No, this isn’t Stephanie Gilmoure’s glamorous aunt that accompanied the five times world champ to the recent Australian Hall of Fame awards, it is in fact Westerly Windina, the woman formerly known as Peter Drouyn. The Queensland champ and inventor of man-on-man surfing  was inducted back in 1991, but since having gender re-assignment surgery in Thailand last year, was bought back on stage to accept her award as a woman.

Nat Young gave her a kiss (which she said “went on for a little longer than I thought it would”) while Tom Carroll summed up the reception and reaction of the 500 strong crowd telling The Australian newspaper, “I’ll fess up – there were some people talking about her, not to her face, and I was one of them. It was quite hard for a few of us who had known Peter Drouyn to see that transformation. But I recognise that we’re not all black and white, male and female. This was about more than Peter Drouyn and Westerly Windina. There is a large percentage of humanity that is caught in between. And this was a great opportunity to confront that.”

Rumours that Windina went home with the new world champ Joel Parkinson, however, have been unsubstantiated.