Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography

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In 1951 George Jorgensen, an American man of 26, left for Denmark and returned a year later as the first world-renowned transsexual, Christine Jorgensen. In her own personable style, Jorgensen offers a firsthand account of her ground-breaking life. “Nature made a mistake,” she wrote, “which I have corrected.”

This handsome reprint of Jorgensen’s 1967 memoir makes it abundantly clear how moments of grace can descend on even the most strange of lives. When ex-G.I. George Jorgensen went to Copenhagen in the early 1950s to consult experts in sexual deviance, he used to be afraid they’d simply proclaim him a fairy. A full battery of hormonal and psychological tests revealed that, at the same time as he used to be drawn to men, he used to be no garden-variety homophile; he used to be a lady. Keeping the name of the game from his circle of relatives, Jorgensen endured a groundbreaking series of operations, in the end emerging in November 1952 as a delicately beautiful young woman. “I merely wanted to correct what I thought to be a misjudgment of Nature,” wrote Jorgensen, who died in 1989. No person seeing the photographs included here (many of them new to this edition) can doubt the success of Jorgensen’s transformation or wonder too long at the fascination she engendered back home, where a newspaper bought her story for $20,000 and she used to be proclaimed New York City’s Woman of the Year. A stage and screen career soon followed. As Susan Stryker points out in a new introduction, Jorgensen offers a slightly flattering and selectively abridged account of herself in the autobiography, but no more so than any plucky girl smiling her way through what should have been, at times, a harrowing and lonely journey, but one that she conducted with remarkable dignity. –Regina Marler

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