In New York the best thing one can say about the Daily News is that it is easy to read on the subway or the train into the city.
Also while the New York Times has the news the Daily News has the cartoons.
Sixty years ago the Daily News screwed up the Christine Jorgensen story. Or perhaps I should say she screwed up her own story. In making her big publicity leap by claiming to be the first she managed to set of the first bitch fest among post-transsexual women.
You see the British sister Roberta Cowell beat her by a year and a half. Also Roberta Cowell had a vaginoplasty and Christine didn’t until several years later.
Roberta Cowell took Christine down a peg or two in her memoir Roberta Cowell’s Story.
From Wikipedia:Roberta Cowell, (born 21 May 1921 in Croydon), was the first known British male-to-female transsexual to undergo sex reassignment surgery.
Born Robert Cowell, she was a Spitfire pilot in World War II and a racing driver after the war. She had a vaginoplasty on 15 May 1951, via a surgical method invented and performed by Dr Harold Gillies. This occurred two years before Christine Jorgensen‘s surgery in Denmark. Roberta Cowell’s surgical transformation and friendship with the female-to-male transsexual Michael Dillon, also operated on by Dr Harold Gillies, is documented in the book The First Man-Made Man by Pagan Kennedy.[1]
I wasn’t exactly impressed by Christine’s book in the late 1960s when I was first coming out. There was something about it that smelled dishonest.
In the spring of 1970 Gina, a sister I was living with in East Oakland, and I went to the San Francisco premier of her movie, where we met her. She was nice, her movie stink.
I met her again on a couple of other occasions when she was speaking at gay and lesbian events and was far more impressed.
So it has been 60 years.
I had my SRS over 40 years ago. I’ve out lived her by a couple of years and had my surgery a couple of years longer.
I’m a youngster and there are sisters who have been post-op some 10-15 years longer than I have. While it is a hard life it isn’t a guarantee of a young death, one of the things doctors warned us about in the early days.
From the NY Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/60-years-christine-jorgensen-born-article-1.1211068
Former Army Pvt. George Jorgensen made headlines around the world when he returned from Denmark as a blond woman named Christine.
By Michael Walsh / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, November 30, 2012This weekend marks the 60-year anniversary of the first widely known successful sexual reassignment surgery — when a boy from the Bronx became a lady.
Former Army Pvt. George Jorgensen made headlines around the world when he returned from Denmark as a blond woman named Christine. But before Jorgensen shocked the world, she shocked her family.
“Nature made a mistake which I have had corrected, and now I am your daughter,” Jorgensen wrote to her parents, shortly after the operation.
While serving in the U.S. Army, Jorgensen — who felt trapped in the wrong body since adolescence — read an article about a Danish doctor who was experimenting with sex hormones on animals.
Continue reading at: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/60-years-christine-jorgensen-born-article-1.1211068
From The BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20544095
Christine Jorgensen: 60 years of sex change ops
By Chloe Hadjimatheou
29 November 2012News of a pioneering sex change operation, one of the first involving both surgery and hormone therapy, was announced in 1952 – exactly 60 years ago this weekend.
“Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty!” screamed one headline as newspapers in the United States broke the news.
George Jorgensen, a quiet New Yorker, shocked a nation by returning from a trip to Denmark transformed into the glamorous Christine.
As the slender, blonde 27-year-old woman wrapped in a fur coat stepped out of the plane on to the tarmac in New York, her long eyelashes, high cheekbones and full red lips betrayed little of the shy man she had once been.
Jorgensen grew up in the Bronx, a happy child in a large close-knit family.
As a teenager he became convinced he was trapped in the wrong body.
“In photographs from the time Jorgensen looks like a very gay man, which would have been a problem,” says Teit Ritzau, a Danish doctor and documentary maker who got to know Christine Jorgensen when he made a film about her in the 1980s.
“The young Jorgensen never identified himself with homosexuality but rather as a woman who happened to be in a man’s body,” he says.
In her autobiography Jorgensen says that, while she was still living as George, despite being attracted to men she felt physically sick when a man propositioned her.
Continue reading at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20544095
