The First Man-Made Man
The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In the 1920s, when Laura Dillon felt like a man trapped in a woman's body, there were no words to describe her condition; transsexual had yet to enter common usage. And there was no known solution to being stuck between the sexes. In a desperate bid to feel comfortable in her own skin, she experimented with breakthrough technologies that ultimately transformed the human body and revolutionized medicine. Michael Dillon's incredible story, from upper-class orphan girl to Buddhist monk, reveals the struggles of early transsexuals and challenges conventional notions of what gender really means.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1950, Michael Dillon, a dapper, bearded medical student, met Roberta Cowell, a boyish-looking woman, for lunch in a discreet London restaurant. During the lunch, Dillon announced that five years earlier he was a woman named Laura, and Roberta stated she was on her way to full womanhood from being Robert. Eventually, Cowell (a former Royal Air Force captain) would garner fame as a glamorous woman and author of the 1954 bestseller Roberta Cowell's Story, while in 1958 Dillon began a long, rocky journey to become a Tibetan monk. But Kennedy (Black Livingstone) does far more than detail their short-lived, topsy-turvy transgender romance. She gives us an enlightening tour of how mid-century science conceptualized gender, hormones and transsexual surgery, as well as how advances in plastic surgery for men maimed in WWI became the basis for sex change operations. Kennedy's slangy style she describes presurgery Dillon as living in the "slushy canal between sexes" also suits the material. Though her effort doesn't surpass other books on the topic especially Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States it's an entertaining and informative popular history.
