SFGate.com – By Pagan Kennedy – Reviewed by Julie Foster
The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution
Laura Dillon faced a double conundrum. She knew she was different from everyone else. She also knew there were no words to express that difference. Born into an upper-class British family in the early 20th century, Dillon came to believe that she was a man trapped in a woman’s body.
“The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution,” by Pagan Kennedy, is a well-sculpted account of Dillon’s remarkable life amid the buttoned-up attitudes of her times.
Kennedy splices in fascinating side stories associated with Dillon’s saga. She details the rage for a bizarre sex operation, the Steinach, popular during the 1920s, that was performed on W.B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud; the rise of organology, a bogus field of medicine whose purpose was to raise the level of hormones and thus increase a man’s vigor by “grafting slices of chimpanzee testicles into their gonads”; and the forgotten climate of tolerance in 1920s Berlin that fostered cross-dressing and the founding of the first center devoted to research of sexuality and gender.