It was 1976. I was a stand-in for a doctor on holiday, in a down and nearly out city practice, no fresh paint applied anywhere for many years. The surgery was up a flight of scruffy and poorly lit stairs above a chemist’s shop. I, a newbie, naive, middle class, English family doc, was about to be served up a two week bonanza of eye-popping experiences.

Georgina walked into the consulting room. As she moved towards me, my eyes were drawn to her bright, shiny and, enlarged with lipstick, lips. On sitting down she pursed those lips and checked her hair. ‘Jesus she’s flirting with me’. Her perfume was powerful, too sweet for my liking. Once seated, something snapped my attention to her neck.

I spied a prominent Adams’s apple. This was a first for me! Georgina was to be one of the major highlights of many.

There were many rumours about the doctor I was working for. He was according to these a user of hard stuff and an alcoholic. One of his patients told me that for two years, while he was in rehab, his wife ran the practice. She signed all the necessary documents, prescriptions, etc. She arranged bloods, etc; and she wasn’t even a nurse. I wondered how they had got away with this for so long. Turns out this doctor and his wife were deeply liked and appreciated.

My job mostly involved signing sick notes, accident compensation forms and scripts; and chatting with people who lived very strange, for me, lifestyles.

The cupboards in his office were dangerous to open. To do so was to be avalanched with many years worth of drug rep samples. Medical journals lay in piles on the floor, undisturbed and unread. The flat surfaces were dusty. The loo didn’t smell too good either. The clientele varied from the complete down and outs, to TV personalities, to ambassadors, to drug abusers by the score and to any kind of misfit you could imagine making you uncomfortable. There were very few ‘normal people’ dropping in to see me.

On my third day I was no longer sure of my own sanity. I rang my wife, Tish, during the lunch break to chat with her and get some grounding and reassurance.

This doctor was providing a service that others weren’t. Folk came from fifty or more miles for their regular check ups and chats. It soon dawned on me, he had empathy and a fellow feeling for his struggling customers, that they almost certainly couldn’t get anywhere else. He had suffered. He knew suffering.

To get back to Georgina. I looked at her notes and saw she was taking female hormones. She was I assumed a transvestite.

“What can I do for you Georgina”? I enquired.

“You have probably guessed I’m a tranny. All I want is a sick note and three months supply of my hormone pills”. She pursed her lips again and pulled on her skirt and made a thing of crossing her legs.

“What does your doctor put on your sick note? You look pretty fit to me”. Maybe not the best word to use, fit I mean. My unfortunate use of a word in a few years time was to get me into trouble.

“Not as fit as when I played representative rugby”. She smiled. “He usually puts down some kind of mental emotional problem”.

I wrote out her sick note and prescription as ordered. I could not help noticing her breasts and an obvious cleavage. They were surprisingly large and full. She caught me looking.

“What do you think of my tits”? She sat up straight and pushed them out.

“They look good ones to me. I mean, oh never mind. Are they transplants or drug enhanced”? I was curious and I was also beginning to feel somewhat awkward and uncomfortable.

“No fear doc, these are real flesh and blood ones. They are all mine. They have grown like this since I have been taking oestrogens. All I need now is an operation down below to remove my pecker and I’ll be right”.

‘A little operation and Bob’s your auntie’, I thought.

“I am saving up for it now. I am going to Egypt to get it done, hopefully within two years”. She winked at me. “Do you want to have a look at my tits or not doc? They are worth a peek”.

I nodded. Curiosity killed the cat. She lifted up her blouse. They looked virginal and teenage. She walked over to me holding her blouse up. She bent down to my level. She was only two feet away. She was into garlic.

“Would you like to have a feel, lover boy. Go on, I won’t bite”?

I declined the offer. She winked at me, dressed herself up, took the prescription, her sick note and left.

Next please!

“Hey man, I am in a lot of pain. Dr usually gives me pain killers”.

‘Oh Dear! Here we go’.

Commentary

What a peculiar site, a body with breasts and a penis, the mind boggles, mine did.

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom (citation 1967 c. 60). It decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21. The Act applied only to England and Wales and did not cover the Merchant Navy or the Armed Forces.

1973 – On 15 October the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council declares homosexuality not an illness – the first such body in the world to do so….

My my, how things have changed. I witnessed the following operation not long after homosexuality had been decriminalised but was still a disease!!!

I was a medical student walking past theatres one day, when a surgeon caught me by the arm. He looked at my name tag.

“Will you help us with an operation please”?

It was a private op, nothing to do with the NHS. (I didn’t see any money.) I scrubbed and gowned up. The patient’s penis and scrotum were hanging through a hole in the surgical covers. I had no idea what they were about to do. Next thing, this guy, the surgeon, incised the scrotum and pulled the testicles out. He cut them off and threw them in a plastic bucket.

“Excuse me sir, What are you doing?”

“This chap is having a sex change operation. He’ll be a she soon”.

“Really”, was all I could say. This would have been about 1969.

Next, through the hole in the scrotum he skinned the core of the penis, separated the core from the skin. Just like skinning a rabbit. He flicked the core out of the skin and chopped the core off, at the base, plastic bucket in use again. Then through the hole in the scrotum which the testicles had been removed from, the surgeon placed a metal penile shaped object in front of the rectum and pushed it in and up to make a cave. Next he inverted the penile skin into this cave. The outer skin of the penis now became the lining of this man-made vagina. Next he sewed the pee pipe into a wee hole he made in the scrotum. A few nips and tucks and the rest of the scrotum became the lips of the vagina. I was impressed by the technology but sickened by what I had seen and the speed of it, brutal. Half an hour and Bob’s really your Auntie,

This surgeon told me of a client who was a stripper in Hong Kong and that she was a highly sort after high class escort and her clients have no idea that they are sleeping with a woman who was a man. She uses artificial lubricants and a dilator to keep things functioning, the vagina from not closing up. I wondered what happens when she orgasms, after all she still has a prostate and seminal vesicles? I didn’t ask.

He told me of another client who is officially married and has, with her husband, adopted two kids. This couple is in the upper echelons of a small rural village in England and no one knows. They attend church and many local functions as Mr and Mrs so and so.