For Your Eyes Only

Once in a while I bought a Playboy magazine, but when I went to purchase the copy of Playboy in 1991 with Tula I thought lights and sirens would go off with signs pointing to me saying “Crossdresser!”

BOND GIRL TULA WAS THE FIRST TRANSGENDER WOMAN TO BARE IT ALL IN PLAYBOY MAGAZINE
By Shane Michael Singh
June 22, 2015

Before Bruce Jenner sat down with Diane Sawyer, before Laverne Cox earned an Emmy nod for Orange Is the New Black and before President Barack Obama appointed the first transgender woman to a senior government position, there was Tula. A striking six-foot-tall British model whose face graced magazine covers and popped up in national ad campaigns for vodka and lingerie in the 1970s, Caroline “Tula” Cossey never yearned to be more than a working model and, someday, a wife. But when her enormous success as a model backfired into public hysteria, she had decisions to make. She could stand and fight, or she could run away. She chose to fight. In the wake of it all, Tula would become the first of many things, much to her surprise.

In June 1981, Tula debuted as a Bond girl in For Your Eyes Only. To promote the film, she, along with the film’s other Bond girls, appeared in a Playboy pictorial, images from which appear in these pages. Tula’s career was soaring. Life was good. But everything changed the following year. The British tabloid News of the World revealed Tula’s secret in a single headline: JAMES BOND GIRL WAS A BOY.

I remember all the media that surrounded her, I couldn’t read enough or watch enough about her. The times had changed since Renee Richards came out and this was the male bastion “Playboy” and here it was featuring a “transsexual!” Somewhere in my pile of trans memorabilia is the copy that I saved.

The article goes onto a Q&A with Ms. Cossey,

Was your retirement from public life voluntary or forced?
My career had definitely taken a turn. I was being offered only trans roles on shows like Hill Street Blues. I thought, No, that’s not right. I didn’t like it. There’s a difference between being known as Tula the transsexual international model versus just a successful model. It wasn’t the same. I felt like a circus act. I was also on a tour for my second book, doing eight interviews a day. It became overwhelming, and I got burnt out. Two, three years into it I worried about my sanity. I wanted quiet. I wanted peace of mind and to fall back into society in a more regular manner as a loving and supportive wife. For that reason, I became reclusive for an awfully long time.
[…]
Has the growing acceptance of LGBT people made life easier?
I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling like a second-class citizen. It’s embedded and instilled from birth. You grow up, you don’t fit in, you don’t belong, you’re bullied. That doesn’t go away in five minutes. I don’t think it ever goes away. When I look back at it all, what I went through was tragic. But how do you deal with pain? You shrug it off. That’s the British way of doing it, at least. [laughs] I do feel a hell of a lot better. I’m an optimist and try to make light of the tragedies I went through, to see the funny side, and that has helped tremendously. I’m never going to be ashamed of something I had no control over, but I don’t want to walk around with it written on my forehead. I know I felt great when I was successful as a model, before my career took off in a different direction.

Speaking of your career, the job that started—and nearly ended—it all was For Your Eyes Only. The Bond films are bigger than ever, winning Oscars and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. If you were to get a phone call tomorrow asking you to appear in another Bond movie, what would you say?
There’s not a big calling for 60-year-old transsexual women. [laughs] I would hear it out. I would never say no to something that’s tastefully done, but I’m not expecting to grace any covers anytime soon.

I would love to see her back in pictures.

When her book “My Story” came out I once again summoned my courage and bought it and this time it was even harder because it wasn’t Playboy but a book by and about a “transsexual” but the clerk didn’t even blink an eyelash.

Oh by the way, her photos in Playboy didn't really "bare it all."

P.S. Her ebook "My Story" is now on sale on Amazon... no more sneaking into bookstores to buy it.