Transforming Sex: Christine Jorgensen in the Postwar U.S.

Abstract

Christine Jorgensen entered the public eye in December 1952, via the New York Daily News. The front-page headline read, Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty Operations Transform Bronx Youth, and the story inside told of her medical treatments in Denmark and her sex-conversion from man to woman (1). The initial publicity quickly escalated into media madness. Over the next several months, Jorgensen appeared in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles in the United States and abroad. In February 1953, she returned to New York and learned to live in?and love?the spotlight. Soon she launched a successful nightclub act, which sus tained her popularity, and she appeared on television and radio and in theatri cal productions. In 1967, she published her autobiography, which sold almost 450,000 copies in its paperback edition, and in 1970, the Hollywood director Ir ving Rapper produced the movie version of her life. In the early 1970s, she went on the college lecture circuit and relayed her story to a generation of baby boom ers who had missed her startling debut. In the shadow of the atomic bomb, the red scare, the Korean War, and the emerging civil rights movement, Jorgenserfs part as the first celebrity transsexual might seem at first glance to be a forgettable blip in the reg ister of the past. But on closer examination Jorgenserfs story provides a critical entry point into twentieth-century tensions over science and sexu ality. In an era when others were questioning the hierarchies of race and gender, Jorgensen forced her public to think about the very definition of biological sex. Who qualified as a man, and who qualified as a woman? Was sex as obvious as it seemed? Could modern science enable a person to change sex? Were males necessarily masculine and females feminine? Why were gays, cross-dressers, and other transsexuals stigmatized, fired, arrested, and ridiculed at the same time that Jorgensen was treated as a star? In short, Jorgenserfs story allows us to listen in on a questioning of sex that marked the postwar years.