Tribute: Michael Dillon (Lobsang Jivaka), 1915-1962
Over the course of his life, he was a doctor, a seaman, an author, a Buddhist monk, and the first known trans man to receive a phalloplasty.
He wrote the book Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics, arguing for the importance of access to gender-affirming care all the way back in 1946.
Today, when I see trans folks portrayed as patients but not doctors, as "health disparity populations" instead of resilient, it helps me to remember that our people have been experts for at least 80 years.
And when medical knowledge and spiritual knowledge are sometimes held in opposition to one another, he embodied both.
To learn more, there's a wonderful online exhibit of his life, or for a deep dive, there's his own book, Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions.
Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind, despite the prejudices of those who have not suffered these things, yet to suffer which they so readily condemn others. – Michael Dillon in Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics, 1946