It was a full life. “We’ve not squandered it,” Genesis said in 2018, using the plural pronoun to convey that she spoke for this dual identity. “We’ve utilized it to the maximum we could.”

She was born Neil Andrew Megson on Feb. 22, 1950, in Manchester, England, the second of two children of Ronald and Muriel Megson, who both worked briefly as semiprofessional actors.

Sickly as an adolescent, she had what she described as a tortured passage through England’s elite public school system, never comfortable with her body and gender. When, as a teenager, she discovered the Surrealist drawings of Max Ernst, which mashed together heads of one species with bodies of another, it gave her an early taste of the liberation she would pursue for the next five decades.

“I’d grown up thinking that the world was what I saw, and then I realized it wasn’t — it could be anything at all,” she told The New York Times in 2018.

It was the dawn of the psychedelic 1960s, and she saw that she could create herself in a new form, as an alter ego she called Genesis P-Orridge, who became a canvas for a wide range of experiments: artistic, pharmaceutical, surgical and spiritual.