Dear Janus:

You are very welcome, thank you, and Happy Holidays to you!

You mentioned the actor Elliot Page, Wikipedia: “Page (currently 35 years old)… was assigned female at birth and used his birth name of Ellen prior to transitioning… On February 14, 2014, Page, who at that time presented as female, came out as gay… On December 1, 2020, Page came out as a trans man on his social media accounts, specified his pronoun as he and they, and revealed his new name, Elliot. Page explained that his decision to speak openly about his gender identity was partially prompted… by the anti-transgender rhetoric in politics and the news cycle. GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) spokesperson Nick Adams stated that Page ‘will now be an inspiration to countless trans and non-binary people‘…Page also revealed that at the age of nine, ‘I felt like a boy… I wanted to be a boy. I would ask my mom if I could be someday.‘”.

You mentioned Michael Dillon (1915-1962, died at the age of 47), from Wikipedia, summarized: Dillon was born female and grew up in the Church of England.  In 1939 (age 24), he sought treatment from George Foss, who had been experimenting with testosterone to treat excessive menstrual bleeding. The hormones soon made it possible for him to pass as male at his workplace (a garage) and eventually the garage manager  insisted that other employees refer to Dillon as ‘he’ in order to avoid confusing customers. He went through a double mastectomy, and officially became Laurence Michael Dillon in 1944 (age 29). Gillies, a surgeon who had previously reconstructed penises for injured soldiers and performed surgery on intersex people with ambiguous genitalia, performed a phalloplasty on Dilon, consisting of at least 13 surgeries between 1946 and 1949 (ages 31-34). From what I read elsewhere, Michael Dillon was the world’s first person known to have successfully transitioned both hormonally and surgically from female to male.

Michael Dillon went through both hormonal and surgical transitioning (and died) BEFORE  the beginning of the political movement for gay rights in the late 1960s  and before the initials LGBT were ever used (1988), so he had no political and social support.  From my readings, none of it was easy for him, and most, if not all of his physical transitioning was done in secret, but he was driven to … transition. I tried to find his cause of death, but couldn’t. Do you know what it was?

anita