User:Snchristensen/Christine Jorgensen

Jorgensen was publicly outed when her letter to her parents in New York leaked to the press. She had planned to keep her transition a secret but she was forcefully outed by the New York Daily News. Her letter stated, "Nature made a mistake which I have had corrected, and now I am your daughter."

The New York Daily News ran a front-page story on December 1, 1952, under the headline "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty", announcing (incorrectly) that Jorgensen had become the recipient of the first "sex change." In reality, German doctors had performed this type of surgery in the late 1920s and early 1930s; Dorchen Richter and Danish artist Lili Elbe, both patients of Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, were known recipients of such operations.

After her surgeries, Jorgensen originally stated that she wanted a quiet life of her design. However, upon returning to the United States, she could only earn a living by making public appearances. Jorgensen was an instant celebrity when she returned to New York in February 1953. A large crowd of journalists met her as she came off her flight, and despite the Danish royal family being on the same flight, the audience largely ignored them in favor of Jorgensen. Soon after her arrival, she launched a successful nightclub act and appeared on television, radio, and theatrical productions. The first five-part authorized account of her story was written by herself in a February 1953 issue of The American Weekly, titled "The Story of My Life." In 1967, she published her autobiography, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, which sold almost 450,000 copies.

In the wake of her transition, part of the media coverage debated her original gender identity, many claiming that she was never fully male, but rather intersex. At the time, a popular theory was that she was a "pseudohermaphrodite" with the internal anatomy of a female and the external anatomy of a male. Nothing that Jorgensen said explicitly supported this theory, but various professionals adopted it anyways. This theory was also used to downplay the importance of Jorgensen's transition, with doctors claiming that her surgeries were "far from a medical rarity... [with] similar cases in hospitals all over the U.S.". Others insisted that Jorgensen's pre-transition body was clearly male and the surgeries were not to meant a physical abnormality, but rather align her gender with her physical sex. The overwhelming amount of coverage opened new discussions surrounding gender, sex, and transexuals.

The publicity following her transition and gender reassignment surgery became "a model for other transsexuals for decades. She was a tireless lecturer on the subject of transsexuality, pleading for understanding from a public that all too often wanted to see transsexuals as freaks or perverts ... Ms Jorgensen's poise, charm, and wit won the hearts of millions." However, over time the press was much less fascinated by her and started to scrutinize her much more harshly. Print media often asked her if she would pose nude in their publications.

According to a 1985 publication, Jorgensen opposed the word "transsexual" due to the word sex, in her opinion, only being relevant to sexual intercourse. She stated, "I am a transgender because gender refers to who you are as a human."