Christine Jorgensen, A Personal Autobiography. - book review

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2001 by Vern L. Bullough

Christine Jorgensen, A Personal Autobiography. By Christine Jorgensen, with an introduction by Susan Stryker. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 2000, 310 pages. Paper, $14.95.

Susan Stryker, in her brief introduction to this reprinted edition of Jorgensen's 1967 autobiography, claims (arguably she says) that Christine Jorgensen was the most famous person in the world for a few short years. The story is well known: George Jorgensen, a shy veteran of World War II, departed for Denmark in 1951 at the age of 26. She returned one year later, newly named Christine Jorgensen.

By 1953 more than 1.5 million words had been written about Christine in publications throughout the world. The Hearst publication American Weekly, for example, serialized her story for its millions of readers (for which Jorgensen received $20,000). The New York Daily News ran a banner headline proclaiming that a Bronx ex-GI had become a blonde beauty. It was for a time a media frenzy.

Although Christine was not the first person to change her sex with surgical help (that had first occurred at least twenty years before), she became the one that the media seized upon, a role that she sought and relished. Throughout the rest of her life she strove successfully to, somehow or other, remain in the limelight. For some twenty of those years, she was on the road performing, at her height earning as much as five thousand dollars a week. Her road show included a little singing, some dancing (not particularly good), bawdy jokes, numerous costume changes, and mostly talk about herself. On the other hand, she was also ever ready to speak out for transsexual causes, and early on made friends in the gay community, giving her support, for example, to a conference which I organized with ONE, Inc. during the early 1970's.

Even before her trip to Denmark, Jorgensen had been taking estradiol, which had promoted breast development and a general softening of her appearance. Her European expedition was an attempt to find a sympathetic surgeon to remove her testicles and penis. Technically, Jorgensen was not what today we would call a surgically complete transsexual since initially there was little reconstructive surgery. She was literally a castrated male who had also undergone a penectomy; it was the administration of hormones that radically changed her appearance. In fact, it was not until several years later that she underwent surgery to construct a vagina, which never proved very satisfactory. It was only much later that the current techniques utilizing scrotal and penile tissue for such purposes were developed. Whether she sought the publicity about her sex change (I believe she did), Christine was able to capitalize on it and in the process helped transform American (and world) ideas about transsexualism, transvestism, and homosexuality.

Unfortunately, her autobiography is rather pedestrian and portrays a picture quite different than she actually was. It gives a good and somewhat sanitized account of he youth and then sort of name drops through her later years. As Stryker says, it often makes for dull reading. The book fails to portray the bawdy and contentious woman who wanted always to be on center stage. It ignores many of her failures, her litigious personality, her constant petty law suits, and her somewhat improbable get-rich-quick schemes. Stryker reports that late in Christine's life she contemplated a new, no-holds-barred, tell-all autobiography, but like many of her projects, nothing came of it. Christine died of bladder cancer in 1989.

It is not for her autobiography, however, that Christine Jorgensen will be remembered. It is for what she accomplished. She capitalized on her publicity to open the door for others. Ultimately, through her efforts as well as others who befriended her (such as Harry Benjamin and several of us in the sexuality field), that transsexualism came to be medically recognized. Whatever her failings, Christine blazed a path that tens of thousands of others followed. Some day, someone will write her true biography and that ought to make for fascinating reading. In the meantime, for those who have heard of Christine but know little about her, the republication of this work will have to serve as the primary source of information.

Reviewed by Vern L. Bullough, Ph.D., R.N., 3304 West Sierra Drive, Westlake Village, CA 91362-3542; e-mail: vbullough@csun.edu.