Monika: Your 1998 article places Jorgensen within a much longer history of stories about sex transformation in the
American popular press, going back to the 1930s. Does the extraordinary attention Jorgensen received in 1952 risk
making her appear more historically unique than she actually was?
Joanne: I’ve seen some popular accounts that claim that Jorgensen was the first transsexual. She was not the first
trans person to take hormones and undergo surgery for transition, and she was also not the first trans person whose
story appeared in the popular press. But she was unique, or at least a first, in the sheer volume of publicity given
to her story and in the way she made an enduring career out of her transsexuality.
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"Christine Jorgensen arriving
in London." 1970. Digital Transgender Archive |
Monika: You describe Jorgensen’s story as a culminating episode in a process through which people encountered the
possibility of transforming their bodies through popular culture. How confident can we be that readers actually
constructed their identities from these media stories rather than simply consuming them as sensational
entertainment?
Joanne: Well, I’m guessing that most readers did see the magazine and newspaper stories about “sex change” as
sensational entertainment. But some readers found something more. The best evidence I have for that is letters that
I found: published letters to the editor in the magazine Sexology from the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of letters that
people wrote to Jorgensen, which she donated to the archives of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, and letters
to Jorgensen’s doctors, especially Harry Benjamin, which are now at the Kinsey Institute Library at Indiana
University.
A number of letter writers responded to stories asking for hormones and surgery for themselves. Through the popular
press, they had learned about the possibility of medical treatment, what we would now call gender-affirming care,
and they asked for it for themselves. I wouldn’t claim that they constructed their identities from these stories,
but I would say that they had what one trans person remembered as a “shock of recognition,” the sudden knowledge
that someone else felt the same way they did and that someone else had managed to find doctors who helped make
bodily transformation possible.
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"Christine Jorgensen in
a Chair at Home." 1970. Digital Transgender Archive |
Monika: Your account shows that Jorgensen became a celebrity partly because she was young, attractive, white and
conventionally feminine. How much of her apparent cultural acceptance do you think depended on those
characteristics?
Joanne: There’s no way she could have garnered the extensive positive publicity that she did if she had not been
white, feminine and conventionally attractive. Emily Skidmore elaborated on this theme in her article on Jorgensen
as the “good transsexual.” Like most other women of her day, Jorgensen presented herself as a respectable
heterosexual woman, but her whiteness and her beauty also allowed her to position herself as a symbol of glamour
and progress. There were (and are) multiple ways to present as a woman. Jorgensen had the option (and the
privilege) to choose (and succeed at) the kind of cosmopolitan femininity of the urbane celebrity, which is not
the femininity of, say, the housewife or the drag queen.
She liked the limelight and she used the publicity to stay in the public eye and earn a living as a nightclub
entertainer with an international following. (After she was outed in the press, it would have been hard for her to
earn a living any other way.) She did work to distinguish herself from allegedly deviant gays and crossdressers
and, like movie stars of her day, she did cash in on her white femininity. But it’s worth noting that she didn’t
just use her fame for her own benefit. All along she supported trans rights. She also spoke out in favor of gay
rights in the late 1950s, which was highly unusual, and in her autobiography, she labeled her youthful homophobia
as “immature” and “moralistic.” And later in her life she came out against “male chauvinism” and against Anita
Bryant’s anti-gay campaign. So at least to some extent, she used her privileged position as a platform for
political causes, not only for herself.
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"Christine Jorgensen Walks Down
the Street in Hollywood." 1982. Digital Transgender Archive |
Monika: Jorgensen later offered a more complicated account of herself, including her statement that every person
was both sexes in varying degrees. How does that statement sit with the much more binary public narrative
through which she became famous?
Joanne: When she first entered the public eye, Jorgensen described herself as someone with a hormonal imbalance
that needed medical attention. Later she adopted what was once known as the theory of “universal bisexuality,”
meaning that all people are some physical mixture of male and female. This was a theory that some doctors and
scientists had promoted since the early twentieth century, and Jorgensen and her doctors publicized it in the
1950s.
In this understanding, sex is not two binary categories; it’s a spectrum or continuum with everyone
somewhere between the two idealized poles (and with Jorgensen more on the female side). This vision of sex made it
easier to imagine inching sex one way or the other along the spectrum, bridging the gap between female and male.
So the theory challenged the sex binary and helped make “sex change” seem possible. But as we know, it never
replaced the conventional binary understanding of sex.
Monika: One of the most interesting arguments in your work is that transsexuality helped destabilize the idea of
sex as a fixed biological fact while simultaneously encouraging medicine to divide people into increasingly
precise categories. Did the medicalization of transsexuality ultimately undermine binary sex categories, or did
it create new ways of policing them?
Joanne: I’d have to say it did both. Medicalization allowed people to transform their bodies in ways that
undermined the notion of two separate and unchangeable categories of sex. But the doctors served as gatekeepers,
deciding who could have access to hormones and surgery. In the gender clinics that they established in the 1960s,
they insisted that trans people conform to the conventions of gender expression. They would accept a candidate for
medical treatment only if they saw a trans woman as convincingly feminine and a trans man as convincingly
masculine. In that sense, as others have noted, they policed the boundaries of sex through their conservative
vision of gender.
Monika: Joanne, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions and for sharing your knowledge of
Christine with me and with the readers of The Heroines of My Life.
Her books include Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (1988), How Sex Changed: A History
of Transsexuality in the United States (2002), which won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award, and A
War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (2021), which won the Myrna
Bernath Prize. She has also edited Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 and History
and September 11th. Her work on transgender history examines medicine, popular culture, law, media and the
experiences of transgender people, with particular attention to Christine Jorgensen and the emergence of
transsexuality in postwar America. Her research also includes the transnational history of sexuality. Her
fellowships have included awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim Foundation, National
Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute and Social Science Research Council.
END OF PART 2
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
Main photo: "A Portrait of Christine Jorgensen" Photograph. 1975.
digitaltransgenderarchive.net
and
transascity.org
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