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Christine Jorgesen Gallery

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Christine Jorgensen was not the first surgically altered transsexual woman and not even the first American transsexual, that award goes back a long way, but she did change what being transsexual meant in press terms.

On December 1, 1952, news of her sex change in Denmark made front page news.

Jorgensen's desire to be a woman was overwhelming and was fortunate to find sympathetic surgeons and endocrinologists in Copenhagen. When she wanted to become a woman, sex-change surgery was illegal in most countries there was no surgery available in America as it would make a man ineligible for military service & the draft.

Denmark was the only place Jorgensen could go to have surgery as castration was used to treat sex offenders there. Christine had removal of penis and removal of testis, but did not have the construction of a vagina (neo-vagina). The surgical techniques were not that advanced at that time but the hormones she took made her appear a very convincing woman. Now aged 26 Christine was not ready for the immense press intrusion who put lights on her parents home in the Bronx and comedians had a heyday - it was something very shocking for the public. But in time She was someone who loved the lime light and would tip off the press and use the press to her advantage.

People began to look to her as a role model and she was an inspiration to so many closeted transgender people. She feared that she would be now outted so she decided to manage the process herself and ran the story that she was once a man! But she cashed in on it with picture post and she charged $15,000 pounds for it.

According to Publisher's Weekly, Jorgensen was the most written-about person in the press in 1953. As she herself noted years later in her autobiography, "I found it a shocking commentary on the press of our times that I drove news of the hydrogen bomb tests on Eniwetok Atoll off the front pages of newspapers around the world."

The attention she received damaged any hope of a quiet life. Although she considered herself primarily a photographer, she toured as a stage actress and singer and she eventually found herself work as a nightclub entertainer. For 10 years some say she was making up to $5,000 a week.

She published her autobiography in the 1960s which became a film in the 1970s. She was one of the most popular speakers on the college lecture circuit. She had settled into a modest retirement in Southern California when she died of bladder cancer in 1988, at the age of 62.

Jorgensen herself never married, but there were countless reports of liaisons: In 1952, a Texas GI told the world that he had dated her in Copenhagen �and she had the best body of any girl I ever met.� In 1959, she became engaged; her fiance later broke the engagement. �I�ve never been married,� she said in the Newsday interview, �but I have been engaged twice, and I�ve been deeply in love twice. I was never engaged to the men I was in love with, and I was never in love with the men I was engaged to.�

When the notoriety died down, Jorgensen settled into a fairly private existence. After she left Long Island in 1967, she lived quietly in California, first at the Chateau Marmont, the historic apartment�hotel on Hollywood�s Sunset Strip, then in a four-bedroom house in Laguna Niguel, 60 miles south of L.A., and for the last two years in San Clemente.

Although she had dropped out of the lecture circuit for 15 years, she returned onandoff during the 1980s. She had also been planning a sequel to her autobiography and had been trying to find a U.S. distributor for a Dutch-made documentary on transsexuals, lesbians and female impersonators. After she was diagnosed as having cancer in 1987, she confessed that one of her remaining dreams was to appear on the hit TV show, �Murder She Wrote.�

Jorgensen never found even fleeting fame on TV. But she didn�t need it. To many, she had won more enduring recognition, as a pioneer, as a man-turned-woman who broke down at least one of society�s sexual barriers. For her own part, though, she saw it as nothing more than a case of self-preservation. �Does it take bravery and courage for a person with polio to want to walk?� she once said. �It�s very hard to speculate on, but if I hadn�t done what I did, I may not have survived. I may not have wanted to live. Life simply wasn�t worth much. Some people may find it easy to live a lie, I can�t. And that�s what it would have been - telling the world I�m something I�m not.�