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"I feel that a hurdle has been jumped, from the Christine Jorgensen of sex notoriety, to Christine Jorgensen the stage actress."
CHRISTINE JORGENSEN
(1927-1989)
In 1952, she was a scandal; when George Jorgensen decided to change his name -and his body- the nation wasn't quite ready
It was meant to be a private affair, a quiet series of operations that would change the 26-year-old Bronx photographer into a woman and, in the process, exorcise the personal demons that had haunted him since childhood. But even before she left the Copenhagen hospital in February, 1953 - transformed from George Jorgensen Jr., the 98-pound ex-GI, into Christine Jorgensen, "the convertible blonde" -word had leaked out. Overnight, it became the most shocking, most celebrated surgery of the century.
"I could never understand why I was receiving so much attention", Jorgensen said in a 1986 interview. "Now, looking back, I realize it was the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, and I just happened to be one of the trigger mechanisms".
Christine Jorgensen - with her sleek hair, smoky voice, slender body and smart clothes - exploded into the nation's consciousness in the halcyon days of the postwar Baby Boom, in the placid I-Like-Ike, I-Love-Lucy era when issues of sexuality, much less transsexuality, were strictly taboo. It didn't take much to propel her private, two-year odyssey from man to woman into the object of international debate - and ridicule. "EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BOMBSHELL", screamed the headline in the Daily News, which broke the story on December 1, 1952, after it was leaked word about the second of Jorgensen's three operations.
Unwittingly, Jorgensen's surgery proved to be something more than the lurid tale it was made out to be at the time: It was also the beginning of greater candor and understanding in the way the world looked at issues of transsexuality. According to the International Gender Dysphoria Association, by 1980 an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 American adults had undergone hormonal and surgical sex changes - among them, tennis pro Renee Richards and British-born writer Jan Morris. And while transsexual surgery has hardly become commonplace since it was pioneered in Europe in the 1930s, it has certainly become less-than-scandalous in most quarters. Indeed, by 1982, when news spread that a Nassau County police officer had undergone a sex-change operation and was planning to return to the force, the response, from the county executive to the police commissioner, was more support than embarrassment. "It [the surgery] wouldn't get on the 95th page of the newspaper if it happened today", Jorgensen said last year in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. "It's not news anymore".
But it was news - scandalous news - when Jorgensen did it. In those pre-feminist days, t was no end to the cutting appellations: The press described her variously as "mankind's gift to the female species", "the latest thing in blonde bombshells", "tops in swaps" and "the turnabout gal". In and out of the press, she became the subject of endless conversation and the butt of thousands of titillating jokes. And that was just the beginning. While Jorgensen was still in Denmark, she had sold the rights to her life story to the Hearst Corp.'s American Weekly Magazine for $ 20,000. But that contract did little to dissuade other journalists - and everyone else - from besieging her. On February 12, 1953, when she stepped off the plane from Denmark at what was then Idlewild Airport (now JFK), Jorgensen was greeted by more than 350 "admirers, autograph hounds and just plain curious people." Not to mention hordes of reporters and photographers who catalogued everything from her baggage (13 pieces of luggage) to her destination ("the swank Carlyle Hotel" in Manhattan) to her first beverage in America (a Bloody Mary "containing two shots of vodka and tomato juice"). From then on, wver Jorgensen went, neither the press nor the attendant carnival atmosp was far behind. Every detail was gr...
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