Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Christine Jorgensen

Actress and entertainer Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989) was the first publicly-known American trans woman. After serving in the army, Jorgensen moved to Copenhagen to work with doctors specializing in hormone therapy and transitional surgery. She did not originally intend to share her story publicly, but the New York Daily News outed her when they published private letters to her parents about her reassignment surgery. She took it in stride and accepted a twenty-thousand-dollar offer for the exclusive rights to share her story in American Weekly magazine. When she returned from Denmark in 1953, the media circus was already waiting for her at the airport. She had captured the fascinated curiosity of a nation, but she also opened the closet door for all those afflicted with gender dysmorphia. Jorgensen leveraged her popularity into a nightclub act, stating that if people wanted to see her, they would have to pay for it. She became a writer and speaker on the transsexual experience and allowed herself to be experimented on and studied by doctors in exploration of the field. Above all, Jorgensen handled all the discrimination and ignorance with great wit and sass, and in the year of her death, she stated that she had given the sexual revolution “a good kick in the pants.”