Leigh Goodwin - Christine Jorgensen: The Power of...

2018, Christine Jorgensen, English, Leigh Goodwin,

Full title: "Christine Jorgensen: The Power of Transgender Visibility (Transgender Empowerment Book 4)" by Leigh Goodwin.

"Christine Jorgensen is known as the Army GI that became a Beauty Queen in the early 1950s. She was an early open transgender woman, an early transgender advocate and she set a good example of work ethic for transgender people. Suffering from classic gender dysphoria, she was not the first to receive sexual reassignment surgery but was one of the first Americans to receive her surgeries supplemented with hormone replacement therapy medication. As is sometimes common with goal of obtaining sexual reassignment surgeries Miss Jorgensen had to travel abroad to receive some surgical treatments. Christine Jorgensen played a major role in helping to create transgender visibility by her openness about her gender identity in both her professional and her personal life."

The book covers the story of Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989), an American singer, actress, celebrity, and the most iconic figure of the transgender movement in the USA, if not in the whole world, famous for being the first world-famous person to have surgery sexual reassignment conducted in Denmark in the 1950s, inducted into Chicago's Legacy Walk celebrating LGBT history in 2012, honored in San Francisco's Rainbow Walk in 2014, and included in the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at Stonewall National Monument in New York City in 2019.

When a slender young woman stepped off a plane from Denmark to be greeted by howling reporters and an outraged American public, nobody expected that it would be one of the biggest moments in the history of transgender women. The woman, Christine Jorgensen, had been born a male and after living as a shy, effeminate young man for twenty-four years, had been surgically transformed into a woman. For Christine, the transformation signalled the end of a tortured search for sexual identity. For the press and public, however, "George-Christine" became America's No. 1 topic of conversation.

Her private life was not successful. She wanted to marry John Traub, a statistician but the engagement was broken. In 1959, she announced her engagement to Howard J. Knox, who worked as an office worker in Massapequa, New York, where her father had built a house for her after her reassignment surgery, but the couple was denied a marriage license because Jorgensen's birth certificate still listed her as a man. She died in San Clemente, California, on May 3, 1989.

Available via openlibrary.org

and Amazon

Photo via TransasCity.org