Firstman



"Deeply moving as a love story ... A tale
of the connections people can make with each other, agains all odds. Smart, unsettling, and intriguing."      -- Jennifer Finney Boylan,  author of  She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

"Absolutely outstanding. By far the best biography of a transgendered person that I have read."  -- Dr. Ben Barres, Neurobiology professor, Stanford University


"An enlightening tour of how mid-century science conceptualized gender ...An entertaining and informative popular history."  -- Publisher's Weekly


In 1950, Michael Dillon, a scion of British aristocracy, guarded an astonishing secret about himself.  Born Laura Dillon, he had endured the world’s first female-to-male sex change in late 1930s and 1940s.  Now bearded and broad-shouldered, with a pipe tucked into his pocket, he could saunter into any gentleman's club without drawing a second glance.  But Dillon lived in terror of discovery – if word got out, his story would be trumpeted by tabloid newspapers all over the world.

The First Man-Made Man tells one of the most incredible life stories of the 20th century.  The book also leads readers through the medical breakthroughs that would forever change the rules of living in a human body.

Pagan Kennedy has published eight previous books in a variety of genres, including novels and non-fiction narratives. Her recent biography, Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the 19th-Century Congo, made the New York Times Notable list of 2002 and won a Massachusetts Book Award Honor in nonfiction.  A novel, Spinsters, was short-listed for the Orange Prize.  She also has been the recipient of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Boston Globe Magazine. Pagan has been described as a “modern-day Chekhov” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “one of the best writers of her generation,” (Scotland on Sunday).

For more information about The First Man-Made Man, contact Sara Mercurio at Bloomsbury.  

1915   Laura Dillon born.
                         
1938   She becomes the first woman ever to take testosterone with the intention of changing into a man. The pills, which hit the market only a year before, give her a broad chest and  facial hair.                
   

Mid-1940s   Dillon drops "Laura" and begins calling himself Michael.  He writes one of the first books ever to advocate for sex changes.

Late 1940s.  The world's top plastic surgeon builds a penis onto Dillon's body; the operations are conducted in secret. 

1950.  Dillon meets Roberta Cowell.  A year later he proposes marraige.  They are the only two post-operative transsexuals in Britain.

1957.  Michael Dillon begins studying astral projection and other mystical arts with a "Tibetan" occultist.  Though Lobsang Rampa is a a fraud, he helps to awaken Dillon's curiosity about Buddhism.  

1958.  Living in a dormitory in India, Dillon takes vows of poverty.  He wants nothing more than to be a Theravada monk, but an ancient rule in the Buddhist canon excludes members of  "the third sex" from ordination. 

1960 - 1962 Dillon manages to gain entrance to one of the few remaining Tibetan Buddhist monastaries, in a war zone high up in the Himalayas.  He studies there, as a novice monk, and finally feels he has found his home.  He dies of a mysterious illness while trekking in the mountains.