From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/feb/15/transgender-magician-1986-archive
Fay Presto finds herself outside the Magic Circle and it will take more than a wave of the wand to get her back in again
Nicholas de Jongh
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 February 2013
1986
It’s a man’s world in the Magic Circle. Let any spellbinding magicienne, as the female exponents of the art call themselves, try for admission and they’ll be quickly asked to disappear.
For the Circle, founded in 1905, now numbering more than a thousand members and with a rule discouraging the ‘disclosure of magical secrets to the public’ is a Men Only organisation.
This is causing some annoyance to Oliver Winter, who three years ago was just an ordinary chap, an associate member of the Circle, with an amateur interest in slicing girls in half and doing the usual with rabbits.
Today, things are very different, having been involved in a bit of medical magic himself – he changed his sex to female and his name to Fay Presto – he has become Britain’s first professional transsexual magician.
She finds herself outside the Magic Circle and it will take more than a wave of the wand to get her back in again.
‘If they just want to be a gentleman’s club they must be allowed to do so.’ says Miss Presto, a tall handsome blonde with long painted finger nails. ‘But they also set themselves up as the arbiters of all that is right and proper in magic.’
She believes that the Circle should either confine itself to amateurs or admit the girls, who want more out of the magical world than to be sawn apart, or used as old fashioned sex symbol.
The Magic Circle is sticking, uncharacteristically, to firm reality. It sets examinations and is eager to see if an aspiring magician knows how to get things out of his bag to the manner born. But it insists it is a club for Gentlemen only.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/feb/15/transgender-magician-1986-archive
