Jorgensen, Christine (1926-1989)

Christine lorgensen was born George William lorgensen in 1926. Reflecting in later years on childhood, Christine described struggling with a longstanding sense of herself as really a girl despite her male body. In the mid-1940s, George was drafted to fight overseas in World War II. The military did nothing to alleviate his sense of himself as a woman. After the war, George traveled to Denmark, a country known at the time for doing experimental sex reassignment surgery. He met Christian Hamburger, an endocrinologist, who was receptive to George's desire to become a woman. Under Hamburger's care, George took estrogen, underwent electrolysis, and had a castration operation. She took the name “Christine” to honor Hamburger. By 1953, Hamburger had received hundreds of letters from people hoping to follow in Christine's path.

The story of Christine's sex change hit America in 1952. The first public transsexual, she spoke extensively to the press about her sex change. Explaining that she had always felt herself to be a woman trapped in a man's body, she separated herself from male homosexuals, whom she saw as pathological. The gay male homophile groups of the 1950s returned these feelings of animosity, as they worried that the success of her sex change would create pressure for gay men to transition as a form of normalization. She eventually recanted her views on homosexuality, becoming an advocate for gay rights in her later years.

Christine created a career from her media attention, doing nightclub acts and vaudeville shows. As a public figure, she encountered reverence for her beauty, but also ridicule. The mechanics of her surgery became an area of interest. Reflecting the conflicted attitudes about “sex changes” and sexuality, her surgeons had created the appearance of a labia but no vaginal canal. Though she later had an additional surgery, initially this lack of ability to have vaginal intercourse generated debate about whether she was a woman or a castrated homosexual. Christine remained dignified in her press interviews, always carefully maintaining secrecy about her romantic life. Her 1967 autobiography, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, sold 450,000 copies. The book was made into a film, Fhe Christine Jorgensen Story, in 1970—the same year the movie version of Gore Vidal's controversial novel about an eccentric transsexual, Myra Breckenridge, arrived in theaters. Reflecting a new public interest in transsexuahty, a spate of semi-pornographic films and novels about transsexuals soon followed.

Christine continued as a performer until the early 1980s. She made one last film appearance in a 1985 Danish documentary about transsexuahty, Paradise Is Not For Sale. She succumbed to bladder cancer in 1989. Her willingness to be public about her transition left a lasting legacy because the popular press, doctors, and psychologists began to take notice of trans-sexuality through her story. Her story also gave many people who desired to change sex the hope that such a path was a possibility.