The Case of Christine

For a while, having achieved notoriety, she was Manhattan's No. 1 glamour girl. A blonde with a fair leg and a fetching smile, she seemed to be everywhere that was anywhere, with everybody who was anybody. Columnist Leonard Lyons introduced her to a gaggle of celebrities, Broadway Star Yul Brynner and she grinned at each other over a couple of highballs at El Morocco. She appeared in Madison Square Garden at a charity rally sponsored by Walter Winchell, on half a dozen television programs, and was photographed in a soft tailleur for the Easter Parade.

Last week came the revelation that Christine Jorgensen was no girl at all, only an altered male.

This was no surprise to U.S. psychiatrists (TIME, Dec. 15), or to careful readers of Jorgensen's own story in the Hearst newspapers. Jorgensen, a onetime G.I. named George, told how he "was in ... affections more like a woman than a man"; how two years ago, at 24, he had heard of a doctor in Denmark who might help him live like the woman he wanted to be; how the Danish doctors had diagnosed him as a transvestite,* treated him for a year with female hormones, then operated on him to remove "the evidences of masculinity."

Jorgensen acknowledged in his articles that his organs had been normal in the first place. But many readers jumped to the conclusion that his was one of the not uncommon cases of pseudohermaphroditism (organs of one sex so malformed or concealed as to be mistaken for those of the other), or one of the rare cases of true hermaphroditism (possessing the gonads of both sexes). In either instance, the operations would have left Jorgensen a girl, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The New York Post put the facts on the line. Reporter Alvin Davis, who flew to Denmark to interview Jorgensen's doctors, established two main points: 1) Jorgensen's case was not one of hermaphroditism or pseudohermaphroditism; 2) in an attempt to accommodate his urge to transvestitism, his Danish doctors had simply amputated penis and testes. left him a male castrate. The disclosure kicked up a storm of discussion around questions of medical practice.

Can transvestites be cured? In relatively mild cases of transvestitism, involving patients who actually want to be normal, U.S. doctors agree that psychiatric treatment, sometimes accompanied by hormones of the patient's own sex. often effect real cures. But in some cases of transvestitism, as in severe cases of homosexuality, cures are exceptional at best. Jorgensen's Danish psychiatrist, Dr. Georg Stuerup, insists that "not one of the major psychotherapists has ever published a satisfactory example of a real, severe case of homosexuality or transvestitism that had been treated successfully."

Can a male transvestite possibly lead a relatively happy life as a "woman"? Absolutely not, say most U.S. psychiatrists. The castration many of them crave may give them the temporary illusion of womanhood, but it can be nothing more than an illusion, and when it disappears, the disappointment and frustration are likely to make their last state worse than their first.

With this the Danish doctors flatly disagree. Jorgensen may well be in for much suffering, they admit, but if so, the publicity given to the operation will be to blame. If Jorgensen had been able to slide quietly into society and be accepted as a woman, the prognosis would be much more favorable.

Is it a mistake to remove the sex glands? It is illegal in every state in the U.S., except in cases of physical disease, though some states have experimented with voluntary emasculation for sex of fenders as an alternative to a prison sentence.

Dr. Stuerup, who is in charge of administering his country's program of voluntary emasculation, feels Denmark is effectively treating sex criminals instead of punishing them, points to some statistics: in Denmark only 3.7% of voluntarily castrated sex criminals repeat their crimes as compared to 43% of the uncastrated. He considers the U.S. attitude a childish and hypocritical taboo. "In America," he says, "a surgeon can operate on any organ in the body, including the brain. But he may not operate on the testes. That is a hypocrisy which the mature society of Denmark refuses to accept." How will the Jorgensen case affect the future treatment of transvestites? In Denmark there will be other similar experiments. Two months ago, a closed meeting of leading Danish psychiatrists, surgeons and lawyers approved the procedure that had been followed with Jorgensen. But there will be no such operations in the U.S. (or in Britain, France and many other countries) where the operation is illegal. And the transvestites now clamoring to go to Denmark for the "Jorgensen operation" (Drs. Hamburger Stuerup have heard from 600 so far) are doomedto disappointment. The Danes have decided never to perform it again on a foreigner. Too much excitement.

*Medical definition: one who has a "morbid desire to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex."

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