I just finished reading the most bizarre biography I have ever read. The book is Peninsula Of Lies, subtitled "A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love," by Edward Ball. It begins when an English girl named Marjorie had an illegitimate baby she named  Gordon Langley Hall.
Marjorie got a job as a servant at Sissinghurst, a dilapidated English castle, where Gordon became acquainted with how the rich live, but he was always an onlooker, never part of the "in" crowd of course.
When he was a young man, Gordon moved to New York and made the acquaintance of Isabel Whitney, a wealthy elderly heiress who had been famous for her mural paintings in her younger days. Whitney had never married, and she and Gordon became close. He moved in with her, and though she was old enough to be his grandmother, he said they had been lovers. She showered him with gifts, and at her death left him a house in Charleston North Carolina,  paintings, antique furniture, and money.
Gordon was known to have sexual encounters with men, but he began to have a fixation that he was a hermaphrodite. In Charleston he met a 19 year old black man--Gordon was past 40--and fell in love. He had sex reassignment surgery to make himself a female, and the elite of Charleston who had at first welcomed the rich Englishman, turned their back on him.
Gordon and John Paul Simmons got married in a black church, and after that Gordon was totally ostracized. S/he changed her name to Dawn Pepita, and wearing women's clothes, said she was pregnant. One citizen of the town doubted that, especially when he said he saw "a military issue blanket with US NAVY stenciled on it under her clothes."  Nevertheless, Dawn produced a mulatto child she claimed she had given birth to.
Dawn lost all her money and sold her belongings one by one to make ends meet. S/he did write several books during her life, none brought in much income. John Paul developed schizophrenia and disappeared from her life. The author Edward Ball did research in the places in Europe and the US where Gordon/Dawn had lived, talked with her surgeon, her friends, her daughter, and finally found the truth.
It was ultimately a sad tale of someone who wanted to change themselves so much they were willing to fabricate and lie to produce a facade for the public. I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't made a movie already.
susil