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Out of the Ordinary - A Life through Gender and Spiritual Transitions (Paperback)
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Out of the Ordinary - A Life through Gender and Spiritual Transitions (Paperback)
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List price R502
Loot Price R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
You Save R46 (9%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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Now available for the first time in Ireland and the UK - more than
half a century after it was written - is the memoir of Michael
Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62), the Anglo-Irish doctor 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. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka's
extraordinary life story told in his own words. Out of the Ordinary
captures Dillon/Jivaka's various journeys - to Oxford, into
medicine, across the world by ship - within the major narratives of
his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically,
Dillon/Jivaka was from Lismullin House, County Meath, but spent his
childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by spinster
aunts, telling of his days at Oxford immersed in theology,
classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while
working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher in Bristol during
World War II and describes his surgical transition under Sir Harold
Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school at Trinity
College, Dublin (1945-51). He details his travels as a ship's
surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on
his engagement with colonial and postcolonial subjects in Asia,
followed by his 'outing' by the British press while he served
aboard The City of Bath. Out of the Ordinary is not only a unique
record of early gender affirmation but also a compelling account of
religious conversion in the mid-twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka
chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the
esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky,
to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir
with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic
ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died
before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: it
made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan
Buddhist tradition. This first-person narrative, written in the
early 1960s and first published more than a generation later in the
US by Fordham University Press, is both ahead of its time and
distinctly of its time and class, with Dillon's views being
sometimes enlightened, sometimes colonial. A Foreword by Susan
Stryker from the Fordham University Press edition describes Dillon
as 'a seeker after truth, who traveled wherever his queries led
him'. An Afterword, 'A Mapless Journey', by London-based literary
agent Andrew Hewson - unique to the Lilliput Press edition - traces
the typescript memoir's provenance and preservation prior to its
eventual publication. An introductory biographical essay by
consultant psychologist Aidan Collins gives an overview of the
timeline of this remarkable individual's history. Out of the
Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a singular voice
from within the history of the transgender movement.
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