One day in 1956 a man called Michael Dillon was going through the possessions of two aged aunts who had raised him and who had recently left their home in Folkestone. One had been a miser and he found Christmas and birthday presents from before the second World War still in their original containers.
He also found a doll, frilly underwear, dresses and a sash with 22 girl guide badges. These had been his.
Laura Dillon, born in London into a family which held the baronetcy of Lismullen in Co Meath had, by the end of 1949, completed a series of surgical procedures to make her a man. The series of operations, by the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, also made her the first woman to transition through a combination of surgery and hormone treatment in the modern era.
His long journey was to take Michael Dillon from London to Trinity College Dublin and to death at a hill station in India at 47 years old, debilitated by years of malnutrition.
His story gives us a glimpse of the experiences of a transsexual person in a very different era to ours. For instance, when Laura Dillon fell in love with girls, who rejected her, she was upset that they saw her as a lesbian. When she made the transition to becoming a man – and she became a handsome man who was attractive to women – he displayed a dismissive attitude to women.
This, he said, was because it would be unfair to lead them on since he could not give them children.
By now he had qualified as a doctor at Trinity College Dublin. He was forbidden to visit his brother Bobby (his only childhood companion) at Lismullen for fear of scandalising the family; nor, for many years, could he visit the aunts in Folkestone who had raised him.
He fell in love with Roberta Cowell, a man transitioning to being a woman and they had – or so he thought – become engaged. When he was a fifth-year medical student he performed a clandestine medical castration on Cowell so that he could legally have the necessary surgery from Gillies to become a woman. And when she had got what she wanted – the surgical procedure – Roberta dropped him. Place in the world Dillon never seems to have found a place in the world that he didn’t have to leave. Contradictory entries in Burkes and Debrett’s Peerage – Michael in the first and Laura in the second – led to his outing by the media. This ultimately led him to India, Tibet and his death.
He had fallen under the influence of a fake Tibetan mystic (really an Englishman) who lived in Howth and who had written a book called The Third Eye under the name Lobsang Rampa.
Under Rampa’s influence, Dillon ended up in India seeking to become a Buddhist monk. One senior monk blocked him because he considered him still to be a woman. However, he was allowed to become a novice monk.
As part of his move he instructed his lawyers in London to give all his savings to charity. From now on he did not have sufficient money to feed himself adequately or to pay for medical treatment. When he finally got to a Tibetan monastery where he felt at home and was accepted he worked in the kitchen but was always hungry because he could not afford to supplement the meagre monastery rations. Yet this is where he longed to stay.
After three months he had to return to India because his visa ran out. He was promised that if he could come back to Tibet he would be ordained a monk. But malnutrition, debilitation and disease led to his death on a hill station. His ashes were scattered on the Himalayas.
He died in 1962 just as attitudes were beginning to undergo a change that could have seen him accepted and even celebrated had he lived into old age.
You can read more in The First Man-Made Man by award- winning American author, the splendidly named Pagan Kennedy.
pomorain@yahoo.com Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.