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10 June 2021

By Göran R Buckhorn

Where HTBS goes others will follow…

The month of June is Pride Month, something that HTBS would like to take note of by reminding our readers of a brilliant article by Greg Denieffe, which was published on 16 February this year. Greg wrote about Dr. Laurence Michael Dillon, born Laura Maude Dillon in 1915, who rowed and raced first as a woman then as a man.

Michael Dillon was featured in The Irish Times on 1 June. “I have never seen anything about Dillon in the Irish papers before and it makes me wonder where they got the idea from, although his rowing activities aren’t mentioned,” Greg writes in an e-mail.

In The Irish Times article, Dr Maurice J Casey wrote about Dr Dillon:

[Dillon’s autobiography] Out of the Ordinary, as the manuscript was titled, remains a remarkable document. It records the life of an Anglo-Irish transgender man whose journey took him from an aristocratic upbringing, through education at Oxford and Trinity College Dublin and, finally, to India, where he was ordained a Buddhist monk.

Read Dr Casey’s article “Ireland’s remarkable trans pioneer: ‘People thought I was a woman, but I was just me’” here.

To read Greg’s article from February 2021, go here. Also please do not miss the comments to Greg’s article by Teresa Stokes and artist Kep Trefler, whose art work HTBS used as “header” image for Greg’s piece. Trefler writes in his comments “Dr. Dillon is my hero and I spend a lot of time trying to honor his memory and in all honesty I owe him a debt I can not really repay.”

HTBS would like to stress that the sport of Rowing is for everyone!