Juliet Jacques, who kept a blog about her gender reassignment surgery, reflects on a history of media coverage of transsexualism:
It was only after the Second World War, as photographs on newspaper covers became commonplace, that transsexualism developed into a mass media phenomenon. On 1 December 1952, the New York Daily News ran the sensational story of Christine Jorgensen under the headline ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’ – with contrasting images of her as a male soldier, then glamorous woman, dominating the spread. Instantly, Jorgensen became a celebrity, working as an actress, singer and transgender rights advocate.
In Transgender History (2008), Susan Stryker claims the fascination with Jorgensen ‘had to do with the mid-20th-century awe for scientific technology, which now could not only split atoms but also, apparently, turn a man into a woman’. Stryker, a professor of gender studies at the University of Arizona, also notes that Jorgensen was the first American transsexual woman to become prominent after the war changed women’s relationships with paid labour and domestic work. It wasn’t just gender roles that were in flux, but gender itself.
As it transpired, The Transsexual Phenomenon (as the sexologist Harry Benjamin called it in his influential 1966 book) did not destroy US society. Or even visibly change it. Looking at the New York Daily News photographs of Jorgensen now, they come nowhere near to justifying their attention-grabbing tag – ‘Operations Transform Bronx Youth’. Jorgensen’s facial structure, her hairline, eyes, nose and chin, barely altered between 1943 and 1952: the main differences were her clothes and make-up.
(Video: 1953 British newsreel coverage of Christine Jorgensen)
The Dish 