Two of my favorite larger than life early transsexual women are April Ashley and Coccinelle. Both are significant to trans history. I was reading through the Ashley’s hilarious biography again and had to share a passage:

A few months before the Italian tour, Coccinelle had vanished. When she reappeared she was smirking her head off. What had changed?  Coccinelle was in no mood to keep her secret. She threw off her clothes, fell backwards on to the sofa with her legs in the air and wide apart, and pointed between then with a long carmine fingernail. ‘Now, M’Lady, what do you thin of THAT!”

‘Jesus, Monique…’ I’d never before seen her without her cache-sexe. She had a very pretty body (with remarkably beautiful feet) and now there was no doubting the brilliance of the work between her legs. She had, as far as one could see without getting too close, a five-star vagina.

‘Where did you get it?’

April Ashley

‘Aha, that would be telling. I’ve been sworn to secrecy!’ She could be such a tiresome beast. Coxy donned a blue chiffon robe trimmed with ostrich feathers. It was ultra-see-through and she posed about in it so that everyone could see that there was nothing a-dangle.

I knew I had found my doctor.

Coccinelle had paved the way as a result of the extraordinary degree to which she regarded her body as an adjustable object. She’d had masses of silicone injections in her breasts. She’d had five nose jobs – transvestites and transsexuals are obsessed with remodeling the nose. When her nose collapsed to nothing, she tried to have a sixth to build it up again but it wasn’t possible with mere nostrils to work with. As a young boy Coxy had been ugly, with a nose that went on for miles, hence, her passion for having it sawn down until nothing was left, just two holes that glared at you in the front of her face.

Coccinelle

April goes on to say that she was “priggish” in her opinions of Coccinelle:

Bambi and I disapproved of Coccinelle… we came to the conclusion that not only was Coxy an exhibitionist, of the demi-monde but, underneath it all, she was also a man, a homosexual transvestite whose passion for the knife was driven by vanity, the desperate need to be admired.

In recalling her opinions, she wrote…

How prissy we were! How sure and how simple-minded. Coxy was far more complex than all of that. I t would have taken twenty-five psychiatrists to sort her out. Compared to us little puritans, she was awesomely liberated, always floating around in big cars, swathed in minks, oozing sex.

When it came time to have vaginoplasty, Coccinelle was Ashley’s only supporter.

• More info on Coccinelle
• More on April Ashley