When technical writer and former WWII pilot Jonathan Ferguson changed his gender in 1958, it made the news in Britain. I’ve imagined the moment many times since I first read about it in a paper called “Hacking the Cis-Tem” by scholar Mar Hicks. Ferguson’s name change, according to the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, was straightforward: someone took a pen and amended a line in the Official Register.