Laurence Michael Dillon
The World's First Transsexual Man
Born on the 1st May 1915 in London Laura Maud Dillon, daughter of Robert Dillon of Lismullen, County Meath, was anatomically a healthy female child.
Her mother died two days later and her father rejected her and sent her with her brother to his three unmarried sisters in Folkestone, England.
In 1925 her father and grandfather died and her eleven-year-old brother became Sir Robert Dillon, eighth baronet.
She was educated at an exclusive girls' school and at St Anne's College, Oxford, winning her rowing blue in a women's crew and graduating in 1938.
She spent her summer holidays with a housekeeper on the family estate in County Meath.
Facial hair and a deep voice confirmed her feelings of being physically and emotionally a man, and she took a job as a garage hand, living in loneliness and anguish for four years.
A Doctor Foss agreed to give her male hormone pills, she had a mastectomy in 1942, and in 1944 she had her birth certificate amended, changing 'daughter' to 'son' and 'Laura Maud' to 'Laurence Michael'. Sir Robert reacted with disbelief and horror and cut him out of his life.
Michael, as he now called himself, entered medical school in Trinity College Dublin in 1945 under his new name.
During the long holidays he had protracted and painful operations at the hospital of the plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillis to complete the physical changes.