LGBT History Month: Remembering transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen

While almost completely unknown today, the public’s awareness of trans people can be divided into Before Christine Jorgensen and After Christine Jorgensen.

At 26, she – and the concept of identifying with a gender different than the one assigned at birth – exploded into public consciousness from newspaper articles in 1952. Further explosions followed in more papers, magazines, radio, TV, and movie theater newsreel coverage upon her return to the US in 1953 from Denmark where she had her initial surgery and spoke at the first-ever press conference for a transgender person.

She was not the first trans person to attract mainstream attention. The 1931 Danish biography of Lili Ilse Elvenes (aka Lili Elbe and the highly fictionalized The Danish Girl) was translated into several languages including English in 1933 as Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex / Lili Elbe.

However, a search of newspapers.com‘s archive of 14,000+ mostly American newspapers reveals only about 20 contemporary articles about the posthumous release of Elvenes’ biography versus over 8,000 about Jorgensen between 1952 and 1957 alone.

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