Dillon thrived at Rooksdown. It was now possible for surgeons to entirely re-shape the human body, he claimed. After three years of therapy and surgery, Cowell seemed to find emotional contentment that was matched only intermittently by material security. But the attempt never came about. He had decided, from the logic of his own profound isolation, that Cowell must be his soulmate. Roberta Cowell had discovered Michael Dillon's book and decided she had to meet the open-minded scholar. But after a splash in the 1950s, she withdrew from public life and died in obscurity. Roberta Cowell had discovered Michael Dillon's book and decided she had to meet the open-minded scholar. He'd wanted her to see how he'd turned that suffering into a handsome piece of flesh. And so he avoided women. Then, in 1972, she reappeared when she gave an interview to justify her gender reassignment. After all, if she was ever to emerge from the awful limbo of her body, she would need his help. In 1957 she won a noted hill climb auto race and bought a wartime Mosquito fighter-bomber in which she planned to break the speed record for a flight across the South Atlantic. If the rumor got out that Michael Dillon, brother to a baronet, had once been a girl, the gossip would surely be trumpeted in every low-class newspaper in Britain. "At Christmas ... there was a grand party on the Eve, which I M.C. Furthermore, if Dillon fell ill, a penis would allow him to check into a hospital without having to explain why his genitals did not match the rest of his body. When the term ended, Dillon would ride a train through the English countryside to small town called Basingstoke, home to Rooksdown House, the hospital overseen by Sir Harold Gillies. She made a joke about the thing being rough-hewn. She achieved this fame when she became the first person in her country known to have her gender reassigned from male to female. “I preferred to steer clear of children and elderly ladies; they were too observant or at least too outspoken in their remarks.”. He puffed smoke and fidgeted with his coffee cup but did not drink. Or a surgeon pouring a pint of human blood into the tomato patch. It was Dillon who secretly performed an illegal inguinal orchiectomy on Roberta. The publication of her story in Picture Post in 1954 and her autobiography earned her the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars. Dillon turned out to be handsome, Cowell reported in her autobiography. He liked to lecture his dates about how the female brain was more suited to housework than intellectual pursuits - a strategy guaranteed to stifle any romance. . In 1950, Michael Dillon, a dapper, bearded medical student, met Roberta Cowell, a boyish-looking woman, for lunch in a discreet London restaurant. To keep the other students from asking questions, he cultivated a reputation as a stodgy bachelor, an older student who sequestered himself in the little house he owned. Both of them pushed Laura away. He mailed her letters brimming with advice and tender confessions. Then, Michael Dillon fell silent. "I don't really see why I shouldn't tell you. Now, sixty years later the amazing untold medical history of the first sex changes can be told. “So complete was her withdrawal from public life that even her own children did not know she had died,” the article said. And why did Dillon want the penis so badly? As Dillon saw it, a penis would help to safeguard his privacy and his family's honor. He - or was it a she? Cowell played along. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Michael and Roberta began to fall in love and considered marriage. By the early 1940s, Dillon had mustered the courage to leave the garage for medical school - under his male name. With no idea how to push her transformation further, Cowell was stuck in a no man's land between the sexes - a terrible place to find yourself in 1950. Laurence Michael Dillon (1 May 1915 – 15 May 1962) was a British physician and the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo phalloplasty. She knew herself to be a man, a man who was disappearing inside a ridiculous body, underneath breasts and hips. This had been reinforced by a book called “Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology” (1946) by Michael Dillon, a medical student whom she sought out in 1950. Cowell’s name has been summoned as a trailblazer in the years since her death, her transition having preceded by decades the public discourse over gender identity and L.G.B.T.Q. Despite her earlier dismissal from flying duties, Cowell was allowed to return to the R.A.F. He'd dared to confide in so few friends, and even the kindest of them had never really understood. To marry a young woman, he would have to confess too much to her: the thirteen operations, the testosterone pills, the years of living as Laura. They separated in 1948 and divorced in 1952. Roberta Cowell. It was 1951 now, Cowell had turned herself into a va-va-voom peroxide blonde; she'd begun venturing out onto the streets of London in a wig, skirt, make-up. From an early age, she wrote, she felt conflicted about her gender, compensating for feminine “characteristics” with an “aggressively masculine manner” that persuaded gay men to take her “for one of themselves.”, Physically, she was sensitive about being overweight, displaying what she called “feminoidal fat distribution.” In her teenage years, other pupils nicknamed her “Circumference” and “Bottom.” She left school at 16 to work briefly as an apprentice engineer until she joined the Royal Air Force in 1935. Americans were perhaps more familiar with Christine Jorgensen, a former U.S. Army clerk who transitioned in Denmark just months after Cowell. She enlisted in the Army in 1940. Roberta had been taking oestrogen, but she was still living as a man. Self brought him to the attention of Roberta Cowell (born Robert Cowell), who would become the first British transwoman to receive male-to-female sex reassignment surgery. Some of the patients at Rooksdown were so disfigured that, even with the best care, they would remain outcasts for the rest of their lives. Pumping petrol at the garage where he worked, greasy in his coveralls, Dillon easily passed as just another workingman. People, she wrote, would speculate openly on her gender. She achieved fame — and received several marriage proposals — when her story was told in newspapers and in Picture Post magazine. Dillon had learned this early on. Laurence Michael Dillon (born Laura Maud Dillon, 1 May 1915 - 15 May 1962) was a British physician and the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty. She crash-landed the stricken warplane and was taken prisoner. Her body was found on Oct. 11, 2011, in her small apartment in southwest London by the building superintendent. That was the basis of my ethics," he wrote later. She became the first woman on record to take the drug with the intention of changing her sex. I had never seen anything like it. In fact, Laura had grown up thinking of herself as above the common lot. In the early days of her captivity, she said, an Allied air raid on Frankfurt forced her and her captors into a bomb shelter where angry German civilians realized that she was an enemy pilot. For the first time in his life, Dillon allowed himself to believe that one person might be able to understand him. Dillon shared his table with a person so odd-looking that the other diners in the restaurant ogled and whispered to one another. By several accounts, Dillon fell deeply in love with Cowell, but she ultimately rejected his proposal of marriage. Not bad-looking, he was a very masculine type.". At the post office or on the street, Dillon and his friends could expect smiles and hallos from the villagers. At least the operation would be legal. The book brought him to the attention of Roberta Cowell, who by Dillon’s hand would become the first British trans woman to receive MTF sex reassignment surgery. In the mid 20th century, Michael Dillon underwent the world's first gender correction from woman to man. - wore a blazer and trousers, cropped hair, and tie, but seemed to be hiding breasts under the suit jacket. She wore her hair short and a sports jacket hid her breasts; a skirt, her only concession to femininity, flapped around her calves. Within days, Cowell and other British captives had been flown home aboard American Flying Fortress bombers. The flight, she said, had been scheduled as the “very last trip of my second tour of operations.” In fact it was her last flight of the war. Her transition — and all of the yearnings and hopes that came with it — involved hormone treatments and surgeries despite what some regarded in strait-laced 1950s Britain as flouting contemporary laws. After the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, she flew out of a Belgian air base in a Hawker Typhoon airplane that was shot down by ground fire over Germany on a low-level attack east of the Rhine River. But she also detected a mounting sense of “restlessness and unhappiness,” she wrote in her autobiography, and resolved to undergo Freudian psychoanalysis. The encounter was “so shattering that the scene will be crystal-clear in my memory for the rest of my life,” she wrote. After they'd eaten, she lingered at the table to debate the issue of women's intelligence. And so he trusted Roberta immediately. Cowell participating in the women’s race car competition in Sussex, England, when she was 39. The interwar idea of ‘sex change’ implied that sex or gender fluidity was possible, and that individuals might choose their sex. Maurice Ambler/Picture Post and Hulton Archive, via Getty Images, Roberta Cowell on the cover of Picture Post magazine in March 1954. Gillies had reconstructed the genitals of soldiers who'd been bombed or burned, but he had never built a penis from scratch on a woman's body. Dillon had waited his whole life for a woman to fasten her eyes on him the way she did, to ask for his protection. He blamed his troubles on the war - insinuating he'd been maimed in the Blitz, which he had not. Cowell wrote in her autobiography “Roberta Cowell’s Story,” that during their meeting, over lunch, Dillon revealed that he had himself changed his gender identity through doses of testosterone and gender-affirming surgery. In his terrible loneliness, Roberta Cowell began to haunt his thoughts. Michael Dillon, a bearded medical student, fiddled with his pipe and then lit it nervously. Somewhere in there lived the one woman who could understand him, the one woman who could recognize him as a real man. But blink again and Laura was nothing but a cross-dressed girl. Madly In Love Vintage Girls Retro Crossdressers Transgender The Twenties Captain Hat Romance The Incredibles. In 1948, Cowell left her family and sought help. About the relationship between Michael Dillon, the world's first woman to become a man, and Roberta Cowell, a former spitfire pilot and war hero who was Britain's first man to become a woman. . People who passed her on the street couldn't help staring, confused by the double image she presented. Ordinary dresses filled her with the sickening sense that she had been obliterated. She relied on him, he liked to believe, not just as a doctor but also a man with a superior mind, who could guide her through difficulties. “If it gives real happiness,” Gillies wrote of his procedures, “that is the most that any surgeon or medicine can give.”. The pioneering trans people were Michael Dillon and Roberta Cowell. “It seemed to do the trick and the angry growling died down,” she wrote in her autobiography. Though Dillon had not yet completed his medical training, he performed an orchiectomy on Cowell, a procedure that was illegal under British law. After World War II, she developed an interest in the idea of a combination of hormone therapy and surgery to more closely align her body with her gender identity. Laurence Michael Dillon (born Laura Maud Dillon; 1915–1962) was a British physician and the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo phalloplasty. Burn victims, a platoon of shot-up soldiers, children with cleft palettes and survivors of factory accidents - Dillon joined this small society of the mutilated and maimed. Laura Dillon had managed to get hold of testosterone pills in 1938, soon after she'd graduated from college. Only in 2013 — two years after her death — was her passing reported, by the British newspaper The Independent on Sunday. Cowell’s death, by contrast, went all but unremarked upon, even in Britain. The year was 1950; the city, London; the restaurant, discreet. Dillon had enjoyed only a few close friendships, and these had almost always been with men - back-slapping boys who accepted Dillon as a brother. The two men then helped Michael's great love, rally driver Roberta Cowell, to undergo gender correction from man to woman. This month we’re adding the stories of important L.G.B.T. Early life and transition. During the university term, he shadowed doctors on their hospital rounds, assisted in the surgical theater, and even performed an appendectomy. Almost no medical literature acknowledged that thousands of people felt themselves to be trapped in the wrong bodies and would do anything - including risk death - to change their sex. This allowed her to have a new birth certificate issued on 17 May 1951, with her recorded sex changed to … A handful of friends attended her funeral, but, apparently at her request, there was no fanfare for the woman who had helped pioneer gender reassignment at a time when it was virtually taboo. They talked on the phone, when she was in. She was indeed a trailblazer and her life illustrates how vulnerable so many trans people are and also how many of us need therapy and support even when we seem to be in a “good place”. But hormones could only take Dillon so far. Laura Dillon as a teenager, left, and Michael Dillon with his aunt in 1950. Rather, a penis would serve as a membership card into the world of men, their bathrooms and their gentlemen's clubs in London. Dillon feared, above all, the tabloids. He was terrified, too, of what would happen if he ever did work up the nerve to tell a girlfriend about himself; he imagined how the smile would freeze on her face and her eyes would dart away, and how, when she looked back at him, she would no longer see him as a real man. Still, he refused to be discouraged. Dillon had one advantage over most of the other patients: in that world beyond Basingstoke, he could pass as an ordinary man as long as he kept his clothes on. His brother, Sir Robert Dillon, was the eighth Baronet (of Lismullen in Ireland). He kept his distance by treating women in a "rough brotherly fashion," developing a reputation as a bit of a woman-hater. His brother, Sir Robert Dillon, was the eighth Baronet of Lismullen in Ireland. Now, finally, they sat across from one another. Dillon continued exploring the interplay between body and mind during medical school at Trinity College, Dublin, which he began in the autumn of 1945. In 1941 she married Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter, a fellow engineer and racecar driver whom she had met in college. You see, Roberta Cowell was born Robert Cowell in 1918. She'd written to him care of his publisher and they'd exchanged a flurry of letters. "Dillon did not exactly have the most perfectly developed sense of humor," according to Cowell. Her brother, the eighth baronet of Lusmullen, presided over a threadbare estate in Ireland, and her family still retained a residue of an ancient fortune. Sir Harold, as the patients called him, understood that recovery had as much to do with the mind as the body. His brother, Sir Robert Dillon… And then Roberta Cowell slid into the seat across from him at that London restaurant, and he dared to hope again. 1 Early life and transition; 2 Self and Roberta Cowell; 3 Later life; 4 Works; 5 Notes; 6 References; Early life and transition. By age 35, he had vowed never to fall in love. "I felt resentful that I should always be alone and never have a wife and children," he wrote. Or a burn victim wearing blue toenail polish. In 1950, Cowell was taking oestrogen when she encountered Michael Dillon (born Laura Dillon), a British physician and the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo phalloplasty surgery. She had begun dosing herself on massive amounts of estrogen - enough to melt away her muscles and put a blush in her cheeks. Contents. Dillon claims that his misogyny was all an act, one of the tools he used to keep women from falling in love with him. It was not until the 1950s that transitioning became medically possible and eventually available in Britain. Towards the end of her school days, she visited Belgium, Germany, and Austria with a school friend. She wrote back to him, when she could find the time. And all she could do was snigger. But Dillon didn't go on second dates. Evening gowns terrified her - they invited young men to slide their arms around her waist. And for all of her achievements, her life was so riddled with tragedy and misunderstanding that she wrote herself out of history. Overlooked No More: Roberta Cowell, Trans Trailblazer, Pilot and Auto Racer. Maybe too masculine. the cover of Britain’s popular Picture Post magazine, Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. The children and old ladies were the cruelest, shouting insults or demanding Laura explain herself. But, in fact, he did believe the female mind to be a strange and rather frightening organ. She was three years younger than he was, but seemed younger than that. As soon as Dillon could looked entirely male, he became invisible. rights. He wanted her to know everything. She implored him for help; she needed him utterly. He didn't laugh. But the patients knew that once they boarded the train, they would become pariahs at the very next town - passengers would flinch, stare, scuttle away from them. With Andrew Bamji, Benjamin Coakley, Diana Cowell, Dick Dyerson. Roberta Cowell in Paris in 1954. Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell (no relation to the author of this article) was born on April 8, 1918, in Croydon, south of London, one of three children born to Dorothy Elizabeth Miller and a high-ranking military surgeon, Maj. Gen. Ernest Marshall Cowell, who had served as a physician in both world wars and, in 1944, was appointed honorary surgeon to King George VI. 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