Christine Jorgensen may have wooed the press in 1953, but she was, by no means, the world’s first transsexual. Beating her across the finish line was Michael Dillon, who in the 1940s shed his birth identity, Laura, to become the man he had always dreamed of being. Too bad his dream was short on stardust.

Born in England in 1915, the then-Laura found frustration in how people treated her as a female. Donning a boy’s haircut in her late teens and even taking to pipe smoking didn’t change things. But a change of sorts came through a physician specializing in “sex problems” who gave her a vial of testosterone pills. A deepened voice and stubble followed. Newly confident, Laura became Michael. Who now wanted a penis.

A plastic surgeon obliged, constructing for Dillon, in at least 13 painful operations, a phallus that author Pagan Kennedy describes as “a frankfurter, oddly fat and smooth.” Mission accomplished, the virginal Dillon tried to woo Roberta Cowell, who hoped to lose “her” own testicles to become a woman. No dice on the romance front. Dillon, taking to lengthy peregrinations, found himself in Tibet, seeking spiritual enlightenment. Instead, he found penury, dying alone in 1962.

Kennedy largely handles this bio with brio. On the page, Dillon’s Tibetan hegira loses steam. Even so, the book chronicles a trailblazing transsexual who never attained what Jorgensen did: fame.

— Rosette Royale