Liz Roberts in 1998, 29 years after the operation that made her New Zealand's first male-female sex-change patient.

Liz Roberts sets the plastic bag down on the coffee table with a glassy clatter.



"They're sterilised. It's all right."



She clinks about and pulls out a solid glass object, the size and rough shape of a large cigar – "They start out this size."



She fishes out half a dozen more of increasing length and girth, some solid, others more like test-tubes. "I haven't got the whole set. I threw some of them out."



There was a time, after Roberts' second round of sex-change surgery, during which surgeon Graham Liggins fashioned her first vagina, when she had to use these glass dilators night and day to keep things in shape as everything healed.

Cough, and the dilator might pop out. Sometimes it didn't even take a cough, like the time she was crossing Christchurch's Cathedral Square.

"The only reason I looked down was because it was raining and I had patent leather shoes on, and if they stick together in the wet you're liable to lose your balance. I glanced down and there was a glass tube down there in my stocking. I thought, 'God, how am I going to get round this one?'"

She got round it, of course. She always does.

Liz Roberts at home in Christchurch.

Liz Roberts is 72. She was the first person in New Zealand to receive a male-to-female sex change, after surviving a childhood of rejection and abuse from her father. She's served two brief stints in prison – the first in a men's prison and the second in a women's. She's survived near-death at the hands of an Australian surgeon who botched a gastric operation. She's been swindled (while designing couture in swinging-60s London), slandered (by an unhinged acquaintance who claimed she had Aids), and half-strangled (by her father, as punishment for winning an art award at school).

The travails are all there in the memoir that's just been ghost-written by broadcaster Ali Mau, but so are the triumphs: persuading surgeons to attempt risky techniques they'd only read about; making history with her birth certificate gender-change; carving out a place in a society that didn't know how to place her; and forging several successful careers.

It's been a hell of ride, but now she's back roughly where she started – geographically anyway. Late last month, on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, I paid Liz Roberts a visit at her flat in the Christchurch suburbs.

Garry, the boy who wants to be a girl, in the early 1950s.

Perry Como is singing Catch a Falling Star quietly in the corner. The scones are just out of the oven. The sitting room's in mild disorder: a gilt-framed mirror leaning against one wall; a large Italianate cherub next to the kitchenette; dressmaker's dummies squeezed in by the sofa, which is littered with scraps of lace from a morning's scissor-work. Roberts has only just returned to Christchurch after fleeing to Auckland after the 2012 quake and she's waiting for Housing NZ to repair some wall damage before she puts her stuff up.

She wheels a little tea trolley over.

"Milk?"

Yes please.

"Before or after the tea?"

Before thanks.

"The Queen Mother liked it the other way."

It would be hopeless to ask for Roberts' life story in a single afternoon – Mau says they recorded about 60 hours of interviews for the book, which is packed with scrapes, strange yarns and curious characters. But in its simplest version, Roberts was born a boy in August 1943 and was named Garry.

Garry knew from very young he wanted to be a girl, but he had a father who found that appalling and who hit him. The father also hated that Garry, like his dressmaker grandmother and mother, liked to make things, and he was banned from doing anything "arty".

Still, says Roberts, "my mother taught me two things – how to put pockets and darts in. I taught myself the rest really."The outfit she's wearing today – a dark maroon silk jersey crossover top with a pencil skirt – is her own design. It cost $11 in materials.)

At 13, in trouble at school and home, Garry spent a year in a boys' home – a haven where he met supportive adults who told him it was OK to be different. As he got older, and dressed as a woman increasingly often, he found work as a hairdresser, as Cook Strait ferry steward, as a designer – environments where it was safer to stray outside gender norms. This was a time when you could get arrested simply for wearing a glorious frock while waiting in the street for a taxi into town for a night out.

Then there were four busy years in London where she (the pronoun was fluid by now) designed dresses for wealthy women, befriended drag queens, bumped into Natalie Wood and Catherine Deneuve, and developed a sideline as a make-up artist, working alongside photographer David Bailey and prettifying models including Twiggy ("quite unkempt, with chewed fingernails") and Jean Shrimpton.

It was in London, too, that she started taking the hormones that would start her transition towards becoming fully a woman. An expired visa halted the UK adventure before a planned surgery date, but back in New Zealand she found other surgeons willing to give it a go, and on 22 July 1969, about the same time the world watched Neil Armstrong take one giant step for mankind, Liz Roberts took her own big step. After booking into a private Christchurch clinic as "Mrs Trask" (the last name of her then-boyfriend) she had her hormonally-shrunken male genitals refashioned. The surgeon, Tom Milliken, didn't attempt a vagina, telling Roberts: "I can only do so much. I can't play God."

The Registrar-General accepted the letters from shrinks and surgeons saying Roberts was now a woman and changed the sex on her birth certificate without a quibble. Four months later she was Mrs Trask for real, marrying her man in Australia. (When she was about to remarry in the late 1990s, a less enlightened Deputy Registrar-General got wind of it and tried to alter her birth certificate back to male, but that's another story).

The book features an extraordinary number of colourful ratbags: a friend whose cheque-bouncing saw Roberts serve four months' prison as an accessory; a deranged acquaintance who told the police Liz had murdered a man and put the body out in her rubbish; a breathtakingly unfaithful husband; a stalker. She doesn't know why she kept running into them.

Man and wife – Liz Roberts with first husband Tim and his grandparents.

In 1973, in search of the marital "icing on the cake", Roberts asked Auckland surgeon Graham Liggins to finish the job Milliken started. Liggins gave her a vagina made out of skin from her leg but the operation – glass dilators and all – was pretty much a disaster, with years of pain and repeat surgeries. It was only in the early 1990s, when Christchurch surgeon Peter Walker used a cunning new operation to fashion a brand-new vagina from a section of repurposed bowel, that Roberts' medical adventures of becoming a woman were finally over.

"Though then," says Roberts, "I had to go and lose my virginity..."

In the book, as in person, Roberts can be bawdy and bitchy, a yarn-spinner and a gossip, someone's who sees the comedy value of a bagful of rude-looking glass objects. But at the same time she's respectable, almost prim – a slim, tall, graceful woman with a soft, low, slightly posh voice, who makes bespoke dresses for Canterbury gentry. These days, she says, "I keep to myself like an old lady."

The double-persona is hardly mysterious, I guess. If you're born a boy who knows she's really a girl, and you're growing up in the 50s and 60s, your choices narrow. You gravitate towards the safety of the enclave: the gay clubs, the drag scene, certain hair salons, the fashion world, the ferry route where the stewards are gay. Liz found her place – achieved great success – in these marginal subcultures, but you can't help thinking part of her didn't want to be there. She wasn't a gay man. She was never a "drag queen". She was a boy who wanted to be a girl.

In London, she says, "I went to two gay nightclubs with guys who were hairdressers. They were austere little places with lots of screaming queens dancing and smooching and carrying on, and I just used to think, 'I've got to make a dress tomorrow. I better go home.'"

Tragedy is woven through the memoir, even if as jaunty anecdote. There's a relationship with a nice man in London that falters after he takes Liz to meet his posh parents and somebody phones mid-meal to tell the mother "the GAL is really a BOY".

A New Zealand newspaper write-up of Liz Roberts' London successes in the world of fashion.

Most wrenching, perhaps, is the 10 days when Roberts takes care of a baby girl born of an affair between her husband and another woman, and even considers raising her, before realising the situation has become too chaotic to manage.

There are the day-to-day indignities, like the cops who keep arresting young Garry for masquerading as a lady but always let him off after checking his undies – if he's wearing men's briefs rather than ladies' knickers they figure he isn't too far gone. Or the casual suggestion by a lawyer that electric shock treatment might be a solution to Garry's "female delusions".

It all hurt, but "I have learnt not to show emotions", says Roberts.

Her happiest years were probably in Australia in the 1990s, when she was designing costumes for big theatre shows. Good money, good times, good people.

She married twice during the span of the sex-change operations. But later she had a seven-year relationship with a man called Keith without telling him she'd once been a man. When someone told him, it ended badly.

Why wouldn't you share such as big secret with your partner?

"I didn't want to. I was legally female. I was a woman. Why should I tell people?"

The more important question, says Roberts, was the one someone asked Keith's friend after the split: "Why would it matter now, after you've been together that long?"

What to reveal and what to keep quiet is something Roberts often thinks about.

"There was a lady here last week. I'm making her daughter a dress to go to a ball, and she said 'I used to be a prison officer.' I said 'Oh I did a stint at Christchurch Prison', then I thought 'Oh Christ. I shouldn't have said that'. It just came out.

"She was fascinated and she giggled and it didn't matter, but normally I wouldn't run around saying, 'Look, I've been to prison. Do you want me to make your daughter a dress?' It's the same thing."

By the time she was with Keith, everything was functioning perfectly as far as sex goes. "He passed comment about that to somebody. He said, 'This is the best sex life I've ever had.'

"I just didn't think you told people those sort of things. There are things that people just have that die with them, and you find out later."

Roberts makes another pot of tea, puts another log in the woodburner, offers another excellent scone with jam and clotted cream ("It's just Edmonds out of a packet, with water"). The Platters sing The Great Pretender.

She has read the memoir, which is called First Lady, three times. She's shed a few tears. She wanted the book to sound like "I was telling somebody the story", and thinks Mau has achieved that.

Now everyone will know her secrets. Goodness knows what her new neighbours will think. Some of them are a bit nosy, and it's "like living in the lawn cemetery – there's never any fuss here".

For the book launch this week in Auckland she'll wear one of those outfits currently on the sitting-room dummies. The two-piece is a silk-wool boucle Chanel jacket she's trimmed with "a little bit of zhuzh", with matching pencil skirt. The black dress is "just a pure-wool gaberdine with french beaded lace top and sleeve".

She walks me out to my waiting taxi. It's getting chilly. As I get in the taxi she folds her arms tight over the dark maroon outfit she made from materials that cost $11. She hadn't needed a pattern as she cut it out. She knows the shape of her own body.

WHEN ALI MET LIZ

In mid-2012, after Ali Mau had argued for the merits of same-sex marriage in a televised debate, she received a call from Liz Roberts to applaud her stance. Roberts told Mau a little about her own life, and Mau rashly offered to write a book about it.

In 2010 Mau revealed she was in a relationship with a woman, but she says her newfound engagement with the LGBT community had little to do with the offer to ghost-write Roberts' book. It was just a great story that needed telling; her own circumstances were "just a coincidence".

Over the next couple of years Mau and Roberts met a couple of times a month, accumulating around 60 hours of interviews. Then Mau, a first-time author, set about stitching it into a coherent shape, verifying Roberts' more outlandish stories using press reports and Roberts' own papers, all the while trying to preserve Roberts' conversational, anecdotal voice.

Despite the conservatism and intolerance Roberts faced, especially in the first few decades of her life, "'none of this stopped her living the life she wanted to live," says Mau. "Some would call it reckless. I'd call it brave."

First Lady, by Elizabeth Roberts with Alison Mau, $39.99 (Upstart Press).