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The fascinating case of Michael Dillon
Aug. 23rd, 2010 07:55 amSomeone asked on Wikipedia what happens to transgender knights. Do they automatically become dames?
I checked for case history, and there appears to be none, or at least none that's public. But in so doing, I discovered the fascinating case of Michael Dillon (1915-1962), who was the first female-to-male transsexual person to have genital reassignment surgery. Dillon was a remarkable person in many ways, having a reasonably distinguished career as a medical doctor, working as a tow-truck driver in Bristol during the Blitz, and emigrating to Kashmir to become a Buddhist monk. The relevant point is that his elder brother was a baronet; baronetcies can't be inherited by women, but when Dillon became legally male, the editor of Debrett's Peerage gave his opinion to Time magazine that Dillon was the legal heir to the baronetcy, and they listed him as such until his death. This gives weak evidence in favour of the question.
Dillon was an Oxford graduate. In those days there were no mixed colleges, and what I found particularly interesting was that he successfully requested the university to change his records so that he had attended Brasenose College, a men's college, rather than St Anne's, a women's college.
I checked for case history, and there appears to be none, or at least none that's public. But in so doing, I discovered the fascinating case of Michael Dillon (1915-1962), who was the first female-to-male transsexual person to have genital reassignment surgery. Dillon was a remarkable person in many ways, having a reasonably distinguished career as a medical doctor, working as a tow-truck driver in Bristol during the Blitz, and emigrating to Kashmir to become a Buddhist monk. The relevant point is that his elder brother was a baronet; baronetcies can't be inherited by women, but when Dillon became legally male, the editor of Debrett's Peerage gave his opinion to Time magazine that Dillon was the legal heir to the baronetcy, and they listed him as such until his death. This gives weak evidence in favour of the question.
Dillon was an Oxford graduate. In those days there were no mixed colleges, and what I found particularly interesting was that he successfully requested the university to change his records so that he had attended Brasenose College, a men's college, rather than St Anne's, a women's college.
