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By Root 2024 0

wrote to the Angelos, “As you can see by the enclosed photo, taken just before the operation, I have changed a great deal…. Half the time, people in shops call me ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ and it doesn’t embarrass me because I’m not afraid of people anymore.” As the months flew by and autumn turned to winter and then to spring, Jorgensen continued her daily visits to the Seruminstitut and her consultations with Dr. Hamburger. In May, she visited the American Embassy in Copenhagen for another momentous step—changing her sex on her passport. Presenting letters from her doctors and the Ministry of Justice, Jorgensen was greeted cordially by Mrs. Eugenie Anderson, the American ambassador to Denmark, who inquired what name Jorgensen wished to submit to Washington for the new passport. “I admit the question didn’t take me by surprise, for I’d given it much thought in the previous year and to me the choice was a logical one. Dr. Hamburger was the man to whom I owed so much, above all others. I transposed his first name, Christian, into the feminine Christine, a name which I’d always thought attractive. Thus, my new name of Christine Jorgensen.”

When the new passport arrived, Jorgensen “felt free at last to take my place in the outside world,” and for the first time appeared in public in feminine attire. In June, she wrote “the most important letter of my life,” to her parents, which a visiting aunt promised to hand-deliver. In the letter, Christine first tells her parents that she is “happier and healthier than ever before in my life,” before offering a brief lesson in endocrinology. In a famous phrase, reprinted months later in hundreds of newspapers, she says, “Nature has made a mistake, which I have corrected, and I am now your daughter.” The shocked but supportive Jorgensens responded with a telegram: “Letter and pictures received. We love you more than ever. Love, Mom and Dad.”

In November 1952, Christine once again entered Rigshospital, in Copenhagen, for the second stage of her transformation, which she defined as “removal of the immature sex organs,” or penis. Ten days after the surgery, as she lay recuperating in her bed, she was handed a telegram by a young woman who identified herself as a reporter for Information, a Danish newspaper. “Filled with a kind of unknown dread, I reached out to take it from her hand, and read the message: BRONX GI

BECOMES A WOMAN. DEAR MOM AND DAD SON WROTE, I HAVE NOW BECOME YOUR DAUGHTER.” A family friend, someone to whom her parents had confided their secret, had sold the story to the newspapers.

“To me that message was a symbol of a brutal and cruel betrayal,” Jorgensen writes years later. “A lifetime of agonizing unhappiness, two years of medical treatment and two surgical operations had been telescoped into a couple of succinct lines on a telegraph form, and I knew without being told that it would go far beyond that hospital room.” By the time the twenty-four-year-old photographer returned to the United States, in February 1953, after two life-transforming years abroad, she was arguably the most famous person in the world. More news stories were filed on Christine Jorgensen in 1953 than on any other single individual or event. A private decision, arrived at after much soul-searching and struggle, had become a public scandal.

One of the people who read about Jorgensen’s surgery in the New York newspapers was Harry Benjamin, but unlike most Americans, Benjamin was not surprised. Beginning in the thirties, he had begun spending his summers in San Francisco, living at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and seeing patients in the office building across the street. In 1945, he met the American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and like many other friends and colleagues, had his sex history taken by the Kinsey researchers. In 1948, while conducting interviews at the hotel, Kinsey met a young man who “wanted, as he said, to become a girl, and his mother supported him in this. Kinsey had never seen a case like this, and it was new even for me,” Benjamin recalls in an interview years later. “It went well beyond