Christine Jorgensen
Jorgensen was born George William Jorgensen, Jr., the second child of George William Jorgensen Sr., a carpenter and contractor, and his wife, the former Florence Davis Hansen. Jorgensen grew up in the Bronx and later described himself as having been a "frail, tow-headed, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games".
Jorgensen graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in 1945 and shortly thereafter was drafted into the Army. After being discharged from the Army, Jorgensen attended Mohawk College in Utica, New York, the Progressive School of Photography in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant School in New York City, New York. Jorgensen briefly worked for Pathé News.
When she returned to New York after her military service, increasingly concerned over (as one obituary called it) her "lack of male physical development", Jorgensen heard about the possibility of sex reassignment surgery, and began taking the female hormone ethinyl estradiol on her own. She researched the subject with the help of Dr. Joseph Angelo, a husband of one of Jorgensen's classmates at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant School. She intended to go to Sweden, where she had found the only doctors in the world performing this type of surgery at the time. At a stopover in Copenhagen to visit relatives, however, Jorgensen met Dr. Christian Hamburger, a Danish endocrinologist and specialist in rehabilitative hormonal therapy. She ended up staying in Denmark, and under Dr. Hamburger's direction, was allowed to begin hormone replacement therapy, eventually undergoing a series of surgeries.
During this first round of surgeries in Copenhagen, Jorgensen was castrated. According to an obituary, "With special permission from the Danish Minister of Justice, Jorgensen had his testicles removed first and his still-undeveloped penis a year later. Though technically a eunuch, Jorgensen received large doses of hormones, which led to changes in his body contours and fat distribution, and, with help from the American ambassador, had his passport changed to identify him as female and began life as a woman." Several years later Jorgensen obtained a vaginoplasty, when the procedure became available in the U.S., under the direction of Dr. Angelo and a medical advisor Harry Benjamin.
Jorgensen chose the name Christine in honor of Dr. Hamburger. She became a spokesperson for transsexual and transgender people.
A media sensation developed on December 1 1952 when the New York Daily News carried a front-page story (under the headline "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty") announcing that in Denmark, Jorgensen had become the recipient of the first "sex change". This claim is not true, however, as the type of surgery in question had actually been performed by pioneering German doctors in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Danish artist Lili Elbe and "Dorchen", both patients of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, were known recipients of such operations in 1930-31. What was different in Jorgensen's case, however, was the added prescription of hormone therapy.
When Jorgensen returned to New York in February 1953, she became an instant celebrity. Following her vaginoplasty, Jorgensen planned to marry John Traub, a labor-union statistician, but the engagement was called off. In 1959, she announced her engagement to Howard J. Knox, a typist, in Massapequa, New York, where her father had built her a house after her reassignment surgery. The couple was unable, however, to obtain a marriage license because Jorgensen's birth certificate still listed her as biologically male. In a report about the broken engagement, The New York Times noted that Knox had lost his job in Washington, D.C., when his engagement to Jorgensen became known.
Jorgensen said in 1989, the year of her death, that she had given the sexual revolution "a good swift kick in the pants". She died of bladder and lung cancer at age 62.
