How an American soldier returned from Denmark as a cute blonde

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

On February 12, 1953, American journalists greeted a bright, beautiful woman at the airport. Because of the hype around, this lady could be mistaken for a Hollywood star. However, Christina Jorgensen was only famous for being a man until recently. Today, such news would not shock anyone, but almost 70 years ago it became a real sensation. Many ordinary people simply could not understand how such an increase could occur in principle.

George Wilfm Jorgensen was not the very first person to undergo such operations, as some sources mistakenly write today, but he became the first patient to simultaneously undergo hormone therapy. The result of two years of efforts by Danish doctors was so striking that Christina (formerly George) became a real celebrity in her homeland.

The second son of a carpenter, who grew up in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, was as a child, as he later described himself, "a fragile, introverted boy who avoided fights and physical games." The slender young man was drafted into the army, where he served the prescribed term. However, the service for the good of the Motherland did not make him a real man, but rather the opposite. Returning home, George began to think more and more about who he was, and as a result, he came to the conclusion that nature made a mistake in his case. Having learned that modern medicine is already capable of helping him, the young man decided to go to Sweden. At that time, it was the only country where gender reassignment surgeries were already performed. It is difficult to say how the parents reacted to the idea of the unlucky son, because even today such intervention causes an ambiguous reaction in people, and in the middle of the 20th century, most Americans were also very religious. It is known that the young man managed to find support from the father of a former classmate, a practicing surgeon, who, perhaps, prompted such a radical decision.

In 1951, George left his home to return to it as a completely different person. On the way, Jorgensen stopped in Copenhagen to visit relatives. Here the incident brought him to Dr. Christian Hamburger. This famous endocrinologist was very interested in this unusual patient and advised him to first undergo hormone therapy. After some time, he received permission from the Danish Ministry of Justice to undergo a series of sex reassignment surgeries. Two years later, an article appeared in the New York Daily News titled "Former Soldier Turns Awesome Blonde." Christina chose a new name for herself in honor of the doctor, thanks to whom this transformation took place.

It is interesting that this particular case went beyond the pages of medical encyclopedias and became a major public event that received publicity. Since the moment of the grandiose and noisy return of Christina Jorgensen to America, the whole world has been arguing about what a person has the right to do with himself, and where it is better for him to stop trying to improve his own body or "correct the mistakes of nature." The woman herself, by the way, spent most of her life in the fight for the rights of transgender people and in educational work in this direction. The fact that society in the middle of the 20th century was not yet ready to loyally accept such phenomena, she had to make sure from her own experience. So, for example, having decided to officially get married in 1959, Christina was faced with the fact that this was impossible due to inconsistencies in the documents. Moreover, the man with whom she was supposed to be married was fired from work when they found out that his wife was transgender. Even that issue of the New York Daily News, which told about the fate of George and his transformation into Christina, was prohibited from distribution in the US Army.

Today, more than half a century later, we are already quite calmly accepting the information that the gender division of people sometimes turns out to be a more complex issue, and, despite the difference in opinions, we are able to at least discuss emerging problems. Much of this shift in public opinion is due to Christine Jorgensen. The most famous transgender woman in history did not become a famous actress or singer (although she was invited by Hollywood), but her series of public speaking on the topic of gender identity and autobiography, which sold half a million copies, attracted attention to such people. Christina lived to be 62 years old. She passed away in May 1989 from cancer.

And now let's fast forward to our time - a story about who Papamama and Mamapapa are, or how in a gender-fluid family both parents decided to change their sex at once