Stuff You Should Know - Michael Dillon: Trans Pioneer

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Michael Dillon was a lot of things - author, doctor, and most importantly, trans pioneer. Learn all about his story in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles Chuck Bryan over there looking all stern and serious with his glasses on.

Oh, no, he took them off, he's all good. And there's Jerry over there who's not sure where she is. Jerry always sets her glasses on. I know. She looks weird with her glasses off. She is a four-eyes, that's what they call them in sixth grade. That's right. Well, that's what they used to, I don't know,

sixth graders are probably way more mature than they were when we were young, huh? Or way more advanced in their digs and insults. Right. You know, just a lot smarter than four-eyes. Right, like, your mom gives you no screen time each week. Chew on that. That's a good one.

Is it? Sure. So, Chuck, I'm glad we're here. In the hot box. This was a really good pick on your part. Thanks. You basically yanked an unsung, or probably sung now, but for many years unsung, hero of the trans community.

Yeah, give all the credit to me. You really did a great job here, Chuck. No, you did a good job finding this one, because I hadn't heard of Michael Dillon yet, but that's who we're talking about today. That's right, and it's just the most macro view. So, you know, what we're talking about is Michael Dillon, very much overlooked over the years

as a trailblazer in the trans community. Period, that's enough of an overview. Oh, okay, sure. Like one of the first people to undergo surgery, one of the first people to write about it and write books. Yeah, but not necessarily even just one of. They believe that Michael Dillon was the first female to male gender confirmation surgery ever.

Yeah, and there are different terms in this article, we should say. They call that gender confirmation surgery now. They used to call it sexual reassignment. Before that it was sex change. Yeah, for sure, and the pronouns in this are going to shift too, because I think we're just gonna follow

the timeline of the story pronoun-wise, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of makes sense. Yeah, because for a significant portion, well, the first several years. No, I'm trying to think, I don't know how old he was, but he spent like a lot of his formative life as a girl. And the waters are a bit muddied,

but they were kind of purposefully muddied historically. And it's not entirely clear whether Michael Dillon, born Laura Dillon, Laura Maud Dillon, whether Laura Maud Dillon was born intersex, or if that was just kind of draped over the public presentation of this gender confirmation journey in order to kind of gain public sympathy,

which is something you had to do back then for sure. Yeah, I mean, the waters were very throughout history and still are very much muddied. I mean, you can go back and look at examples in history of people that we don't know, because the world wasn't set up for recognition or acceptance of any kind of alternative lifestyle or anything on the gender spectrum.

And so we don't know about Joan of Arc, or we don't know for sure about Emperor, what is his name, Allegabilis. Like he tried to get, well, I guess, I don't even know what the hood called that surgery back then in like Roman times, who knows. But he tried to have the surgery way back then even. Oh, I didn't find anything like that, okay, all right.

But we just don't know, like you said, because history didn't acknowledge this kind of thing. So it's hard to sort of categorize it today. Yeah, absolutely, right? It actually wasn't until about the early 20th century, like the first fifth of the 20th century that the medical establishment, just tiny little pieces and dots here and there

of the medical establishment, especially in the kind of newly burgeoning discipline of plastic surgery, began to see like, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, there are people out there who feel like that they were born the wrong gender. Like their sense of self, their identity of their gender doesn't match their biology,

and we can do something about that. And at first it was extremely radical for the first several decades, it was extremely radical. I mean, now even it's definitely gained much more acceptance, this idea that some people are born, they identify with a different gender than what they were born with. In the like 1920s, it was very, very radical,

but it did exist in some parts of the medical community. Yeah, and I also get the feeling that plastic surgeons, especially like, A, some of them were probably out to assist people, but I think a lot of them were just like, it was such a new discipline period, they liked the challenge. They were like nip-tucking it.

You remember those renegades on that show? I forgot about that show. That was a good show at first. Yeah, but I never saw it. Oh, it was a good show at first, it went off the rails, maybe even more than Dexter did, but it was a good show at first for the first several seasons. No, but I get the feeling that plastic surgeons back then

were just like, oh, well, this is probably the ultimate challenge. Right, yeah, I have that feeling too, for sure. So this is just a means of setting up the world that Laura Maud Dillon found herself born into in Ireland in 1915 as a, and I'd never heard this term, but his family had a title of baronet. Okay.

Which is apparently the lowest hereditary titled order. That's a teeny baron. So you're a commoner, but you are required to be called sir. Really? Yeah. Okay, and even if it wasn't like kind of the teensy version of the baron, the Dillens were not like wealthy. They had an estate, but it was kind of an old,

kind of crumbling estate. They weren't poor or anything, but they were certainly not well off. Right, and then by Downton Abbey times, the Sinn Féin came along and burned the place to the ground, the estate to the ground, because it was kind of a reminder of English intrusion into Ireland, like landed gentry kind of thing.

I'm rewatching Downton Abbey by the way. Are you? Yeah. How is it? It's comfort food, which is what I need right now. So that's why we're watching it. Is it better the first time or the second time around? Well, I don't know.

Right now it's just kind of what the doctor ordered. So it's kind of great. Okay. Just like all my old pals, plus the movies coming out this fall. That's so neat. So maybe this is a primer, I don't know. What, they're making a movie?

Yeah. Has there, let me ask you this, sorry everybody, has there ever been a movie version of a TV show that was better than the TV show? I'll have to get back to you on that. Okay. I can't think of one. A movie version of a TV show.

I cannot think of one. I think the Fresh Prince movie was pretty great. They did, okay. No, I'm just kidding. I was like, we have to stop for two hours. It was called Independence Day. Right. Yeah, I guess it kind of was.

All right, so Laura Maud Dillon, the family, like you said, the state was burned down. He had gotten, or I guess she, see, there we go. At the time, she had gotten an inheritance, a little bit, not a ton. Yeah, because she was young when she would have gotten this inheritance case. Yeah, but her brother got the actual estate,

which as it turned out, wasn't that great of a get, so it was burned down. He, Robert, her brother, became the eighth baronet of Liz Mullen. And I guess when he was ex-handed the title, he was like, thanks, I guess. But young Laura knew very early on that she was different.

She, especially when she got to puberty, she didn't like wearing girls' clothing. She never thought of herself as a female. Yeah, I think that's a good point. Like, that comes through in everything I've read about her. Oh yeah. Or him, that he never thought of, he never identified as female,

like basically his entire life. Yeah, and apparently there was even an incident when she was a teenager where like a boy held open the door for her. And that just sort of, it was a symbol, I think, of all the confusion that she was feeling. And really kind of wrecked her identity, you know, in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I think it was the first time she was really confronted with what people saw her as. And it was a girl. And she was like, I don't feel like a girl. That's not me, I'm a man. Yeah. That's, I didn't grow up that way, but I can't imagine how rough it is to feel

out of sync like that. And especially at a time where, Sure. What do you do? You don't even have words for it, let alone procedures to follow where people whose footsteps you pioneered the way,

which is one reason why Michael Dillon was a pioneer. So she gets that inheritance, which allows her to go to Oxford. And this sort of begins a trend of going somewhere else to try and find herself and figure herself out. She tried at Oxford, she joined the rowing team. She was an award winner for the Women's Boat Club and was successful.

And then, and it's hard, well, I guess it's not too hard to believe, but there was a photo of her in a tabloid as a student rower that was titled Man or Woman. Yeah, cause she had like a boyish haircut. Yeah, I just can't imagine back then, like, I mean, now it's awful too, but they were doing this kind of thing back then.

Yeah. Like outing college students. Yeah, I think it was more like the commoners poking at the titled people. Oh, really? Any chance they got. Oh, okay. That's the impression I have.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Great Britain. And this is about the time where we should mention a novel published in 1928 by Marguerite Radcliffe Hall called The Well of Loneliness, which was a radical, radical book because it depicted a lesbian. And there wasn't even a name for that at the time, like you said.

Yeah, I looked that up and I was like, like there really wasn't, like the word lesbian wasn't in use yet and there was no word whatsoever. And from what I saw on etymology online, it just says with zero explanation, lesbian, 1925. Oh, really? Yeah, but I can't find any other thing.

I'd find no other date or whatever. So it's possible it was in use right around this time but it hadn't spread. But from what I saw, I think the point is there wasn't a concept, not just a word, there wasn't a concept for women who were interested or who were sexually oriented toward other women. That kind of fell under an umbrella term

as far as society went for women who were sexually uninhibited. Like they would do that, but then they would also have sex with guys and they would walk around parties naked or whatever. It was all one big personality. There wasn't the idea that there was a sexual orientation of women who were oriented toward women.

That was, I think, what really didn't exist and what the well of loneliness really kind of put out there like, hey, this does exist. And you could say that it wasn't well received by British society. Yeah, and a lot of ways it was a great thing because it gave people like young Laura the something to look at and identify with

but it also put forward ideas about lesbians being very manish and like they want to be men and look like men and dress like men, which is of course not the case, but it was also 1928. Right, and so the British government decided that this book was obscene and had a huge trial over it and banned the book and it had a complete Streisand effect.

Everybody's like, wait, what book is this? What are you talking about? And they know this Barbara Streisand. Right, exactly. And so everybody wanted to know about it and it like made this huge impact. It's just totally backfired by banning it and going to the trouble of taking it to trial

and everything, it became kind of a big deal. And so it kind of informed how a lot of British lesbians viewed themselves. It gave them like, okay, I'm not the only one. This is a real thing. It was helpful in a lot of ways too. Well, I mean, one way it was helpful to young Laura Dillon was realizing,

well, wait a minute, I'm not a lesbian either. So there, I have no idea how to think about myself other than the fact that I was born into the wrong gendered body. Right, because at first she was like, oh, okay, maybe this is it. And supposedly she fell in love as a teenager. So air quotes, with two women who were straight

and they rejected her and it had a big impact on her. But from that experience, and I think having been guided by this book, like you said, she realized like, I'm not a lesbian, that's not what this is about. She was a man and what superseded all of their desires and what drove her more than anything else was to be the man that she felt she was physically so that she could be accepted into male society.

That was her goal. It wasn't to have sex with women. If she could have had a kid with a woman, she would have loved that, but in as much as it would confirm her identity as a man. And so that's what drove her to undertake hormone procedures, surgery, and basically everything that pushed her toward confirming her identity as a man.

It was the desire to be accepted as a man. Yeah, and that process kind of started at Oxford when she started dressing as a man, kind of presenting outwardly as a man, going to events as a man. And it was sort of a double-edged sword. There was a little bit of freedom to that and a little bit of work towards self-realization.

But she graduated as a woman, still had a female name on her birth certificate, still had to, you know, got a job and had to wear skirts and dress as a woman at work. So it was sort of just still trapped between two worlds when she comes in contact with a man named Dr. George Foss. I think we should take a break. I agree.

Okay, all right, you're mine. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. All right, Chuck, you were setting everybody up for the Dr. Frost bomb drop. Let's hear about Frost. It's not a bad band name. The Dr. Frost bomb drop? It's like a Dr. Teeth in the electric, what?

Electric mayhem? That's right. Nice work. I would never have thought of that. Frost was, speaking of double-edged swords, he was a doctor who was experimenting with testosterone on patients. Like one of the first?

Yeah, and injections. This was in the 1930s. And this was to help reduce unpleasant, heavy periods for women. But it had the side effect, the obvious side effects, that would happen when a woman takes testosterone. And Laura Dillon gets word of this and volunteers and says, I'm kind of interested in the side effects,

if you know what I mean. He's like, I don't know what you mean. This is 1930. I have no idea what you're talking about. So he's like, oh, OK, all right. Well, you would be the absolute first, as far as anybody knows, since synthetic hormones were very, very new.

Laura Dillon was the first to try to undergo hormone therapy for gender confirmation. No one had ever tried that before. They didn't even call it hormone therapy. But FOSS was like, all right, I'm not quite sure about this. How about I've heard of people like you. You go see a shrink and talk to a shrink first, and then come back afterward, and then

I'll talk about treating you or whatever. And so Laura went to a shrink. And they didn't call them shrinks back then, either. No, they call them psychotherapists. They had no words for anything. Psychotherapists. That guy over there, I think is what they said. And then came back and said, hey, the shrink said whatever.

And how about we do this hormone therapy? FOSS said, you know what? I've changed my mind. But here's a bottle of testosterone tablets. Good luck. I'm just going to leave them on this table and walk out of the room. I was thinking we should fully in the sound

effect of a bottle of pills being tossed from one person to another. What does that sound like? Quitch. It's kind of a silent act. A little. Yeah? These are really good mics, though.

So and we should also point out that that's psychiatrists or psychologists who spoke with Laura, then gossiped about this to other people. And that got back to the research facility where Laura worked. So just one of many betrayals in her life. And such a betrayal that she said, I'm out of here. She had to actually leave work this research lab because the heat had been turned up on her.

And yeah, there are a string of betrayals that popped up throughout his Michael Dillon's life. And this was one of the first significant ones. But also, he was also a very lonely person just because of his situation and because there was no community for him. And he had some real friends here or there. But they were kind of random surprising people.

Like one of the big influences on his life was the town vicar from where he grew up as a girl. Really kind of connected and understood him. Yeah. And his family was not very supportive. His brother, Robert disowned him at one point. His aunt, Toto. Have you ever seen a picture of aunt Toto?

No. If there's ever been a woman named aunt Toto that looked like an aunt Toto, it's this lady. She was obviously supportive because in the picture, she's walking around with Michael Dillon full dress, beard, and everything. Aunt Toto was supportive? She was in as much as she would be out in public pictured

with him. Interesting. But I don't have the impression that she was like supportive, supportive. I think maybe she tolerated it. That's the impression that I have. It probably chided him. Who knows?

But he didn't have a lot of friends. But the ones that he did have really helped him in some profound ways and helped kind of, he did have this kind of mountain chain of support throughout his life, but never a bunch of people at once. Gotcha. You know what I mean? So mediocre support dabbled here and there throughout his life.

I guess so. He had to do it on his own, I guess. So this is where the pronoun definitely shifts at this point because Laura fully starts using testosterone, fully starts living life as a man. Took on the name Michael. Became Michael, grew a beard, his voice, because the hormone treatments worked,

like his voice dropped and became lower pitched. He got a job as a mechanic. Of course, he got made fun of there some. But it was working well enough to where customers started to, he started to kind of pass as a man among people that didn't know who he was. Very much so. As long as he was clothed, he was a man.

That's just what he looked like to everybody. Like you said, the voice, the beard, the demeanor, he was a very, he was a large man, very well built from all those years of rowing. Sure. And then a decade of testosterone pills or half a decade by this point had really taken effect. Yeah, and this is in Bristol.

I don't think we mentioned another move to try and start over. Right, because of that gossipy head shrinker, who basically got him driven out of his job at the research lab. So he's working at the garage, and there is a certain bittersweet confirmation or affirmation from interacting with customers who believe thinking that they just interacted with the man.

Making him feel like himself, the person he's always wanted to be. But like you said, he's getting mocked by coworkers. But one of the things that he does is he takes on extra work as a fire watcher. Because this is during the Second World War, and Britain was getting bombed during the Blitz by the Germans.

And Michael Dillon would sit up and watch four fires that broke out and would call the fire brigade, tell them where to go because a bomb had just set some building on fire, which meant very long hours awake in the dark, sitting around doing nothing. And he took this time to write a book called Self. And Self was a really interesting tome from what I can tell, where there was kind of a scientific

treatise on endocrinology, psychological treatise on basically what would come to later be known as trans identity. Well, and everything, gender identity, homosexuality. Like he was kind of tackling it all, except not saying like, this is who I am. Right, he was approaching it like, I'm a scientist, and this is what's what.

Yeah, and it got published in 1946. It was obviously not some huge bestseller, because it was 1946. I would say it was probably tucked away in certain corners of certain bookstores. But not widely acknowledged and available at the time. Now looked upon as a landmark piece of work, but in 1946. And the people who were in this scattered trans community

at the time, who were lucky enough to find it, found a lot of solace in it, because it argued on their behalf. At the time, the medical community was like, if you're born intersex, where it's unclear what your gender is, you're morally in the clear. Like we can feel bad for you, there's things we can do. We'll do surgeries. No one's gonna really judge you.

If you're born biologically one gender, but you want to be the other gender, you're what everybody considered back then a freak. Like that was the word they tossed around, was freak. And you deserve scorn and plenty of it. Whatever anybody wanted to do to you, that's what you deserved at the time. And it was up to the medical community

to dole out judgment of who deserved what. And Michael in this book self argued, no, no. It's up to the person to decide. If that person decides that it's their head that they want changed to match their body, or their body they want changed to match their head, it's up to them to decide. And this was the complete opposite

of what the medical community held at the time. Well, yeah, and also the point was like, there needs to be a physical change. Like we can't be quote unquote fixed psychologically. This is real, so we need to be able to physically change our bodies. Right, and that was radical at the time. Well, it was, and it was also a time where

it's important to point out that transitioning from male to female, believe me, nothing was like super accepted, but that was slightly more accepted. In England and the West, at least. And there were famous cases that was one transgender person named Christine Jorgensen, who, and ironically too, if you're transitioning male to female

and you transition into this beautiful woman, then it's more accepted and written about as like, well, you know, but look what happened. Like the chrysalis turns into a butterfly. Right, like everybody's like, why can't you be more like Caitlyn Jenner? Yeah, exactly. But this is, why can't you be more like Christine Jorgensen?

Yeah, so the whole point of all that is Michael Dillon was sort of in one of the roughest positions to be transitioning the other way, which was not accepted at all, and the least sort of like understood even. But ironically, at least legally, it was easier for Michael Dillon to undergo an actual surgical transition.

Yeah. Going from a female to male than it was for somebody who wanted to go male to female, at least in Great Britain, because in the UK at the time, there were laws against surgical castration of healthy male genitalia. Right. It was illegal to do.

Because, and I don't know if this is confirmed, but one of the thoughts is to get out of the army. Right. They didn't want men having the surgery to get out of the army. But also at the time, homosexuality was outlawed and had been since 1885. Yeah, that little fact as well.

Right. Which we talked about. Yeah. So here we are with Michael Dillon, still very much in between worlds, still very much in pain and not living like a full, true life as is true self. But much happier than say,

during the time when he was working at the research lab. Right. At the very least, the hormones have given him a certain amount or confirmed his male identity much more than it had before. That's true. So we should add here that Dillon had diabetes, which turned out to be an interesting sort of

good thing in some ways, because he's at the doctor because he has diabetes. He really loved his cake. In Bristol. And I couldn't tell if it was type two or type one. I never saw that either. So at the hospital in Bristol, Dillon is seen by a plastic surgeon who says,

wait a minute, here's a diabetic man from the doctor's point of view who has breasts. And I bet you probably want those removed. So let me put you in touch with this plastic surgeon. His name is Dr. Harold Gillies. I think that guy actually performed a mastectomy first. Oh really? Yeah.

Well, he put him in touch with Gillies because this guy's the real deal. Like, if you want a penis, this is your man. Do you remember? That's what it said on his card. Are you, do you remember Gillies from the War Masks episode? Yeah.

He was like the hero surgeon from that episode. Yeah, so that, I mean, his specialty was helping physically repair people who were mangled in a factory or burned or blasted up at war. Yeah. And he got a reputation, like I said, if you were in battle and you lost your penis, go to Dr. Gillies because he can make you a new one.

Do you remember that part in Big Red One where I think Mark Hamill gets his penis blown off? I do remember that. It's Mark Hamill, right? Mm-hmm. That was my first R-rated movie. And Lee Marvin, we have had the same coverage. We have, but years ago.

Yeah. Many years ago. It's so weird, Chuck. Anyway, Harold Gillies could have helped him. Probably could have. Put it back on. So, all right, so that's where we are.

Met Dr. Gillies and said, you know what? I can make you a penis. It's an interesting procedure. What I do is I cut a flap of skin, allow that skin to grow, and I'm rolling this thing and forming it into a tube shape the whole time. Right.

And then effectively, I can take that tube of skin and we can talk about what you want out of it. What do you want to do? You got a tube of skin. It's up to you. Go crazy with whatever you want to do with it. Yeah, but I mean, those are some of the questions. Like, do you want to urinate out of this?

Do you want to have sex and have, you know, have sex that actually feels good? Right. And this was, believe it or not, all possible, thanks to Gillies at the time. Yeah, he has it. I don't think it was like 100% like success rates, but for the time, inventing falloplasty,

it was some, you know, at least there was a glimmer of hope. So, yeah, I believe Gillies did invent falloplasty and Michael Dillon was the first recipient of falloplasty in the world. So that's not to say that there weren't gender confirmation surgeries that had happened prior, but by the time Gillies had come along, he really managed to standardize these

and figure out like the best practices for them. Before the first ones, they started to take place back in, I think, 1919 in Berlin. There was a guy named Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld who ran the Institute for Sexual Vicenschaft, or Sexual Sciences. And under Dr. Hirschfeld's watch, some of the earliest gender confirmation surgeries

took place, including a radical surgery for the Danish painter Lily Elby. Yeah, they made the movie, well, in the book. Is it the Dutch girl? The Danish girl. The Danish girl? Yeah. Okay, all right, I've got to see that then.

Is it sad, I'll bet it's sad. I never saw it. Well, I can tell you Lily Elby's story is sad, but in a very bittersweet way, she transitioned into a woman and all she wanted was to be able to have a baby. And actually got a uterine transplant. Oh, that's how she died.

And a vaginoplasty, right? But she didn't die for like, I think 14 or 18 months later. Yeah, it was an infection that eventually led to cardiac arrest. But she wrote like, she knew she was dying. She wrote toward the end, she said, some people would say that 14 months

isn't a very long life to live as the person you were born to be. But to me, it was a whole lifetime. So it was like, she got what she wanted finally. She got to be the woman that she'd always felt she was and lived that way for 14 months. Yeah, I gotta check that out.

But that was the idea that she died from the surgery. Like they were just practicing basically at this point, but they were practicing on live patients. And in their defense at the Institute, they weren't doing this because they were mad scientists. They were doing this because these were people coming to them saying like, if you don't do this, I'm gonna do this myself.

Because that was kind of your option. Do it yourself or go totally nuts, banging your head against the wall, trying to find some other alternative for it. So by the time Gillies came along in the 40s, actually World War I and then onward into the 40s, he really figured out how to do this. And he was the guy who laid the groundwork

for everything that came after. Yeah, and he was actually another like, he was not only a talented surgeon, but he could provide a medical reason that would be acceptable to the bureaucrats, which was there's a condition called hypospadia. That's when a man's urethra exists further down the penis rather than at the tip of the penis.

And so a boy might be misgendered at birth, mislabeled. And so this surgery would, I guess, correct that. So he had sort of a, I guess, legal standing to stand on. Remember like the surgeons, and so the community at large had said, okay, if you're born intersex, hypospadia qualifies as intersex, right? You deserve to be taken care of.

Like it's fine, legally you can do it, all that stuff. So if you have a surgeon who's saying this patient has hypospadia, you're in. All right, should we take a break? Oh yeah, I think we should. All right. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. OK, so where we left off was Dr. Gillies has been introduced

to Michael Dillon. Michael Dillon, hormone therapy has worked. Michael Dillon has been living pretty successfully for the time as a man. And said, all right, I'd like to have this surgery. And Dr. Gillies said, that's great. But get in line, pal, because I got a lot of war masks. Now, I got a lot of injured men in the war

that I have to treat that, in my mind, take priority over you. And so it took a little while to actually go under the knife for Dillon. Yeah, and it also wasn't like this was just one surgery. This was a series. So Gillies, in his notes, later on, said that he performed 13 surgeries on Michael Dillon. Dillon, in his autobiography, said that it was 17.

But it was a lot, either way, a lot of surgeries. Over a three-year period, during which time Michael Dillon goes to medical school. Yeah, Trinity and Dublin. Yeah, so he's kind of taking his life into his own hands in a big way by saying, I want to go be a doctor and potentially a surgeon even. Right, but he's going and doing his studies during the term

and then after the term, he's going to England to visit Gillies at Gillies Hospital, the one we talked about in the war masks episode. And remember how we said this hospital was kind of like a refuge for people who had trouble existing in the outside world? Well, Michael Dillon was finally, for the first time in his life, he felt accepted there. And he could thrive.

And he did thrive in this hospital with all these other patients. It was like a really happy time for him, actually, when he would go spend time there getting surgeries and recuperating while he was out of school. He felt good. Like he called it the country club is where he was going. Yeah, and then weirdly though, it was also a time

where Michael Dillon developed this, I guess, sort of a defense mechanism and survival technique, relationship wise, where he was sort of, I mean, in the article here that it was labeled misogynistic. I don't know, that's a tough word, but at the very least it was sort of like, well, who needs women, women belong in the kitchen, which is all clearly a defense of self-preservation.

Well, I even wrote later on that it was to keep women at arms length, and it was purposeful. They didn't really actually mean it. Well, absolutely, because even if this surgery, and we're gonna get to that in a second, even if it went off without a hitch, when push comes to shove, if he got in a relationship with a woman, while he may have a functioning penis,

it's still not one that's like, they would be able to tell, and he would have to have some sort of conversation, which he did not wanna have. Right, but it's even more nuanced than that, Chuck, because remember how Laura Dillon was befriended by the town vicar as a young kid? Well, that vicar is credited by Michael Dillon

as really instilling the set of ethics and values into him, and one of the things that he said is, if I can't give a woman a baby, I have no business leading her on. So it wasn't just self-defense, it was also in a very strange way looking out for other women, he didn't want anyone to fall in love with them,

or expect something from him that he couldn't give, and I can't get whether he actually was okay with being denied love like that, or if that in itself was a defense mechanism, not talking about it, but from what I gather, what he was really interested in, he would much prefer, have just been hanging out with the guys.

He wasn't after love for a baby or a wife, he was after hanging out with the guys, that's what he wanted, and that's to him is what Gillies gave him by creating this penis form was, that was it, that was the key, that was the final ticket into the male world. Now he could be anywhere men were including

a dressing room or a locker room, and still be accepted as a man, that was it. And so finally, by 1950, after these years of surgery, after more than a decade of testosterone therapy, Michael Dillon was Michael Dillon the man, he had been confirmed in his gender identity. Yeah, so this is where someone named Roberta Cowell comes into Dillon's life.

I don't even think we talked about Roberta earlier on, did we? No. We didn't mention her yet? No, she really does just kind of come in now, so I think it's okay. So Roberta Cowell. We should go back and start over.

Roberta Cowell was born male, but began that hormone treatment, and when it was in that transition period that's so difficult, when Roberta read Dillon's book, Self, which again, not some huge book, but got a copy of it, and said, I would like to meet you and talk to you. Yeah, because she wanted info on how to get a surgeon

to do this, that might as well have been magic at the time. Well, and he was a doctor at this point too, Dillon was, so Roberta thinks like I'm meeting with this doctor, which was true, but it was all a ruse. I'm no doctor, I'm a mechanic. Well, he was all those things. So at the very first meeting, Dillon just sort of spills it, and this was something that Dillon didn't talk about

openly with people, I always kept it very guarded, and just basically says, here's my whole life history, here's who I am, and at last I found someone who understands me, and by all accounts, they sort of felt like they were meant to be together in some way. He felt they were meant to be together, she did not feel that way.

Well, not in that way, but she was very close to him, it's not like she shunned him or anything like that. No, she didn't, I have a feeling that he, well actually, I know he had a little more of a future in mind for them than she did. Like romantic future. Right, and he also, at the very least, he served as her guide to transitioning.

He knew Gillies, he knew how to do this, and just was a really great resource for her as well. Well, and not just emotionally helped with the transition, but literally with a scalpel. Oh yeah, that's a big one. Dillon, as a doctor, actually performed an orchidectomy on cowl. Right, which is the removal of the testicles.

That's right. Which is illegal at the time, and so they found in- And was he even like, I know he went to medical school, but I don't know, was he a certified surgeon? I'm not sure if he graduated yet. He had definitely performed an appendectomy by that point. He did that in medical school for sure. Yeah, I could do that though,

to like tomorrow probably. Right, we actually are scheduled for surgery tomorrow. But he did it illegally, and they found out about this because they meaning historians. Right. In either Michael's letters or Roberta's letters, there is a document that was found that said, I, Roberta Cowell, understand that Michael Dillon

is a doctor, but is not an experienced surgeon. I also know that there are a lot of risks involved in this, and that it's illegal, but I hereby remove any responsibility should I not survive this orchidectomy that Michael Dillon's about to perform on me. And so with Roberta Cowell's testicles removed, now all of a sudden,

she is a candidate for gender confirmation surgery. From Gillies. From Gillies, who can do it legally now because there's no testicle removal, which again is illegal. And so Gillies, who's been introduced to Roberta by Michael, performs a, not a, is it a panectomy, I believe? Not a panectomy, but a vaginoplasty.

The very first one. The very first one in Great Britain. Remember, I think, Lily Elbig was the first vaginoplasty recipient. Yeah. But this is the first one in Great Britain. It's not like they were a dime a dozen by this time. It was groundbreaking surgery for sure,

and it was successful too. That's right. So he did get his medical degree, Dillon did. Didn't get a job for a little while, but eventually got a job as a ship's doctor. And this is in the Merchant Navy. Oh, we didn't say he asked Roberta to marry him. And Roberta was like, nah, he said, fine.

I'm done with relationships. I'm going to join the Merchant Marines. That's right. Ann was a doctor and very much living as Dr. Michael Dillon on these ships. Bearded, pipe-smoking doctor. Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, you can find pictures on Google images

and all that stuff, like all kinds of good pictures. Look up Michael Dillon and Aunt Toto, seriously. Aunt Toto looks like Aunt Toto. I don't even know what that means. You will know what it means when you see Aunt Toto. I can't stress this enough. So if you go back to the beginning of the show, remember where we talked about the inheritance

and the lineage and all that. This is where Michael Dillon says, you know what? I want to get back in the family lineage as a man. For my birthright. And there are two ways that this is done in Britain, which this is all so fascinating to me. Debrets, Peerage and Burke's Peerage. They're the two books that track the thoroughbreds

of British aristocracy. You should have used air quotes. So Dillon makes this change in one of them in Debrets. Doesn't make the change in Burke's. Because Debrets assured him that if the change was made in Debrets, Burke's would follow suit automatically. It's just about to say that. So that didn't happen.

And this is when things go really, I mean, you think what a journey this man has been on to this point. This sends him to like down the philosophical spiral where, or maybe up the philosophical spiral. Can you spiral up? Sure. It's like a corkscrew.

All right. An inverted corkscrew. So it starts getting into Buddhism, specifically a book called The Third Eye. Which is, I think, like about Tibetan Buddhism, but how they can like fly around and do stuff. Yeah, I mean, that book is definitely one that's been taken issue with over the years.

Sure. So he goes back to Britain. He's very much in this mindset of Buddhism and philosophical introspection. This is when he's basically exposed in the press as this scandalous person who had a sex change and is trying to like get the family fortune when he's not even entitled,

or they probably use the she pronouns, I imagine, back then. And he basically finally comes out, does an interview, fully outing himself in the press, even though he did say he suffered from hypospadia, which in an order to gain sympathy, which was not true. No, apparently it wasn't true.

That's what we were saying at the beginning, like the historical record has been muddied by stuff like that during that interview, but it doesn't seem to be true. But he's exposed, he's basically like, I can't go anywhere in England, I can't go to America, all the press is gonna follow me wherever I go, except probably to India.

I wanna go meet some of these Tibetan monks. So he headed off to India after one of the voyages in the merchant navy and started studying Buddhism. He found, he sought out a guy, another Britain, who had been transformed under Theravada Buddhism, the Theravada tradition, who had become known as, let me see if I can get this right Chuck, right out of the gate.

Sangharakshita, pretty good, right? I think so. So Sangharakshita was a British guy. I can't remember what his born name was, but he had become like a pretty well-respected, renowned Theravada Buddhist teacher in India. And so Michael Dillon sought him out and started studying under him.

Well, and as, but gave him his whole story and said, this is who I am, by the way. So at this point, like not only has he become a man, now he's becoming a Buddhist. And so to kind of undergo this further transition from Michael Dillon to this new Buddhist practitioner, he takes a name, Sramanera Javaka. Javaka was Buddha's doctor.

He throws his pipe off the mountain, he shaves his beard, shaves his head and starts learning Buddhism. And Sangharakshita takes him on and says, I will let you be a novice. You can study under me. And so Michael had, or I should say, Sramanera at this point,

had like this sudden idea that he was going to become a Buddhist monk. That this was in the cards for him in the future and he dared to dream. Yeah, this was to me maybe the saddest thing of all this. Like toward the end of this man's journey, finally says, you know what is going to bring me peace is to become a Buddhist monk.

And they're accepting me in my story. And that's when they said, actually you can't really become a monk. Yeah. Sorry about that. But it falls under one of these bands and you can't be ordained as a monk because only men can be monks. And it was just like,

I can't imagine how crushing that was. There was also a prohibition against the third sex becoming monks. And apparently nobody knew exactly what third sex meant but everybody was like, it's probably you. There's probably referring to you. So if you're a born a woman, you can't be a monk.

If you're a third sex, you can't be a monk either. So Michael had these things going against him but he still kept that, he still kept trying. He left the Theravada tradition and he found acceptance with Tibetan monks. Right. And it was the Tibetan monks that he felt most at home with.

He was accepted on as a novice. And he was a novice who at age like 45 I think was at the same level as 10 year old boys living in this Buddhist monastery up in the Himalayas but was happier than he's ever been in his life just for this period of three months. And so he's found where he thinks he belongs but he has to leave because his visa runs out.

So he goes back to India to wait the prescribed amount of time. And Fully believes that he's going to be able to go back to become a confirmed monk. He would be ordained and start to become a monk under the Tibetan tradition which probably would have happened had Sangharakshita not intervened again.

Yeah, and at this point he had fully was living this monastic lifestyle. He wrote home and said, give away all my possessions and Anttodo was like, you know that there's more money coming your way like 20,000 pounds. He's like, I don't want it. Just give it away. Give it away.

And I guess Anttodo did so. Said thanks, thanks for the 20,000 pounds. So like I say, he thinks he's going to be ordained because the Tibetan monks had said we're going to ordain you when you come back. But Sangharakshita, the original guy from the Theravada tradition found out about this. And sent a letter in triplicate to Michael,

to the Tibetan monks and to the Buddhist central office, I guess, and basically said, here's everything that Michael Dillon told me about himself. He was born a woman, he underwent surgery. He is in no way a candidate for the monastery, for a monkhood and just shot down his chances. And I read a tricycle magazine article. It's like the Buddhist magazine

where they interviewed Sangharakshita years later. This is like in 2007. And he said, I still stand by it. He's like, I don't think he had any business in my mind being a Buddhist monk, which is pretty rough, man. Even all these years later, he has zero regrets over it. It's sad. So the sad, sad ending for Michael Dillon

is he died at a very young age. He was, had no money because he gave it all away, was traveling and malnutrition sets in. And they're not really sure what sickness originated, sort of the downward slide. But he ended up in a hospital in India and died at the age of 47 in 1962. And had written an autobiography called

Out of the Ordinary, which did not get published until two years ago. Yeah, he sent it off to his publisher who he'd written a couple other books for, like just right before he died. And his brother found out about it and wanted to get his hands on the manuscript so he could burn it.

And his publisher hired lawyers to keep the family off of the manuscript and was successful. Amazing. And finally in 2017, it was published. And now the world knows about Michael Dillon and his contribution. There's gotta be a movie in the works. It's coming.

Yeah, it is coming for sure. So that's Michael Dillon, Chuck, good pick. Thanks. I'm glad we know more about this guy because he deserves to be known about. And if you wanna know more about Michael Dillon, well, go check him out. He has an autobiography out there

and I'm sure he would be very happy from Nirvana, smiling down on you for reading it. That's right. Okay, I said that, so it's time for Listener Mail, Chuck. I'm gonna call this a rowboater. Hey guys, my name is Jacob, writing from a rowboat on the Pacific Ocean. Oh yeah.

I've been alone at sea for 270 days on an attempted record-setting journey. My oars keep talking to me. You know what's funny is I just watched that, there's a documentary about obituary writers called Obit. And in it, they kind of talk about some of their favorite obituaries over the years and one of them was about the initial guy

who rode the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, which I had never heard of, and I was like, man, we gotta do one on this guy. Sure. And then we get this email from Jacob all these years later who's doing it again. Okay. Crazy.

Did that set in everyone rowing a boat across the ocean? That's big. No sails. No. Rowing. Rowing. All right, I hadn't listened to your podcast prior to departing, but luckily,

I guess he was just like, geez, who has a thousand episodes of something? We're the only ones. Yeah, I hope it's good. I hadn't listened to your podcast prior to departing, but luckily chose your show in an audio entertainment download frenzy before leaving. I've now been through many episodes,

though sometimes drift away, staring at oncoming waves and have to rewind, which is more difficult than it should be since saltwater has destroyed most of my electronics. About 75% of the way there, hoping to reach Australia from Washington state. Wow. Oh man.

I just want to say thanks for all you guys do. Appreciate your show and I value you. The next 25% for me are far from certain, but you'll be with me all the way till the end, wherever that may be. And that is from Jacob from somewhere over the Melanesian Basin. Okay, Jacob, we need weekly dispatches from you.

Please. Just at the very least to say, hey, still alive, still rowing toward Australia. Well, he won't hear that. I don't think he's able to download stuff from the Melanesian Basin. Oh, that's true. That's true.

So maybe he'll hear this at the end of his journey. There's satellite internet out there, so maybe. Well, Jacob, if you hear this and you're still on your journey, it doesn't even matter. Whenever you hear this, email us back, okay? Yeah, if it's in 20 years. Everybody cross your fingers and your toes for Jacob. That's right.

Okay, if you want to be like Jacob and get in touch with us from a rowboat somewhere and some ocean, you can do that. You can go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com and look up our social links. And you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production

of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.