Laurence Michael Dillon
Early life
Michael Dillon was born in Ladbroke Grove, London on May 1st 1915, and assigned female at birth. He was the second of two children born to Robert Arthur Dillon, heir to the Dillon baronetcy of Lismullen, and Laura Maude McLiver, a young Australian widow. Their first child Robert, known as Bobby, was born in 1914, seven months after their wedding, and Michael was born just fifteen months later on May 1st 1915. Laura, after whom Michael was named, died of puerperal fever when he was ten days old. His grief-stricken father refused to have anything to do with him.
The newborn Michael and his one-year-old brother Bobby were sent to the family house in Folkestone to be raised by his father’s sisters. Although their father sent money to support them and pay for a nanny, he played very little part in their lives and saw them on only a few occasions before his death ten years later.
There were six aunts in total, three of whom were in residence in the house when the children arrived. The primary responsibility for their care was taken on by the third and fourth daughters, Melita (known as Toto) and Minna (known as Daisy).
In his autobiography Out of the Ordinary Michael described the atmosphere in which he was raised as Victorian. Toto, who Michael wrote ‘took precedence’ both among the aunts and in their upbringing, was 48 when the children came to Folkestone.
‘I was brought up to believe in the superiority of the Englishman, and of Englishmen, of the superiority of the aristocracy of which, apparently, the Dillons formed no small part. What the English aristocracy did was “done”, what it did not do was “not done”, and this was as irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians!’
From a very young age, Michael chafed at the rigid gender expectations of the upbringing provided by his conservative, old-fashioned aunts.
'One morning we were being dressed to go to the barber when I inadvisedly said: "I want my hair cut like Bobby's." Nanny only laughed and said: "Don't be silly, you can't, you're a little girl and he's a little boy." When we were at the hairdressers, some devil prompted her to say: "Tell the barber what you said in the nursery." Embarrassed, I tried to pretend I had forgotten, but she persisted so at last I came out with it defiantly: "I want my hair cut like Bobby's." They both laughed uproariously, as I knew they would, and it remained as a bob with either a slide or a ribbon.'
Michael’s father died of pneumonia in 1925 when he was ten. A few weeks later a distant family member, Sir John Fox Dillon, also died, making the eleven-year-old Bobby the eighth baronet. Bobby was sent to public school, while Michael was left alone with the aunts. Toto became increasingly controlling and emotionally manipulative, frequently trying to prevent Michael from leaving the house and discouraging him from forming friendships with other young people.
His discomfort with his gender was brought to a head by an incident in his late teens. While out for a walk with the vicar’s nephew, they passed through a gate which he opened for Michael and stood aside to let him walk 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…Life could never be the same again. People thought I was a woman. But I wasn’t. I was just me. How could one live like that?’
His longing to get away from Folkestone intensified and he eventually persuaded his aunts to allow him to take the Oxford entrance exam. In 1934 he was accepted into St Anne’s College, then a women’s college known as the Society of Oxford Home-Students, to study theology.
Oxford
Michael loved Oxford, and remembered it with longing for his whole life. He joined the women’s rowing team and in his second year was elected president. In the 1930s, Oxford still discouraged women from rowing on the grounds that it might damage their reproductive capacity. The womens’ team was only allowed to row a very short and easy course, did not have uniforms, and was generally regarded with mockery. Michael worked tirelessly to improve the team’s reputation, commissioning uniforms, hiring a prestigious coach and successfully fighting to allow the team to row a proper course. He won a rowing blue, the highest honour granted to individual sportspeople at Oxford.
Although his rowing career gave him a deep sense of fulfilment, it also led to his first unwanted brush with the press and further tension in his family relationships. Unbeknownst to him, a journalist took a photograph of him in his cox’s uniform of trousers, blazer and cap. The photo was published in the Daily Mirror with the caption ‘Man or Woman?’ Aunt Toto wrote angrily demanding that he stop making a freak of himself, and his relationship with his brother Robert, who was already embarrassed by Michael’s gender non-conformity, was further damaged.
Away from Toto’s direct influence, however, Michael was able for the first time in his life to form relationships with his peers without interference. He confided in a friend about his feelings about his gender, who told him that he must be a homosexual and advised him to ‘take a woman’. Michael accepted this label, but never took the advice: ‘Somehow it seemed wrong.’ He did decide to tell one of his aunts, Aunt Evie, but she was dismissive.
‘I went over to tea with her one afternoon and began to tell her about my apparently being homosexual but before I had finished, she had burst out into a contemptuous laugh and said I had been reading something and the sooner I got married the better.’
Michael’s first inkling that he was not alone in his feelings came in one of his friendships at Oxford, a ‘brother-relationship’ with an unnamed person he described only as ‘a girl who was in many respects similar to myself’. He and his ‘brother’ developed an intense friendship, rowing from Oxford to Putney together and taking boxing lessons from an ex-Army sergeant. This person’s identity remains unknown.
At Oxford, Michael was able to find ways of expressing his gender non-conformity that toed the line of social acceptability. He wore his hair in a short Eton crop, dressed in increasingly masculine styles, and bought a motorcycle. People who looked like him, although still unusual, were not completely unheard of, and he could be grouped in with more daring and forward-thinking women who were pushing gender boundaries. But the wider world was less tolerant, and he experienced constant street harassment and speculation about his gender from strangers.
Early transition
Michael graduated in 1938 and went to work in a laboratory in Gloucestershire conducting brain research, and when war broke out in 1939 he joined the W.A.A.F territorials. When he learned of a doctor who specialised in ‘sex problems’, he saw an opportunity to do something about his struggles with his gender. Testosterone had only recently been chemically isolated, and doctors were experimenting with using it to treat a wide range of issues. Dr George Foss was using it to treat women with excessive menstrual bleeding. Michael went to see Dr Foss, who initially agreed to help but insisted that he see a psychiatrist first. When he returned, however, Dr Foss had become wary of treating him. He gave him some testosterone pills, but would have no further involvement in his treatment.
Michael began taking testosterone in 1939, making him the first trans person known to do so, but he quickly discovered that his secret was out. The psychiatrist had told his story to one of the doctors at the lab where he worked; the story spread quickly through the workplace and he was mocked by his colleagues for ‘wanting to be a man’.
Deeply humiliated, he quit his job at the laboratory and after a brief stint in the F.A.N.Y.’s (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), began working at a garage in Bristol. The testosterone made him look increasingly masculine, but because of his female documents his birth sex was known to the other garage workers, who wasted no time in spreading it amongst themselves. Only one of his fellow employees refused to participate in this mockery. A teenager who had grown up in an orphanage, Gilbert Barrow’s background was a stark contrast to Michael’s, but the two nevertheless struck up a lifelong friendship. They didn’t discuss Michael’s history until Gilbert was called up for the Navy, when Michael finally asked him if he knew.
‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘They told me the first day, but I told them I would knock the block off anyone who tried to be funny about you.’
Michael and Gilbert worked together as firewatchers during the blitz on Bristol, a dangerous job which Michael took on with a complete lack of concern for his own safety. Gilbert had to persuade him to wear a protective hat, as he felt that being killed in an air raid would give him an escape from a life he struggled to see as worth living. Gilbert’s friendship was a bright spot in a period he would later describe as the worst of his life, and Michael felt a deep lifelong debt of gratitude to him. Later in life he paid for Gilbert’s son to go to public school.
Mastectomy and legal sex change
Michael might have remained in this painful limbo indefinitely if not for a stroke of chance. He passed out in the street from a hypoglycaemic attack and was taken to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, where he confided his history to the house surgeon. The house surgeon introduced him to a plastic surgeon who would give him a double mastectomy, and then refer him to another surgeon to whom he had been a student to construct male genitalia- plastic surgery pioneer Sir Harold Gillies.
This unknown surgeon also suggested that Michael re-register as male and have his legal documents changed. Michael had resigned himself to a lifetime of being trapped and constricted by identity cards, driving licences and documents in the wrong name and gender, and it had not occurred to him that it was possible to change these things. The suggestion was an unexpected glimmer of hope. He underwent a double mastectomy in 1942 and set about getting his documents changed the following year. He also decided that he would finally have to tell his aunts, which he did with the help of Dr Alison Macbeth, a doctor who was a friend of the family.
‘Toto’s reaction was that God made them male and female, she had never heard of His making them intersex as well. Daisy said she had never heard of it either but if it could happen then I would be the most likely person it could happen to, and Maudie merely snorted. But the hurdle was past.’
Although the aunts came to grudgingly accept Michael as a man, his brother was a different story. Robert had always been self-conscious that his ‘sister’ was more masculine than he was, and Michael’s transition only compounded his insecurity. He refused to acknowledge Michael as a brother, or as any kind of relation at all.
The next step was to change his legal identity. When he went to get his documents changed, there were further hints that other people like him might be out there.
‘With the poker face back on and on the defensive I went to get a new identity card at the Labor Exchange, prepared for grins and curiosity. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the man behind the counter, ‘we have had quite a lot of these applications’, and made me out a new card without batting an eyelid! How common was it? I am none the wiser on that point now.
Then I automatically received my call-up papers for the Army although I was told that the medical examination would be a mere formality. ‘Yes’, said the Army doctor, ‘we’ve turned down a lot like you.’
Although there was no official process for trans people to change their legal documents in the mid-twentieth century, there is evidence that a number of trans people did so via unofficial routes. An unofficial procedure at the Ministry of Pensions amended some trans people’s legal sex by recording that a ‘mistake’ had been made in identifying their sex at birth. By the 1960s they had a secret record of hundreds of trans people. These loopholes were closed by the case of Corbett vs. Corbett in 1971, and no official avenue for trans people to change their legal sex was opened until the passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2003.
In 1943 Michael had his first meeting with renowned plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies in Basingstoke, who would perform a series of operations on him unprecedented in transgender medicine. While the standard medical view at the time was that gender-affirming surgery amounted to mutilation of a healthy body, Gillies felt that such surgeries were justified if they brought a person happiness and ended their distress. In his time at the garage, Michael had begun working on a book making similar arguments, which would be published in 1946.
Gillies agreed to operate on him, although he would have to wait until after the war. To shield himself from potential scrutiny, Gillies put Michael down in his records as suffering from hypospadias, an intersex condition which causes urethral malformation of the penis.
With a new sense of hope for the future, Michael decided to go back to university, where at last nobody would know about his history and he could be seen as an ordinary young man. At Alison Macbeth’s encouragement, he decided to go to medical school. There was one final bureaucratic hurdle: he would need to show evidence of his Oxford M.A., which was in his old name and showed his attendance at a women’s college. He wrote to his old Oxford tutor Jimmy McKie for help. McKie had Michael’s name transferred from St Anne’s College to Brasenose, arranged for his M.A. certificate to be re-issued with only the initials ‘L.M. Dillon’, and wrote Michael a reference that avoided using any gendered pronouns.
Michael’s academic skills were rusty after years at the garage, and he was rejected by several universities, but he was eventually accepted by Trinity College, Dublin, for their pre-medical year. As his brother lived near Dublin, Michael made an attempt to reconcile with him. They met for lunch and Michael suggested they present themselves as cousins, but Robert refused to have anything to do with him and told him never to mention any connection between them.
Publication of Self
Michael’s first book was eventually published by Heinemann in 1946. In Self: A Study In Ethics and Endocrinology, he argued for better treatment of homosexual, intersex and trans people. The word ‘transsexual’ was not yet in use, so he used vague language like ‘these people’ and ‘these types’ to describe trans people. The book is written as though from an impartial medical perspective, and there is no indication that the author is one of the people described. Nonetheless, it is one of the earliest known instances of a trans person arguing for the right of trans people to gender-affirming care. Michael argues that since a person’s innate gender identity cannot be changed, the only effective course of treatment for trans people is to change the external body to match the innate gender identity. He writes that trans patients should have the autonomy to choose their course of treatment (‘Is it not for the individual to judge whether he be "mutilated", experimented on or left alone?’), and that the treatment should be free, before the creation of the NHS made free healthcare the standard in Britain.
‘The psychologist's only suggestion is to make the mind fit the body, to which course such a patient will never accede. Thus a rift occurs between him and the would-be helper who cannot understand why, being really a man (or a woman as the case may be) he does not wish to be helped towards achieving the personality of such. The patient's answer is simple. He does not feel himself to be a man, and how would any woman like to be turned into a man? So they arrive at a deadlock. The question therefore arises, which is the most important to sex, the mind or the body? [...]
‘Now there is, for these people, no recognized form of treatment other than that offered by the psychologists; for what the patient asks, namely, that his body be made to fit his mind, is refused him. This, according to the psychologists, would be mere mutilation and, since it leads to non-productivity, therefore useless. But we have seen the latter objection of non-productivity is invalid since whether treated or left alone, such persons will not reproduce. Moreover recent researches have shown that possibly treatment by hormone injection might make a change, incomplete, it is true, and unproductive save in one respect (and that respect is after all the important one) namely, the achievement of a tolerably happy life for the individual concerned. But is not this an end worth striving after? Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind…’
The book did not sell particularly well and gained little general notice, but it made a powerful impression on a small number of readers. One of those people would be Roberta Cowell.
Trinity College and surgeries
Michael began his medical studies at Trinity College in the autumn of 1945, at the age of thirty. To his overwhelming relief, for the first time in his life, he was surrounded by people who knew nothing about his past and had no reason to believe he was anything but an ordinary man.
But the final stage of his medical transition was not yet over. On the last day of every term, he flew from Dublin to Rooksdown Hospital near Basingstoke to be operated on by Dr Gillies, often arriving late at night and going into surgery the next morning. The whole vacation would be spent recovering, and he regularly flew back to Trinity still bandaged and not fully healed.
This gruelling pattern continued for four years, with Gillies operating on him a total of thirteen times. Gillies had performed phalloplasties on cisgender men who had congenital deformities or lost their genitals in combat, but no-one had constructed a penis on a transgender man before. Gillies invented his own technique, which required taking large grafts of skin from Michael’s legs and stomach. He spent three months in hospital when one operation went wrong, missing a whole term, and walked with a cane when he was able to return to Trinity, telling his classmates that the scars and the cane were the result of wounds sustained in the bombing of Bristol. Nevertheless he returned to rowing and won a second rowing blue, making him likely the first person in history to do so on both a mens’ and womens’ team.
Michael struggled to make friends at Trinity, being significantly older than his classmates and with a unique life experience he could not share with them. Throughout his life he was a shy person who struggled to connect with others, and the people he did connect with tended to be those he saw as fellow outsiders. He became friendly with Tolani Asuni, the only Black medical student in his year, who would go on to become one of the first indigenous psychiatrists in Nigeria. But he was particularly wary of interaction with women. Although he craved romantic connection, he felt it would be wrong to become romantically involved with a woman. He was also terrified by the prospect of telling potential partners about his history, in case they told others.
‘With girls one had to be careful. No-one seemed to suspect anything and I developed something of a reputation of being a woman-hater, since I made a point of treating them in a rather rough brotherly fashion, and sheered off if any showed any signs of being interested. One must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children. That was the basis of my ethics. An evening’s flirting at a dance was one thing and a relief- but no more.’
Roberta
It was during his time at Trinity that Michael received his first letter from Roberta, who was then still going by her birth name and living publicly as a man. She had identified with the people he described in Self, and got in touch via his publisher. Although he was initially hesitant to meet her, when they met at a restaurant in London he was immediately smitten. Within an hour and a half of meeting her, he blurted out his secret:
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you, but five years ago I was a woman.’
Roberta was looking for help with her transition, particularly with obtaining surgery and legally changing her gender, and Michael agreed to help. His initially formal letters to Roberta quickly became friendly and then romantic. He decorated his letters with hearts and kisses, writing ‘I love you’ over and over in English and Latin and addressing her as ‘My own dear Bobbie’ and ‘my best beloved’. Roberta later claimed that she was never romantically interested in Michael, but it is clear that at the very least she allowed him to believe his feelings were reciprocated, and Michael fell deeply in love.
Although Michael introduced Roberta to Dr Gillies, Gillies was unwilling to perform the orchidectomy (removal of the testicles), as this would be illegal due to mayhem law- a centuries old law that forbade the amputation of a healthy body part from a ‘male’ who might serve as a soldier. Without this initial surgery, Roberta could not have a vaginoplasty (the surgical construction of a vagina), and would not be able to legally change her sex. This was perhaps the most important factor from Michael’s perspective, as he was intent on marrying Roberta, but until she was legally female, no marriage would be possible. Unable to find a legal avenue for her surgery, she eventually asked Michael- by then a fifth-year medical student- to operate on her himself.
Michael was horrified by this request, but when it became clear that they couldn’t find an alternative, he agreed. They drew up a handwritten document in an attempt to protect Michael from legal consequences if the operation went wrong.
‘I, R.C. have, of my own free will asked and persuaded LMD, who I am aware is an unqualified man, a fifth year medical student, to perform an orchidectomy upon me. I am also aware that his operating experience has been confined solely to assisting at operations as a resident pupil in hospital and to one appendectomy in the presence of a surgeon and that he has neither seen nor practised this particular operation and is aware of his deficiencies. I desire that he be absolved from all responsibility in this operation, due to possible haemorrhage or sepsis, which I am desirous to undergo being fully aware that either might, per fortunam, be fatal.’
The surgery took place in secret in the house of Alison Macbeth, the doctor who had helped him come out to his family. Although he had never performed or even seen it before, it was successful. Roberta legally re-registered as a woman in May 1951. Michael’s letters became increasingly filled with plans for their wedding and fantasies about their married life. He spoke frequently about potential wedding arrangements such as hymn selections and possible venues, about collecting furniture and other things for their future home, and even about the possibility of having children together. He wrote to friends and family informing them of the engagement, and sent Roberta an engagement ring in an empty cigarette packet which he informed her not to open until he had passed his final exams.
But Roberta rejected him. What exactly she said to end the relationship is unknown. Michael never gave anyone any details, but when his friend Gilbert Barrow asked about Roberta he was told ‘It’s all over’. He never entered into a romantic relationship again.
After Roberta
Although Michael passed his final medical exams and qualified as a doctor in 1951, he did not get the grades he had hoped for, and missed out on one of the prestigious jobs at the City of Dublin hospital that went to the students with the highest marks. With no professional prospects and his hopes of a happy married life destroyed, he found himself once again unsure of his future. He took a job for a year at a small hospital in the north of Dublin on a salary of just £1 a week, less than he had earned working at the garage.
Michael knew what it was like to spend weeks as a bedridden patient, so he resolved to help the long-stay patients keep active. During his many recuperations at Rooksdown he had learned handicrafts such as leatherwork, knitting and embroidery, and he passed these skills on to the long-stay patients. The resulting products were then sold on visiting days and the proceeds were used to benefit the patients, organising an outing to a pantomime at Christmas and fitting the beds with headphones so that they could listen to the radio.
He took his first steps down the path that would lead him to Buddhism when he read In Search of the Miraculous by Russian philosopher and esotericist P.D. Ouspensky. He went on to read every book he could find by or about Ouspensky and his teacher George Gurdjieff, and began to work on improving his own personality. Ouspensky wrote that most people revel in their self-pity, instead of choosing not to augment their negative emotions by feeling any self-pity at all. Michael resolved to eliminate his own self-pity, which he had struggled with all his life. Gurdjieff wrote ‘Nothing in life can hurt you if only you can learn not to react’, which he would use as a mantra when his secret eventually got out.
Merchant Navy
When his year at the hospital ended, Michael joined the Merchant Navy as a ship’s doctor. He had a lifelong love for uniforms and the sense of belonging that they gave, from his Girl Guide days as a child to his rowing uniforms at Oxford and Trinity. The Merchant Navy uniform with its brass buttons and gold braid was the grandest he had ever had: ‘Never had I dreamed I would one day be adorned in such glad rags!’ His first job was on a P&O cargo vessel, a short trip of three weeks visiting Antwerp, Hamburg and Rotterdam. He took to naval life immediately, and felt an intense sense of gratitude to everyone who had helped make his situation possible.
While on leave in England between assignments, Michael turned his attention to one last trace of his former life. Members of aristocratic families were recorded from birth in two separate volumes, Debrett’s Peerage and Burke’s Peerage, and he was still listed in both under his birth name as Robert’s sister. Michael visited C.F. Hankison, editor of Debrett’s, explained his history, and asked for his entry to be updated. Hankison agreed to do this, and also promised to support Michael’s claim to the Dillon baronetcy. As Robert had no children, the change from sister to brother made him, at least in theory, the heir to the title. Hankison assured Michael that any changes made in Debrett’s would automatically be copied in Burke’s, but unbeknownst to them his entry in Burke’s remained unchanged. This oversight would have devastating consequences years later.
In 1954, Michael signed a four-year contract with P&O cruises on a ship transporting Muslim pilgrims undergoing hajj back and forth from Singapore and Penang to Mecca. This period of Michael’s life allowed him to satisfy an urge he had had since childhood to travel the world, and he wrote about it with great enthusiasm both in his autobiography and in his correspondence with Dr Gillies, with whom he continued to exchange regular letters.
Michael continued to pursue his spiritual development, and while back in England between jobs he joined a discussion group for people interested in discussing Ouspensky’s ideas. He made a conscious effort to let go of the worldview in which he had been raised, with its emphasis on English aristocratic supremacy. He was never fully successful in this, although his quest for self-improvement became a driving force in the last few years of his life; his writing about his travels betray a typically colonial attitude towards the people and cultures he encountered, with broad and frequently disparaging stereotyping. But when docked in South Africa, he was happy to discover that apartheid was not enforced at the Mission to Seamen:
‘We were in Durban a week and there saw the colour bar in action for the first time. But there was one place where it could not be exerted, as a result of its constitution, and that was in the Mission to Seamen, and on filmshow nights negroes, Indians, Chinese and Europeans, all Seamen sat together. May it long continue!’
‘Lobsang Rampa’, aka Cyril Henry Hoskins
In 1956, Michael decided to try and settle on dry land. He broke his contract with P&O two years early and took temporary work at a hospital in London while he decided what to do next. He came across a book called The Third Eye, which purported to be the autobiography of a Tibetan mystic named Lobsang Rampa. Rampa claimed that he was born in Lhasa, Tibet, trained at a monastery, and at the age of eight was selected by the lamas to undergo surgery to open his ‘third eye’, granting him psychic powers and the ability to read others’ auras. In actuality, Rampa (born Cyril Henry Hoskins) was a plumber’s son from Plympton, Devon who had never been to Tibet. But in the 1950s most Westerners knew very little about Tibet, and The Third Eye became a global best-seller. One newspaper wrote ‘This is probably the first time such an account has been written from the inside of a way of life and a society utterly foreign and well-nigh incredible to Western minds.’ Michael, along with most of Rampa’s readers, was unsuspecting. He found the book revelatory, and wrote to Rampa, who wrote back and suggested a meeting.
Michael was immediately drawn in by Rampa, and after their first meeting accepted an invitation from him to visit him at his home in Howth, a village near Dublin. Michael saw in Rampa a fellow outsider and misfit, and someone who he could talk to about his search for self-improvement and truth. By the end of his two-week visit, Michael was completely convinced of Rampa’s powers. He experienced strange dreams at night where he felt Rampa’s presence guiding him through what he came to think of as his ‘astral travels’. Even when Rampa’s background was later unmasked in the press Michael stood by him, and continued to believe most of what he had written.
At the end of his visit, Rampa told him that he had intuited how Michael ought to spend the rest of his life. He told him to do one more sea voyage and then go to India and look for a monastery where he could learn meditation.
Exposure by the press
Seeking to follow Rampa’s instructions, Michael signed up as the doctor on the City of Bath, a ship transporting cargo back and forth between the United States and India. On board the ship in May 1958, he received a telegram which read:
Do you intend to claim the title since your change-over? Kindly cable Daily Express.
Michael realised that his greatest fear had come to pass. Somehow the press had found out about his transition, and about his claim to the baronetcy. A crew member informed him that two reporters were waiting for him on the wharf. Knowing that he could not prevent the story from being published, he decided to co-operate. He spoke to the reporters as briefly as possible, allowed them to take his picture, and then retreated back to the ship, where he faced the task of telling the captain before he found out from the newspapers. The captain was sympathetic, and, anticipating that the ship would be besieged by reporters when they reached New York, cabled ahead to arrange a police guard for the gangway.
Faced with an agonising wait of eight hours before the evening papers arrived and the crew would find out, Michael fell back on the mantra he had learned from Gurdjieff, ‘Nothing in life can hurt you if only you can learn not to react’, which he recited over and over. But by the next morning, when the papers had come out, he could no longer tolerate not knowing who knew and who didn’t.
'Next day I could stand it no longer and I took the bull by the horns and went up to the Second’s cabin at twelve o’clock, the hour for drinks and social converse. He and Sparks were in there and I was at once invited in for a drink. I made a direct attack by asking if they had seen the papers and what was their attitude going to be. The Second poured me out a gin, raised his glass and knocked mine and then said that they had discussed it at length over beer the night before and had come to the conclusion that I had had a raw deal and since they had liked me before and I had not changed overnight they saw no reason for letting it make any difference.'
As his story began to appear in more newspapers, letters of support poured in from old friends, including Dr Gillies and Rampa, who was suffering his own exposure by the press. A letter from Gilbert Barrow, enclosing a copy of the Sunday Express, shed some light on how his story had gotten out. Somehow a reporter had spotted the difference between his entry in Burke’s Peerage and his entry in Debrett’s. Reporters then flocked to his brother’s house, demanding to know whether he had a sister or a brother. Bobby told them he had a sister who was a doctor, and initially refused to say more, but after two days he gave them the name of Michael’s ship, allowing them to look him up as the ship’s doctor.
It is not clear how a reporter came across the obscure discrepancy between the Burke’s and Debrett’s entries. Roberta, whose story had been made public several years earlier, had declared bankruptcy the previous year in September of 1957, and was known to sell stories to the press when in need of money, but there is no direct evidence of her involvement. In her autobiography Roberta Cowell’s Story, published in 1954, she described her first meeting with Michael, but did not name him, and made no reference to their relationship.
As he had promised, C.F. Hankison, editor of Debrett’s, publicly defended Michael's claim as heir to the baronetcy, and was quoted in TIME magazine:
"I have always been of the opinion that a person has all rights and privileges of the sex that is, at a given moment, recognized."
The version of Michael’s story published in the newspapers presented his transition as something that had begun naturally and was later completed with surgical intervention. In his reluctant Sunday Express interview, he claims that he began to grow facial hair as an adolescent (which is not mentioned in his autobiography), and does not mention that he took testosterone. Several American newspapers described him as a ‘victim of a sex mix-up’ and claimed he had hypospadias- the condition Dr Gillies had put in his records as a legal cover for Michael’s operation.
In the 1950s the distinction between intersex and trans people was still poorly understood. Many trans and intersex people who entered the public eye in the mid-twentieth century presented their ‘change of sex’ as something that had happened, or at least started, on its own, because of biological factors that had been present from birth. In some of these cases, such as that of British athlete Mark Weston who was born with an intersex condition, this was the truth. In others, including Michael’s, there may have been some element of truth to this, but it’s impossible to know for sure. By downplaying the role of medical intervention or framing hormonal treatment and surgeries as helping along a process that had already started, trans people were able to get more sympathetic press treatment than they would have if they had presented their transition as something they chose of their own free will. This is borne out by press coverage of Roberta’s case, which became much more hostile when reporters began to suspect that her transition had not happened organically.
When his ship reached New York Michael was told he should not go ashore for his own safety, as the journalists might try and tear his clothes off to get a picture, and indeed, the wharf was full of people brandishing cameras. For ten days he remained holed up on the ship, thinking about his future.
What to do now was the question. I could never set foot ashore in America with safety again. Probably the company would allow me to change ships in India, but then if I arrived back in England would my advent be heralded and reporters once more be waiting?
In fact press coverage of Michael’s story in the UK was fairly limited, especially compared to Roberta’s a few years earlier. But any amount of scrutiny was painful to Michael, and he could not stand the thought, after years of anonymity, of once more becoming a ‘museum piece’, the subject of whispers and gossip. He attempted to resign from his gentleman’s club in London and his job with the Ellerman Lines, but the company urged him to stay on as ship’s doctor, and his club refused his resignation, telling him that he remained a member in good standing.
Despite this support, he believed he had no choice but to disappear, at least for a few years. He requested his release from Ellerman Lines in India, deciding that now was the time to follow Rampa’s instructions to join a monastery and learn meditation. He wrote to his friends telling them that he planned to stay in India for a couple of years, and asked them not to try and find him, telling them that he planned on returning to England some time in the summer of 1961.
Monastic life
Michael left the City of Bath in Calcutta in the summer of 1958. Although he was seeking to live in a monastery, he knew very little about Buddhism or meditation.
‘It never occurred to me to study Buddhism at all or to look for books on it while we were in Bombay or Colombo. I had no ideas about changing my religion whatsoever.’ Rather, he saw it as a next step in his quest for self-improvement, to ‘get away from the world for a while and fit myself for coping with it better’.
He travelled to a monastery in Kalimpong he had visited a year previously, but was turned away. Since his last visit, the monastery had undergone a scandal involving a French former Catholic nun who had arrived and persuaded them to make her a Buddhist nun (getsulma). She had gone on to accuse various of the monks of rape and sexual assault, and was later found to be a Communist agent. The monastery was therefore wary of Westerners claiming that they wanted to become Buddhists, particularly if, as Michael did, they showed up unannounced. He was refused entry and told he would have to go to another monastery in Kalimpong which was run by an Englishman.
Michael made his way to the Kalimpong monastery, where he was to stay for four months. Believing that in a holy place his confidences would be kept, he told the English monk (the bhikshu) his whole life story. As it was run by an Englishman, the monastery was frequently visited by Westerners, and Michael made it clear to the bhikshu that he did not want his true identity revealed to anyone. The bhikshu gave him the name Jivaka, meaning ‘doctor’. He went by this name for the remainder of his life.
Jivaka was keen to learn about Buddhism, but the bhikshu refused to teach him formally or to allow him full access to his library, giving him access only to books that he selected himself. A visiting Tibetan lama took Jivaka to the dharmsala (pilgrim’s resting place) in the town of Sarnath, where he could stay for a while for free, only having to provide his own food, would have access to the large library, and could attend the nearby Sanskrit University. His serious interest in Buddhism began at Sarnath, and he began not only to read everything about it he could but to write extensively about it. He went on to publish several books about Buddhism, mainly for English-speakers.
Although he had only planned to stay in India for a few years to allow press attention to die down, Jivaka began to consider permanently renouncing his former life in a world which he felt had let him down. He felt he had done everything he could to live a respectable life and leave his past behind, and yet the press had thought nothing of digging up his secret and exposing it to the general public, turning his life upside-down in the process.
Jivaka was ordained as a sramenera, or novice monk, of the Theravin Order of the Hinayana school, and decided to cut off ties with his former life by writing to his lawyer and instructing him to dispose of his estate. He still had a substantial sum of money from bequests left to him by relatives, which he now gave up. In his book Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery, he wrote:
‘In Buddhism monastic vows do not bind for life, as they do in Christianity. A man may lay aside the robes at any time if he feels he has made a mistake. But it was not my intention merely to give it a trial, as it were; I meant, having once given up the world, never to return to that mode of life. I would not put my hand to the plough and then look back. With this end in view I wrote to my stockbroker and solicitor, enclosing a 'will' distributing my private property to those of my friends and acquaintances who were most in need…
But even as there are no vows for life in Buddhism, so also there are no closed orders. Accommodation was free, but if the monk has no family and no supporter, he must somehow find the means to feed himself. And the only possible source of income for me was writing...’
For the remainder of his life, his writing would indeed be his sole, often insufficient source of income. He gave up the last of his possessions when he returned to Kalimpong, giving the bhikshu the remainder of his pay-off from the Navy, about £130, as well as a signet ring his cousin had given him on his 21st birthday. He was determined to renounce all ties to his former life, including his aristocratic background. Giving up the ring, he wrote:
'was a marked wrench, which was why I made myself part with it. Despite other values being different, this one worldly value still had some hold on me and even now I think of the ring wistfully and despise myself for so doing.’
In the course of his reading about Buddhism he found a reference to a ‘third sex’, referring to people who were not fully male nor female, and discovered that anyone belonging to this ‘third sex’ would be automatically denied Higher Ordination, the next step after the initial ordination he had already undergone. He also found out that anyone who had suffered any form of bodily mutilation would be banned from Higher Ordination. This greatly concerned him, as he seemed to belong to this ‘third sex’ category, and had undergone many surgeries over the course of his life that might be categorised as ‘bodily mutilation’.
Jivaka quickly became frustrated with the way things were run at Kalimpong, where food was often very scarce, and returned to Sarnath, where after a few months he was offered Higher Ordination. He admitted to the bhikshu that he was in the ‘third sex’ category which was barred from Higher Ordination. They allowed him to stay while they came to a decision, during which time he began working on an updated translation of a book called The Life of Milarepa (an eleventh-century Tibetan yogi), Although he finished the book in 1959, it would not be published until 1962, a month before his death. After months of deliberation, the bhikshu ultimately decided that he could not be ordained.
Jivaka became disillusioned with the form of Buddhism he had thus far encountered (Hinayana), and became more attracted to the Tibetan form of Buddhism described in The Life of Milarepa (the Mahayana sect). He met (and later befriended) a Tibetan monk named Lama Lobzang, who agreed to re-ordain him into this form of Buddhism.
Jivaka now experienced yet another betrayal. He invited the English monk from Kalimpong, in whom he had confided his life story, to his re-ordination. Rather than reply to the invitation, the English monk wrote to Lama Lobzang to inform him of Jivaka’s past, breaking what Jivaka had believed to be a sacred trust. He told the Tibetan lama that Jivaka was of the ‘third sex’, and therefore unsuitable for ordination.
About a month later the Dalai Lama visited Sarnath, and Jivaka was able to meet with a member of his senior staff, who told him that his ordination was not impossible. Jivaka was eventually re-ordained as a novice monk in the Tibetan order in 1960, making him the first known Westerner to do this. The name ‘Lobzang’ (ordained monk) was added to his name.
Jivaka increasingly felt that rather than the temporary retreat from the Western world he had intended, he wanted to remain in India for the rest of his life. He spent three months at the Rizong monastery in Ladakh, then a disputed territory between India and China, during which he felt that many of the vestiges of his ‘sahib’ personality- the tendency instilled in him by his upbringing to judge people based on their appearance or manner of speaking- were at last beginning to break down. He left Rizong reluctantly, hoping to return the next spring, by which time he hoped to have become a gelong- no longer a novice, but a fully-fledged monk.
But Jivaka was struggling to make enough money from writing to sustain himself and becoming increasingly emaciated. He struggled with the mandatory vegetarian diet, and was unable to banish fantasies of the familiar foods he had left in England.
One morning while seated on the floor of the kitchen with the other getsuls and genyens, using a bit of twig for cutlery to spear the tiny lumps of dough out of their watery environment, I had a sudden vision of my London club — the bed with its Dunlopillo mattress, the tail-coated waiter wheeling a breakfast trolley into my room and handing me the morning paper. As I look at the trolley I see the cornflakes and milk, creamy from the cow, not from water buffaloes as in India, and sugar, as much as one wants; under the silver cover is crisp brown bacon and scrambled eggs on fried bread, and a rack of toast and marmalade.
- Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery
Illness and death
Shortly after finishing the manuscript for Imji Getsul in late 1960, Jivaka became seriously ill with typhoid fever in addition to liver damage and jaundice and was hospitalised. Even after his discharge he was considerably weakened.
Jivaka attempted to get a permit to return to Ladakh, but ran into further difficulties. A Communist local newspaper had written a column accusing him of being a spy for British Intelligence, and although Jivaka thought that this idea was too far-fetched to be believed, it escalated to the point that two Communist MPs suggested that his intention in returning to Ladakh was to gather information. One Hindi-language newspaper published an account of him having been a ‘lady-doctor’ who had changed sex, but to his relief this story was not taken up by any other papers. He was, however, unable to return to Ladakh, which disappointed him deeply.
His books Imji Getsul and The Life of Milarepa were both published in April 1962. His publishers and friends with whom he had been in regular correspondence were concerned when his letters abruptly stopped, without any acknowledgement of the exciting news that two of his books had been published. Their fears were confirmed when a notice appeared in The Times on the 20th of May:
DELHI. Lobzang Jivaka, formerly Dr Laurence M. Dillon, of Britain, who became a Buddhist, is reported to have died in the Himalayan town of Dalhousie after a short illness.
Ten days later, Jivaka’s publisher Simon Young received a letter from someone named Sister Vajira informing him of Jivaka’s death at the Civil Hospital, Dalhousie, on May 15th. No cause of death was specified. A story that appeared a few weeks later in a Buddhist journal called The Middle Way recounted that Jivaka had collapsed while travelling, been taken to Dalhousie Hospital and died within two days. He had just turned forty-seven. His body was cremated, in accordance with Mahayana rites. Although his health had been worsening for some time, the exact cause and circumstances of his death are still unknown.
Weeks later, his publishers received a final manuscript- his autobiography, detailing his full life story including his transition. Unlike his other books, this manuscript was signed with both his names- Michael Dillon and Lobsang Jivaka- indicating that he was at last ready for his full identity to be revealed. His literary agent John Johnson was quoted in a Sunday Telegraph article about Jivaka’s life.
‘Dr Dillon felt there was no reason why, finally, his story should not be told. He wanted to tell it in his own way, in his own time.’
Johnson was unable to find a publisher who would take the manuscript. Several publishers considered the manuscript ‘boring’- despite the sensational content of his life story, Jivaka’s writing style tended to be somewhat dry. There was also interference from Jivaka’s brother Robert, who attempted to intervene and have the manuscript burned, and publishers may have feared legal action from his family. It remained unpublished for decades, until it was eventually published in 2017 under the title Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions. Both of his chosen names, Michael Dillon and Lobsang Jivaka, appear on the cover.