After five months, the doses of estrogen were halted so that the experimenters could assess their subject’s reaction to the withdrawal. “The hormone tablets were discontinued for several weeks and I was upset physically and mentally as the male hormones, no longer suppressed, took over again. Almost at once the old fatigue and disturbing emotions returned,” Jorgensen reports. Around this time, Hamburger sent his patient to see Dr. George Sturup, a psychiatrist. Sturup’s job was to find some psychological explanation for his patient’s desire to become a woman, some “childhood trauma or emotional aberrations that would give me the cause.” He never found one, and later told Jorgensen, “I felt you could not be cured, psychologically. After many visits, it was finally clear to me.” Jorgensen’s physicians then applied to the Ministry of Justice for permission to surgically castrate their patient. Sturup applied to the Medico-Legal Council of the Ministry, submitting his findings together with those of Hamburger and the other physicians who had consulted on the case. Jorgensen too was asked to submit a letter, stating why the surgery was being requested. She closed the letter with a poignant plea, not only for herself but also for the unknown others who shared the mysterious condition, which her doctors were alternately calling “genuine transvestism” and “psychic hermaphroditism.” “To return to my old way of life would destroy all my hopes and ambitions as well as my body. This operation would not only be helping me, but perhaps open a whole new field of investigation for similar cases. If you could really realize how desperately we, of my kind, need help.”
The last hurdle to surgery was cleared when Helga Pederson, the attorney general of Denmark, brushed aside the reservations expressed by the Ministry of Justice about performing a castration on someone who was not even a citizen of Denmark. The operation was performed on September 24, 1951. Soon after the surgery, Jorgensen wrote to the Angelos, “As you can see by the enclosed photo, taken just before the operation, I have changed a great deal…. Half the time, people in shops call me ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ and it doesn’t embarrass me because I’m not afraid of people anymore.” As the months flew by and autumn turned to winter and then to spring, Jorgensen continued her daily visits to the Seruminstitut and her consultations with Dr. Hamburger. In May, she visited the American Embassy in Copenhagen for another momentous step—changing her sex on her passport. Presenting letters from her doctors and the Ministry of Justice, Jorgensen was greeted cordially by Mrs. Eugenie Anderson, the American ambassador to Denmark, who inquired what name Jorgensen wished to submit to Washington for the new passport. “I admit the question didn’t take me by surprise, for I’d given it much thought in the previous year and to me the choice was a logical one. Dr. Hamburger was the man to whom I owed so much, above all others. I transposed his first name, Christian, into the feminine Christine, a name which I’d always thought attractive. Thus, my new name of Christine Jorgensen.”
When the new passport arrived, Jorgensen “felt free at last to take my place in the outside world,” and for the first time appeared in public in feminine attire. In June, she wrote “the most important letter of my life,” to her parents, which a visiting aunt promised to hand-deliver. In the letter, Christine first tells her parents that she is “happier and healthier than ever before in my life,” before offering a brief lesson in endocrinology. In a famous phrase, reprinted months later in hundreds of newspapers, she says, “Nature has made a mistake, which I have corrected, and I am now your daughter.” The shocked but supportive Jorgensens responded with a telegram: “Letter and pictures received. We love you more than ever. Love, Mom and Dad.”
In November 1952, Christine once again entered Rigshospital, in Copenhagen, for the second stage of her transformation, which she defined as “removal of the immature sex organs,” or penis. Ten days after the surgery, as she lay recuperating in her bed, she was handed a telegram by a young woman who identified herself as a reporter for Information, a Danish newspaper. “Filled with a kind of unknown dread, I reached out to take it from her hand, and read the message: BRONX GI BECOMES A WOMAN. DEAR MOM AND DAD SON WROTE, I HAVE NOW BECOME YOUR DAUGHTER.” A family friend, someone to whom her parents had confided their secret, had sold the story to the newspapers.
“To me that message was a symbol of a brutal and cruel betrayal,” Jorgensen writes years later. “A lifetime of agonizing unhappiness, two years of medical treatment and two surgical operations had been telescoped into a couple of succinct lines on a telegraph form, and I knew without being told that it would go far beyond that hospital room.” By the time the twenty-four-year-old photographer returned to the United States, in February 1953, after two life-transforming years abroad, she was arguably the most famous person in the world. More news stories were filed on Christine Jorgensen in 1953 than on any other single individual or event. A private decision, arrived at after much soul-searching and struggle, had become a public scandal.
One of the people who read about Jorgensen’s surgery in the New York newspapers was Harry Benjamin, but unlike most Americans, Benjamin was not surprised. Beginning in the thirties, he had begun spending his summers in San Francisco, living at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and seeing patients in the office building across the street. In 1945, he met the American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and like many other friends and colleagues, had his sex history taken by the Kinsey researchers. In 1948, while conducting interviews at the hotel, Kinsey met a young man who “wanted, as he said, to become a girl, and his mother supported him in this. Kinsey had never seen a case like this, and it was new even for me,” Benjamin recalls in an interview years later. “It went well beyond the by then recognized transvestism. The concept of transsexualism did not yet exist. It only gradually took shape in my thinking, not least because of this first case.”
Like Jorgensen, this patient (referred to as “Barry” in Benjamin’s case studies) had from his earliest childhood felt that he was in fact a girl, and after reading about “operative procedures which feminized men” had “pressed his parents to find a surgeon who performed such operations.” Unlike Jorgensen, however, Barry became emotionally disturbed when he was unable to fulfill this desire and had been institutionalized by the courts when his frustration erupted into violence.
Barry was taken by his parents to see Alfred Kinsey in 1948, when the famous sex researcher was taking case histories at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Kinsey, whose previous research had not prepared him for Barry, sent the boy to Benjamin, then seeing patients in the same hotel.
“Benjamin’s first inclination was to send the boy to a psychiatrist, but he soon discovered that this was not a good idea,” says Christine Wheeler. When asked whether or not castration and peotomy were indicated for the “very effeminate” boy, “the psychiatrists disagreed among themselves,” Benjamin says. “Some were for it, others were against it.” He started the boy on a course of hormones, which “had a calming effect,” but was unable to find a urologist in the United States willing to perform surgery. He advised the boy (and his mother) to travel to Germany for the operation.
When the Jorgensen story broke, in 1953, Harry Benjamin was sixty-seven years old and looking forward to retirement. He had enjoyed a long and a productive career, and as his geriatric patients died, he stopped acquiring new ones. He recruited Virginia Allen, a doctor’s wife whom he had met at a meeting a few years earlier, to help him slowly phase out his practice. “He invited me for drinks at the Sulgrave Hotel and told me he felt he had only a few years left and wanted to spend them quietly in a retirement practice,” Allen recalled at the memorial that was held following Benjamin’s death, in 1986. However, things didn’t work out quite the way that Benjamin had planned.