Word: jorgensen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week came the revelation that Christine Jorgensen was no girl at all, only an altered male...
This was no surprise to U.S. psychiatrists (TIME, Dec. 15), or to careful readers of Jorgensen's own story in the Hearst newspapers. Jorgensen, a onetime G.I. named George, told how he "was in ... affections more like a woman than a man"; how two years ago, at 24, he had heard of a doctor in Denmark who might help him live like the woman he wanted to be; how the Danish doctors had diagnosed him as a transvestite,* treated him for a year with female hormones, then operated on him to remove "the evidences of masculinity...
...Jorgensen acknowledged in his articles that his organs had been normal in the first place. But many readers jumped to the conclusion that his was one of the not uncommon cases of pseudohermaphroditism (organs of one sex so malformed or concealed as to be mistaken for those of the other), or one of the rare cases of true hermaphroditism (possessing the gonads of both sexes). In either instance, the operations would have left Jorgensen a girl, or a reasonable facsimile thereof...
...York Post put the facts on the line. Reporter Alvin Davis, who flew to Denmark to interview Jorgensen's doctors, established two main points: 1) Jorgensen's case was not one of hermaphroditism or pseudohermaphroditism; 2) in an attempt to accommodate his urge to transvestitism, his Danish doctors had simply amputated penis and testes. left him a male castrate. The disclosure kicked up a storm of discussion around questions of medical practice...
...Christine Jorgensen's homecoming, when she "tossed off a Bloody Mary" [TIME, Feb. 23]: Apparently my colloquial vocabulary has not kept pace with TIME'S; it does not seem to encompass a Bloody Mary...