A fellow English convert hindered Dillon's own access to his vocation, however: in Kalimpong, Dillon encountered Sangharakshita, a monk of the Theravada tradition, details of whose identity and painful conflict with Dillon are revealed in Pagan Kennedy's The First Man-Made Man.

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Although Dillon embraced Sangharakshita as his mentor, the latter believed that despite his surgeries Dillon remained a woman or a member of a "third sex" and was ineligble for ordination as a monk. Dillon's conflict with Sangharakshita led him to find his way into the Tibetan branch of Buddhism, which had drawn him for several years.

Although he had inherited a fortune from his aunts, Dillon had given away his worldly belongings in the hopes of becoming a monk. Thus, he struggled with poverty and severe malnutrition. Still, he had finally found a home, which he describes in Out of the Ordinary as a milieu in which he could continue to live out the answer he had come to about "the purpose of life in general and of [his] life in particular: to evolve spiritually."

Dillon sought full monastic ordination, but before it could take place, he succumbed to an unknown illness in the hill city of Dalhousie, India on May 15, 1962. He had sent his memoir to his literary agent, John Johnson, just days earlier on his forty-seventh birthday.

Against the wishes of Dillon's brother Robert, who had never accepted Dillon's transition, Johnson sought to publish the memoir, ultimately without success.

Thus in death as in life, Dillon was in transit, striving toward personal transformation and seeking inspiration, as he wrote in Milarepa, with "all those who feel that circumstances weigh against them and that their ends are unattainable."

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Buddhism is unusual among world religions in that it generally expresses neutrality on the issue of homosexuality.

Today's glbtq spirituality movements must be seen as part of a long history in which gender-special people were considered sacred to their tribe or family because of their obvious spiritual gifts.

"Transgender" has become an umbrella term representing a political alliance between all gender variant people who do not conform to social norms for typical men and women and who suffer political oppression as a result.

Controversial for defending sadomasochism and pornography, gender outlaw and sexual anarchist Patrick Califia, who recently underwent gender reassignment, is widely admired as a defender of individual freedom.

Einar Wegener, a male Danish painter of some renown, became Lili Elbe, one of the world's first male-to-female transsexuals to undergo sexual reassignment surgery.

An early female-to-male transsexual, Reed Erickson is best known for his philanthropy, which greatly benefited glbtq causes in the 1960s and 1970s.

Actress, singer, and writer Christine Jorgenson was not the first male-to-female transsexual to undergo sex reassignment surgery, but the publicity surrounding her case enabled her to educate the public about the differences between homosexuality, transvestism, and transsexualtiy.

The talented and prolific Anglo-Welsh journalist, historian, and travel writer Jan Morris was one of the first transsexuals to tell her story publicly in a memoir.