Christine Jorgensen

I’ll be honest; I added Christine Jorgensen to the schedule to start the Month of Chris because there are fewer Christines, Christinas, Kristinas, and so forth than you might think who qualify for this column. On the other hand, she is iconic, and she’s worth discussing for her place in history. I’m not displeased to have learned more about her. But also this is how I discover things like Louis Farrakhan, under the name of The Charmer, had a Calypso career including a song about her. These columns are a never-ending series of Wikipedia rabbit holes, friends, and you would be amazed the tangential stuff I’ve learned.

Look, I’m not going to deadname her, even though it’s trivially easy to look it all up. She was a skinny blond kid from the Bronx. She was drafted into the Army in 1945; it seems, reading between the lines (I haven’t read her autobiography), that she drifted for a while after her enlistment ended. She heard about the revolutionary work in Sweden. She went first to Copenhagen, ostensibly to visit relatives, and she met Christian Hamburger, a Danish endocrinologist, who started her on proper hormone replacement therapy. Then, she went on to Sweden, from where she returned named after Hamburger.

She was outed when a letter to her family was leaked to the New York Daily News, and let’s consider that a moment. She wrote a letter to them informing them, in simple terms, “Nature made a mistake which I have had corrected and I am your daughter.” She returned to New York on the same plane as the Danish royal family and created more of a stir than they did. She was unable to find a job and was basically forced into nightclub work. But she came to enjoy it, and “I Enjoy Being a Girl” was her signature song.

There’s an interview with her on YouTube where she among other things establishes that she and her male persona are indeed the same person, but she would’ve been very sad if she hadn’t done what she did. She said she wouldn’t call herself happy, necessarily, because happy was a high bar, but she was content. She was aware she was in the medical books, but she didn’t have a problem with that. She had lived a long, interesting life, and while her life wasn’t over yet, she had already lived a good one.

She herself kept learning as time went by. She stopped calling herself a transsexual and started calling herself transgender because terminology evolved. The interview I watched included a subtle implication that her sister was a Reagan supporter—supportive of her personally, but she’s very clear her sister has different beliefs than she does. She was, though, firm on the subject that things were getting better. With luck, they will keep getting better. After all, “person has surgery to conform with their gender identity” is hardly front-page news anymore.