Out of the Ordinary ─ A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions

Out of the Ordinary is the memoir of Dr. Michael Dillon/ Lobzang Jivaka (1915-1962), a transsexual man 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. Out of the Ordinary details his extraordinary life, including childhood days being raised by spinster aunts in Folkestone, England; college at Oxford immersed in theology, classics and rowing; hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and firewatcher during WWII; surgical transition by Sir Harold Gillies (performing the first known phalloplasty on a patient born female) while Dillon/Jivaka himself attended medical school; worldwide travel as a ship's surgeon in the British Merchant Navy; and, finally, Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet.

Out of the Ordinary offers a rare, early female-to-male account of transition, filling out the narrative shadow that trans studies scholars have noted in Dillon's 1946 volume Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. In addition to Lili Elbe's Man into Woman (1933), Roberta Cowell's 1954 memoir, the Autobiography of Christine Jorgensen (1967), and Jan Morris's Conundrum (1974), the circa 1962 Out of the Ordinary falls chronologically between Robert Allen's But for the Grace (1954) and Mario Martino's Emergence (1977). Because it is written in the genres of spiritual autobiography and travel memoir, it invites an interdisciplinary readership, including not only transgender studies, but also the study of religion, postcolonial studies, and the history of science.

Jacob Lau is a Doctoral Candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA.

Cameron Partridge is a Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School and co-editor (w/ Zachary Guiliano) of Preaching and the Theological Imagination.

Susan Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, as well as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona.