Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions
256
Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions
256eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Now available for the first time—more than 50 years after it was written—is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915–62), the British doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka’s extraordinary life story told in his own words.
Out of the Ordinary captures Dillon/Jivaka’s various journeys—to Oxford, into medicine, across the world by ship—within the major narratives of his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically, Dillon/Jivaka begins with his childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by his spinster aunts, and tells of his days at Oxford immersed in theology, classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher during World War II and his surgical transition under Sir Harold Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school. He details his worldwide travel as a ship’s surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on his interactions with colonial and postcolonial subjects, followed by his “outing” by the British press while he was serving aboard The City of Bath.
Out of the Ordinary is not only a salient record of an early sex transition but also a unique account of religious conversion in the mid–twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: It made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
Out of the Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a distinct voice from the history of the transgender movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823274819 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 917,976 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Cameron Partridge is an Episcopal priest, theologian, scholar of trans and religious studies, and an openly transgender man. He has taught at Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School and Episcopal Divinity School and is currently the rector of St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in San Francisco.
Read an Excerpt
Out of the Ordinary
A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions
By Michael Dillon, Lobzang Jivaka, Jacob Lau, Cameron Partridge
Fordham University Press
Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Michael DillonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8232-7481-9
CHAPTER 1
Birth and Origins
I was born on May 1, 1915, in a nursing home in Ladbroke Grove in the borough of Kensington. The nursing home is no longer in existence but one can still read "Ladbroke Grove" on the front of some of the London buses. Although never having gone with one to its destination, I have often had the urge to see the area whereon my eyes first rested, changed though undoubtedly it must be by now. I had been preceded fifteen months before by a brother who had been a seven months baby. He had caused his mother much trouble in labor and in anxiety for some time afterwards, since he was naturally delicate. Then, all too soon, I followed and after six or perhaps ten days she died, of puerperal sepsis it seems.
The vagueness of information on the whole matter is due to the fact that none of my family knew her. For some reason our father, who had not married until the age of forty-seven, never took his wife down to Folkestone where his aged parents were still alive and four of his sisters resident. Only one sister who happened to be staying at the time in London, and a niece of his, attended the wedding. The sister, our Aunt Evie to-be, said that our mother was a fine looking woman, big and handsome, and our cousin, Auntie Daphne, said that she was much addicted to playing bridge while carrying me and she had often wondered whether the baby would be a bridge player. Long before I ever knew of this I had expressed an intense dislike of bridge and would never learn to play it, thus saving myself much time and money in future days while I was at sea.
A further source of information was to come many, many years later from my mother's only surviving sister in Sydney, Australia, when I was a Merchant Navy Surgeon. But that must wait until it occurs in its chronological order. It was she who maintained that my mother lived for ten days and not six and that she died suddenly when almost on the point of leaving the nursing home.
Be that as it may, on our father's side we are Anglo-Irish and on our mother's side Australio-German. I always regretted the German, but what could one do about it? It seems that our maternal grandfather emigrated from Germany to Australia with his wife and family, but his wife, far from being German, too, was an Irish girl from Cork, so that the Irish blood runs the more thickly in our veins. He, too, had a large family, but of them all our mother alone showed signs of independence of spirit, abjuring the Catholic faith in which she had been brought up (as, indeed in time did several of her brothers and sisters), and determined to see what lay beyond the confines of Sydney Harbor.
Just under what circumstances a young lady in the first decade of this century could have managed to break away and go a-sailing off alone, has not been discovered, but it seems that she landed first in South Africa and there married a man named MacLiver who owned a ranch or a fruit farm or the like and was very happy with him. Then one day disaster overtook them. Her husband was entertaining a friend to lunch and wished to show off the fine points of a new pony he had acquired, for he was an enthusiastic horseman. The horse put its foot into a rabbit hole and threw its rider and to the horror of the wife and the guest watching from the verandah, rolled on its master, disemboweling him. At the time our mother-to-be was with child and the shock caused a miscarriage and long illness. It was after she had recovered from this that she left South Africa and came to England where she met our father in a boarding-house and it appears it was a case of love at first sight. Whether it was because she was technically a Roman Catholic whereas his family was rigidly Protestant, that prompted his not bringing her to meet his parents, I do not know. At any rate no better explanation has been offered.
Hence it was that, although other children were accustomed to having two families, in the shape of aunts and uncles, multiple grandparents and cousins, to us there was only one family and that was the Dillons. True, as children, we had an occasional letter to write to an aunt in Australia, the place which had swans on its stamps, but there was no connection in our minds between her and the other aunts who surrounded us from morning till night. And how that came about was as follows:
Our father, it appears, was somewhat of a weak character and had already ruined a promising career in the Royal Navy by drink which habit he was to keep through life, although possibly for the one year of a happy marriage, he may have abjured it. As it was he was completely demoralized by his wife's sudden and unexpected death and he blamed it on to me. He refused to so much as see me, but arranged with his favorite sister, who lived with her parents in Folkestone, to come to London and fetch the two babies and bring them up in the tall, six-storey house in Westbourne Gardens and he would contribute weekly to their upkeep. Employ a nanny and give them all they needed but keep them away from him, especially that new one! And so we came to Folkestone.
The atmosphere was Victorian, or at the best Edwardian, since two generations separated the new arrivals from the youngest of the resident aunts and at least four from our grandparents. Our grandfather was a fine character by all accounts and I lived with him for one year before he died at the age of ninety-six. I have ever since wished that I had been old enough to talk with him for his experience of the changing world must have been fascinating.
He was born in 1820 and followed the army as did many of his forebears. He lived in the days when commissions were bought and not earned and my brother still has the letters patent signed by Queen Victoria giving him his different ranks. He became a major in the Crimean War and after that decided it was time to retire and settle down to raise a family. So with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel he took to himself a young lady from Malta where he was, I believe, for a while Governor, whose name was Mills and who is the person remembered as "Granny." By her he had seven children, all but one of them girls, which accounts for the bevy of aunts that were to be ever present.
After Malta they had all gone to live in Brussels where the older girls were educated, learning it seemed little more than French, but our father was sent to school at Westward Ho! in Devon and was a schoolfellow of Rudyard Kipling. When they were in their teens they came to Folkestone and Toto became the belle of the ball held at Shorncliffe Garrison and, indeed, photographs show her as immensely attractive in her youth; but she was too "nervous" to marry, although she had an album of pictures of her admirers. Only three of them did marry. One, the eldest, Auntie Grace, lived in Worthing, because she had suffered from asthma since the age of two and Folkestone air did not suit it. Her husband had died before we were born. The second eldest, Auntie Kate, also married, but her husband, too, had died before we came, although her two daughters were given the courtesy title of Auntie, since they were grown up. But her two sons lived elsewhere and played no part in our lives. It was one of these daughters who had been present at our father's wedding.
The third eldest was the favorite of our father, one year younger than he, and she was the one who was to have the main shaping of our earliest years. She had been born on the island of Malta when Grandfather was living there, and so had been christened Melita, the old Roman name for the island, but she had always been called Tottie, a common nickname for girls of that period. In our early efforts to talk we had somehow converted this to Toto and henceforth the new name stuck. Next to her came Daisy, four years younger than Toto and four years older than the twins who were born sixteen years after the eldest child. They were identical, one right-handed, the other left, and no one outside the family could ever tell them apart. Time and again one would be accosted as an acquaintance by a stranger and would have to embarrass him or her by denying any acquaintanceship.
They were called Maudie and Evie, or Evelyn, and they were quite famous at Wimbledon in the days when tennis of a public nature was considered to be rather forward for young ladies. Mavrogadato was their contemporary, a name I often heard in my childhood, and Suzanne Lenglen was hardly beginning when the partnership, which covered the court with one right-handed racquet and the other left-handed, broke up through Evie marrying. Her husband was an Engineer in the Indian Civil Service and she departed with him to India where, in Calcutta, her daughter Joan was born. In time, Joan was to become as a sister. Before Aunt Evie's son was born, however, her husband, our Uncle Joe, died of pneumonia and she returned to England with one baby and carrying a second, a boy, Leslie,who therefore never knew his father. Thus with six aunts and no uncles we lived in an all-feminine atmosphere.
We had some cousins who were famous in Toronto, Ontario, as leading members of the United Empire Loyalists, a name scarcely heard these days, but that of General Henry Brock is still remembered there. His wife took up the family tree as a hobby and composed what she termed The Generation Book, with information culled from many sources which seem to have been authentic enough. So, as we grew older we learned that we were descended from an ancient King of Ireland, O'Niall King of Tara, who lived in 595 A.D. — a long enough time ago. His son Logan Dilune killed the son of another Prince and fled to France to escape his father's wrath. What happened in between I do not recall but a descendent of his, Sir Henry Delion, went to Ireland from France in the train of John of Gaunt and was granted large estates in the county of Roscommon which was at one time known as Dillon country, as his name became. My brother could resuscitate the title of Earl of Roscommon if he wished but having no issue it is not worth the trouble and expense.
The next in line to have bearing on our lives was Sir John Talbot Dillon, first baronet of the present baronetcy, an eighteenth century scholar and traveler who, although a staunch Protestant, worked for the representation of Catholics in Parliament and received the title of Baron of the Holy Roman Empire for himself and his heirs in perpetuity from the Emperor of Austria. We do not use foreign titles in England but the French branch of our family uses it. In any case by a decree of King George V, the "in perpetuity" ceases since foreign titles are no longer to be handed down although present holders may retain them. Thus was my brother informed when the Act was passed.
The picture of Sir John Talbot appeared in a copy of the Gentlemen's Magazine, date unknown, for our Aunt Evie, who was an amateur artist as well as tennis player, reproduced a black and white sketch of it which used to hang in my room before I gave up my house and property.
From him stemmed the French branch of the family, the Dillon-Cornecks, who are therefore distant cousins. One member I have met and enjoyed the hospitality of his house whenever my ship docked in Singapore, since he was a banker out there until he retired. And to a generation or two ago the name of the Dillon Regiment in France would also have been well known. But modern warfare has made a volunteer Irish regiment out of date and it was disbanded but recently. One of its Colonels, Timothy Dillon, was guillotined in the French Revolution.
The Dillon-Cornecks came from the youngest daughter of Sir John whose choice of a husband did not accord with that of her father and the couple eloped to France and settled there. His eldest son, however, began the line of which Viscount Dillon is the representative.
If the modern reader finds so much about the aristocracy tiring, let him bear in mind that this was the background that was rammed into us from infancy, and which has produced in me the ultra-Englishman personality which has hampered me so much in recent years and to which reference was made in my book Imji Getsul as being one of the chief reasons for the need to go to a Tibetan monastery in Ladakh to try and break some of it down. I was brought up to believe in the superiority of the Englishman, and of Englishmen, of the superiority of the aristocracy of which, apparently, the Dillons formed no small part. What the English aristocracy did was "done," what it did not do was "not done," and this was as irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians! And the effect of this upbringing is still apparent and in no wise can I shake it off despite that I have myself done at last what the English aristocracy just don't do in becoming a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan Order — unheard of before.
Apart from this one scholar and from the poet Thomas Wentworth Dillon of the Roscommon branch, there were none who were academically minded in the family until my own advent. Soldiering was the favorite occupation and Colonels abound in our annals. Our father, however, either chose, or had chosen for him, the Royal Navy as a career. For this there had been but a single precedent: an illegitimate son of Sir John Talbot had become a naval officer and risen to the rank of Commander in Chief of the Red. Doubtless naval types will understand the significance of that; it is beyond me who sullied the family record by joining the Merchant Navy, which I was told most definitely by Toto was not for gentlemen!
He became a midshipman on the Britannia, a famous training ship and his companion midshipmen were the future King George V, the Duke of Clarence and Duke of York. Only one story is told of this. Catapults were favorite playthings with the middies, and equally anathema to the officers and so were banned on pain of beating. One day, someone having been hit by a catapult, all the midshipmen had to line up to empty their pockets in front of their naval schoolmaster. The offender was the Duke of Clarence who rather meanly slipped the catapult into the pocket of my father without his realizing it. But standing on the other side of him was the Prince of Wales, George V to-be, who did see, and he reached round the back of my father, pulled out the catapult and threw it overboard, while the officer was engaged in searching further up the line.
Our father rose to rank of Lieutenant and then, unfortunately, having discovered the delights of alcohol, he narrowly escaped being cashiered, it being only the influence my grandfather had in the Mediterranean at that time, apparently, which enabled him to be withdrawn quietly and sent home. It was a pity when he had had the best of good starts.
What he did after that I do not know. In a way he had something of the artistic temperament, for he could draw and paint quite well and play the piano and he even composed a waltz which he entitled Mione or "My One." He wrote one novel, too, The Prince's Predicament, which was Puritanical and a typical product of the era. He paid to have it published and distributed it among his friends. In my teens I acquired it and found it readable but no masterpiece.
Of the aunts, as has been said before, Toto took precedence. All her life she had succeeded in having her own way and in being coddled by the simple expedient of pretending to be delicate and to have "nerves," that convenient complaint of the young Victorian Miss. She was indulged by her father without whom she would never travel anywhere since she said she was afraid to go alone. This was a major point of my own upbringing, for she wished to make me as she herself was, and from earliest times she tried to mollycoddle me and would not let me out of her sight or go anywhere without her; and as she could scarcely be persuaded to go anywhere herself, I saw only a little outside Folkestone until nearly grown-up.
On the other hand the house was admirably suited for children for it was one of a square built around public gardens, which comprised a large center of grass which would take six tennis courts, a gravel path around and then, the joy of joys, "the bushes." It was in the bushes that we played with the other children, subject to a certain reservation, climbing trees as we grew old enough, swinging on the huge, or apparently huge, garden gate, having a "shop" on its top bar and the like.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Out of the Ordinary by Michael Dillon, Lobzang Jivaka, Jacob Lau, Cameron Partridge. Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Michael Dillon. Excerpted by permission of Fordham University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.