The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [40]
Jorgensen was born on Memorial Day, May 30, 1926, the child of two first-generation Danish Americans, George and Florence Jorgensen. She was the second child born to the couple, and her parents named her George, Jr., after her father. Her sister, Dorothy (called Dolly), was three years older. Jorgensen’s autobiography, published in 1967 and reissued in 2000, describes her childhood as a happy one. “Dolly and I were surrounded by a closely knit, affectionate family of the sort that gives a child a warm feeling of belonging. Happily we had the advantage of being in a family that enjoyed activities as a unit, and that still applies today,” she writes. In her youth, Jorgensen was called “Brud,” short for “brother.” Brud was especially close to her grandma Jorgensen, “a person of grace and dignity,” Jorgensen recalled years later. “Grandma was always my champion when others laughed at my ‘sissified’ ways.”
From an early age, Brud was aware of the differences between him and the other boys in the neighborhood. “A little boy wore trousers and had his hair cut short. He had to learn to use his fists aggressively, participate in athletics, and most important of all, little boys didn’t cry. Contrary to those accepted patterns, sometimes I did feel like crying and I must have felt that Grandma understood and didn’t disapprove when I ran away from a fistfight or refused to play rough and tumble games.” In her autobiography, Jorgensen describes George’s crushing disappointment when instead of the “pretty doll with long golden hair” that he already knew enough not to request for a Christmas present at age five, he was given a “bright red railway train.” She also describes a conversation that George had with his mother around the same time, asking why his sister, Dolly, was allowed to grow her blond hair long and wear dresses, things he envied and admired but was not permitted to have. “ ‘Mom,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t God make us alike?’” His mother explained that the world needed both men and women, and that there was no way of knowing before a baby was born whether it was a boy or a girl. “‘You see, Brud,’ she said. ‘It’s one of God’s surprises.’”
“ ‘Well,’ I replied. I don’t like the kind of surprise God made me!’”
Like many boys who fail to conform to society’s views of masculine behavior, Brud was often ridiculed for his differences by both children and adults. In mid-century America, those differences were particularly jarring. The “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siecle had long since given way to a rigid sexual binary. Male and female were once more separate and distinct categories, with no discernable overlap. Home and family, not the office and factory, were defined as women’s proper sphere, as Rosie the Riveter put on her apron and turned domestic goddess. Men were expected to be workers, husbands, and fathers. “After World War Two, there was the creation of this really rigid gender system in the West,” historian Susan Stryker said in our 2001 conversation. “Like, the world is cut in two and you are on this side or this side. There are no anomalies. That construction of gender/sex/sexuality is I think as much an artifact of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall.” Like the millions soon to be trapped