The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [41]
Jorgensen describes one particularly painful incident in the autobiography—the time a teacher called Mrs. Jorgensen to school after she had discovered a piece of needlepoint in Brud’s desk. In front of Mrs. Jorgensen and the other students, the teacher asked Brud if it was his, and when he replied yes, she responded, “Mrs. Jorgensen, do you think that this is anything for a red-blooded boy to have in his desk as a keepsake? The next thing we know, George will be bringing his knitting to school.” Both George and his mother were humiliated by this incident, though to Mrs. Jorgensen’s credit, she didn’t utter a word of reproach to her unhappy son.
Incidents like these increased Brud’s feelings of loneliness and isolation, which became even more acute in adolescence. “Instead of assimilating into a group as most teenagers did, I felt like an outsider. I didn’t like sports and I wasn’t interested in dating girls, which had become the chief topic of conversation among the boys of my acquaintance,” Jorgensen writes. “I tried to find some solace in books, and they became my closest companions.” Jorgensen also developed an interest in photography and began to dream of a “time when I would have an important place behind the cameras of Hollywood, the gilded Wonderland of make-believe.”
This new hobby led to a job as a stock librarian with the Pathe News Service in New York City, after George’s high school graduation. “I wondered if my new associates would notice what I had long since known: that I was one who deviated, emotionally, from what had been termed ‘normal,’” Jorgensen writes. “But I was determined to behave like a man, even if I didn’t feel like one, and try to hide the pretense behind a brave exterior.” It became even easier to “act like a man” the next year, when the nineteen-year-old George Jorgensen was drafted. Though he had already been rejected by the army twice during the war, owing to his thin build, this time he was accepted. “I wanted to be accepted by the army for two reasons. Foremost, was my great desire to belong, to be needed, and to join the stream of activities around me,” Jorgensen writes. “Second, I wanted my parents to be proud of me and to be able to say, ‘My son is in the service.’ Although they never mentioned it, I was poignantly aware that Mom and Dad must have felt their child was ‘different,’ and hence unwanted.”
Despite the triumph of passing the army physical, living with hundreds of other young men in close quarters during and after basic training provided yet more proof of George’s “difference.” As a clerical worker living in barracks and helping to manage the discharge of thousands of soldiers after VE day, George
couldn’t help comparing myself with the boys in my group and I was aware that the differences were very great indeed, both mental and physical. My body was not only slight but it lacked other development as a male. I had no hair on my chest, arms or legs. My walk could scarcely be called a masculine stride, the gestures of my hands were quite effeminate and my voice had a feminine quality. The sex organs that determined my classification as male were underdeveloped. It was, of course, quite possible that some men having the same build would feel completely masculine, but my mental and emotional chemistry matched all the physical characteristics which in me seemed so feminine. “What is masculine and what is feminine?” I thought. The questions plagued me because I couldn’t find a clearly established dividing line.
If George Jorgensen, Jr., wasn’t able to find a dividing line between masculine and feminine, he was quite