widely publicized. Roberta was undeniably a trailblazer of transgender awareness, despite her own personal fixation on chromosomal DNA validating or invalidating a person’s right to transition. Most historians believe this is a product of her being of her time and era where anti-transgender sentiments ran commonplace in all media and medical arenas alike.