Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell (8 April 1918 – 11 October 2011) was a British racing driver and Second World War fighter pilot.

At the time, one of her hobbies was photography and filmmaking, and she was briefly arrested in Germany for shooting a cine film of a group of Nazis drilling.

Shortly before the D-Day landings, on 4 June 1944, she had a lucky escape when the oxygen system of her Spitfire malfunctioned at 31,000 feet (9,400 m) over Fruges, France.

[15] South east of Kessel, Cowell attacked targets on the ground, but her aircraft's engine was knocked out and its wing holed by German anti-aircraft fire.

Cowell was flying too low to bail-out and instead jettisoned the cockpit canopy and glided her Typhoon to a successful deadstick crash-landing.

[16] However, the attempts failed and she was taken further into Germany, spending several weeks in solitary confinement at an interrogation centre for captured Allied aircrew,[16] before being moved to the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft I.

[16][17] Cowell remained a prisoner for around five months, occupying the time by teaching classes in automotive engineering to fellow inmates.

She was offered the part of a woman in a camp theatrical production but turned it down, as she thought this would make her appear homosexual in the eyes of other prisoners.

[19][20][Note 5] In June 1941, Cowell married Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter[10] (1917–2006),[21] who also had been an engineering student at UCL with an interest in motor racing.

[Note 6] After demobilisation, Cowell was engaged in a number of business ventures until, in 1946, she founded a motor-racing team and competed in events across Europe, including the Brighton Speed Trials and the Grand Prix at Rouen-Les-Essarts.

She also experienced traumatic flashbacks when watching the film Mine Own Executioner, in which the hero is shot-down by anti-aircraft fire while flying a Spitfire.

Sessions with a second Freudian psychiatrist, described in her biography only as a Scottish man with a less orthodox approach to his profession, gradually revealed, in her own words, that her "unconscious mind was predominantly female" and "feminine side of my nature, which all my life I had known of and severely repressed, was very much more fundamental and deep-rooted than I had supposed".

[26] She had become acquainted with Michael Dillon, a British physician who was the first trans man to get a phalloplasty, after reading his 1946 volume Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics.

Secrecy was necessary for this as the procedure was then illegal in the United Kingdom under so-called "mayhem" laws and no surgeon would agree to perform it openly.

The operation was carried out by Sir Harold Gillies, widely considered the father of plastic surgery,[28] with the assistance of American surgeon Ralph Millard.

[29] The name on her birth certificate was changed on 17 May of that year,[30] on production of a statutory declarations by Cowell and Charles Eugene Dusseau, who was a Canadian doctor.

[34] Such reports tended to conflate the unrelated concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity, so transsexuality had become closely associated in the public mind with male homosexuality (during this period, highly taboo) and effeminacy amongst men.

Her marriage, her parenting of children, her wartime combat service and her association with motor racing were, during this period, perceived as strong markers of heterosexual masculinity; these aspects of her life were described repeatedly in press reports.

Her funeral was attended by only six people and (on her instructions) was unpublicised; her death was not publicly reported until two years later, when a profile of her was printed in The Independent newspaper in October 2013.