JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
, the New York Daily News announced the "sex change" surgery of Christine Jorgensen. The front-page headline read "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth," and the story told how Jorgensen had traveled to Denmark for "a rare and complicated treatment." The initial scoop soon escalated into an international media frenzy. Reporters cast Jorgensen, who was young and beautiful, as a starlet on the rise, and within two weeks had sent out fifty thousand words on her through the news wire services. 1 In the winter of 1953, Jorgensen returned to the United States and surrendered to her celebrity. That spring, she embarked on a show business career that kept her name on marquees and her body in spotlights for the rest of the decade. The press coverage accorded to Jorgensen triggered an avalanche of publicity about sex change through surgery and hormones, but she was not the first transsexual, nor was her story the first media attention to sex change. Stories of "sex reversals," "sex changes," and "sexual metamorphoses" had appeared in American newspapers and magazines since the 1930s. These stories differed from the more frequent reports of "passing," in which a person known previously as one sex was discovered living as the other. 2 Rather, these were sensationalized stories of bodily change that, in the decades before Jorgensen's fame, introduced American readers to the concept of sex transformation. In this article, I place Christine Jorgensen in broader historical context. I focus on the European origins of medicalized sex change in the early twentieth century, on specific examples of American media coverage of sex changes in the 1930s and 1940s, and on the responses of people whom we might now label trans-GLQ 4:2 pp. 159-187
Show how common culture That we have to unlearn Shapes the separate lives: Much that we were taught, Matrilineal races And are growing chary Kill their mothers' brothers Of emphatic dogmas; In their dreams and turn their Love like Matter is much Sisters into wives.. .. Odder than we thought.-From W. H. Auden, "Heavy Date," 1939 From the late 1920s into the early 1950s, a loose network of social scientists, known as the Culture-and-personality school," collaborated in an epistemic shift in social thought that reverberated through the rest of the twentieth century. They explicitly rejected biological theories of race and investigated instead how different "cultures" produced diverse patterns of human behavior. In the past two decades, some historians, including Elazar Barkan, Lee D. Baker, and John P. Jackson, have applauded the liberalism of the culture-and-personality vision of race, while others, including Peggy Pascoe, Daryl Michael Scott, and Alice O'Connor, have critiqued it. In either case, historians agree that the cultural approach shaped the intellectual and legal history of race and the civil rights movement. For example, culture-and-personality theorists had direct and indirect roles in the writing of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco) statement on race (1950), and the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision (1954). 1
Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's vision of sexual taxonomy continued to evolve after he published his first landmark volume on human sexuality, and his research into sexual subcultures went beyond his initial studies of homosexuality and prostitution. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he developed a new interest in cross-dressing and cross-gender identification. This article outlines how and why he began to interview transvestites and transsexuals, and places his emerging vision of gendered behavior and gender identity within the scientific theories of his day. Kinsey rejected the prevailing views, preferring instead a behaviorist model of gender. He saw cross-dressing and crossgender identification as male phenomena and used them to speculate about sex differences in the capacity for psychological conditioning. In his usual style, he did not condemn transvestites or transsexuals, but he disapproved of the genital surgery requested by male-to-female transsexuals. It was here that Kinsey hit the limits of his well-known sexual liberalism in which he approved of all sexual variations that did not involve coercion.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.