The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [68]
The teenager’s budding breasts were noticed by his mother, who took her child to a number of doctors, including a “brain specialist” who suggested “an exploratory operation to see if I had female sexual organs.” Though Mrs. Hammonds refused to consent to the surgery for fear of complications, the response of the physicians “proved to my mother that beyond a doubt I was half-man and half-woman,” Hedy Jo Star writes in her autobiography. “They proved her suspicions that my ‘sissiness’ was really inborn femininity.” The doctor’s prognosis was discouraging to Mrs. Hammonds, though she concealed this fact from her child. Years later, Mrs. Hammonds confessed to Star that “a couple of the doctors who examined me said that I would probably not live past thirty-five because of my dual sexual nature. One doctor told her that even if I did live a normal life span, I would probably go insane.”
Instead, Carl Hammonds ran away at seventeen to join a carnival freak show. Dragged back home by his disgusted father, the unhappy teen ran away again and found work as an exotic dancer in carnivals. Living and working as a woman, Hammonds took the name Hedy Jo Star, and by age twenty-four she owned and performed in a traveling burlesque show called The French Follies. “The first couple of years on the road I worked harder than I had ever done before. I painted the scenery for the show, created the dances, trained the girls, made their costumes, and even was the show’s barker,” Star writes in her autobiography. “By the end of two years the show had earned enough money so that I owned my own tent, costumes, scenery, truck, car and a house trailer. I was proud of my achievement.” Despite her business success, Star had one overwhelming problem. She might look like a woman and feel like a woman, but she was not a woman beneath her g-string. Despite her great legs, her rounded hips, and the small breasts that she enhanced with falsies onstage, Star had the genitals of a man—and those genitals were a source of torment to the dancer and to the men who fell in love with her. When it came time to reveal her secret to various lovers, Hedy Jo began the difficult conversation by telling them that she was a “morphidite”—a hermaphrodite or inter-sexual person—before revealing the truth: that she had a penis, but no vagina. Star’s anatomy failed to intimidate her great love, a fellow carny named Red, and the two lived together for over six years. But eventually the relationship began to fall apart, and Hedy Jo placed the blame on her genitals. “Red was a normal man with a normal sexual desire, and I was a physically abnormal woman with emotionally normal wants. I had the sex organs of a man but the sexual feelings of a woman. I knew I could never be fulfilled the way I was, nor could I possibly fulfill a man sexually. If I was ever to be happy, I had to be a woman completely.”
In 1956 Star traveled to New York to see a female endocrinologist, who performed physical and hormone tests that led the physician to conclude that despite her male genitalia, Hedy Jo Star was female— and to recommend sex-change surgery. The physician, whose name Star does not reveal in her autobiography, brought in a number of other specialists (also unnamed) to examine her unhappy patient. “My face was covered during the examination with a sheet. Then my doctor and her colleagues examined me. Later my doctor explained to me that what she was planning to do was illegal under New York law, which is the reason the other specialists she consulted wished to remain anonymous. It was all right, she said, for a doctor to straighten a cripple’s twisted limbs, but not all right to straighten a sexual cripple.”
Star’s endocrinologist explained that “there wasn’t a single hospital in New York who would take the case.” Her disappointment was somewhat assuaged by the intermediate steps the doctor suggested— administration of estrogen and breast-enhancement surgery. “I was