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Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography
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."
310 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
About the author
Christine Jorgensen
4 books10 followersChristine Jorgensen (born George William Jorgensen, Jr.) was the first widely known person to have sex reassignment surgery.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 16, 2024
important piece of queer history, but I wish it had been juicier :(
wdym you worked in the New York night club scene and don't have a single anecdote about what the nightlife was like?? wdym you almost got MARRIED to a man you only mentioned on one page and then never again?? like girl don't be shy just spill the tea 😩
wdym you worked in the New York night club scene and don't have a single anecdote about what the nightlife was like?? wdym you almost got MARRIED to a man you only mentioned on one page and then never again?? like girl don't be shy just spill the tea 😩
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 13, 2022
Fifty-five years after its publication, Christine Jorgensen, A Personal Autobiography is still a relevant and timely book. Jorgensen, for those who don’t know, was the first American transgender. (Note: there were no doubt others before her, but Jorgensen was the first to have surgery and live openly.) Unhappy with her male characteristics, she went to Denmark in 1951 to explore new treatments and surgeries there. It was there she began hormone therapies and eventually had two surgeries. Her return to the US was met with a publicity thunderstorm she never wanted. As a result, with all this notoriety, Christine admits her only career avenue was show business for she was far too noted to just assume a simple, private life in a small town somewhere. As a result, she became an accomplished night club entertainer and well-received and lauded actress in the theater. Jorgensen’s story is amazing in that so many of her trials and tribulations, both public and private, are the same as transgender persons face today. Many accepted her; many reviled her. An “incident” happened during one of her Las Vegas appearances that points toward the “bathroom” controversies of today—the idea that a transgender woman should not be allowed to use the women’s restroom. In Jorgensen’s case, the press reported the showgirls who were working in her act refused to share a dressing room with her. And, mirroring today’s restroom controversies where most do not care if a transgender woman is sharing the next stall, Jorgensen, as the star, had her own dressing room and thus, it was a fabricated controversy. In fact, the showgirls collectively wrote her a note proclaiming none of them had told the reporter anything and they would be proud to share a dressing room with her. This sort of thing makes the story from more than half a decade ago so relevant today. Times are changing, and thankfully, transgenders are more and more accepted. But many still face similar circumstances as Christine Jorgensen did in their quest to be themselves. The final sentence of this autobiography states “I found the oldest gift of heaven—to be myself.” And that is how all life stories should end.
May 21, 2026
Although as trans historian Susan Stryker points out in her introduction, trans women had been receiving gender affirming surgeries since the 1930s, Christine Jorgensen was the first public trans woman in America. She's basically what today we'd call an influencer.
Stryker's intro is particularly valuable as it puts the story into its historical and social context, and also fills in aspects of Jorgensen's story that she herself doesn't exactly highlight: her drinking and smoking, her temper, her self-interestedness, her bawdy sense of humour. To be fair to Jorgensen, given how under fire she often was in the public sphere, it makes sense that she would play to respectability politics and portray herself as demurely above reproach in her memoir. But as Stryker points out, we are missing aspects of the true Christine in this narrative because of it, including, perhaps, some of the most interesting parts of her. That said, I felt Stryker was a bit harsh in calling the book "dull." Sure, it can get excessively caught up in detail, but that's not uncommon for autobiographies, and I personally can get quite wrapped up in the minutia of someone else's life.
Jorgensen portrays herself as stumbling into show biz by virtue of the fact that there was no way for her to have a quiet, private life, once she was global front page news in 1952, as the "first" woman to have been assigned male at birth and physically change sex/gender. Stryker's intro throws this reluctance somewhat into question (some have even questioned whether Jorgensen herself leaked her transition to the press), but nevertheless, it's likely true Jorgensen would have been unable to have a private life given how hounded she was by the press, and how everything became filtered through her transness.
It's sad, in some ways, if she really would have preferred to continue her photographic career, that she couldn't do so, because people preferred to have her as a dancing, singing novelty. I tried to find some of her photographs, and unfortunately, all I could find was photographs *of* her, as opposed to those she shot.
Her life was remarkable. As a trans person who didn't have my "egg crack" until I was nearly 40, it's amazing to me when I read of trans people like Jorgensen who experienced clear gender dysphoria from an early age despite a lack of any kind of cultural script for understanding their transness. I loved her pebbling her way to medical transition - gathering little bits of forbidden knowledge on endocrinology and sexology as a teenaged library assistant, which led her to try several doctors before finally finding one who was sympathetic and put her on a path to find the Danish doctor who would eventually start her on hormone replacement therapy and perform the first step of her gender affirming surgery. It was an epic quest to get where she did at the time she did, even with the privilege she had as a white woman from an upper-middle class western European immigrant family.
After her medical transition, Jorgensen meets and befriends Dr. Harry Benjamin, who, for better or worse, developed the first standards for transgender care. (I say for better or worse because although he was a pioneer in advancing trans care, he also created highly binary, heteronormative, medicalist standards that involved gatekeeping access for those who couldn't or didn't want to fit in those molds, and which proved challenging for subsequent generations of trans people to expand).
One thing that was interesting/puzzling in her narrative is that she essentially describes herself as intersex, even though as far as I could find from a bit of internet searching, she was not. She writes to her parents of the investigations into her biology pre-transition:
"My male hormone output was reduced to a point just higher than the normal female output, and the female output was higher than is found in the normal male patient... therefore, I had a bit of a chemical war going on within me, one trying to outdo the other" (120).
She writes later in the autobiography: "I was never an absolute male and I shall never be an absolute female... mine was rather a process of revised sex determination, inspired by the preponderance of female characteristics" (195).
She also describes her (male) secondary sex characteristics as underdeveloped pre-transition, painting herself as a waifish, hairless androgyne. What's not clear to me is if she's what we'd now call intersex, or whether she's making what we'd now call a trans-medicalist argument to justify her transition; that is, understanding it as the correction of a medical problem for which she is not to blame. Such a tactic would be similar to how she appeals to respectability in other ways, including distancing herself from the trans people who write to her, most of whom she describes as unhappy and unwell, not legitimately transsexual like her. It could actually be both.
The other thing that was amazing to me in her story was despite the significant discrimination she faced, how accepted she was in a time long before the gay and lesbian rights movement in the 60s/70s, or our current culture wars. She literally walks into the American Consulate in Denmark and says, so, I'm a woman now, can I have a new passport? And they say, right-o! What do you want your name to be? That was wild to me.
In all her complexity, I am grateful for Christine Jorgensen. Let the TERFs not forget that she helped to pave the way for the feminist movement, as well as the gay and lesbian movement in being a public figure defying gendered biological determinism. Her story is well worth reading; it's a fascinating historical snapshot and our community owes her a great debt of gratitude.
Stryker's intro is particularly valuable as it puts the story into its historical and social context, and also fills in aspects of Jorgensen's story that she herself doesn't exactly highlight: her drinking and smoking, her temper, her self-interestedness, her bawdy sense of humour. To be fair to Jorgensen, given how under fire she often was in the public sphere, it makes sense that she would play to respectability politics and portray herself as demurely above reproach in her memoir. But as Stryker points out, we are missing aspects of the true Christine in this narrative because of it, including, perhaps, some of the most interesting parts of her. That said, I felt Stryker was a bit harsh in calling the book "dull." Sure, it can get excessively caught up in detail, but that's not uncommon for autobiographies, and I personally can get quite wrapped up in the minutia of someone else's life.
Jorgensen portrays herself as stumbling into show biz by virtue of the fact that there was no way for her to have a quiet, private life, once she was global front page news in 1952, as the "first" woman to have been assigned male at birth and physically change sex/gender. Stryker's intro throws this reluctance somewhat into question (some have even questioned whether Jorgensen herself leaked her transition to the press), but nevertheless, it's likely true Jorgensen would have been unable to have a private life given how hounded she was by the press, and how everything became filtered through her transness.
It's sad, in some ways, if she really would have preferred to continue her photographic career, that she couldn't do so, because people preferred to have her as a dancing, singing novelty. I tried to find some of her photographs, and unfortunately, all I could find was photographs *of* her, as opposed to those she shot.
Her life was remarkable. As a trans person who didn't have my "egg crack" until I was nearly 40, it's amazing to me when I read of trans people like Jorgensen who experienced clear gender dysphoria from an early age despite a lack of any kind of cultural script for understanding their transness. I loved her pebbling her way to medical transition - gathering little bits of forbidden knowledge on endocrinology and sexology as a teenaged library assistant, which led her to try several doctors before finally finding one who was sympathetic and put her on a path to find the Danish doctor who would eventually start her on hormone replacement therapy and perform the first step of her gender affirming surgery. It was an epic quest to get where she did at the time she did, even with the privilege she had as a white woman from an upper-middle class western European immigrant family.
After her medical transition, Jorgensen meets and befriends Dr. Harry Benjamin, who, for better or worse, developed the first standards for transgender care. (I say for better or worse because although he was a pioneer in advancing trans care, he also created highly binary, heteronormative, medicalist standards that involved gatekeeping access for those who couldn't or didn't want to fit in those molds, and which proved challenging for subsequent generations of trans people to expand).
One thing that was interesting/puzzling in her narrative is that she essentially describes herself as intersex, even though as far as I could find from a bit of internet searching, she was not. She writes to her parents of the investigations into her biology pre-transition:
"My male hormone output was reduced to a point just higher than the normal female output, and the female output was higher than is found in the normal male patient... therefore, I had a bit of a chemical war going on within me, one trying to outdo the other" (120).
She writes later in the autobiography: "I was never an absolute male and I shall never be an absolute female... mine was rather a process of revised sex determination, inspired by the preponderance of female characteristics" (195).
She also describes her (male) secondary sex characteristics as underdeveloped pre-transition, painting herself as a waifish, hairless androgyne. What's not clear to me is if she's what we'd now call intersex, or whether she's making what we'd now call a trans-medicalist argument to justify her transition; that is, understanding it as the correction of a medical problem for which she is not to blame. Such a tactic would be similar to how she appeals to respectability in other ways, including distancing herself from the trans people who write to her, most of whom she describes as unhappy and unwell, not legitimately transsexual like her. It could actually be both.
The other thing that was amazing to me in her story was despite the significant discrimination she faced, how accepted she was in a time long before the gay and lesbian rights movement in the 60s/70s, or our current culture wars. She literally walks into the American Consulate in Denmark and says, so, I'm a woman now, can I have a new passport? And they say, right-o! What do you want your name to be? That was wild to me.
In all her complexity, I am grateful for Christine Jorgensen. Let the TERFs not forget that she helped to pave the way for the feminist movement, as well as the gay and lesbian movement in being a public figure defying gendered biological determinism. Her story is well worth reading; it's a fascinating historical snapshot and our community owes her a great debt of gratitude.
March 22, 2021
Christine Jorgensen's A PERSONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY is the crown jewel of autobiographies. It should, in fact, be essential reading for all trans women and transfems. While it centers the life of just one trans woman, I was astounded at how much I truly related to Christine and her journey into womanhood, and how it made me reflect on my own journey as an intersex woman of the trans experience. While Christine obviously came from a place of immense privilege not only because of her race as a white Danish-American with a well-to-do, semi-wealthy, multi-talented, and accepting family, we can all learn a lot from Christine, if not to truly be inspired and to admire her for being a hero and a trailblazer when at the time, transitioning was risky, experimental, and potentially dangerous. What's most remarkable about this autobiography is just how accessible it is, Christine's warm, shy, wise, witty, and charming personality leaps off the pages through her words, and while at times she seems to rush through some areas of her life where I wish we could have been given more of her insight and in more detail, or that she'd just slow down a little, it was pretty breathtaking at just how much you can truly feel her spirit on every page. There were so many moments that deeply moved me and that will never leave me, such as some of her most touching albeit heartbreaking anecdotes were when she'd talk about her crushes with heterosexual men, on how it highlighted her aversion towards being perceived as a gay man, not because she was homophobic, and not even because she felt misgendered, but because it would literally make her vomit to not be seen as merely a woman attracted to a man, exactly as how she saw herself, as a straight woman in love with a straight man. Or when she detailed her struggles with finding medical professionals who would take her seriously, at how it went from being a humiliating and disappointing experience, to when all it took was one, Dr. Christian Hamburger (his first name which inspired her to name herself the feminine version, Christine, as an homage to him!) who was the first to offer her HRT (as a guinea pig), and another, Dr. Georg Stürup (her psychiatrist) who would change her life forever, as well as the oh so wonderful and famous Dr. Harry Benjamin, all of whom were trailblazers in their own right for their warmth, their empathy, and their ambition to help their transfem clients in their transition as they deserved with hardly any questions asked. Christine's coming out to her family when they had no idea that her two years in Denmark was not for work or studies but was for her transition was especially heartwarming. There were so many brilliant moments in Christine's life, that at times I had to re-read some of those passages, because they were SO GOOD! To say that her autobiography and her time with us on Earth was important is obvious, but truly, she was and always will be especially for me. Christine, her autobiography, has my heart. If only this book was still in print (aside from a library copy) and more accessible to everyone, as Christine's story and the incredible person that she was in general is still a marvel, not only as a time capsule, but as a reminder of how far we've come in this community.
July 2, 2026
I loved so much getting to read Christine Jorgensen's story, and I'm going to miss spending time with this book.
May 2, 2026
Very touching and honest look at the life of a transgender woman struggling to be herself and find happiness living as the person she knew she was in a world that wasn’t ready to accept transgender people. I thought it provided great insight into the transgender experience. Christine is a very likable person who presents her thoughts, feelings and decisions so clearly that you really feel for her. I especially appreciated her candor about why she made decisions and her perspective on humanity, which is so positive and generous toward her fellow humans, despite the fact that they often didn’t deserve such grace. Her awareness of what her actions would mean to other transgender people was inspiring. Her story is extraordinary because she made decisions that were revolutionary at the time so that she could live a life that really strived to be pretty ordinary.
September 30, 2022
It took me a few months to finish but this book is an important part of queer history. Obviously, Christine didn’t like using the term transsexual to describe herself, she was indeed a trans woman who has gone on to inspire people like Kate Bornstein, Armistead Maupin (whose character of Mrs. Anna Madrigal is heavily inspired by Christine), Leslie Feinberg and so many more. I love reading nonfiction and to read an autobiography of the first trans woman to get bottom surgery (she got an orchi, that was the surgery she got while in Denmark) is so awesome. Christine does not speak for the majority but her visibility in a postwar America was important to transgender acceptance now. We need more books like this one!!!
June 5, 2024
This is an important work certainly, which captures Christine's insights and experiences and recapitulation of her historical context well, at times. But it is, in all honesty, also frequently banal, preoccupied as it is with a very sanitised and sterile portrayal of her life, with only the faintest mentions of romantic or sexual aspirations or dreams (but enough that we know she had them, and simply wished to stay largely silent on the subject).
One cannot blame her for wishing to suppress the controversy which dogged her mercilessly, through no fault of her own. That is completely understandable. But for the modern reader, this very carefully curated portrait constructed with public decency as a priority is less approachable for that fact.
One cannot blame her for wishing to suppress the controversy which dogged her mercilessly, through no fault of her own. That is completely understandable. But for the modern reader, this very carefully curated portrait constructed with public decency as a priority is less approachable for that fact.
March 30, 2026
I found this book utterly delightful and I rather loved the Christine Jorgensen who she shared with the world. while some complained it wasn't revealing enough I LIKED that it was smart, clear, and real. soul bearing is overrated and overused these days. rather than wallow in why's and poor me she was a person of action and she knew what she needed, made it happen, and lived her life as who she wanted to be. so glad this book dropped into my hands because I loved it 100%
Want to Read
July 3, 2021
October 7, 2023
I really enjoyed Christine's voice, with humorous and thoughtful coverage of an interesting life.
In addition, it is an important testament to her experience, what it was like, especially when so much was new.
Recommended.
In addition, it is an important testament to her experience, what it was like, especially when so much was new.
Recommended.
March 9, 2026
I love the language of the time in which this book was written. It helps that Christine Jorgensen came from a normal, almost Norman Rockwell kind of family. No abuse or hardships to blame. I got the sense that the author was very sweet and genuine. I really enjoyed her telling her story.
June 10, 2025
A marvelous and fascinating read. What her story lacks in more salacious, personal details, it more than makes up for in showing us how little times change.
July 25, 2019
very interesting. A daring personal account.
January 31, 2016
Looking for something deeper
I can't remember where I heard about this book,but it sounded pretty interesting. It started off okay and you can forgive the fact that it's not written by a practiced writer, but it was a bit boring. I didn't find any depth in this autobiography, any struggles experienced were really glossed over, no fears , family and friends were all instantly accepting, no worries surrounding the surgery or anything else. It might have been about getting a tonsilectomy. Most of the issues were about getting an acting career off the ground and too much name dropping in my opinion . It was kind of a waste of reading time and too superficial. I had hoped for more depth.
I can't remember where I heard about this book,but it sounded pretty interesting. It started off okay and you can forgive the fact that it's not written by a practiced writer, but it was a bit boring. I didn't find any depth in this autobiography, any struggles experienced were really glossed over, no fears , family and friends were all instantly accepting, no worries surrounding the surgery or anything else. It might have been about getting a tonsilectomy. Most of the issues were about getting an acting career off the ground and too much name dropping in my opinion . It was kind of a waste of reading time and too superficial. I had hoped for more depth.
October 7, 2014
Interesting story and it moves quickly, though it feels like Christine took pains to keep everything PC and friendly. Seems like there's a real story underneath this one. Still, fascinating to read her experiences and her take on things at that time.
My Kindle version also included a foreword by Susan Stryker, was which a great addition.
My Kindle version also included a foreword by Susan Stryker, was which a great addition.
Read
September 1, 2015Reading articles/reviews today about The Danish Girl coming to theaters.... sparked my memory of having read this as a kid (I pretty much read everything mom had lying around the house). I clearly remember that blonde hair and those eyes. She had something to do with Denmark too.
Want to Read
January 23, 2016This is an autobiography of someone who had a sex change. This was in a time, by the way, when that was a lot less common, so I'm sure the book is as much about dealing with the social taboo as it is about a sexual identify conflict.
Want to Read
August 12, 20111st edition, signed by author
January 15, 2011
Amazing one of the first sex change operations performed in Denmark
March 18, 2017
Интересна биография за трудният път към себе си!
October 22, 2013
Groundbreaking story as well as life.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews