I’ve never understood the fetishizing of Christine Jorgensen as some supposedly heroic transsexual/transgender icon.
I wasn’t all that aware of her and her big Copenhagen Adventure.
I’m nearly 65 and was five or six years old when the story originally broke, we didn’t have a television yet and they didn’t feature her story in my Weekly Reader.
The first transsexual sisters I heard about were far more glamorous and sexy than Christine. They were the late 1950s early 1960s crew that worked at Le Carousel in Paris and got their sex change operations from Dr. Burou in Casablanca.
I especially idolized April Ashley.
There was a multi-part serialization of her biography to that point in one of the tabloids in 1962.
She had a sex change operation. Not gender confirmation surgery or any other weaselly euphemism, but a sex change operation.
I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to have a sex change operation and be a hot babe who enjoyed sex.
The whole England swings, pop culture, music and fashion scene was just coming into play.
She was hot and sexy and admitted she liked having sex.
In the late 1960s when Christine Jorgensen’s book came out I read it and was appalled at the entire white washing and expurgating of any sexual aspect.
Poor Christine never seemed to have a man in her life or between her legs.
By that time I was out , pickled on pussy pills and horny.
I wasn’t some sort of tight legged virgin saving myself for after SRS and a diamond.
Her movie came out in the spring of 1970 and she was going to be at a theater in San Francisco promoting it. I was living in East Oakland with queen named Gina at the time. We went to the opening to meet the famous Christine Jorgensen and were blown away by how square she came off.
This was 1970 and she looked trapped in the 1950s. then I remembered her book, which should have been subtitled “How I got sort of a sex change, even though a vagina wasn’t part of it and managed to be so square as to not have any fun along the line.”
The movie was one of the most abysmal pieces of dreck I’ve ever seen thrown up on the screen. It couldn’t have been any campier if Ed Wood had directed it.
It was painful to watch.
Christine was prehistoric by 1970.
The people of my generation didn’t even have all that much in common with the gang from Le Carousel.
We weren’t dancing in shows, our Carousel Ballroom was on Market Street and run by Bill Graham.
People like Autumn Sandeen and Cristan Williams talk about medicalization and sexualization in the same tone of voice one heard from the heterosexual transvestite set.
Christan Williams transgender Borg 23 of 78 is obsessed with telling people who actually lived through that era and remember that era that they are all wrong because CW manged to dig up some obscure references.
The big problem is we didn’t talk that way in the 1970s when the generic term was “transie” not transgender and the world was divided into transsexuals who got sex change operations to be real women and drag queens who got implants and facial surgeries but kept their dicks because they liked using them.
Why are we supposed to embrace the sterile life of Christine Jorgensen who was experimented on by doctors who didn’t think a vaginoplasty was all that important? What was done to her was kind of a nightmare that led to a whole set of myths as to why people were better not having SRS.
Dr. Burou and Dr. Barbosa understood importance of being able to have vaginal sex as part of our motivations for having sex change operations.
This piece by Sandeen needs some comments to balance out the bullshit:
Trans sexualization; Trans medicalization
I swore I wasn’t going to get sucked into this bullshit and I may hate myself in the morning but I hate Transgender Borg fictional history as much as I hate the crap David Barton spews forth.
In fact the two have a good deal in common.
