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Michael Dillon (1915-1962) This page has multi-media links
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Transsexual |
| Laurence Michael
Dillon
The World's First Transsexual Man
Born on the 1st May 1915 in London
Laura Maud Dillon, daughter of Robert Dillon of Lismullen, County
Meath, was anatomically a healthy female child.
Her mother died two days later and
her father rejected her and sent her with her brother to his three
unmarried sisters in Folkestone, England. |
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1925 her father and grandfather died and her eleven-year-old brother
became Sir Robert Dillon, eighth baronet.
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She was educated at an exclusive girls'
school and at St Anne's College, Oxford, winning her rowing blue in
a women's crew and graduating in 1938.
She spent her summer holidays with a
housekeeper on the family estate in County Meath.
Facial hair and a deep voice
confirmed her feelings of being physically and emotionally a man,
and she took a job as a garage hand, living in loneliness and
anguish for four years.
A Doctor Foss agreed to give her male
hormone pills, she had a mastectomy in 1942, and in 1944 she had her
birth certificate amended, changing 'daughter' to 'son' and 'Laura
Maud' to 'Laurence Michael'. Sir Robert reacted with disbelief and
horror and cut him out of his life.
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| Michael,
as he now called himself, entered medical school in Trinity College
Dublin in 1945 under his new name. |
| During the long
holidays he had protracted and painful operations at the hospital of
the plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillis to complete the physical
changes. |
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| Sir
Harold Gillies, internationally renowned as the father of modern
plastic surgery, played a pioneering wartime role in Britain
developing pedicle flap surgery. Gillies later performed surgery on
the United Kingdom's first male-to-female transsexual - Roberta
Cowell. |
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What is not so well known is that Sir
Harold was also one of the pioneers of sex change surgery.
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In 1945, he and his colleague Ralph
Millard
carried out the world's first sex change of a woman into a man on
the young aristocrat, Micheal Dillon.
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Micheal is also believed to be the first
woman to have taken the male hormone testosterone in order to look
like a man.
Within months of starting
testosterone, he had grown a beard and was living as a man. It was
the dramatic transition in his appearance that finally persuaded
Gillies to operate.
Michael later showed his amended
birth certificate to Debrett's Peerage, who agreed to change
their entry, thus acknowledging his claim to the baronetcy as the
next male in line after his childless brother.
The editor assured him that changes
in Debrett were automatically followed by Burke's Peerage.
He won his rowing blue, this time as a man, graduated in 1951, and
became a ship's doctor, serving on voyages to Asia, Australia, and
America. |
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Burke's Peerage
failed to change their entry, and the discrepancy with Debrett's was
discovered in 1958 by the Sunday Express, which investigated
further and publicised the change of sex.
Michael was devastated at this
revelation of a secret he had sedulously concealed, and he fled to
Calcutta, then took refuge in a Buddhist monastery at Sarnath,
Bengal. |
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He was ordained a monk of the Tibetan
order, taking the name Lobzang Jivaha, and spent his time studying
Buddhism and writing.
He gave what money he had to help
struggling students.
The hardships of life in primitive
conditions, made worse by the meagre vegetarian diet required by
Buddhism, took their toll; his health failed, and he died in
hospital at Dalhousie, Punjab, on 15 May 1962, aged 47.
Two books by him were published in
London in 1962: The Life of Milarepa, about a famous 11th
Century Tibetan yogi, and Imji Getsul, an account of life in
a Buddhist monastery. |
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