The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [47]
“However, it was the rare glandular disturbances which intrigued me more. Abnormal growth due to pituitary malfunction, steroids, enzymes, and sex hormones were all new areas of knowledge, but ones which I felt had some bearing on my own problem. Avidly, I discussed glands and glandular disturbances with the doctors who were my instructors,” Jorgensen writes. “These studies occupied my every waking moment, and probably many of my sleeping ones to become an all-consuming drive.”
Shortly after beginning studies at the school, Jorgensen received another in a series of propositions from gay men, in this case a Danish sailor, at a dance. Disturbed and confused by the desire he inspired in gay men, the student of medical technology turned for comfort to Paul de Kruif’s book, The Male Hormone, which points out that the chemical difference between testosterone and estradiol is merely a matter of four atoms of hydrogen and one atom of carbon. “If Dr. de Kruif’s chemical ratio was correct, it would seem then that the relationship was very close,” Jorgensen writes in her autobiography. “That being so, I reasoned, there must be times when one could be so close to that physical dividing line that it would be difficult to determine on which side of the male-female dividing line one belonged.” Jorgensen decided that she belonged on the female side, and a few days later she walked into a pharmacy “in an unfamiliar part of town” and requested a hundred tablets of high-potency estradiol. At first, the clerk was unwilling to hand over the hundred tablets of ethynyl estradiol without a prescription, but when Jorgensen claimed to be a medical technology student “working on the idea of growth stimulation in animals through the use of hormones,” the clerk relented. “Once out of the store, I headed for the car and unwrapped the package,” Jorgensen writes. “How strange it seemed to me that the whole answer might lie in the particular combination of atoms contained in those tiny, aspirinlike pills.”
Although estrogen hadn’t received quite the same star treatment as testosterone in the press, research on female hormones had been proceeding in tandem with testosterone research throughout the first decades of the century. In 1923 and 1924, the zoologist Edgar Allen and the biochemist Edward Doisy published papers describing the induction of sexual maturity in young female animals through injections of “the ovarian follicular hormone.” They called the newly purified hormone “Theelin,” a name that was dropped in favor of “oestrin” in 1926. In 1929, various researchers—including Allen and Doisy; Thayer and Veler in the United States; and Adolf Butenandt in Germany—succeeded in isolating oestrin in crystalline form. This pure crystalline oestrin was called “estrone.” One year later, a researcher named Zondek discovered that the urine of pregnant mares was a rich source of the hormone. In 1932, at the International Conference on the Standardization of Sex Hormones, in London, the names “oestrone,” “oestriol,” and “oestradiol” were adopted, and in 1938, chemists working for the German pharmaceutical company Schering developed ethynyl estradiol, the first orally active estrogen. In 1939, diethylstilbestrol, a highly potent synthetic estrogen, was developed and marketed in Germany, and after review by the Food and Drug Administration, in the United States. By 1941, a pill made from conjugated estrogens collected from pregnant mares (Premarin) was being marketed in Canada, and a year later in the United States.
In tandem with these advances, scientists learned that women’s urine contained the “male” hormone, testosterone, and the urine of men contained the “female” hormone, estrogen. Though the proportions were