When the World's First Transman Castrated Britain's First Transwoman
Why did the world's first transman end up castrating Britain's first transwoman and why don't we hear more about it?
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If you want to know what makes the gender identity movement tick then the brief and distinctly err….bloody romance between the first transman and transwoman in Britain is a good place to start.
Roberta (Robert) Cowell and Michael (Laura) Dillon are regularly cited by the LGBTQ+ lobby as courageous pioneers who blazed a trail. They overcame obstacles. They refused to be browbeaten. They pushed doctors to extend the boundaries of medicine and surgery. All that is true. But…
Cowell, the first man to have a vaginoplasty in Britain and Dillon, the first woman to have a phalloplasty in the whole world, were certainly unbelievably stubborn. But…
Just as the story of the supposedly heroic Magnus Hirschfeld has a few uncomfortable glitches, like the fact the good doctor was a fervent eugenicist and the surgeon he employed went on to commission horrific experiments at Dachau, so the emblematic origin story of Britain’s transgender movement isn’t all we’ve been sold.
You may not be entirely surprised to discover there’s another darker side to their story that keeps getting skated over. That’s because those who write about these two pioneers seem determined to turn them into martyrs, the original ‘bold and brave Adam and Eve of Britain’s trans movement. The LGBTQ+ lobby has also rigorously enforced an omerta about these two figures that has sanitised their misogyny, their reckless behaviour and the strange co-dependence as well as the violence of their relationship.
The fact they had a relationship may surprise you. It’s not, by the way, that the love affair between Britain’s first transman and transwoman is a secret. It’s just that it tends to be glossed over, not least because, as we’ll discover, in this romance the biological woman was treated really badly and the biological man was a narcissistic shit. Plus ça change.
At the heart of their story is another even more remarkable fact. It too is not a secret. But whenever it is mentioned it is usually no more than a passing reference. Blink and you’d miss it.
Did you know that Britain’s first transwoman was castrated by the world’s first transman? Yes, really. It’s just one of many extraordinary aspects of the story of these two ‘trans pioneers’ that isn’t given the prominence it deserves.
The more I’ve looked into this story the more shocked I’ve become at the way it is so wilfully misrepresented. We are told, for example, that ‘Michael’ Dillon was terribly spiritual and followed his passion for Buddhism to Tibet. We are not told that the world’s first transman actually became the dupe of a plumber who claimed to be a reincarnated Tibetan guru.
We’re told about how brave Britain’s first transwoman was. We’re not told so often that he suddenly abandoned his family without a word of explanation and refused to talk to his two daughters ever again. Nor are we told about his visceral hatred for homosexuals.
As for misogyny, it’s hard to decide who hated women most out of these two distinctly strange individuals. And that is a clue to why the story of Britain’s first transwoman and transman is so important. The dynamic of their relationship reveals in all its raw weirdness the unedited inner workings, the DNA you might say, of today’s gender identity lobby. That DNA includes homophobia, misogyny, woohoo spirituality and a gobsmackingly troubling obsession with physical mutilation.
Until a month or so ago I knew only the outlines of the stories of Robert Cowell and Laura (Michael) Dillon.