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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 (i). 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 sustained her popularity, and she appeared on television and radio and in theatrical productions. In 1967, she published her autobiography, which sold almost 450,000 copies in its paperback edition, and in 1970, the Hollywood director Irving Rapper produced the movie version of her life. In the early 19703, she went on the college lecture circuit and relayed her story to a generation of baby boomers 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, Jorgenseris part as the first celebrity transsexual might seem at first glance to be a forgettable blip in the register of the past. But on closer examination Jorgenseris story provides a critical entry point into twentieth-century tensions over science and sexuality. 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, Jorgensen's story allows us to listen in on a questioning of sex that marked the postwar years.
George William Jorgensen Jr. was born in 1926 to a Danish-American family living in the Bronx. To all outward appearances, he led an uneventful youth. But in later accounts, Jorgensen remembered loneliness, alienation, and depression. As a child, George longed for girls' toys and dresses,...