Out of the Ordinary: a Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions
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Out of the Ordinary Out of the Ordinary A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions Michael Dillon / Lobzang Jivaka Edited and with an Introduction by Jacob Lau and Cameron Partridge fordham university press New York 2017 Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Michael Dillon All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1 First edition contents Foreword by Susan Stryker vii Editors’ Note xi “In His Own Way, In His Own Time”: An Introduction to Out of the Ordinary 1 Out of the Ordinary 27 Author’s Introduction 29 Part I. Conquest of the Body 1. Birth and Origins 35 2. The Nursery 43 3. Schooldays 58 4. Oxford 74 5. War—The Darkest of Days 88 Part II. Conquest of the Mind 6. Medical Student 109 7. Resident Medical Offi cer 131 8. Surgeon M.N. 142 9. On the Haj 155 10. Round the World 168 11. Interlude Ashore 187 12. The Last Voyage 202 13. Imji Getsul 223 Michael Dillon / Lobzang Jivaka: A Timeline 233 Acknowledgments 237 foreword Susan Stryker More than twenty-fi ve years ago, when I fi rst started seriously researching transgender history, I came across an anecdote in Liz Hodgkinson’s 1989 biography, Michael née Laura: The World’s First Female to Male Transsexual, about an unpublished manuscript that whetted my curiosity. Hodgkinson’s book recounted the life of a person whom she called Michael Dillon, who had been given the name Laura Maude Dillon at birth in 1915 and who would die soon after taking the additional name of Lobzang Jivaka in 1962. The manuscript in question was an autobiography that recounted this man’s remarkable life, completed mere days before his untimely death. Dillon, or Jivaka, as you will discover in the pages that follow, was a fascinating fellow—not, in truth, the fi rst female-to-male transsexual but almost certainly the fi rst to have undergone phalloplasty (the surgical con- struction of a penis) in a series of procedures carried out in the late 1940s, after having started taking testosterone a few years earlier. He was an in- satiably inquisitive, doggedly determined person whose quest to actualize his sense of self led him not only to transition from social womanhood to life as a man but to attend university at Oxford, become a doctor, serve as a shipboard medical offi cer sailing the seven seas, read widely in various religious and spiritual traditions, and eventually to take vows as a novitiate monk in a Buddhist monastery. He was a minor member of the British aristocracy, to boot. While still a medical student in the midst of gender transition in 1946, Dillon authored an obscure but erudite little book, Self: An Essay on Ethics and Endocrinology, which functioned as cryptoautobiography. Grounded in his self-experimentation with hormones but written in an impersonal voice in spite of his deeply personal, embodied stake in the argument, it laid out, from the perspective of sexological science, a cogent case for the ethi- cal use of medical procedures to change the sex-signifying characteristics of people like himself who experienced a mismatch between their inner and outer realities. Seen through a contemporary transgender lens, Self is a prescient account, avant la lettre, of the “transsexual discourse” that vii viii Susan Stryker took shape in the mid–twentieth century. It is a tale told by one of the fi rst individuals to comprehend the possibility of using the plastic surgeries developed to repair the combat-injured genitals of male soldiers and the hormones synthesized in the hope of extending life or restoring the libido’s lost vigor for the novel purpose of “changing sex.” Although Dr. Harry Benjamin is generally credited with developing the “logic of treatment” for transsexual medical care in his 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon, Dillon actually got there fi rst, a full two decades earlier. As a young transgender historian searching for kindred spirits a quarter- century ago, Dillon’s Self left me hungering for a fuller, fi rst-person per- spective on Dillon’s self—something a biography might describe but by defi nition could never get inside of. Sadly, Dillon’s published fi rst-person writings—a slender 1957 volume, Poems of Truth, and Jivaka’s 1962 Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery—are woefully short on subjective, introspective detail. Hence the romantic allure for me over the decades of his unpublished autobiographical manuscript—it functioned as a vague receptacle that held half-formed fantasies about connecting with a lost and disremembered past—and my great delight, all these many years later, at being asked to write a foreword to that autobiography, now that it is fi nally seeing print. Dillon /Jivaka’s Out of the Ordinary long remained unpublished, but it was never lost. The manuscript, bearing both of the author’s names, was mailed from India shortly before the author’s death, and it arrived on the desk of the literary agent John Johnson shortly after the author’s death. Dillon /Jivaka’s transphobic and publicity-averse brother—Sir Robert Dillon, eighth Baronet of Lismullen—wished the manuscript destroyed; Johnson nevertheless pursued posthumous publication, without success, though whether because the work was deemed to lack literary merit or commercial potential or from publishers’ fears of a lawsuit by the fam- ily remains unclear. Johnson’s successor at the literary agency, Andrew Hewson, retained a copy of the manuscript, which he made available to Liz Hodgkinson in the 1980s. Indeed, Out of the Ordinary was a crucial source for Hodgkinson’s Michael née Laura, though she trod lightly around the fact, lest the uncooperative and hostile Dillon family continue to seek the manuscript’s destruction. Two decades later, Hewson made the manuscript available to another researcher, Pagan Kennedy, who was working on her own biography of Dillon /Jivaka, The First Man-Made Man, published in 2007. At a book- store reading in Brookline, Massachusetts, that year, Kennedy mentioned Out of the Ordinary and the fact that it remained unpublished. Two young Foreword ix trans* scholars from the Harvard Divinity School, Cameron Partridge and Jacob Lau, were in the audience that night. They approached Kennedy, who made her digital photographs of the manuscript available to them, and the result is the book you now hold in your hands. Reading Out of the Ordinary at long last, it feels too constraining to char- acterize the book as primarily a “transsexual autobiography,” too partial to foreground the author’s being “the fi rst manmade man” or “the fi rst female-to-male transsexual.” First and foremost, the author of this text was a seeker after truth who traveled wherever his queries led him. His peregri- nations from Laura to Michael to Lobzang were all of a piece, as spiritual and metaphysical as they were intellectual and transsexual and medical. We tend to privilege a materialist scientifi c epistemology in the modern secular West and in doing so easily fall into apprehending Dillon fi rst and foremost as a certain kind of being called a transsexual who also happened to have a mystical bent. It’s harder to appreciate that the discourse of trans- sexuality produces one kind of truth-effect, and religious seeking another, and that Dillon’s becoming-Jivaka was an embrace of both as well as a refusal to put one “technology of the self” above the other. If the question “Who am I?” is, for all of us, as Winston Churchill once said of Russia, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” Dillon / Jivaka’s pursuit of his own particular answer to that conundrum took him to the primal scene of meaning making, where we seem to discern something ineffable moving against the veil of representation. This topos of ontologi- cal construction is the place creation myths come from, and revelations, as well as the veridictions of science; it all depends on how the experi- ence of that encounter is framed, narrated, validated, and transmitted. In their introduction to Out of the Ordinary, Partridge and Lau, both stu- dents of religion, are especially attuned to this dual dimension of Dillon / Jivaka’s life quest and consequently deepen our understanding of him— and of the nonsecular qualities that transsexual/transgender life processes can harbor. So much has changed since the early 1990s, when I discovered Lobzang née Michael née Laura’s story through Liz Hodgkinson’s exemplary bio- graphical research and fi rst caught a glimpse of the manuscript that became this book. “Transgender” has exploded in the intervening years. It is no longer an obscure and virtually unknown topic, one of greatest interest to transgender people themselves. It currently saturates mass media on a daily basis and is the subject of widespread attention, fascination, consternation, and concern.