Michael Dillon: British Trans Pioneer (#161)

The 1950s were the years that the concept of medical gender transitioning became possible in the UK, with 2023 marking just over seventy years since the first known sex change was carried out in Britain. The story leading up to this milestone was long and complex, and the life of British trans pioneer Michael Dillon is grossly neglected by mainstream LGBTQIA+ history. In fact, it is time for trans history in general to become more centralised in historical narratives of gender and sexuality. So why not start today?

Michael Dillon (1915-1962) was the second child of Robert Arthur Dillon, heir to the baronetcy of Lismullen in Ireland, and his Australian wife, Laura Maud McCliver. Dillon's mother died of sepsis ten days after giving birth to Dillon, and his father of alcoholism ten years later, so Dillon and his older brother Bobby were raised by their two aunts in Folkestone in Kent. Despite this and the state of semi poverty enforced by the frugality of their aunts, Dillon and his brother Bobby had a fairly untroubled childhood and holidayed on the family land in Ireland each summer. Yet as the years went by, he felt a growing unease at the different way he and his brother were treated:

“I was out for a walk with the eighteen-year-old nephew of the Vicar […] and somewhere there was a gate which he opened and stood aside to let me pass through first. Suddenly I was struck with an awful thought, for no one had done this for me before. “He thinks I’m a woman.” It was a horrible moment and I felt stunned. I had never thought of myself as such despite being technically a girl.” – Out of the Ordinary

As a way to escape, or at least delay, the inevitabilities of life as a woman, Dillon applied to study at Oxford University. Dillon discovered an enthusiasm for rowing at Oxford and joined the women’s boat club in his first term, quickly securing a position rowing stroke (the key position at the stern) and led the women’s rowing team to many victories in the 1930s. By the time of their success in his final year (1938), where the eight won against Cambridge, London, Kings, Bristol and Edinburgh; the team earned the attention of the local and national press. Though mostly positive, some of the coverage was unpleasant and drew unwanted attention to Dillon, something that he would be battling against for the rest of his life.

After graduating in 1938 and buying a motorcycle that summer, impressing the men at the garage with how quickly he took to it, Dillon gained employment as a Laboratory Assistant at Stoke Park Colony, Stapleton, Bristol. Much like when he was in Oxford, Dillon was more comfortable wearing men's clothing and at this point more self-assured living as a male. While working at the laboratory Dillon sought treatment from Dr. George Foss, who was interested in the medical uses for testosterone, experimenting with it to treat excessive menstrual bleeding; at the time, the hormone's masculinizing effects were poorly understood. Foss requested that Dillon consult a psychiatrist before treatment, however the psychiatrist’s indiscretion led to Dillon being ‘outed’ to his colleagues and forced to leave.

But still, he began hormone therapy. Following the outbreak of WWII, Dillon undertook various stints of war work before finding a position at College Motors, a garage. He endured mocking from his colleagues there but, once the effects of testosterone therapy began to show, was eventually treated as a man to avoid confusing customers. He was soon promoted to recovery-vehicle driver and doubled as a fire watcher during the Blitz. But the turbulence of wartime Bristol coupled with the difficulties caused by the early stages of Dillon’s physical transition made this a painful time for him.

Despite the difficulties he endured, being in Bristol did benefit Dillon in several ways. Dillon suffered from hypoglycaemia, and twice injured his head in falls when he passed out from low blood sugar. During a hospital stay following one of these attacks, Dillon happened to meet one of the world's few practitioners of plastic surgery, who offered to perform a double mastectomy and suggested he change his birth certificate to male, which he managed to achieve in 1944 having secured a letter from his doctor declaring him to be intersex. Dillon legally became Laurence Michael, one of the few transgender people able legally to change his identity at this time. It also meant that he was now heir presumptive to the baronetcy.

Following this, Dillon attended the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College part-time to enable him to earn the qualifications he would need to pursue a medical degree. Now finally being able to be simply accepted as an ordinary young man and following the intervention of a supportive former tutor at Oxford, who persuaded the registrar to alter his records, he was able to have his name entered on the books of Brasenose College, an all-male college, rather than at the women-only college so that his academic transcript would not raise questions. This allowed him to apply to medical schools and he was accepted into Trinity College, Dublin in 1945 to begin his studies and again he became a distinguished rower, this time for the men's boat club.

There, he spent university vacations at Rooksdown House in Basingstoke, undergoing genital reconstruction surgery with Sir Harold Gillies. Dubbed “the father of modern plastic surgery” for his incredible cosmetic work on combat veterans - Gillies had previously reconstructed penises for injured soldiers and performed surgery on intersex people with ambiguous genitalia - they were introduced to each other by the surgeon who performed Dillon’s double mastectomy. Interestingly, the operation was completely permissible, though the first of its kind: antiquated legislation continued to ban the ‘mutilation’ of male genitals, but medical intervention concerning the female genitalia, and therefore phalloplasty, was entirely legal. This meant that he was the first person in the world to fully transition from female to male.

Dillon later himself trained as a doctor, and his interest in medicine and philosophy inspired him to work on his first book, publishing the title Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology in 1946. This work laid out the argument that being trans was not a new phenomenon, and that trans individuals had a place in the natural order of things. It also presented a view on transgender medical care decades ahead of its time, and separated being transgender from being homosexual, as the two were often mistakenly conflated at the time.

In 1949 Dillon had been tracked down by one avid reader of his Self, Roberta Cowell, who became Britain's first male-to-female trans woman. Cowell (1918-2011) had been a racing driver in the 30s and a spitfire pilot during the war, consulting psychiatrists in the late 40s for what would now be termed gender dysphoria. She began living as a woman, and sought out Dillon to assist her further, which he did, with an illegal orchidectomy (removal of testicles). Like Dillon, Cowell later was operated on by Gillies, resulting in Britain’s first ever surgically created vagina.
The two developed an extremely close bond, for Cowell this was friendship, but for Dillon, the relationship quickly became romantic. However, Roberta did not return his feelings. Their relationship soured in 1951 after Roberta rejected Dillon’s proposal of marriage. So Dillon made the decision to join the merchant navy as a as a ship surgeon, staying at sea for several years in order to lay low and protect his privacy. At one point during his time at sea, Dillon spent time in India practicing meditation after a sea voyage and began to explore Buddhist thought.

But in May 1958 Dillon was, as he had long feared, once again exposed by the press as an indirect result of his aristocratic background. Reporters from various newspapers contacted his ship, The City of Bath, by cable following a discrepancy noticed between different peerages: 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. The unwanted attention drove him back to India.

Initially Dillon went to Kalimpong and ordained there as a novice monk, taking the name Jivaka after the Buddha’s own physician and making him first western European to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. But thanks to Sangharakshita (aka fellow white English monk Dennis Lingwood) blocking of his path to higher ordination because he disapproved of Dillon’s aspirations, he went to Rizong Monastery instead to be reordained as a novice monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. There he stayed and, through a desire to finally tell his story on his own terms, rather than through the press (both at home and, unfortunately, in Hindi newspapers as well) wrote his final manuscript Out of the Ordinary until his death in 1962.

However, fifteen days after completing the manuscript, Michael Dillon died suddenly on his way to Kashmir, aged only 47 years old. It would take a further 55 years to be published in its entirety - after Dillon's death, his brother said he wanted to burn Dillon's unpublished autobiography, but the manuscript was thankfully saved by Dillon's literary agent.

Stories like Laurence Michael Dillons are crucial to our understanding of trans heritage Britain. In times such as these, it is important not only to push forwards for change, but to look backwards as well – refusing to let important stories like these be erased from history.
There is an amazing exhibition that was curated by Lauren Ward and Duncan Jones for the launch of the Michael Dillon LGBT+ Lecture Series, in conjunction with the University of Oxford, back in 2021 which can be found in the notes section for this episode. Also, not to worry – the lectures were also filmed, and can be rewatched thanks to the power of Youtube!