Hemingway

It's a little-known fact that Ernest Hemingway began his life as a woman.  Born as Edith Mary Hemingway, she struggled to accept her gender as she always identified as a man.  Upon her return from nursing work on the Italian front in World War I, she began living as a man and styling herself Ernest, affecting a range of overtly macho behaviours, perhaps to distract from her feminine looks.  It was in Spain as a correspondent covering the civil war that Hemingway finally obtained the gender reassignment surgery that she craved.  This experience formed the basis of her semi-autobiographical novel, For Womb The Bell Tolls.