Dillon Michael - The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution

Praise for The First Man-Made Man

"Thoughtful storytelling... snappy writing. Kennedy... exposes a stirring tale of lost love (which could have been grist for its own book) in just the sort of smart read we've come to expect from her."

Boston Globe

"Devastatingly good... Novelist Kennedy's literary chops serve her well in this fascinating and heartbreaking social history."

Booklist (starred review)

"A well-sculpted account of Dillon's remarkable life amid the buttoned-up attitudes of her times. Kennedy splices in fascinating side stories associated with Dillon's saga... When Dillon began his quest... he struggled alone. Had his autobiography been published or he'd survived to live openly, Dillon could have been a model for others. Thanks to Kennedy, his story has finally been given a life."

San Francisco Chronicle

"Absolutely outstanding. By far the best biography of a transgendered person that I have read."

Ben Barres, professor of neurobiology, Stanford University

"This story is fascinating to modern readers whether or not they have personal questions about gender." School Library Journal

"This book is pure brilliancethe research, the execution, the wonder and heartbreak. What an incredible story. What is it to be a human being Who are we? Everyone should read this book as we stumble through our lives." Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones and The Great Failure

"Sheds welcome light on the changes in society's attitudes and in scientific thinking about gender." Kirkus Reviews

"The biography reads like a novel... Not only is her book a medical history of the procedure and an examination of the complexities of gender, it's a devastating portrait of a man who goes to huge lengths to be at home in his own body and in the world."

Boston Phoenix

"An enlightening tour of how mid-century science conceptualized gender, hormones and transsexual surgery... an entertaining and informative popular history." Publishers Weekly

"The First Man-Made Man is so many things at oncea welcome glimpse into the early history of transgender pioneers; a postmodern critique of the complexities of the gender binary; and a page-turning biography of a man of unusual courage. Above all, though, it is deeply moving as a love story, as a tale of the connections people can make with each other, against all odds. Smart, unsettling, and intriguing." Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

"Pagan Kennedy traces the life of midcentury Englishman Michael Dillonship's doctor, Tibetan Buddhist, and, quite possibly, the world's first post-op FTM... How all this came to pass is a bit complicated to divulge here, but erstwhile zine queen Kennedy has laid it out in vivid and absorbing detail in her excellent biography of Dillon ." San Francisco Bay Guardian

THE FIRST MAN-MADE MAN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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Eater Black Livingstone

The Exes

Pagan Kennedy's Living

Zine

Spinsters

Platforms

Stripping & Other Stories

THE FIRST MAN-MADE MAN

The Story of Two Sex Changes,
One Love Affair, and a
Twentieth-Century
Medical Revolution

PAGAN KENNEDY

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2007 by Pagan Kennedy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information address Bloomsbury USA,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Photo credits: Photos 1 and 4: Courtesy of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. Photos 2 and 6: From the collection of Liz Hodgkinson. Photos and 10: Courtesy of the Hulton Archive. Photos 8 and 12: Courtesy of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. Photo 13 and image 14: From Sangharakshita's private collection, licensed by the Clear Vision Trust.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Distributed to the trade by Macmillan

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Kennedy, Pagan, 1962
The first man-made man : the story of two sexes, one love affair, and a twentieth-century medical revolution / Pagan Kennedy.1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-016-4
1. Dillon, Michael, 19151962.2. TranssexualsGreat BritainBiography. 3. Sex changeGreat BritainBiography. 4- Gender identityGreat Britain. I. Title.

HQ77.8.D55K46 2006
306.76'8094I dc22
2006018511

First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007
This paperback edition published in 2008

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

CONTENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In this book I often use the word transsexual rather than transgendered to refer to people who have switched sex. I do this because I am discussing a time in which the word transgender did not yet exist. In addition, transsexual tends to connote those who have used surgery and hormones to change their appearancewhich is true of most of the people documented here. My use of the word transsexual is not intended to strike any particular political tone, but rather to avoid confusion.

Pronouns, too, caused me angst. For clarity, I often found it necessary to refer to Laura Dillon as "she" and Robert Cowell as "he," even though these pronouns did not match Dillon's or CowelPs internal sense of themselves before they transformed their bodies. Wherever possible, I have tried to use the pronoun that refers to a person's preferred gender role rather than his/her body type.

PART I
MAKE THE BODY

CHAPTER 1
HE PROPOSES

MICHAEL DILLON, A BEARDED MEDICAL STUDENT, fiddled with his pipe and then lit it nervously. The year was 1950; the city, London; the restaurant, discreet. Dillon shared his table with a person so odd-looking that the other diners in the restaurant ogled and whispered to one another. Heor was it a she?wore a blazer and trousers, cropped hair, and tie, but seemed to be hiding breasts under the suit jacket. In fact, Roberta Cowell had been born male, but she could not live as a man anymore. She had begun dosing herself on massive amounts of estrogenenough to melt away her muscles and put a blush in her cheeks. With no idea how to push her transformation further, Cowell was stuck in a no-man's-land between the sexesa terrible place to find yourself in 1950.

The word transsexual had yet to enter common usage. Almost no medical literature acknowledged that thousands of people felt trapped in the wrong body and would do anythingincluding risk deathto change their sex. Michael Dillon, the medical student, had authored what was then one of the few books in the world to delve into the subject. In an eccentric little volume called Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, he had argued on behalf of people like Roberta Cowell. Dillon proposed an idea that seemed wildly radical at that time: why not give patients the body they wanted? Thanks to recent technological breakthroughs, doctors could transform a man into a woman and vice versa. But because of the stigma against these sex changesas well as laws that prohibited castrationonly a few people in the world had ever crossed the line.

Roberta Cowell had discovered Michael Dillon's book and decided she had to meet the open-minded scholar. She'd written to him care of his publisher and they'd exchanged a flurry of letters. Now, finally, they sat across from one another.

Dillon turned out to be handsome, Cowell reported in her autobiography. "He was a good deal younger than I had expected and wore a full beard. Not bad-looking, he was a very masculine type."