Learning to Speak Softly: The Autobiography of Roberta Cowell

The presentation uses the autobiography of motor racing driver Robert Cowell who became one of the first high profile cases of transgender identity in British sport history: hence its the title Roberta Cowell, Her Story by Herself. The book has a preface written by Canon Millbourn and was published by Heinemann in Melbourne, London and Toronto in 1954. The preface suggests that the author spoke quietly in this book and because of that deserves sober reading and sympathetic understanding. It begins ‘It is a strange story I have to tell; too fantastic to be fiction...’ It remains unclear whether Roberta Cowell is alive and what happened to her after the mid 1970s and early 1980s.