Christine Jorgensen was not the first person to transition, and she never claimed to be. She was the first to become famous for it in the United States, almost overnight, and she spent the rest of her life turning that fame into something more useful than a headline.
Who was Christine Jorgensen?
She was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in a Danish-American family. After serving in the US Army at the end of the Second World War, she worked as a photographer and studied, and she read what little existed at the time about sex and gender.
In 1950 she travelled to Denmark, where doctors, including the endocrinologist Christian Hamburger, agreed to treat her. Over the following two years she underwent hormone treatment and surgeries in Copenhagen.
The headline
On 1 December 1952 the New York Daily News ran her story on its front page under a headline announcing that an ex-GI had become a 'blonde beauty'. The story had been leaked; she had not planned to announce it.
The coverage was enormous and, by the standards of the time, not only hostile. Journalists were waiting when she flew back to New York in 1953. She had to decide, in public and in a hurry, what kind of figure she was going to be.
What she did with the attention
She chose to use it. Jorgensen built a career as an entertainer, performing in nightclubs and on stage, and later as a lecturer who travelled to universities and spoke about her life and about gender at a time when almost nobody else was doing so publicly.
She was often asked intrusive questions about her body, and she became known for answering with composure and humour rather than giving interviewers the reaction they wanted. Her autobiography was published in 1967.
She died in 1989. By then, many trans people in the United States had first learned that transition was possible because they had heard her name.
Was she the first transgender person?
No, and it is worth being precise. People whose lives did not match the gender they were assigned appear throughout recorded history, across many cultures. Medical transition also predates her: patients were treated at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in the early 1930s, including Dora Richter and Lili Elbe.
What was new in 1952 was the scale of attention. Jorgensen became the first widely known face of transition in the English-speaking world, and the questions the press asked her then are, depressingly, many of the questions trans people are still asked on dating apps today.
Who was the first transgender person? goes into that longer history, and Lili Elbe tells the story of one of those earlier patients.
Wren · Editor
Wren is the name the T4TSpace blog is published under. The posts are written by the small team that builds the app, and signed with one name so the voice stays the same from one piece to the next.