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A Changed Man

By Donald P. Myers | Staff Writer

When he was a boy toying with dolls, George Jorgensen Jr. just wanted to be a girl, that's all. By the time he was man enough for the Army, all 93 pounds of him, he felt like a woman girdled in the wrong body. So the son of a carpenter from the Bronx sailed off to Denmark, where in 1952 surgeons pruned George into Christine.

The coming out of Christine Jorgensen was the most shocking surgery of the century.

``Nature made a mistake, which I have had corrected,'' ex-GI George wrote to her parents back in New York. ``I am now your daughter.''

The world's first publicized sex-change operation scandalized America in the uptight '50s, during the postwar Baby Boom when sex was still in the closet -- or at least in the bedroom with the lights off.

``You Americans are so childish about sex,'' a Danish doctor told Jorgensen in her Copenhagen hospital room. ``Operate on the brain, perform a lobotomy, create a whole new personality -- but operate on a testicle and everybody explodes.''

"EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BOMBSHELL," screamed the headline in the New York Daily News, which on Dec. 1, 1952, broke the story that had been leaked by a family friend after the second of Jorgensen's three operations.

Against a grim backdrop of the Cold War, news of the 26-year-old New Yorker's private, two-year journey from man to woman was juicy stuff. The press, feeding a panting public, called her the convertible blonde, mocked her as a misfit in mink, the turnabout gal, the tops in swaps.

Christine Jorgensen was banned in Boston, of course, but Truman Capote took her to lunch. ``She has the best body of any girl I ever met,'' said a Texas soldier who dated her. A New Orleans promoter offered her $500 a week to star in a two-woman strip show. The enlisted men at an armistice camp in Korea voted her Miss Neutral Zone of 1953.

When Jorgensen came to live on Long Island 45 years ago, in the pre-feminist days when Americans loved Lucy and liked Ike, she was treated like a sideshow freak. Newsday wondered: Would she join the Massapequa VFW post -- or its ladies auxiliary? Would she file her taxes as a man or a woman? One reporter thought he had her figured out: ``Christine probably will not seek work modeling bras.''

The year that Jorgensen set up housekeeping in Massapequa with her parents and a pet Great Dane named Mark Anthony, Dr. Alfred Kinsey's ``Sexual Behavior in the Human Female'' concluded that women had far less sex drive than men. ``The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet'' was a hit on television, and sex outside of marriage was a crime in some states.

In those days, issues of sexuality -- much less transsexuality -- were taboo. Jorgensen's feminizing hormone treatments and genital operations were considered bizarre by most people. But Jorgensen said she had been miserable living a lie as a man, and by becoming a woman she was just trying to survive.

As the shy son of Danish immigrant parents, George Jorgensen had survived on subterfuge. He had a normal, happy childhood, but from boyhood to manhood he secretly guarded his sexual confusion. He was thin and frail, and had no hair on his chest, arms or legs. ``Outwardly, I was a boy, but I felt myself to be a woman,'' Jorgensen would say later. ``I was a miserable misfit.'' He considered suicide.

Jorgensen was drafted into the Army two months after the end of World War II, and served 14 months as a clerk. His trip toward transsexual surgery began with years of independent research. Under the GI Bill, he studied photography and read everything he could find on the subject of sexual hormones and glandular imbalances. Through a friend who was a doctor, Jorgensen discovered that sex-change surgery was being done in Scandinavia.

In 1950, Jorgensen sailed away as George, and flew back two years later as Christine, neatly wrapped in mink. ``I'm happy to be home -- what American woman wouldn't be?'' she said, teetering on high heels.

The seeds of the sexual revolution bloomed in the '60s, but they were planted in the '50s. Christine Jorgensen was one of the planters, breaking down at least one of America's sexual barriers.

``I am proud, looking back, that I was on that street corner when the movement started,'' Jorgensen said. ``It was a sexual revolution that was going to start with or without me. We may not have started it, but we gave it a good swift kick in the pants.''

Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld, a Greenport psychiatrist who has treated transsexuals for almost 30 years, estimates now that about 25,000 people in the United States are transsexual, of whom 6,000 to 11,000 have undergone sex-change operations.

``Christine Jorgensen was a pioneer,'' Ihlenfeld said. ``I know of many transsexuals for whom she was the first person who sounded the way they had felt all their lives. She was the one who gave some legitimacy to their own feelings.''

May is the month of Christine Jorgensen's birth and death. Born in 1926, she would have been 72 on May 30. She died of cancer on May 3, 1989. She was an unwilling celebrity when the scandal broke, but she came to accept all the attention and parlayed it into a nightclub act, a book, a 1970 movie based on her life, a talkshow and lecture appearances.

``I decided if they wanted to see me,'' said the former Army clerk, ``they would have to pay for it.''