Michael Dillon

Laurence Michael Dillon (1 May 1915 – 15 May 1962) was a British doctor, author, poet, Buddhist monk and the first known transgender man to undergo a phalloplasty. A former president of the Oxford University Women's Boat Club, Dillon began living as a man soon after his graduation in 1938. He pioneered female-to-male gender transitioning; he is the first trans man known to have taken testosterone exclusively for this purpose and in 1946 received the world's first phalloplasty from the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies. As a medical student, Dillon performed an orchiectomy on Roberta Cowell, the first British trans woman to receive vaginoplasty. He also wrote the 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, an early text on transgender medicine. After graduation, Dillon worked as a Merchant Navy doctor. His transition became the subject of public attention when it affected his listing as the heir presumptive for the baronetcy of Lismullen. Dillon, who by then had become interested in Buddhism, resigned from the Merchant Navy and moved to India to devote his life to becoming a Buddhist monk. He changed his name to Lobzang Jivaka, named after the Buddha's own doctor. In 1960, he became the first Westerner to be ordained in the Rizong Monastery in Ladakh. Between 1960–1962, he wrote four books on Buddhism, including Imji Getsul: An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery which recounted his three months at Rizong. He also wrote an autobiography titled Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions, which was completed in 1962 and published posthumously in 2016. Dillon died in May 1962, just two weeks after finishing his autobiography.