Lori and George Schappell, the world’s oldest conjoined twins, have died at the age of 62. Lori and her transgender twin George died on Sunday at a hospital in Pennsylvania due to undisclosed causes, as reported in their online obituaries.
The siblings, who had partially fused skulls and shared 30 percent of their brains, surpassed expectations as doctors said that they wouldn’t survive beyond the age of 30. They lived more than double. The twins had previously garnered attention when George, formerly known as Dori, publicly came out as transgender. Lori had full mobility, while George, who had spina bifida, relied on a wheelchair, which his twin Lori pushed around.
A Life Worth Celebrating
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While George enjoyed a successful career as a country singer, Lori pursued her interests in a different direction, becoming a trophy-winning ten-pin bowler.
Lori worked at a hospital laundry for several years in the 1990s, arranging her schedule around George’s music performances, which took them to various countries worldwide, including Germany and Japan, as documented by the Guinness World Records.
In 2007, George, originally named Dori, publicly came out as a transgender man, marking the siblings as the first same-sex conjoined twins to identify as different genders.
At this juncture, he opted to change his name from Reba, a choice made to honor his idol Reba McEntire but later disliked due to the rhyming with Lori’s name, to George.
The twins lived independently in a two-bedroom apartment in Pennsylvania, where they pursued their separate hobbies.
They alternated sleeping in each other’s rooms and managed separate showers by using the shower curtain as a partition while one stood outside the bath.
They also appeared on various television shows such as Jerry Springer, The Maury Povich Show, and The Howard Stern Radio Show.
Complicated but Happy Lives
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In the past, when asked about whether the death of one twin would inevitably result in the death of the other, Lori clarified, “No, it would not. That’s another misconception.” George, then Reba, explained in the 1997 documentary: “If it’s caught early enough, we could both be rushed to the hospital and then in an emergency, quickly be separated to save the other one.”
Elaborating on whether they had ever desired to undergo separation surgery, he firmly said, “No, we wouldn’t. My belief is: why alter something that isn’t flawed?”
“Just because we cannot get up and walk away from each other doesn’t mean that we cannot have solitude from other people or ourselves,’ Lori added. ‘People who are conjoined can have a very private life.”
She also shared her aspirations of starting a family someday, expressing, “Eventually, I would love to have my own family – a husband and children of mine.”
The twins surpassed all the predictions made by medical professionals, who had initially suggested that they wouldn’t survive beyond the age of 30.
In 2015, Lori and George became the oldest female conjoined twins on record, surpassing the previous record held by Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, who died at the age of 53. They are survived by their father, six siblings, and several nieces and nephews.
