Pagan Kennedy: The First Man-Made Man: New York: Bloomsbury: 2008.

As I’ve earlier provided a capsule biography of Michael Dillon, the first recorded female to male transsexual, I thought I’d focus on some more particular details involved in this biography of the world’s first transman.

Michael lived an austere professional life, whether as a mechanic, or after he’d gone to Trinity College, and qualified as a doctor. When it came to relationships with others, it never got beyond dancing due to the painful skin grafts from his legs that were neccessary to create male genitalia.

This may have served as an insurmountable obstacle to his relationship with Roberta Cowell, the first transwoman recorded in the United Kingdom. Roberta was living as a woman, taking oestrogen, and wearing female clothing. Dillon proposed that if her surgery went ahead and they married, they could move abroad to become an invisible straight couple, and then adopt a child, whereupon Roberta could settle down to become a housewife. Unfortunately, as one can see, Michael had some very conservative ideas about gender role polarisation, which may be another reason for the breakdown of their relationship.

It is a shame that no-one has seen fit to reissue Michael’s pioneering volume on transgender rights and reassignment surgery, Ethics. In it, he distinguished transvestites from transsexuals and the pain that the latter felt from body/mind conflicts over their biological sex. He did so nearly twenty years before Dr Harry Benjamin coined the phrase ‘transsexual’ in reference to the glamorous Christine Jorgensen after her much-publicised surgery.

As well as transgender history, Kennedy also gives us some wonderful insights into interwar lesbian and gay mores. Radclyffe Hall had just published her Well of Loneliness in 1928, and despite its prohibition, bootleg copies became cherished heirlooms amongst lesbians of the time, who handed copies to one another, and copied the coiffure, wool trousers and white buttoned shirts amongst the Oxford lesbian set during Michael’s time there. However, Michael (nee Laura) Dillon wasn’t a lesbian- he hated his initial female body, and to mbrace lesbianism would have meant that he had to accept it.

Meanwhile, Robert Cowell (23) had just become an RAF fighter pilot in 1941. There was no trace of the future Roberta, any nascent breast growth or genital anomalies. After crashing during a mission over Germany, he became a POW in Stalag Luft I in a rat-infested, chaotic and unhealthy environment, leading him to hunt feral cats for food. Mental illness and alcoholism were rife, and to keep himself sane, he dreamed about building racing cars after the war was over.

As I noted in my earlier review, Michael had met kindly and altruistic plastic surgeon Harold Gillies by then, whose compassion and warmth sustained Michael during his initial surgical modification. Due to the heavy demand on wartime plastic surgery due to war injuries though, his full reassignment surgery had to wait until after the war.

In 1945, Robert was finally liberated from the concentration camp, but after he went home to his family and started building racing car engines as he’d always wanted, something else was still missing. Then he realised that he liked dressing in women’s clothing, could pass as female, and had a “ female”  unconscious, according to a psychoanalyst consulted after his divorce in 1948.

In the late forties, Robert became an investor and director of Sheridan of London Designs and entered the world of fashion. He found a supportive endocrinologist who gave him oestrogen, leading to breast growth, thinned facial hair and thickened head hair, as well as weakened wrist muscles. And then, Robert met Michael Dillon, who performed the surgery that made her Britain’s first transwoman, in 1951. Gillies finished the work, providing Roberta with facial surgery and a vagina.

Across the Atlantic, Christine Jorgensen had just arrived back in the United States after her own reassignment surgery in Copenhagen. Roberta Cowell decided to cash in on her counterpart’s revelations in 1954, and initially posed as an intersexed person. Unfortunately for Roberta, her father was a surgeon, and had been there when Robert was born, and he testified that was not the case. However, her memoir was still one of the first accounts of gender dysphoria and transsexual life and aspirations, preceded only by the work of Lili Elbe in the thirties, and Christine Jorgensen across the Atlantic.

Michael was far more closeted and discrete. He had contacted two peerage listing publications to press his claim to succeed his childless brother as a peer, leading to one sympathetic modification, and an unfortunate oversight. By the late fifties, he’d joined the merchant navy and became interested in Gurdjieff, theosophy and Tibetan Buddhism. In 1958, he was inadvertantly outed, although Debrett’s Peerage was sympathetic to his claim.

By that time, Christine Jorgensen and Roberta Cowell were living bleak lives on the US entertainment circuit, and at home, after the failure of the latter’s business ventures.

Michael travelled to the Himalayas to become a Buddhist monk, but his efforts were hampered by his lack of assimilation to the arduous and hostile environment, as well as a conservative treacherous older mentor, Sangarakshita, who proved to be a nuisance insofar as the question of Michael’s gender identity was concerned. Despite the surgery, his mentor interfered repeatedly with Michael’s ordination attempts, and “women” and “hermaphrodites” were ineligible for monastic ordination and vows. However, cumulative malnutrition and arduous physical exertion took their toll, coupled with Chinese border skirmishes related to disputed Himalayan border territories with India. In May 1962, Michael died.

It was left to Pagan Kennedy to tell this man’s remarkable story, and we owe her a great debt for that.