The next morning while studying in the library, Sarah spent a few minutes searching online for books about or by Gordon Langley Hall/Dawn Simmons. She was disappointed that the university library didn’t have a copy of Mrs. Simmons’s autobiography, but she was thrilled to see that it was in the collection of the county public library. A five-minute drive, a quick search through the stacks, and she had the book in hand. With the information from the obituary and the autobiography, she looked forward to her human genetics class in the afternoon and hoped that she could get a few minutes after class to speak with her instructor about the “Lady” Dawn.
Later, after she had had dinner and was relaxing on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate in hand, Sarah started reading Mrs. Simmons’s book. Armed with the knowledge she had gained from her discussion with her genetics professor, she was ready to look critically at the biological possibilities that this story of sexual ambiguity raised.
In her reading, Sarah discovered that Mrs. Simmons was quite a namedropper, with an amazing cast of characters in her past including British aristocracy, famous writers, and American celebrities, most of whom were women. However, the truly interesting parts of the book were about Dawn’s “secret,” including a description of the bleeding episodes that caused her to be occasionally bedridden. Unfortunately, Mrs. Simmons provided little detail about her operation and reassignment as a female, and even less about her courtship and the conception of her child.
Sarah concluded from reading the book that Mrs. Simmons was pregnant twice, with the first pregnancy resulting in a miscarriage and the second in a live birth at a Pennsylvania hospital. Proof of the pregnancy and live birth were offered in the form of a birth certificate from the hospital identifying Dawn Langley Simmons and John Paul Simmons as the mother and father of a child born October 17, 1971.
“Well, this book and my conversation with my genetics professor have convinced me,” Sarah murmured to herself. “This is a true story—stranger than fiction. Virginia Woolf could not have imagined that her Orlando would come to life.”
Originally published at http://www.sciencecases.org/lady/lady2.asp
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