Review: 'The First Man-Made Man'
The Story of Michael Dillon, Female-to-Male Sex Change Success
© Kat Long
Author Pagan Kennedy recounts Dillon's F-to-M sex reassignment surgery and complicated search for happiness as a transgender man, from WWI Britain to the Himalayas.
In the late 1940s, Laura Dillon became Michael Dillon: a transgender man who survived the first female-to-male sex change surgery in medical history. But his transformation did not completely soothe the scars of a life lived in the wrong body—and Michael forged a winding path from Edwardian England to remote Tibet in search of enlightenment, as Pagan Kennedy relates in her biography of Michael, The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2007).
Laura’s mother died ten days after Laura Maude Dillon was born in 1915--an event that sparked a lifetime of estrangement from Laura’s family and herself. Laura’s childhood was marked by emotional and physical deprivation despite the family's wealth and position in the British peerage.
Laura escaped her family’s clutches by gaining admittance to the small women's college at Oxford. Tall and muscular, Laura was naturally athletic and thrived on the Oxford rowing team, even forming the first friendships of her life with fellow rowers. But a certain feeling never left her--she was not truly the woman everyone saw in long skirts, the girl for whom male students held open the doors. She was not a woman at all, though her body disagreed with her mind.
Growing Acceptance of Sexual Difference
By the mid-1930s, Europeans would have been familiar with stories of Berlin’s decadent nightlife, Radclyffe Hall’s groundbreaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, and Freud's theories of sexuality. Laura had begun living as a man, but was tormented by her exclusion from the clubs, social responsibilities, and privileges of masculinity. She would have to go further into the unknown territory of gender, including taking testosterone pills to alter her body.
In 1946, Laura began never-before-attempted surgeries to change her gender from female to male at the hands of Dr. Harold Gillies, a plastic surgeon who pioneered the technique of skin grafting. Gillies formed a penis out of Laura's own skin and grafted it to her body in an excruciating series of operations.
Laura became Michael Dillon, but Michael was not satisfied with life—he had no close friendships or romances, save for a single long-distance tryst with a transgender woman (the “love affair” of the title). Despite his education and background, he found it difficult to navigate the world of professional men. Instead, he signed up as a ship’s doctor and sailed as far away from England as possible.
The Search for Truth
He had become entranced by writings of Buddhist monks; Buddhism's search for nothingness made sense to him, as someone weighed down by the caprices of his body. He stayed in India, renounced his wealth and nationality and decided to devote himself to Buddhism. He studied to become a monk under ever harsher and more ascetic living conditions in remote Indian villages and Tibetan mountain-top monasteries.
Kennedy examines the two central conundrums of Michael’s life: his transgenderism and his psychological isolation. He altered his body escape his gender; a solution that allowed him to escape himself proved more elusive. Michael had an unconscious desire to confess his secret even as he fled countries and relationships to keep it hidden. He published Self, a treatise on the idea of gender and identity, under his own name in the early 1940s, even as it revealed his personal struggle with gender definitions. Michael also wrote an unfiltered autobiography while studying in Tibet, keeping the manuscript scrupulously hidden in a trunk; when he left that monastery, he inexplicably left the precious manuscript behind. Such counterintuitive acts seem to reveal his true desires, even if he did not consciously recognize them.
The First Man-Made Man could have been improved with the inclusion of larger and clearer photographs—the reader wants to visually understand Michael’s physical transformation from female to male. But even with scant imagery, The First Man-Made Man is a sobering and insightful glimpse into a transgender man’s life and place in medical and social history.
