Out of the Ordinary
Out of the Ordinary
Edited by Jacob Lau & Cameron Partridge
Author: Michael Dillon/Lobzang JivakaCouldn't load pickup availability
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.
Jacob Lau is a Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow through the Program for Faculty Diversity in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cameron Partridge is an Episcopal priest, theologian, scholar of trans and religious studies, and an openly transgender man. He has taught at Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School and Episcopal Divinity School and is currently the rector of St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in San Francisco.
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ISBN: 9781843518211
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About the Author
Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915–62) was a physician, a pioneer in undergoing hormone treatment and male gender affirmative surgery, and a Buddhist monastic novice.