Fri Feb 08, 2013 at 04:00 PM PST
A History Lesson on a Cold Evening
by rserven
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/08/1185661/-A-History-Lesson-on-a-Cold-EveningThe title of the Post article was Op by unknown doctor was a world first. And that is true, but I'm not so sure that the Post really understands the history in its totality. The title of the February 16, 2013 talk, Michael Dillon: The Man Who Invented Transsexuals by Cheryl Morgan, which is is being presented at Studio 1, M-Shed, Princess Wharf and sponsored by OutStories Bristol stretches the truth terribly.
[...]
The New York Daily News broke the news: Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty. The Daily News claimed Jorgenson was the first sex-change recipient. They were, as often is the case, quite wrong. German doctors performed such surgeries on artist and model Lili Elbe (the former Einar Wegener) and a transwoman identified as Dorchen Richter in the 1920s and 30s. Elbe was celebrated as the first, but she died of complications the next year). Both Lili and Dorchen were patients of Magnus Hirschfeld. Dorchen was in fact a housemaid at Hirschfeld's Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft (after a raid on Hirschfeld Institute was organized by the Nazi's (while Hirschfeld was in France) all his carefully collected papers were burned. Dorchen Richter disappeared. Nobody knows if she was killed by the mob, died later in custody, or perhaps even survived (remote possibility). What is known is that the actions by the Nazi mob set back progress by transpeople by at least a generation...and laid the groundwork for public hatred of us.
What was new with Jorgenson was the regimen of hormones.
When Jorgenson returned to New York in 1953, she became an instant celebrity. Not all of her celebrity, of course, was positive.
So who is Michael Dillon? Well, he was the first recipient of a female to male sex reassignment. Laurence Michael Dillon was named Laura Maud Dillon at birth on May 1, 1915. His mother died 10 days later of sepsis. He and his older brother were raised by two aunts in Folkestone, Kent, England after they were rejected by their father.
