The First Man-Made Man

BLOOMSBURY

Contents

Chapter One

Michael Dillon, a bearded medical student, fiddled with his pipe and then lit it nervously. The year was 1950; the city, London; the restaurant, discreet. Dillon shared his table with a person so odd-looking that the other diners in the restaurant ogled and whispered to one another. He - or was it a she? - wore a blazer and trousers, cropped hair, and tie, but seemed to be hiding breasts under the suit jacket. In fact, Roberta Cowell had been born male, but she could not live as a man anymore. She had begun dosing herself on massive amounts of estrogen - enough to melt away her muscles and put a blush in her cheeks. 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.

The word "transsexual" had yet to enter common usage. 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. Michael Dillon, the medical student, had authored what was then one of the few books in the world to delve into the subject. In an eccentric little volume called Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, he had argued on behalf of people like Roberta Cowell. Dillon proposed an idea that seemed wildly radical at that time: Why not give patients the bodies they wanted? Thanks to recent technological breakthroughs, doctors could transform a man into a woman and visa versa. But because of the stigma against these sex changes - as well as laws that prohibited castration - only a few people in the world had ever crossed the line.

Roberta Cowell had discovered Michael Dillon's book and decided she had to meet the open-minded scholar. She'd written to him care of his publisher and they'd exchanged a flurry of letters. Now, finally, they sat across from one another.

Dillon turned out to be handsome, Cowell reported in her autobiography. "He was a good deal younger than I had expected and wore a full beard. Not bad-looking, he was a very masculine type."

Maybe too masculine. Despite his progressive attitude about sex-change treatments, Dillon "appeared to have a very low opinion of women." It was an attitude that Cowell couldn't abide. After they'd eaten, she lingered at the table to debate the issue of women's intelligence. They ordered coffee. Dillon gestured with his pipe as he lectured her about the differences between the male and female brain. He clearly liked to throw his opinions around, especially with a lady present.

Cowell played along. After all, if she was ever to emerge from the awful limbo of her body, she would need his help. Dillon seemed to relish his role as her protector, fingering his droll little beard, dropping Latin words and medical terms. He assured her that sex changes did exist. It was now possible for surgeons to entirely re-shape the human body, he claimed. In fact, he possessed startling proof of exactly what medical science could do.

Then, Michael Dillon fell silent. He puffed smoke and fidgeted with his coffee cup but did not drink. He glanced up at Roberta, and then, finally, spoke. "I don't really see why I shouldn't tell you. Five years ago I was a woman."

* * *

More than a decade earlier, an athletic blonde named Laura Dillon roared through the streets of Bristol on her motorbike. She wore her hair short and a sports jacket hid her breasts; a skirt, her only concession to femininity, flapped around her calves. With her broad shoulders, patrician accent, and Eton haircut, she could easily pass for a pampered young man. In fact, Laura had grown up thinking of herself as above the common lot. 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.

At first glance, Laura seemed to be a fellow just out of Oxford, dismounting his motorbike with a dashing leap. But blink again and Laura was nothing but a cross-dressed girl. People who passed her on the street couldn't help staring, confused by the double image she presented. The children and old ladies were the cruelest, shouting insults or demanding Laura explain herself. When they came toward her, Laura froze her face into a mask. She refused to let them see how they got to her.

Still, she preferred their taunts to the alternative: female clothing. Evening gowns terrified her - they invited young men to slide their arms around her waist. Ordinary dresses filled her with the sickening sense that she had been obliterated. She knew herself to be a man, a man who was disappearing inside a ridiculous body, underneath breasts and hips. She didn't think she could go on this way anymore.

Pills saved her. Laura Dillon had managed to get hold of testosterone pills in 1938, soon after she'd graduated from college. She became the first woman on record to take the drug with the intention of changing her sex. Over a period of several years, the hormone therapy transformed her into a muscular, deep-voiced man with fuzz on his cheeks. As soon as Dillon could looked entirely male, he became invisible. Pumping petrol at the garage where he worked, greasy in his coveralls, Dillon easily passed as just another workingman. More than passed. He became bland-looking, unremarkable, ordinary - which was what he'd always wanted. "How different was life now! I could walk past anyone and not fear to hear any comments for no one looked at me twice," he wrote about his earliest, testosterone-fueled transformation. By the early 1940s, Dillon had mustered the courage to leave the garage for medical school - under his male name.

But hormones could only take Dillon so far. If other men happened to catch a glimpse of him in the locker room or public baths, they would know immediately he had been born female. So in the early 1940s, Dillon sought out Sir Harold Gillies, Britain's top plastic surgeon. 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. It would be a grueling process, and Gillies could not guarantee the results.

At least the operation would be legal. While an arcane law protected male genitals from "mutilation," no such bans applied to female genitals and reproductive organs.

Dillon would eventually undergo a series of thirteen operations to construct a penis. He began the treatments in 1946, while he was a student at Trinity College medical school in Dublin and he finished his surgeries in 1949, a year before he met Roberta Cowell. Gillies had to harvest skin for the new organ from Dillon's legs and stomach; Dillon suffered from oozing infections where the skin had been flayed; at times, he was so debilitated he had to walk with a cane.

And why did Dillon want the penis so badly? Not necessarily for sex. Rather, a penis would serve as a membership card into the world of men, their bathrooms and their gentlemen's clubs in London. It was the lack of a penis that held him back, "for without some form of external organ he could hardly undress for the shower with the rest of the crew," as Gillies noted. 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. A penis, along with the beard and the pipe, would hide his history, keep his secret that much safer. Dillon feared, above all, the tabloids. 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. As Dillon saw it, a penis would help to safeguard his privacy and his family's honor.

So during the mid-1940s, Dillon lived a curious double life: he was both a medical student in Dublin and a patient in England. During the university term, he shadowed doctors on their hospital rounds, assisted in the surgical theater, and even performed an appendectomy. 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. Here, men in military uniforms - their heads swaddled in bandages - lolled on park benches, putting cigarettes to the holes where their mouths should have been. 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.

Sir Harold, as the patients called him, understood that recovery had as much to do with the mind as the body. 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. Such patients had to be encouraged to relearn the art of happiness, which is why Sir Harold banished many of the rules that make hospitals such grim places and coaxed his charges into dancing the foxtrot, growing zinnias in the garden, or venturing out into the town surrounding the hospital for a beer. As a result, Rooksdown became the kind of place where, even in the middle of the night, you might come across a one-eyed man teaching himself to ride a bicycle down the hall. Or a burn victim wearing blue toenail polish. Or a surgeon pouring a pint of human blood into the tomato patch. "This was no ordinary place," Sir Harold wrote, with typical understatement.

Dillon thrived at Rooksdown. He befriended a man with plastic ears, the girl who'd been scalped by a factory machine, and the Navy officer who'd had his genitals ripped off by the gears of a machine - "the nature of his operation was similar to my own." Stunted by years of ridicule, Dillon flowered in the tolerant atmosphere of Rooksdown: he turned witty, expansive, even popular. "We felt that Rooksdown was more of a country club than anything else. When we returned we would greet old friends and be introduced to new ones," he wrote later. "At Christmas ... there was a grand party on the Eve, which I M.C.'d twice from a wheelchair, thus making my debut into the social world from which I had been so long debarred."

The local people had grown used to seeing to patients without noses or jaws walking around town. At the post office or on the street, Dillon and his friends could expect smiles and hallos from the villagers. 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.

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. Still, this passing came at an emotional cost; a rigidly moral man, he had to lie constantly. When he returned to Dublin and ran into his fellow medical students, he had to invent stories to explain why he limped and sometimes had to walk with a cane. He blamed his troubles on the war - insinuating he'd been maimed in the Blitz, which he had not.

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. Now and then he asked young women out to dances and swooped around the floor in his white tie and tails. But Dillon didn't go on second dates. "One must not lead a girl on if one could not give her children. That was the basis of my ethics," he wrote later.

Ethics weren't the half of it. How many women would be willing to risk the scandal of marrying the first artificial male? None, probably. At any rate, he didn't care to risk finding out. 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. 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. He couldn't bear that. And so he avoided women. "I felt resentful that I should always be alone and never have a wife and children," he wrote.

Still, he loved the way he looked in his tie and tails; he enjoyed a night of dancing, and an evening of playful flirting eased his loneliness a bit. So he took out a nurse or female student now and then, but he never let her closer than the arms-length of a waltz. He kept his distance by treating women in a "rough brotherly fashion," developing a reputation as a bit of a woman-hater. 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.

Dillon claims that his misogyny was all an act, one of the tools he used to keep women from falling in love with him. But, in fact, he did believe the female mind to be a strange and rather frightening organ. Women had hurt him, over and over again, even before the sex change. In Laura Dillon's teenage and university years, she had fallen in love with at least two straight women. Both of them pushed Laura away. The worst part was that these would-be sweethearts had regarded her as a lesbian rather than as the man she wanted to be. 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.

So, women could not be trusted. Dillon had learned this early on. By age 35, he had vowed never to fall in love.

* * *

And then Roberta Cowell slid into the seat across from him at that London restaurant, and he dared to hope again. Her wrists - slim and delicate from the estrogen treatments - peeped out of the cuffs of her sleeves. Her cheeks flamed pink, so soft below the short man's haircut. In the blur of Roberta Cowell's face, he could see the lovely ingnue she would become. Somewhere in there lived the one woman who could understand him, the one woman who could recognize him as a real man.

He had decided, from the logic of his own profound isolation, that Cowell must be his soulmate. Dillon was lonely in the way we can all recognize, and he also suffered from a brand-new, 20th century solitude too, one that had never existed before - the loneliness of a medical miracle, of the person who has experienced unique states of mind and body. He'd dared to confide in so few friends, and even the kindest of them had never really understood.

But now, he shared a table with the first person he'd ever met who entered that blur of hormones, who planned to transform her body just as he had. 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. Dillon, too, had endured the torment of the in-between period when the hormones began pushing his body toward androgyny; he knew what it was like to stumble through a city street where passersby stared at him.

She was three years younger than he was, but seemed younger than that. She implored him for help; she needed him utterly. Dillon had waited his whole life for a woman to fasten her eyes on him the way she did, to ask for his protection.

And so he trusted Roberta immediately. By the end of lunch, he'd poured out his story to her - surprising even himself with his openness.

Then they parted. He returned to Dublin, where he was finishing up the last year of medical school, but Roberta continued to haunt him, to tug at his heart. He mailed her letters brimming with advice and tender confessions. "The chief feeling you arouse in me, Bobbie, is a desire to protect you and to treat you gently and steer you along," he wrote. Whenever Dillon traveled to London, he made sure to call on her.

At one of these early meetings, "He ... whipped out the penis, which he was very proud of," wrote Cowell. "It wasn't any kind of seduction scene. He just wanted me to see what medical science had achieved. I had never seen anything like it. It was huge, and in a constant state of semi-erection." She made a joke about the thing being rough-hewn. He didn't laugh. "Dillon did not exactly have the most perfectly developed sense of humor," according to Cowell. Though, really, how could he have laughed? He'd unzipped for her; he'd showed her the evidence of his excruciating pain, all those operations and infections. He'd wanted her to see how he'd turned that suffering into a handsome piece of flesh. And all she could do was snigger.

Still, he refused to be discouraged. In his terrible loneliness, Roberta Cowell began to haunt his thoughts. For the first time in his life, Dillon allowed himself to believe that one person might be able to understand him. He sent her long confessional letters about his girlhood and his years at Oxford. He wanted her to know everything. She wrote back to him, when she could find the time. They talked on the phone, when she was in.

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. She had yet to go through the vaginal-construction surgery and the facelift, but already she scorched the eyes of sailors as she flitted past them on the sidewalk.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The First Man-Made Man by Pagan Kennedy Copyright © 2006 by Pagan Kennedy . Excerpted by permission.
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