Books

Christine Jorgensen Takes Stage Again

By Wes Lawrence, Book Editor

Christine Jorgensen has written her autobiography, titled Christine Jorgensen (Eriksson, $6.95), and I recommend it as a dignified, instructive and wholly absorbing account of how one of nature's mistakes was corrected, so that a despairing misfit became a normal and happy person.

Christine, if you have for-

gotten, is the former George Jorgensen who, at the age of

26 startled the world by undergoing the medical and surgical treatment that changed his sex from masculine to feminine. The world was startled both because of the sensa-

superficial male physical characteristics, George Jorgensen remained underdeveloped physically as he matured, and scientists discovered when he submitted

to their tests that his output of feminine hormones overbalanced the male hor-

flicted on Jorgensen, and one must read the biography and see photographically the change in appearance and personality to understand and applaud the scientific "miracle" that turned the abashed and distressed

George into the self-confident, beaming and beautiful Christine that she was really always intended to be.

CHRISTINE says she was genuinely shocked and disgusted when what she had considered a wholly private affair leaked out to the press

loyalty of her family and her religious faith plus her newfound self-confidence and satisfaction in becoming the person she was intended to be, carried her through the ordeal.

At first she attempted to

was

continue her photographic career, but when it made clear to her that she would be unable to shun the spotlight she gave up resisting the offers she was receiving and consented to have her story written and to put herself in the hands of a sympathetic agent who

tional manner in which the mones, so that his life-long and became a worldwide launched her on a career as

transformation was treated by much of the press and because of the general public ignorance of the scientific facts about sex.

AS BOTH Miss Jorgensen and her doctors make clear, she was never a genuine male. Although born with

girlish behavior, which was definitely not homosexual in nature, was the result of his actually being more female

than male.

One must read the biography to understand what agony, what lack of self confidence the 26 years of enforced posing as a male in-

sensation. She had studied photography and was begin-

ning a photographic career in Denmark, where she was receiving her treatments, when the unwelcome publicity burst upon her.

Much of that publicity was either deliberately or ignorantly untruthful, but the

an entertainer.

Christine began her treatIT IS 16 years now since ments, which she could not then receive in the United States, but she has not yet achieved universal acceptance. The Army continues to believe that her appearance before GIs would somehow

Christine Jorgensen corrupt them (as a former GI, Christine wonders at the ease with which their superiors believe GIs can be corrupted).

But she has had some success as an actress, and she finds satisfaction in the fact that Johns Hopkins Univeroperation that gave her to sity is now performing the herself and that medical men in this country increasingly are becoming aware of the many persons of both sexes who need to be relieved of the distress caused by nature's mistakes.