Michael Dillon

For other people named Michael Dillon, see Michael Dillon (disambiguation).

Michael Dillon
Dillon in the Merchant Navy
Born	(1915-05-01)1 May 1915 Kensington, England
Died	15 May 1962(1962-05-15) (aged 47) Dalhousie, India
Other names	Sramanera Jivaka Lobzang Jivaka
Known for	First trans man to undergo phalloplasty

Laurence Michael Dillon (1 May 1915 – 15 May 1962) was a British doctor and author, and the first transgender man to undergo phalloplasty. Dillon was an early user of masculinising hormone replacement therapy and one of the first recorded recipients of a double mastectomy for the purpose of gender reassignment, and his 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology is considered a pioneering work in the field of transgender medicine. As a surgeon, he performed an orchidectomy on Roberta Cowell, the first British trans woman to receive male-to-female sex reassignment surgery.

His transition became a subject of public attention when it affected his listing as the heir presumptive for the Dillon baronetcy of Lismullen in Ireland. He later moved to India and became devoted to Buddhism, changing his name to Lobzang Sramanera and then to Lobzang Jivaka. Between 1960–1962, he wrote four books on Buddhism, including Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery. His autobiography Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions was completed in 1962, and published in 2016.

Early life

Dillon was born on 1 May 1915 in Ladbroke Gardens, Kensington. Assigned female at birth, he was the second child of Robert Arthur Dillon (1865–1925), a Royal Navy Lieutenant and heir to the baronetcy of Lismullen in Ireland. His Australian mother, Laura Maud McCliver (née Reese) (1888–1915), died of sepsis when he was less than two weeks old. Robert Arthur Dillon suffered from alcoholism and was forced to leave the Navy. He was unable to look after Michael Dillon and his older brother Robert 'Bobby' William Charlier Dillon, so the children were raised by their two paternal aunts, Toto and Daisy, in Folkestone, Kent. The children's aunts lived in economic hardship which was self-imposed due to their prudent financial practices.

Robert Arthur Dillon died in 1925, making his son Bobby the immediate heir to the baronetcy of Lismullen. Less than a month later, the current baronet—Sir John Fox Dillon—also died, thereby passing the title onto Bobby Dillon, who at the time was eleven years old. With the title, Bobby Dillon inherited the family estate in County Meath where he and his sibling would spend their holidays over the coming years.

Michael Dillon was educated at Brampton Down Girls' School. He enjoyed learning about theology and spirituality, a passion he would retain throughout his life. He was brought up in the Church of England and had close relationships with the local vicars. He later recalled that one in particular, Reverend Watkins, helped him further his philosophical knowledge and practice. Dillon also enjoyed sports and masculine-oriented activities. Later in his life, he claimed that as a child and teenager, he never thought of himself as a girl. He recalled a particular incident from his teenage years when a boy held open a gate for him and he realised for the first time that others perceived him as a woman, which jarred with how he felt internally.

Education at Oxford

Dillon was encouraged by the local vicar to study Theology at Oxford. In 1934, he enrolled in the Society of Oxford Home Students (now St Anne's College, Oxford). Dillon initially had ambitions of becoming a Deaconess post-graduation, but decided to switch his course to Greats, also known as Classics. At university, Dillon discovered a passion for rowing. He became the president of the Oxford University Women's Boat Club and fought for greater recognition of the women's sport and increased parity between men's and women's rowing. At the time, women's rowing involved rowing downstream, unlike the men, and the women wore clothing unsuitable for more strenuous action. The women's teams did not race against each other but rowed in turn and were timed. Dillon reversed these practices as captain and he achieved blues in 1935 and 1936. His advancement of the women's sport gained him press attention, and he featured in a Daily Mail article in November 1937 titled "How unlike a woman!"

Whilst at Oxford, Dillon began to question his gender identity more intently. He continued to feel as if he were not a woman. This led him to present more masculine; he began smoking a pipe and riding a motorcycle. He confided in a close friend who helped him buy men's clothing and took him to boxing matches where women were not allowed. Despite the difficulties of having to live as a woman whilst not feeling like one, there is evidence to suggest that Dillon remembered his time at Oxford fondly, later describing himself as an "Oxford man". He graduated in 1938 with a third.

Transition

Dillon was more comfortable in men's clothing and was more self-assured living as a male. In 1939, he sought treatment from George Foss, who had been experimenting with testosterone to treat excessive menstrual bleeding; at the time, the hormone's masculinizing effects were poorly understood. Foss provided Dillon with testosterone pills but insisted that Dillon consult a psychiatrist first, and the psychiatrist he consulted gossiped about Dillon's desire to express a male gender identity, resulting in the story becoming widely known. Dillon fled to Bristol and took a job at a garage. The hormones soon made it possible for him to pass as male, and eventually the garage manager insisted that other employees refer to Dillon as "he" in order to avoid confusing customers. Dillon was promoted to recovery-vehicle driver and doubled as a fire watcher during the Blitz.

Dillon was prone to illness in his childhood, and suffered from hypoglycaemia throughout his life. He twice injured his head in falls when he passed out from low blood sugar. While in the Bristol Royal Infirmary recovering from the second of these attacks, he came to the attention of one of the world's few practitioners of plastic surgery. The surgeon performed a double mastectomy, provided Dillon with a doctor's note that enabled him to change his birth certificate, and put him in contact with the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies. He officially became Laurence Michael Dillon in 1944 when the birth certificate was amended; this meant that he was now heir presumptive to the baronetcy. Dillon was one of the few transgender people able legally to change his identity at this time; in 1970 the marriage of April Ashley, a trans woman, was declared null in the court case Corbett v Corbett, and thenceforth changes of sex would not be legally recognized in the United Kingdom until a 1999 amendment of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, and not in the absence of medical supervision until the Equality Act of 2010.

Gillies had previously reconstructed penises for injured soldiers and performed surgery on intersex people with ambiguous genitalia. He was willing to perform a phalloplasty, but not immediately; the constant influx of wounded soldiers from World War II already kept him in the operating room around the clock. In 1945 Dillon enrolled in School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin under his new legal name, Laurence Michael Dillon. A former tutor of Dillon's persuaded the Oxford registrar to alter records to show that he had graduated from all-male Brasenose rather than the women's college St Anne's, so that his academic transcript would not raise questions. Again he became a distinguished rower, this time for the men's boat club.

Gillies performed at least thirteen surgeries on Dillon between 1946 and 1949. He officially diagnosed Dillon with acute hypospadias in order to conceal that he was performing sex-reassignment surgery. Dillon, still a medical student at Trinity, blamed war injuries when infections caused a temporary limp. In what little free time he had he enjoyed dancing, but he avoided forming close relationships with women, for fear of exposure and in the belief that "One must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children." He deliberately cultivated a misogynist reputation to prevent any such problematic attachments.

Self and Roberta Cowell

In 1946 Dillon published Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, a book about what would now be called transsexuality, though that term would not be introduced into the English language until 1949, when David Oliver Cauldwell introduced the word directly based on Magnus Hirschfeld's coinage (in German) of the term Transsexualismus in 1923. Dillon described "masculine inverts" as being born with "the mental outlook and temperament of the other sex", using Stephen Gordon in the 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness as an example. Since this form of "inversion" was asserted to be innate, as a hidden physical condition similar to intersex, Dillon said it could not be affected by psychoanalysis and should instead be treated medically. "Where the mind cannot be made to fit the body," he wrote, "the body should be made to fit, approximately at any rate, to the mind."

Self brought him to the attention of Roberta Cowell, on whom he would perform an operation to help her become the first British trans woman to receive male-to-female sex reassignment surgery. Despite the operation being illegal under British law and his not being a qualified medical practitioner, Dillon operated on Cowell to perform an orchiectomy (removal of the testicles). Dillon had also developed a strong romantic interest in Cowell, but she rejected his advances after he performed the operation. Dillon also introduced Cowell to Gillies, who then performed a vaginoplasty for Cowell.

Later life

Dillon qualified as in medicine in 1951 and initially worked in a Dublin hospital. He then spent the six years at sea as a naval surgeon for P&O and the China Navigation Company.

Dillon had not revealed his own history in Self, but it came to light in 1958 as an indirect result of his aristocratic background. Debrett's Peerage, a genealogical guide, listed him as heir to his brother's baronetcy, while its competitor Burke's Peerage mentioned only a sister [sic]. The discrepancy was noticed while Dillon was serving on a freighting vessel, and when he was tracked down by the press in Philadelphia, he said he was a male born with a severe form of hypospadias and had undergone a series of operations to correct the condition. The editor of Debrett's told Time magazine that Dillon was unquestionably next in line for the baronetcy, saying: "I have always been of the opinion that a person has all rights and privileges of the sex that is, at a given moment, recognized."

The unwanted press attention led Dillon to flee to India, where he spent time with Sangharakshita (Dennis Lingwood) in Kalimpong, and with the Buddhist community in Sarnath. While at Sarnath, Dillon decided to pursue ordination and became Sramanera Jivaka (after the Buddha's physician). Because Sangharakshita refused to allow him full ordination, and due to other frustrations with Sangharakshita's management of his Triyana Vardhana Vihara community, Jivaka turned to the Tibetan branch of Buddhism. He went to the Rizong Monastery in Ladakh. He was reordained a novice monk of the Gelukpa order, taking the name Lobzang Jivaka, and spent his time studying Buddhism and writing. Despite the language barrier, he felt at home there, but was forced to leave in 1961 when his visa was not renewed after false accusations of spying, followed by the leaking of his transgender status, as he records in the final chapter of his autobiography.

Writing under both of his Buddhist names, Jivaka published Growing Up into Buddhism, a primer on Buddhist practice for British children and teens, and A Critical Study of the Vinaya, which looks at the Buddhist rules for ordination; both books were published in 1960. Two additional books by him were published in London in 1962: The Life of Milarepa, about an 11th-century Tibetan yogi, and Imji Getsul, an account of life in a Buddhist monastery.

At the age of 47, Jivaka eventually passed away in Dalhousie, India, on 15 May 1962 according to the timeline in the appendix to his autobiography.

After Dillon's death, his brother said he wanted to burn Dillon's unpublished autobiography, but the manuscript was saved by Dillon's literary agent and published as Out of the Ordinary in 2017.

Works

• Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics (1946), as Michael Dillon
• Poems of truth (1957), as Michael Dillon
• Growing Up into Buddhism (1960) as Sramanera Jivaka Maha Bodhi Society of India, ASIN B0007JB4I6
• A Critical Study of the Vinaya (1960) as Sramanera Jivaka Maha Bodhi Society of India
• The Life of Milarepa (1962), as Lobzang Jivaka
• Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery (1962), as Lobzang Jivaka
• Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions (1962; published 2016) as Michael Dillon / Lobzang Jivaka, Fordham University Press, ISBN 978-0823274802

References

Sources

Books

• Lau, Jacob; Partridge, Cameron (2017). ""In His Own Way, In His Own Time": An Introduction to Out of the Ordinary". Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions. By Dillon/Jivaka, Michael/Lobzang. Lau, Jacob; Partridge, Cameron (eds.). (First ed.). New York: Fordham University Press.
• Stryker, Susan (2017a). Foreword. Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions. By Dillon/Jivaka, Michael/Lobzang. Lau, Jacob; Partridge, Cameron (eds.). (First ed.). New York: Fordham University Press.
• Stryker, Susan (2017b). "Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka: A Timeline". Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions. By Dillon/Jivaka, Michael/Lobzang. Lau, Jacob; Partridge, Cameron (eds.). (First ed.). New York: Fordham University Press.

Journals

• Collins, Aiden (March 2017). "Laurence Michael Dillon of Lismullen: World's first transsexual man". The British Journal of Psychiatry. 210 (3): 179. doi:10.1192/bjp.bp.116.196642.

Websites

• Partridge, Cameron (2015) [2008]. "Dillon, Michael (1915-1962)" (PDF). glbtq.com.
• Taylor, Clare L. (23 September 2004). "Dillon, (Laurence) Michael". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/76743. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Ward, Lauren; Jones, Duncan. "Michael Dillon: A Biographical Exhibition". St Anne's College, Oxford. Retrieved 3 April 2024.
• White, Lawrence William; Evers, Liz (June 2023) [October 2009]. "Dillon, Michael". Dictionary of Irish Biography. doi:10.3318/dib.002610.v1.

Further reading

• Taylor, Clare L. "Dillon, (Laurence) Michael". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/76743. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Michael Dillon, The World's First Transsexual Man, Transgender Zone Media Archives.