In 1952, Christine Jorgensen stepped off of a plane from Denmark, where she had received groundbreaking medical care and had grown into herself as a “blonde beauty,” as the New York Daily News declared upon her return to the United States. By most accounts, she was accepted whole-heartedly into mainstream society and fawned upon as an ideal feminine figure, a somewhat unexpected response to the first well-known transgender woman in the country. In a 2011 article in Feminist Studies, historian Emily Skidmore argues that Christine Jorgensen’s success stemmed from her ability to uphold cultural norms of whiteness and femininity, both by playing the part expected of her, and rejecting any associations with “sex deviates” such as gay men, or transgender women without access to sex reassignment surgeries. Ironically, the first key congressional mention of gender identity came almost sixteen years later in 1968, during a hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations in which Dr. Stanley F. Yolles, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, described the use of federal funds to study and treat these same “sex deviates”.
The contrast between the experience of Christine Jorgensen and other lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the 1950s and 60s—who were routinely discriminated against, harassed, and arrested—emphasizes the way that legislation is designed to enforce heteronormative gender roles and expectations. At the time, legislation was still focused on the criminalization of homosexuality through “gay behavior” in the bedroom and otherwise, with violent police harassment in private and public settings. Political campaigns at the time depicted gay people as dangerous and harmful, and enforcement of laws designed to control and oppress them disproportionately affected gender non-conforming people over those who “passed” as straight. Arrests of effeminate gay men, butch lesbians, low-income transgender women, “street queens,” and other gender non-conforming people were commonplace under laws that criminalized dressing or behaving in a way that the police officers deemed inappropriate for someone of a certain sex.