10/01/2026
Kudos to Michael Dillon!
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In 1939, a gas pump attendant in Bristol was working a job far beneath his education because his gender expression made other employment impossible. He had graduated from Oxford. He had been president of the Oxford University Women's Boat Club and earned a blue for rowing. He had a degree in Greats. None of it mattered much when the person standing in front of employers didn't match what they expected to see.
His name was Michael Dillon. He had been born Laura Maud Dillon in Kensington in 1915, the nephew of an Irish baronet, and he had known for most of his life that something was wrong with the match between his body and his sense of himself. In 1939, he sought out a doctor named George Foss, who had been experimenting with testosterone to treat menstrual disorders. The hormone's masculinizing effects were still poorly understood at the time. Dillon became the first trans man known to have taken testosterone specifically for the purpose of transition.
The hormones let him pass as male. He changed his name. The garage manager where he worked in Bristol instructed his employees to refer to Dillon as "he" so as not to confuse the customers. Dillon enrolled in medical school at Trinity College Dublin and became a distinguished rower again, this time for the men's team, almost certainly the first person in the history of either Oxford or Dublin to earn athletic honors for both.
He needed surgery. A chance hospitalization for a head injury connected him with a plastic surgeon who performed a double mastectomy, and that surgeon put him in contact with Sir Harold Gillies, widely considered the father of modern plastic surgery, who had spent the war reconstructing the bodies of injured soldiers. Gillies took Dillon's case. To protect his patient, he falsified the medical notes, recording the diagnosis as severe hypospadias.
Between 1946 and 1949, Gillies performed 13 surgeries on Dillon at Rooksdown House in Basingstoke, using skin grafts from his leg and abdomen. The procedure became known as the Gillies Technique. Dillon described the ward there as deeply affirming, the first place his physical reality had ever matched his sense of himself.
In 1946, the same year his surgeries began, Dillon published Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. It was the first book to argue in medical and ethical terms that when the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit the mind. The word "tr*******al" didn't exist in English yet. He was writing without a map.
His book brought him into contact with Roberta Cowell, a former RAF fighter pilot who became the first British trans woman to receive vaginoplasty. Dillon performed part of her surgery before he had even received his medical license. He proposed marriage afterward. She declined.
In 1958, a steward on his Merchant Navy ship handed him a cable from the Daily Express. His transition had appeared in the peerage records. The press had found him. He fled to India, took the name Lobzang Jivaka, and became a Buddhist monk. He died in Dalhousie in May 1962, at 47.
Christine Jorgensen became famous in 1952 and the world called her pioneering. Michael Dillon had done it a decade earlier, alone, without a word for what he was.
