Long before “transgender” was part of our shared lexicon, the revelation of Christine Jorgensen captivated the public. In a postwar America with expanding scientific horizons, her transformation raised the fascinating — and, to some, unsettling — idea that one’s sex could be altered.
“News of Christine Jorgensen was a seismic event for trans people. It brought attention to possibilities that many people didn’t know about,” said Susan Stryker, author of “Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution” and professor emerita of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.
When Jorgensen was born in New York City in May 1926, the experiments that would eventually help her were well underway in Europe. The Austrian scientist Eugen Steinach had conducted sex-altering experiments on animals a decade before, and the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld built on that work in Berlin, searching for biological causes for those who didn’t conform to conventional notions of sexuality.
Among those Hirschfeld evaluated was Lili Elbe, subject of the 2015 film “The Danish Girl,” who underwent a series of surgeries and died in 1931 of complications from her final procedure. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, caught in the crosshairs of Nazi ideology, was destroyed in 1933 and the contents of its library burned. Hirschfeld was exiled, but his ideas endured.
All this was unknown to a young Jorgensen, who was “keenly aware that I was different from other boys,” she recalled in her 1967 autobiography. Born into a close-knit family of Danish immigrants, she struggled with feelings of “aching loneliness” in her youth, Jorgensen wrote, knowing that she “didn’t measure up to the acceptable standards of a budding young male.”
She was drafted into the Army in 1945, performing clerical work to discharge soldiers at the end of World War II. Working and living amid the “girl-chase” GIs, she “felt embarrassed by them and could in no way share in their enthusiasms,” she later wrote. Jorgensen harbored romantic feelings for a male friend, feelings that remained painfully unrequited.
Reflecting on her time in the Army two decades later, Jorgensen remembered it as a clarifying period that “convinced me more than ever that I wasn’t George Jorgensen, Jr.”
After she was discharged in 1946, Jorgensen went west, attempting a career in Hollywood. But she was plagued by a nagging sense of unbelonging that geography could not fix. She returned to New York, where she tried to “convince” herself that her photographic work, a favorite artistic outlet, “would be fulfilling enough,” she wrote.
