Despite modelling nude for Playboy Magazine in 1977 and Lear saying "and they could see I was a woman like everybody else"[6], she was and still is widely rumoured to be either a transsexual or an intersexual because of her height (5ft 9.25 /176 cm), her masculine facial features and, most of all, her exceptionally low baritone-like vocal timbre.
That Lear was born male is considered an open secret in Continental Europe although Lear herself has since the early 1980s insisted that these rumours are the result of a planned succès de scandale, a clever publicity stunt thought up by herself and Salvador Dalí to get her career in music started, just like her contradictory statements about her childhood.