Write a reply to the following writings, use one quote from the article attached. No less than 100 words.
Early in the era of trans people coming out there were many challenges which the trans community faced. Each person had an experience of their own and the media either supported it or ridiculed it. Many working class or colored trans people were often criticized and looked down upon as opposed to white trans people. The public would support the transition of white middle class men to women and said they looked “natural” and “feminine” because they met the beauty standards of blonde hair and white skin. In the scholarly source, “Constructing the ‘Good Transexual” by Emily Skidmore is states “As a blond, heterosexual, and domestically oriented woman, Jorgensen’s appearance in the mainstream press introduced readers to the concept of transsexuality and yet simultaneously assured them of continued dominance of gender roles forged in reference to white heteropatriarchy” (Skidmore 273). Christine Jorgensen was one of the few trans women who was being supported by the media because she met the beauty standards of society and she was “likable”. Unlike her experience, other trans women were criticized. Charlotte Mcleod was also a white woman, but the mainstream media negatively characterized her because she was not from a middle class family and Tamara Adel Rees was also white woman who was looked down upon because of her dark hair and not being “feminine enough”. Marta Olmos Ramiro , Laverne Peterson, and Delisa Newton were trans women of color and other races and they were seen as negative role models as well. The media would represent them in a sexualized way as if they were not deemed to be mothers and housewives because of their race. Although Christine Jorgensen’s journey of being a trans woman was seen as the only positive one, in the primary source “Christine Jorgensen, A Personal Autobiography” she wrote about all the difficulties she went through as well. She states in the article, “For the next few days, the newspapers had a field day and, once again, I was making headlines. My arrival was fully reported, sometimes in a friendly and sometimes hostile way…” She was seen as beautiful and feminine, but she faced many criticism as well in her personal life early on after transitioning. Although she didn’t face the same challenges as colored or lower class women who transitioned, she did receive many hate letters and threats This shows how the secondary source only focuses on the positive aspects of her life, rather than the negative as well.
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270
Constructing the “Good Transsexual”:
Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and
Heteronormativity in the
Mid-Twentieth-Century Press
Emily Skidmore
As with any new academic field, transgender studies has created its
own pantheon of canonical texts and heroic figures. One of the most cele-
brated figures has been Christine Jorgensen, and not without good reason;
when the news announced in late 1952 that the former GI had undergone
sex reassignment surgery in Denmark, it created a maelstrom of media
attention and introduced many Americans to the concept of transsexual-
ity. Jorgensen remained in the news throughout the 1950s as she appeared
on television talk shows, starred in her own nightclub show, and her 1967
autobiography was adapted and released as a motion picture, titled The
Christine Jorgensen Story, in 1970. Her engaging personality captured the imag-
ination of many Americans, both past and present, and she has remained
the most prominent individual within historical treatments of transsexu-
ality.1 However, Jorgensen was not the only public representation of
transsexuality in the mid-twentieth century. In April 1966, for example,
African American transwoman Delisa Newton graced the cover of Sepia,
and her autobiography was the subject of a two-part series featured in the
magazine. Similar to much of the press coverage of Jorgensen, Sepia’s
coverage of Newton highlighted her lonely childhood and her fervent
desire to one day be a good wife. However, whereas Jorgensen’s story
appeared in numerous mainstream news magazines, such as Time and
Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (Summer 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
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Newsweek and widely circulated newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times,
Newton’s story appeared only in the African American press and tabloid
newspapers such as the National Insider. The disparity between the media
reception of Jorgensen and Newton highlights the significance of race
within media representations of transsexuality and suggests that such
public narratives of transsexuality are not simply about gender but also
about race, class, and sexuality.
Building on the emergent scholarship on transgender studies, this
article denaturalizes the preeminent position Jorgensen has enjoyed with-
in historical treatments of transsexuality and highlights the significance of
Jorgensen’s whiteness within public representations. By discussing Jorgen-
sen in relation to the numerous other transwomen who appeared in the
mainstream media in the mid-twentieth century, I track the formation of
the “transsexual” within popular discourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was
those transwomen (primarily Jorgensen) depicted with the most proxim-
ity to white womanhood, who gained the most visibility in the main-
stream press and whose stories therefore came to define the boundaries of
“transsexual” identity. In order to illustrate this, I will discuss the repre-
sentations of three white transwomen from the 1950s: Christine Jorgensen,
Charlotte McLeod, and Tamara Rees. I argue that these white transwomen
were able to articulate transsexuality as an acceptable subject position
through an embodiment of the norms of white womanhood,2 most
notably domesticity, respectability, and heterosexuality. However, this
maneuver was only possible through the subjugation of other gender vari-
ant bodies; as the subject position of the transsexual was sanitized in the
mainstream press and rendered visible through whiteness, other forms of
gender variance were increasingly made visible through nonwhiteness. To
illustrate this, I will discuss the representations of three transwomen of
color who appeared in the mainstream, tabloid, and African American
press in the 1950s and 1960s: Marta Olmos Ramiro, Laverne Peterson, and
Delisa Newton. Although each of these transwomen articulated their
embodiment in ways similar to Jorgensen, McLeod, and Rees, their bodies
were less intelligible as “authentic” (read: white) women, and therefore
they appeared in the mainstream press as subjects of ridicule, not as
“authentic” transsexuals. Taken together, this article highlights the disci-
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plining power of racialized gender ideologies, ideologies that regulate
which bodies appear within the public sphere as legitimate and which
bodies appear only in order to be disparaged.
This study focuses on representations of transsexuality in the mass
circulation press in the period between 1952 and 1966, as it was during this
period that advances in medical technology first made sex reassignment
surgery possible; thus, it was in these years that the subject position of “the
transsexual” was first introduced to popular audiences. Because it was
through the mass circulation press–not medical literature–that most
Americans learned about transsexuality, it is therefore vital to understand
the narrative structures that allowed the figure of the transsexual to have
coherence within popular discourse.3 Thus, in this article, I am particularly
interested in tracking the ways in which the mass circulation press posi-
tioned transsexual identity vis-à-vis other social groups, because, as Stuart
Hall has written, “There is always a politics of identity, a politics of position,
which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental ‘law
of origin.’”4 In order to get at popular narratives of transsexuality, I have
interrogated a wide range of sources, from mainstream weekly magazines
such as Time and Newsweek to popular daily newspapers such as New York’s
Daily News, from African American publications such as Sepia and Ebony to
cult tabloid magazines such as Mr. and Whisper. I pay particular attention to
the ways in which narratives of transsexuality changed as they traveled
from one publication to the next but ultimately prioritize the narratives
that were produced in publications with the widest circulation.5 Taken to-
gether, this essay asks, how was it that Jorgensen came to be produced as a
“good transsexual” as opposed to “sex deviant”? What normative invest-
ments undergirded her celebrity? And lastly, which bodies were subjugated
by the creation of the notion of a “good transsexual”?
“‘I Could Have Gone for That He-She Girl,’
Says Reporter”
Christine Jorgensen emerged in the mainstream press amidst rapid subur-
banization, increasing birthrates, and heightened cold war tensions. In this
context, popular culture and political rhetoric each upheld the nuclear
family–complete with a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother–as
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the American ideal, a social formation promising both personal happiness
and national defense against communism. This connection was perhaps
nowhere more visible than in the 1959 “kitchen debate” between Richard
Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American Exhibition
in Moscow that year. Amidst the display of model homes, washing ma-
chines, and other appliances, Nixon remarked that this is “what freedom
means to us.” As many historians have pointed out, this image of domes-
tic tranquility did not describe life as experienced by all Americans, yet it
nonetheless represented an ideal that all Americans were instructed to
strive for.6
Indeed, social formations that threatened the stability of the nuclear
family fell under particular scrutiny in the mid-twentieth century, and
gender and sexual deviancy were often equated with political subversion. In
1950, for example, the U.S. Senate held hearings on homosexuals “and
other sex perverts” working for the government, spurring both the purge
of thousands of lesbians and gay men from government agencies and also
increased police surveillance of gay communities throughout the 1950s and
1960s.7 Given the heightened concern over the domestic nuclear family and
proper gendered and sexual behavior, it should be considered no small
coincidence that representations of Jorgensen corresponded with the image
of femininity that was most idealized in the mid-twentieth century. As a
blond, heterosexual, and domestically oriented woman, Jorgensen’s
appearance in the mainstream press introduced readers to the concept of
transsexuality and yet simultaneously assured them of continued domi-
nance of gender roles forged in reference to white heteropatriarchy.
Tellingly, the December 1, 1952, headline that announced Jorgensen’s
transformation to the world read “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” (fig. 1).
With these words, the Daily News announced that Jorgensen’s sex reassign-
ment surgery had not simply turned Charles into Christine, but it had also
transformed her into a “blond beauty.” Demure blonde women repre-
sented the gender norm of white womanhood in the mid-twentieth
century and regulated the gender intelligibility of all women in visual
representations.8 Therefore, the phrase “blond beauty” simultaneously
aligned Jorgensen’s body with an idealized femininity and asserted her
desirability as a woman to an assumed male viewer. The caption below her
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“before” picture read “A World of Difference,” suggesting that Jorgensen’s
body had been completely transformed by the procedure, again indicating
to the male viewer that Jorgensen’s body was an acceptable object of
274 Emily Skidmore
Fig. 1: The Daily News front page that announced Christine Jorgensen’s transformation to the
world, December 1, 1952. Photo courtesy of New York Daily News Archive/New York Daily News/Getty
images.
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heterosexual desire. Similarly, in its coverage of Jorgensen’s return to the
United States in February 1953, the San Francisco Examiner reported: “Chris-
tine is not only female; she’s a darn good looking female. She’s tall, very
blonde and chic.”9 In this way, from the earliest press coverage of Jorgen-
sen’s story, her body was produced as definitively female in part through
her embodiment of the physical qualities of an idealized form of feminin-
ity: her white skin, blond hair, and slender frame garnered constant
comment throughout her tenure in the media, and these comments
ensured that her body would be intelligible as female to readers.
However, given the heightened importance placed on the nuclear
family in the 1950s, Jorgensen’s intelligibility as female also rested upon her
participation in a nuclear family unit. As such, the prominent place of
Jorgensen’s mother and father in much of her early coverage within the
mainstream press was particularly significant. Articles repeatedly cited
how supportive her parents were throughout the lengthy process of sex
reassignment, and many images were published after her return to the
United States showing Jorgensen in the loving arms of her family. In one
Daily News article, her father is quoted saying he thinks Christine “deserves
an award higher than the Congressional Medal of Honor” because she was
brave enough to act as a pioneer within the field of sex reassignment sur-
gery.10 Additionally, in Jorgensen’s 1953 autobiographical series in American
Weekly (a magazine delivered to over 9.5 million homes), she appeared in
several domestic photographs, one in which she was cooking in the kitch-
en with her mother, who reportedly was showing Jorgensen “some
kitchen tricks.”11 These images, along with her frequent assertions that she
desired to one day get married, helped Jorgensen illustrate that her body
was contained within normative kinship structures–not opposed to them.
These images also helped to produce Jorgensen’s body through
notions of middle-class respectability–another factor that helped to nor-
malize her body as a white woman. A Los Angeles Times article from May
1953 reported: “Christine Jorgensen is pretty, personable, and pleasant–by
any standard. She’s courteous and intelligent, too. Over lunch in a suite at
the Statler yesterday, this reporter forgot to remember her past maleness
and saw only the present femininity and charm.”12 In this quotation,
Jorgensen’s femininity is enabled by her embodiment of respectability, a
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vital aspect of white womanhood because of its connection to civility. In
this way, it did not matter that Jorgensen grew up in the Bronx, the son of
a carpenter; what was important was that as Christine she presented her-
self in ways corresponding to traditional notions of middle-class respecta-
bility–a respectability inherently racialized as white.
In the days and months that followed, newspapers across the country
published countless articles retelling the story, solidifying Jorgensen’s
status as a cultural icon. However, Jorgensen was not completely unaware
of the press’s expectations of her embodiment. She told the Washington Post
in 1970, “Unlike other women I had to become super-female. I couldn’t
have a single masculine trait.” Tellingly, the Post reporter followed up by
stating: “And she doesn’t. She looks a bit like Lana Turner. . . . She has
beautiful skin, shapely legs, soft feminine hands which she uses gracefully
to gesture, push back her blonde curls or play with her black beads, and
large grey eyes with lots of real eyelashes.”13 Here, Jorgensen’s identity as a
woman is naturalized by noting her “real” eyelashes and her “soft femi-
nine hands,” and perhaps most of all, by comparing her to 1940s pinup
girl, Lana Turner. With each of these phrases, interviewer Sally Quinn na-
turalized Jorgensen’s femininity and signaled her alignment with hetero-
normativity. In fact, Jorgensen’s allegiance to heteronormativity was one
of the key elements that enabled her body to be read as within normative
kinship structures, respectable, attractive, and available to male viewers; in
order to be read as acceptably female and not strangely deviant, Jorgen-
sen’s body had to be intelligible as heterosexual.
One of the primary ways through which Jorgensen asserted her he-
terosexuality was by distancing herself from other “deviant” groups and
providing the mainstream press with a narrative of her embodiment that
was distinct from narratives of homosexuality or cross-dressing. In her
American Weekly series, for example, Jorgensen made a point of explaining
that after surgeons had successfully reassigned her sex, she did not begin
dressing as a woman until the sex on her passport had officially been
changed by the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen.14 In this way, Jorgensen
avoiding being accused of ever having been a male cross-dresser, and,
perhaps more importantly, Jorgensen placed her embodiment in terms of
proper U.S. citizenship and narrated her sex reassignment through her
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allegiance to the disciplining apparatus of the U.S. state. Implied here is
the suggestion that gender deviants cross-dress, but proper citizens dress
according to the gender assigned to them by the state.
Jorgensen further articulated her allegiance to heteronormativity by
illustrating her repulsion to homosexuality and other forms of sexuality
considered immoral by mainstream America. In her 1967 autobiography,
for example, Jorgensen described an incident prior to her transition in
which she was the subject of the sexual advances of a man. The move
reportedly sickened Jorgensen to the extent that she “spun away from his
lumbering figure and pushed blindly through the crowd of young people
into the darkness, heading for the beach . . . leaned over the edge of the
pier and vomited.”15 In this scene, Jorgensen not only violently rejected a
man’s advances, but the suggestion of same-sex sexual activity elicited a
visceral response of disgust. This scene is significant as it suggests that
Jorgensen strove to appeal to mainstream readers rather than to readers
who shared same-sex desire.
Throughout Jorgensen’s tenure in the public spotlight, she articu-
lated conservative sexual mores that likely served to assure readers that
her public presence was not motivated by a political agenda seeking to
challenge the sanctity of heteropatriarchy. For example, in Jorgensen’s
1954 interview with True Confessions Associate Editor Roy Ald, Jorgensen
registered her distaste for prostitution. When Ald expressed sympathy for
a prostitute who had recently been put on trial in New York City, Jorgen-
sen replied, “I don’t see why you should feel anything toward her. Those
people make me sick. It’s all right as long as they get away with what
they’re doing, but once they get caught they weep and plead for mercy.
She had her fun–now she has to pay the price.” When Ald countered that
the woman in question came from “a broken home,” Jorgensen “became
more incensed. She couldn’t stand people putting the blame on society to
avoid personal responsibility for their actions.”16 In this way, Jorgensen
signaled her alignment with conservative sexual mores and values that
prized personal responsibility. The stakes of such positioning are clear; in
the 1950s, the period in which transsexuality was introduced to the main-
stream public, homosexuality, cross-dressing, and other forms of sexual
and gender variance were often collapsed into the singular category of
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deviance; thus, in order to gain acceptance, transsexuals had to articulate
their distinctiveness from other pathologized minorities they might have
been grouped with.
Indeed, despite widespread criticism, Jorgensen was able to present
herself as a respectable woman and continued to be represented positively
in newspapers around the country throughout the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. As Joanne Meyerowitz has written,
Like Helen Keller, she served for some readers as a model of how the
human will might triumph over adversity. . . . With ambition and a sense
of mission, she perpetuated her popularity and kept herself on stage. Al-
though she could not control the media, she asserted her presence, and
she refused to let the press define her. She told a story that humanized her
and defended her right to pursue her own happiness, and she pushed the
public to acknowledge her status as a woman.17
However, what I am interested in exploring are the normative investments
that aided in Jorgensen’s effort to “humanize” her story, namely, her
avowed allegiance to white heteronormativity. Jorgensen was able to pre-
vent the press from defining her because she had access to the institutional
power of white womanhood–institutional power that allowed her to speak
for herself, insisting that her words be taken seriously. Indeed, in order for
Jorgensen to be taken seriously as a woman, she had to participate in the
subjugation of other nonnormative bodies. In what follows, I will discuss
other transsexuals who appeared in the press during the mid-twentieth
century–none of whom were able to achieve the status of “good transsex-
ual” in quite the same way that Jorgensen was. This failure is no accident,
however, but the grounds upon which Jorgensen claimed respectability.
“Charlotte Is Home Like No Lady”
In February 1954, just one year after Jorgensen’s return to the United
States, the U.S. public learned that a second former GI had traveled to
Europe to undergo sex reassignment surgery: Charlotte McLeod. Despite
many similarities between the two cases, McLeod’s story was produced in
the mainstream press as being quite distinct from Jorgensen’s; and, in fact,
Jorgensen was often invoked as a positive example against which to nega-
tively characterize McLeod. When she was introduced in Time, for exam-
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ple, the magazine reported, “Charlotte’s story resembles Christine’s. He
was a sensitive boy, quiet and lonely, with a penchant for dressing up in
women’s clothing. Like Christine, he was drafted into the Army; unlike
Christine, he found it too hard.”18 Thus, failing to live up to the standard
of the “good transsexual” that Jorgensen’s story had created, McLeod was
castigated by the mainstream press and cast as less authentic as a woman.
Although McLeod sought to narrate her story through the tropes of
white womanhood, articles in the mainstream press often focused on
exactly the aspects of her story most violating the standards of white femi-
ninity–particularly her lack of middle-class decorum. Whereas press
coverage of Jorgensen’s return to the United States was full of comments
on her beautiful features and delicate mannerisms, the coverage of
McLeod’s return was dominated by stories of an altercation she had with a
reporter on the tarmac, highlighted in headlines such as “Charlotte
Home, Battles Photog Like the Charles She Used to Be.” In contrast to the
gracefully posed photographs published upon Jorgensen’s return, New
York’s Daily News and the New York Sunday Times published photographs of
McLeod during or shortly after the altercation, wherein she was either
struggling to get up off the ground or scowling in the backseat of a car,
allegedly on the way to the police station. The Daily News even captioned a
photograph, “The New Charles Wasn’t Ladylike.”19 Thus, McLeod’s asser-
tions that she desired a quiet domestic life were put into question as news-
papers highlighted her aggressive and confrontational manner.
However, even before McLeod set foot on U.S. soil, the mainstream
press had been characterizing her as an individual of questionable morals.
In their first story on McLeod, in February 1954, the Chicago Daily Tribune
highlighted the fact that she had been kicked out of the Second Baptist
Church lodging house where she had been staying. A church spokesper-
son told the paper, “We have done what we could for Charlotte and will
continue to do our Christian duty toward a person in distress. . . . But we
just cannot take this. We have therefore told Charlotte that we thought it
would be wisest if she found another place to stay.”20 By highlighting this
aspect of McLeod’s story, the Chicago Daily Tribune thus produced McLeod as
an individual unworthy of Christian charity–as an outsider who was with-
out the supportive kinship network that was so prevalent in coverage of
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Jorgensen’s case. Similarly, other newspapers often focused on McLeod’s
financial hardships in order to highlight the questionable choices she was
forced to make in order to support herself. The San Francisco Examiner, for
example, reported that McLeod told the paper “that she doesn’t look
forward to night club work, but thinks it necessary to pay bills. . . . She said
she is looking forward to married life and a home of her own.”21 Here, it is
clear that McLeod strove to position herself in relation to normative white
womanhood, but the mass circulation press chose to deemphasize
McLeod’s dreams of domestic bliss and instead highlighted her lack of
middle-class respectability. Herein lies one of the most significant distinc-
tions between the ways in which Jorgensen’s and McLeod’s stories were
told in the mainstream press: whereas Jorgensen’s story was most often
articulated through her own voice or within interviews of her parents,
McLeod’s story was rarely articulated in her own voice, and newspaper
editors virtually always had the last word.
Jorgensen published an autobiographical series in the widely circu-
lated American Weekly magazine, but McLeod’s autobiography was relegated
to the pages of Mr. magazine. Mr. was one of a plethora of “exploitation”
magazines popular in the 1950s, featuring a blend of pinups, cartoons, and
personality profiles, often emphasizing the unusual or bizarre.22 Despite
the fact that the readers of Mr. were accustomed to scandalized stories of
sex, the tone of McLeod’s autobiographical account published there is
remarkably similar to much of Jorgensen’s autobiographical writing. In
particular, McLeod went to great lengths to articulate her distinction
from homosexuals and drag queens. McLeod narrated her transition in
part through an articulation of her distaste for the gay counterculture of
New Orleans. She explains that doctors in the United States refused her
surgery, suggesting instead that she “find such little happiness as I could in
life by going to one of the ‘colonies’ that abound in our large cities.” She
took this advice at first but found this solution unsatisfying, writing
I moved to the French Quarter of New Orleans, but my experiences there
were such as to convince me that I should definitely undertake the drastic
step of a sex change. I did not fit into the normal world and my whole
spirit rebelled against trying to live the life of the homosexuals.
I was appalled at their insincerity, insecurity, and promiscuity prac-
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ticed among them. I did feel a great sympathy for many of these young
men and women who I met, but I could find no peace of mind among
them.23
Similar to Jorgensen’s account of her disgust upon receiving the atten-
tions of male suitors prior to her transformation, this narrative aligned
McLeod’s morality with the majority of Americans in 1956 who felt that
homosexuality was a sin. Just as significantly, however, this passage also
highlights McLeod’s decision to get sex reassignment surgery as a result of
her allegiance to heteronormativity, whereas many might take it as an
indication of her sexual deviancy. Despite these normative investments,
however, McLeod’s story apparently lacked mainstream appeal; although
McLeod attempted to perform white womanhood, she failed to live up to
racialized gender expectations of respectability and domesticity, and thus
her story troubled the bi-gender system in ways that Jorgensen’s did not.
Perhaps as a result, McLeod’s story received far less attention in the main-
stream press than Jorgensen’s had, and what little press she did receive was
markedly negative in tone.
Tellingly, however, McLeod reemerged in the mainstream press in
1959 with reports of her marriage in Florida. Several articles were pub-
lished across the country (almost as many as were published as when her
sex change was first made public in 1954), and in each account, McLeod’s
identity as a respectable middle-class white woman was highlighted
through representations of her newly domestic nature. Many newspapers
published the same photograph of McLeod in her Miami apartment,
demurely looking into the camera, surrounded by the trappings of a
middle-class home.24 It seems that by settling down and marrying a white
man, McLeod was afforded the respectability of white womanhood that
earlier press had denied her. As Dreama Moon has written, “any white-
woman, regardless of class position, can aspire to become a ‘good (white)
girl’ through the acquisition of a racialized notion of bourgeois respectabil-
ity based on racial loyalty.”25 In this way, McLeod was afforded a brief
opportunity to inhabit the public identity of the “good transsexual”
through her alignment within the disciplining structure of heterosexual
marriage. Perhaps bolstering her claims as a “good transsexual” here was
the fact that just months before, Jorgensen’s attempt to secure a marriage
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license had been denied by the state of New York, the marriage license clerk
refusing since Jorgensen’s birth certificate still indicated that she was male.26
“Tamara Joined Paratroopers as Test of Manhood”
In November 1954, newspapers across the country reported that the
former Robert Rees, decorated World War II paratrooper and father of
two, had returned from Amsterdam a woman. On the surface, it would
seem that the story of Tamara Adel Rees was sensational enough to
attract the same kind of attention Jorgensen had received two years
before. However, after a brief flurry of attention within the mainstream
press, Rees embarked on a career as a burlesque dancer, and aside from
people who went to see her perform, very few ever heard of her after 1955.
However brief her stay in the public eye, the ways in which Rees narrated
her transformation within the mainstream press are significant as they
again reiterate the importance of heterosexuality within articulations of
transsexual acceptability in the mid-twentieth century.
The most substantive coverage of Rees’s story was a three-part auto-
biographical series published in New York’s Daily News in November of
1954. The series was published alongside numerous images of Rees, all of
which positioned Rees within domestic settings, and showed her perform-
ing tasks such as pouring tea, doing needlepoint, and painting her finger-
nails (fig. 2).27 These images suggested to readers the willingness of Rees to
assume her new roles as a patriotic domestic woman. However, these
images also displayed Rees’s large frame, dark hair, and lack of conven-
tional white feminine beauty, all of which made her body less intelligible
as a white woman than Jorgensen or McLeod had been before her.
Interestingly, in the text of her autobiographical series, Rees focused
on her past masculinity in order to assert her heterosexuality. She credited
her desire to prevent others from thinking of her as a homosexual as
compelling many of the decisions she made while male. In the first article
of the series, Rees reported that the reason she joined the paratroopers
wasn’t “that the flags were flying, or because I loved the sea, or anything
like that. My motive was just to keep people from thinking of me as a
homosexual. When they saw me in uniform, I thought, they’d think
instead, ‘Here’s a real man–he proved it.’”28 In the second installment of
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the series, Rees described her marriage to a woman in similar terms: “I was
sent to Camp McCall, N.C., where, in July of 1943, I married a Southern
girl. It wasn’t at all successful. She, I think, primarily wanted freedom
from her family. I felt that marriage would automatically clear me of the
homosexual implication that I have always bitterly resented.”29
Emily Skidmore 283
Fig. 2: Tamara Rees, posing with tea cups, as seen in the Daily News, November 1954. Photo
courtesy of New York Daily News Archive/New York Daily News/Getty images.
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Although this strategy to claim white womanhood was successful at
securing Rees several days on the front page of New York’s Daily News, her
story was quickly dropped by the mass circulation press, perhaps because it
held the potential to raise questions about “normal” Americans. Both
McLeod and Jorgensen articulated their heterosexuality by naturalizing
their femininity; by explaining that they had always “really” been women,
they positioned sex reassignment surgery as the only means through which
they could participate in the heterosexual liaisons they so desired. How-
ever, Rees’s focus on her part as a normative male disrupted this narrative
of inherent femaleness and threatened to reveal the performative nature of
both gender and heterosexuality. In addition, the fact that she was able to
succeed at the most “masculine” activities–such as paratrooping–suggested
that even the most seemingly “masculine” men might secretly hold cross-
gender identifications. Jorgensen and McLeod, on the other hand, claimed
white womanhood by not only asserting their heterosexuality but also by
simultaneously participating in the hegemonic discourse that pathologized
homosexuality and gender variance, a strategy that was apparently more
palatable to the U.S. mainstream.
“Mexico’s Hush-Hush Clinic”
One result of the collusion of transsexuality and whiteness was the further
collapse of gender deviance and nonwhiteness, a phenomenon that was
even evident in the locations mentioned in the mainstream press as
having performed sex reassignment surgeries. As Meyerowitz has noted,
some of the appeal of Jorgensen’s story came from the celebrated role of
science and medicine during the atomic age. Even for those who felt a bit
uneasy about sex reassignment surgery, the fact that science had made the
surgery possible was often toted as being a symbol of progress and innova-
tion.30 The mainstream press articulated these advances as emanating
exclusively from Europe, despite the fact that operations were also taking
place in Mexico, Morocco, and Japan; and Americans were traveling to
these locations for treatment as early as 1953.31 However, it was only when
a Mexican underwent surgery in Mexico City that the locale was discussed
as one offering such advanced medical technology.
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In May of 1954, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and New
York Sunday Mirror all reported the sex reassignment of thirty-year-old
Marta Olmos Ramiro, a native of Mexico City. Similar to the coverage of
Jorgensen and McLeod, in interviews Ramiro articulated her sex reassign-
ment surgery as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, one that she hoped
would include marriage and children. The San Francisco Chronicle reported
that she felt “feminine impulses” and “liked to cook and sew and keep the
house. . . . Although I was strong, I didn’t rough house with the other
boys. I finally took this step to end my torment.”32 However, Ramiro’s
coverage within the mainstream press was very different from that of the
white transwomen discussed earlier, and no credit was given to the skill of
the Mexican doctors who performed Ramiro’s sex reassignment surgery.
Throughout the mainstream press, linguistic markers were deployed to
signal their lack of professional credentials, with the San Francisco Examiner
referring to them as “interns” and the New York Sunday Mirror calling them
“Mexican Medics.”33 In this way, Ramiro’s status as a woman was rendered
less legitimate because the doctors who performed the surgery were ren-
dered as illegitimate, a theme that became even more prevalent when
Ramiro’s story was told in the tabloid magazine Whisper.34
Indeed, Ramiro’s visibility within the mainstream press was very brief,
but her story did reappear in the April 1955 issue of Whisper in an article
titled “Mexico’s Hush-Hush Clinic: Sex Surgery While You Wait!” Ac-
cording to the magazine, news of Ramiro’s sex reassignment surgery
“kicked up a fuss in his homeland” which “inspired several Mexican legis-
latures to consider making their country a haven for guys and gals who
want to be gals and guys.” Whisper suggested that Ramiro’s transformation
motivated the Mexican government to consider loosening legal regula-
tions controlling sex reassignment surgery in order to attract tourists,
reporting: “Mexico has embarked on a determined campaign to steal
Copenhagen’s crown as the mecca for mixed-up kids who don’t like what
the doc wrote on their birth certificates.” Whisper suggested to its readers
that this campaign was already underway and devoted the bulk of the arti-
cle to efforts being made by Mexican lawmakers and doctors to cater to
U.S. clients. The article discussed a clinic (or “fairy factory”) operated by
Alfredo Martinez that allegedly boasted rapid service and low cost. While
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Whisper reported that Mexican lawmakers were seeking to create looser
regulations on sex reassignment surgery, the magazine also noted the
various strategies undertaken by doctors at Martinez’s clinic to raise
awareness within the United States. In particular, Whisper reported that
when well-known San Francisco millionaire Bunny Breckinridge an-
nounced his desire to change his sex in early 1955, Dr. Martinez’s Mexico
City clinic offered him free treatment in hopes that “the power of his
name might attract other gilt-edge customers.”35
As this brief summary makes clear, despite the fact that images of
Ramiro were featured prominently within the Whisper article, the particu-
larities of her case were cast as irrelevant as the magazine used Ramiro’s
body to link gender and sexual deviance with nonwhiteness. In fact, the
article mentions that Rafael Sandoval Camacho, one of the surgeons who
treated Ramiro, “disclaims any connection with or knowledge of the
clinic described in this report.” Sex reassignment surgery is cast as com-
pletely illegitimate, and all those who seek treatment are cast as homosex-
uals–both before and after. This link is made explicit by both the dual
focus on Breckinridge (an openly gay man) and Ramiro and by the will-
ingness of Mexican politicians to open their borders to “jasmine jokers.”36
This article is significant here for many reasons, particularly in the
ways in which it articulates race and nation through tropes of sexuality.
Throughout the article, Mexico is cast as a space welcoming to transsex-
uals–a characteristic not celebrated as being indicative of Mexican open-
mindedness but scandalized as evidence of Mexican depravity. For
example, Whisper reports that
many of the re-tread “he-to-shes” refuse to go home after their surgery,
fearing the deluge of jibes, jokes and embarrassing questions which en-
gulfed Christine Jorgensen when she returned to her native land.
Mexico has provided an answer for that, too, in the form of Cuerna-
vaca, the noted quickie divorce capital which is now rapidly becoming a
pansy paradise. Faintly alarmed over the influx of mincing males in recent
months, Mexico’s federal police recently estimated that the comparatively
small resort city now boasts a population of some 5,000 gay guys.37
Here, no distinctions are made between homosexuals and transsexuals, as
both groups are cast as equally deviant. Both groups are welcomed by
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physicians and law officials in Mexico–indicating to the reader that the
Mexican people as a whole are also sexually deviant.
As such, Mexico is portrayed as a space of sexual deviance, a character-
ization that falls directly in line with the tropes pioneered in imperial
travel narratives, wherein colonized spaces were frequently cast as spaces
of moral depravity, signaled by improper sexual and gender formations.
And just as in imperial travel narratives, Whisper magazine’s discussion of
“Mexico’s Hush-Hush Clinic” was concerned not simply with defining
Mexican immorality but also with defining the depravity of sexual and
gender deviants within the United States. As Ann Laura Stoler has written,
Discourses of sexuality do more than define the distinctions of the bour-
geois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic, they have
mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedi-
mented discourses on sexual morality could redraw the “interior fron-
tiers” of national communities, frontiers that were secured through–and
sometimes in collusion with–the boundaries of race. . . . They marked out
those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were
worthy of recognition and whose were not.38
Thus, Whisper’s account of “Mexico’s Hush-Hush Clinic” cast U.S. gay
people and transsexuals as deviants unworthy of citizenship through
racialized tropes of sexual morality. However, the circulation of this
discourse highlights the stakes of Jorgensen, McLeod, and Rees’s rejection
of homosexuality in their self-presentation; given that sexual deviance was
often articulated through racialized tropes of difference, it was all the
more vital that they present themselves as heterosexual in order to legiti-
mate their status as white women.
“New Life Opens for Local Dancer”
Significantly, racialized tropes of sexuality do not produce all nonwhite
bodies in the same way. Popular representations of Asian Americans, for
example, also reflect the legacy of imperial discourse, and yet the effect is
quite different than in the previous example. Western Orientalizing images
have consistently characterized the East as female, with a connotation of
both submission and sexual invitation. As a result, Asian men have been
feminized and considered to be “not real men,” and Asian women have
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been the subject of many an imperialist fantasy, exoticized for their
supposed availability and willingness to serve.39 According to this racialized
logic, in the mid-twentieth century, Asian American transsexuals ap-
peared to be less of a threat to the bi-gender system, as their race aided in
the legibility of their bodies as female. However, given the nonwhiteness of
Asian American transsexuals, mainstream media coverage that acknowl-
edged the femininity of Asian American transsexuals required the simul-
taneous deployment of the racist stereotype of the “exotic” Asian woman
in order to register the distinction between this form of femininity and
white womanhood. This trope is clearly evident in the 1964 coverage of
the sex reassignment surgery of Pacific Islander Laverne Peterson. As she
was not white or blonde, it likely would have seemed out of place if
reporters deployed the same effusive commentary on her beauty as
Jorgensen had received, and yet it is clear from Peterson’s press coverage
that reporters were not completely hostile to accepting her as feminine.
In Honolulu’s Sunday Star-Bulletin and Advertiser’s account, Peterson’s
identity is invoked as one of an enigmatic performer, a characterization
even reflected in the caption to her pre- and postoperative photographs in
the article “New Life Opens for Local Dancer.”40 The article switched back
and forth between Peterson’s chosen female name, Laverne, and her stage
name, Linn Loo, as if to characterize Peterson’s lives on- and offstage as
equally performative. Her exotic nature was portrayed as being reflected
in places of employment: the Tahitian Hut, the Kon Tiki Room in the
Chicago Hilton, and the Forbidden City. She is described not as Jorgensen
had been described, as a “natural” woman, but, rather, as a “sexual enigma.”
When Peterson herself was quoted, however, she articulated a far different
version of her subjecthood, aligning herself along the lines of normative
white womanhood rather than in the racialist tropes deployed by the Star
Bulletin reporter. Peterson reported that she wanted to “live a normal,
quiet, happy life. I’ll stay in show business maybe a year–no more. In this
business your life isn’t your own. I want a normal life.”41 Here, Peterson
presented herself as a respectable woman who seeks to improve her life by
leaving her job as a dancer and settling down with a husband.
The Star-Bulletin refused to let this image be the last word, however,
and the photographs published alongside the article clearly invoke racial-
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ized gender expectations. In her postoperative photograph, Peterson is
posed seductively holding the trunk of a tree with her long dark hair
pulled around her left shoulder, as if to accentuate its length and sheen
(fig. 3). She is wearing a coy smile and a tight tank top that displays her
Emily Skidmore 289
Fig. 3: Laverne Peterson, as seen in the Sunday Star-Bulletin and Advertiser, November 1964. Reprinted
with permission from the Honolulu Advertiser.
12 Emily Skidmore PICS.qxd 8/29/11 6:44 PM Page 289
moderately sized breasts. In contrast to her preoperative photo, her gaze
does not address the viewer, and she is thus positioned more as an object
of sexual interest rather than as a subject. Whereas posed photographs of
white transsexuals such as Jorgensen, McLeod, and Rees in the 1950s were
virtually all taken in domestic settings, the outdoor setting of Peterson’s
portrait seems to accentuate her exotic nature, while the coyness of her
presentation harkens back to Orientalist representations of Asian women.
It would seem that Peterson’s past as a male did not inhibit her availability
as a subject of sexual interest for heterosexual men; by invoking Orien-
talist tropes of the exotic nature of Asian women, she was depicted as no
less of a sexual enigma than all Asian women.
“Why I Could Never Marry a White Man”
Thus far, this article has focused on representations of transsexuality
within the mainstream and tabloid press. Significantly, however, the
African American press, beginning in the 1950s, was covering transgender
issues in a much different way than the white mainstream press.42 Em-
blematic of this is the 1966 coverage of transwoman Delisa Newton in the
African American magazine Sepia. Newton not only was on the cover of
the April issue, but the two-part series, titled “From Man to Woman,” was
advertised in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender.43 In this
autographical account of Newton’s life, Sepia afforded her the space to
articulate her experiences and her desire for acceptance in her own words.
Significantly, one of the things that Newton highlights in narrating
her life is her proclivity toward domesticity, a tendency that she dates back
to her early childhood. She writes, “At first, mama would shoo me out
into the garden of our home. . . . Finally she got used to having me
around her, and she got to like it. To this day, I have kept up my house-
keeping skill; it was good early training.”44 The photographs accompany-
ing Newton’s articles also highlight her domesticity; in one photograph,
she is shown wearing an apron and smiling happily at the camera, the
caption declaring: “A picture of domesticity, Delisa sweeps the floor of her
apartment” (fig. 4). Other photos show her dressed in form-fitting dresses
and furs, some of which appear to be promotional photographs for her
nightclub act “Queen of the Blues.” Even in these publicity shots,
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however, she presents herself as a demure
woman and not a sexy stripper.
Newton’s emphasis on domesticity
reads very similarly to the autographical
writings of Jorgensen, McLeod, and Rees,
and yet it marks her series as distinct from
Sepia’s coverage of other African American
women. Unlike white mainstream publica-
tions wherein images of women centered
on the roles of mothers and housewives,
Sepia had, from its inception in 1945,
depicted women in a variety of roles and
often featured stories of African American
career women and entertainers.45 This stan-
dard remained in the 1960s, and within 1966
alone, model Mitty Lawrence, dancer Lola
Falana, singer Lena Horne, stage actress
Diana Sands, singer Dionne Warwick, and
actress Carole Cole were all featured on Sepia
covers. Within each of the accompanying
articles, Sepia focused on these women’s
careers and rarely published images of them
performing domestic chores. Thus, the fact
that Newton portrayed herself visually as exclusively domestic is very
significant, as it suggests that, given her identity as a transsexual, the stakes
for her appearing respectable were much higher than with biological
African American women who appeared in Sepia.
Newton’s performance of domesticity should not be read as an act of
capitulating to white standards of respectability, however. Newton por-
trayed herself as embodying the space of bourgeois respectability, and yet
from that space, she launched powerful critiques against white supremacy.
In fact, one of the dominant themes within Newton’s second installment
of her autobiography was the impact racism had on her transition.
The article opens:
Emily Skidmore 291
Fig. 4: Delisa Newton as she appeared
in Sepia magazine, April 1966.
12 Emily Skidmore PICS.qxd 8/29/11 6:44 PM Page 291
Because I am a Negro it took me twice as long to get my sex change opera-
tion as it would have a white person. Because I am a Negro many doctors
showed me little sympathy and understanding. “You people are too
emotional for such an ordeal,” one doctor told me.
But finding medical attention wasn’t the only problem complicated by
the color of my skin. Even with my college and nursing education, I
couldn’t get a good, steady job to raise money for the operation.46
Thus, by embodying what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called the
“politics of respectability,” Newton was able to illustrate to Sepia readers
that she was not a gender deviant and protest white supremacy simulta-
neously.47 In extending Higginbotham’s insights, it is useful here to
employ José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” in thinking
through the ways in which Newton narrated her body to Sepia readers.
Muñoz writes: “Disidentification is [a] mode of dealing with dominant
ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor
strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and
against dominant ideology.”48 Indeed, it was through an embodiment of
white norms of respectability that Newton was able to launch a critique
against white supremacy. In addition, by highlighting the impact of racism
upon her story, Newton narrated her story in a way that many African
American readers likely could identify with, even if they approached her
story with some trepidation. This apparently was an effective strategy, as
Sepia’s published letters to the editor indicate that Newton’s series was
received very well by the magazine’s readership.49
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Newton’s story was discussed very differently
outside of the African American press. In fact, the only other publication
in which Newton’s story was published was the National Insider, a tabloid
magazine sold in supermarkets nationwide beginning in 1962. The cover-
age of Newton’s story here was very different than it was in Sepia, as illus-
trated by the inflammatory 1965 headlines: “My Lover Beat Me” and “Why
I Could Never Marry a White Man.”50 The articles accompanying these
headlines portrayed Newton in a way that conformed to hegemonic
images of African American women as oppositional to white woman-
hood; Newton was depicted as sexually deviant and incapable of maintain-
ing a monogamous heterosexual relationship.51 Seemingly, the anticipated
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reader of the National Insider was not interested in seeing Newton posing
with a broom but was anxious to read about her experiences with domes-
tic violence and interracial sex.52 Whereas Sepia provided Newton the space
to articulate her story in her own words, the editors of the National Insider
narrated her story for her, shaping it to conform to mid-America’s racial-
ized gender expectations.
However, the National Insider’s scandalized portrayal of Newton should
not be blamed entirely on its readership’s appetite for stories of African
American women as victims of domestic violence; rather, these represen-
tations must be considered within the larger field of representations of
race and gender in the mid-twentieth century. This period was one of
tremendous racial turmoil within the United States, as white mobilization
against the black freedom movement powerfully illustrated how invested
many whites were in maintaining the status quo. White anxiety about
protecting racial boundaries was often expressed through the policing of
gender and sexuality, as illustrated by the brutal lynching in 1955 of four-
teen-year-old Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman.53
Acts of violence against black men (or boys, in Till’s case) were normalized
in part through the demonization of black masculinity within popular
culture.54 Indeed, black men were often represented as antithetical to white
women; whereas black men were cast as violent, incapable of controlling
their emotions or sexual drive, and uneducated, white women were cast
as chaste, moral, and refined. To mainstream audiences well acquainted
with these images, it seems likely that African American men would have
been perceived as poor candidates for “passable” women. The visual disso-
nance produced by black men inhabiting the normative scripts of femi-
ninity–scripts created in reference to whiteness–holds the potential to
highlight the performativity of race and gender. Thus, in order to natural-
ize white womanhood as the universal ideal (and thereby maintain the
legitimacy of strict racial boundaries), it was vital that the mainstream
press either ignore cases such as Newton’s or treat such individuals as
objects of ridicule for attempting to present themselves as “real” women.
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Conclusion
This article has illustrated that the interrogation of race and racism must
be central to the study of media representations of transsexuality. Thus
far, scholarship on the history of transsexuality in the United States has
focused on Jorgensen to the exclusion of other transwomen and has failed
to interpret the significance of her whiteness. This elision has allowed for
the public discourse of transsexuality to be analyzed as if it were only
about gender, whereas, as this article has shown, narratives of transsexual-
ity are always already about race, class, and sexuality as well as gender. By
placing representations of Jorgensen in conversation with the representa-
tions of other transwomen in the postwar period, I have shown that
Jorgensen’s ability to “humanize” her story was dependent upon her
performance of the scripts of white, middle-class womanhood.
Indeed, it was not just Jorgensen, but also Rees and McLeod, who, as
public pioneers of transsexuality, had the opportunity to put forth an in-
clusive display of gender variance. Instead, they each sought to claim an
identity “just like” other women, and in calling upon the notion of a
universal sisterhood, they conflated transsexuality with whiteness, hetero-
sexuality, and middle-classness.55 This maneuver should not be viewed as a
personal failure on the part of these transwomen but, rather, should be
taken as evidence of the strong disciplinary mechanisms within the cul-
tural ideology of race, gender, and sexuality. As Hillary Harris has written,
“Whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulat-
ing property and keeping it from others.”56 Thus, as public representations
of transsexuality became visible through whiteness, white transwomen
were motivated to articulate transsexuality in exclusionary ways in order
to protect their respectability because, as Harris explains, the ideological
power of white womanhood (and the bi-gender system that it supports)
rests in large part in the exclusive nature of its construction.
The implications of this exclusivity can be seen not only in representa-
tions of the white transwomen discussed here but also within the repre-
sentations of transwomen of color. Whereas Jorgensen’s whiteness enabled
her ascension to the category of “woman,” Peterson’s Pacific Islander
heritage ensured that she would be characterized not as a “real” woman
but rather as a “sexual enigma.” Peterson was not ridiculed in the main-
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stream press for her desire for sex reassignment, perhaps due in part to the
ways in ways Asian men have been effeminized within mainstream U.S.
popular culture. In contrast, African American and Latino men have both
been hypermasculinized in the media, making their bodies virtually
incompatible with mainstream expectations of femininity. As a result,
when Latina or African American transwomen appeared in the media in
the mid-twentieth century, they did so as objects of ridicule, as evidenced
by the coverage of Ramiro and Newton in the tabloid press.
In order to think through the implications of these insights, it is
productive to draw upon Lisa Duggan’s notion of homonormativity. Dug-
gan defines homonormativity as “a politics that does not contest domi-
nant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and
sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay
constituency, and a gay culture anchored in domesticity and consump-
tion.”57 Although Duggan defines homonormativity with specific refer-
ence to gay culture and articulates the notion as having a particular
relationship with neoliberalism, the concept is nonetheless still useful
here and provides a rubric for understanding how certain queer subjects
can be produced as acceptable while other queer subjects are produced as
pathological. In addition, it allows for a more complicated understanding
of queer subjectivity in relation to dominant power structures, highlight-
ing contingency and normative investments.
In Joanne Meyerowitz’s pathbreaking How Sex Changed: A History of Trans-
sexuality in the United States, she argues that the emergence of Jorgensen in the
1950s destabilized gender norms and introduced the public to a more fluid
understanding of the relationship between sex and gender. However, as I
have sought to illustrate here, Jorgensen and other white transwomen
who appeared in the mainstream press in the mid-twentieth century artic-
ulated their acceptability through their performance of the scripts of white
womanhood and by implication, normative investments in heterosexual-
ity, consumerism, and white supremacy. Their ascension to respectability
was dependent upon the subjugation of other forms of gender variance,
particularly drag queens and homosexuals. Jorgensen, McLeod, and Rees
created a narrative of the “good transsexual,” and this narrative helped to
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296 Emily Skidmore
support the continued dominance of the bi-gender system and gender
norms forged in white heteronormativity.
In this article, I seek to make both historical and historiographical
interventions. I argue that it is vital that historians and theorists grapple
with the normative investments contained within representations of early
transsexuals in order to understand that the ways in which transsexuality
is articulated as a phenomenon are not only about gender but also race,
class, and sexuality. However, the narrative of the “good transsexual” was
not something that only the mid-twentieth-century mainstream press
created, as historians and other scholars within transgender studies also
bear responsibility, often being motivated, as Dan Irving has recently
noted, “by efforts to construct proper trans social subjects that can integrate
successfully into mainstream North American society.”58 Susan Stryker
has also noted this tendency within academic scholarship, noting that
information on the 1966 Compton Cafeteria riot in San Francisco’s
Tenderloin district–a riot led by drag queens in response to police harass-
ment–has been discussed most frequently in public history works by
nonacademic writers and disseminated through community-based publi-
cations rather than through professional academic venues.59 Thus, in
taking note of how the narrative of the “good transsexual” was con-
structed in the mid-twentieth century, it is vital that we as scholars inter-
rogate its implications within our scholarship; as the narrative of the
“good transsexual” aided in the ability of certain transbodies to become
visible and articulate their acceptability, other gender variant bodies were
subjugated in the mainstream press, and as such, are more difficult for
researchers to uncover. As I have sought to illustrate here, this invisibility
was constructed, and therefore researchers must pay as much attention to
the structures regulating visibility (both within today’s archives and within
yesterday’s representations) as we do to the representations themselves.
N o t e s
This article is the winner of the 2008 Feminist Studies Award for the best article submitted
by a graduate student.
1. In this article, I focus only on the media discourse around male-to-female transsexuals
12 Emily Skidmore PICS.qxd 8/29/11 6:44 PM Page 296
as they were far more visible than female-to-male transsexuals in the mid-twentieth
century, and thus in many ways transsexuality was first understood as a phenomenon
that affected only those born male. I use the term “transwomen” to refer to male-to-
female transsexuals in order to highlight the specificity of this discussion, as the
dynamics regulating the visibility of female-to-male transbodies are much different.
2. I use the term “white womanhood” to refer to the norms of white femininity in
order to signify both their disciplinary ideological implications as well as their institu-
tional power.
3. See Joanne Meyerowitz, “Sex Change and the Popular Press: Historical Notes on
Transsexuality in the United States, 1930-1955,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
4, no. 2 (1998): 159-87. Lisa Duggan interrogates the formation of what she terms the
“lesbian love murder story” in the 1890s, and her insights on the relationships
between the mass circulation press and the formation of social identities are particu-
larly useful here. See her Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 33-34.
4. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 395.
5. Often in this article I will focus on the popular press rather than more “serious” news
magazines because of the broad reach of many popular daily newspapers. For exam-
ple, in 1952, New York’s Daily News had an average daily circulation of 2,251,430, well
over four times that of the New York Times (507,281) and almost three times that of the
weekly circulation of Newsweek (851,036). See N.W. Ayer & Son, Inc (comp.), A.W. Ayer
& Son’s Directory: Newspapers and Periodicals, 1952, ed. R. Bruce Jones (Philadelphia: N.W.
Ayer & Son, 1953), 695, 710.
6. Lizabeth Cohen, The Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 126. For literature on gender roles in the 1950s, see
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic
Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar
America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); and Beth Bailey, Sex
in the Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
7. Craig Loftin, “Unacceptable Mannerisms: Gender Anxieties, Homosexual Activism,
and Swish in the United States, 1945-1965,” Journal of Social History 40 (Spring 2007): 577.
8. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 20.
9. “Former Boy Real Girl, Writer Says,” San Francisco Examiner, 13 Feb. 1953, Christine
Jorgensen Scrapbook, Louise Lawrence Collection, Kinsey Institute for Research in
Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (hereafter referred to as LLC and KI).
10. Theo Wilson, “Folks Proud of GI Who Became Blonde Beauty,” Daily News, 1 Dec.
1952, Christine Jorgensen Scrapbook, LLC.
11. Christine Jorgensen, “The Story of My Life,” American Weekly, 15 Mar. 1953, 13. For
circulation information, see A.W. Ayer & Son’s Directory, 665.
12. Fay Hammond, “Christine’s Femininity Charms Interviewer,” Los Angeles Times, 9 May
1953, Christine Jorgensen Scrapbook, LLC.
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13. Sally Quinn, “Christine,” Washington Post and Times Herald, 8 July 1970, B1.
14. Jorgensen, “Story of My Life.”
15. Christine Jorgensen, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (New York: Paul
Ericksson, 1967), 83.
16. Roy Ald, “Christine Jorgensen,” True Confessions, September 1954, 64.
17. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 96-97.
18. “In Christine’s Footsteps,” Time, 8 Mar. 1954, 63.
19. “Charlotte Home, Battles Photog Like the Charles She Used to Be,” Daily News, 14
Apr. 1954; “Untitled,” New York Sunday Times, 9 May 1954, all from Christine Jorgensen
Scrapbook, LLC.
20. “Ex-GI Changes Sex after Surgery,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 Feb. 1954, B2.
21. “Charlotte Would Wed,” San Francisco Examiner, 25 June 1954, Christine Jorgensen
Scrapbook, LLC.
22. Alan Betrock, Unseen America: The Greatest Cult Exploitation Magazines, 1950-1966 (New
York: Shake Books, 1990), 57.
23. Charlotte McLeod, “I Changed My Sex,” Mr., December 1956, 12, Transsexualism
Vertical File (folder 1), KI.
24. “Sex-Change GI a Bride,” News-Call Bulletin, 13 Nov. 1959; “Sex Change, Ex-GI Now Is a
Bride,” New York Herald Tribune, 14 Nov. 1959, both in Transsexualism Vertical File
(folder 2), KI.
25. Dreama Moon, “White Enculturation and Bourgeois Ideology: The Discursive
Production of ‘Good (White) Girls,’” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed.
Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith Martin (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999), 182.
26. “Bars Marriage Permit,” New York Times, 4 Apr. 1959, 20.
27. Tamara Adel Rees and Henry Lee, “Tamara Tells Her Story: A Boy Wanted to Grow
Up as a Girl” (11 Nov. 1954, 12) and “Tamara Joined Paratroopers as Test of
Manhood” (12 Nov. 1954, 3, 24), both in the Daily News.
28. “Tamara Tells Her Story.”
29. “Tamara Joined Paratroopers as Test of Manhood,” Daily News, 34.
30. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 52.
31. Louise Lawrence to Harry Benjamin, 23 Feb. 1953, 1, Correspondence on Christine
Jorgensen and Cross Dressing, 1953, Harris Whefled Collection, Bullough Collection
on Human Sexuality, California State University, Northridge.
32. “Male Clerk Now Wants to Be a Mother,” San Francisco Chronicle, 7 May 1954, Christine
Jorgensen Scrapbook, LLC.
33. “Mexican Medics in Miracle Make-Over Turn Him into Her,” New York Sunday Mirror,
30 May 1954; “Surgery by Interns Turns Mexican Man into Woman,” San Francisco
Examiner, 6 May 1954, both in Christine Jorgensen Scrapbook, LLC.
34. Whisper magazine was known for its features on adventures and oddities and had a
circulation in the mid-1950s of about 600,000. It began in 1946 as a girlie magazine, and
pinups were still a common feature by 1955, so it appears as though the imagined
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Whisper reader was a heterosexual male. For information on Whisper, see Betrock,
Unseen America, 111.
35. Juan Morales, “Mexico’s Hush-Hush Secret: Sex Surgery While You Wait!” Whisper,
April 1955, 24-26, 43, Transsexualism Vertical File (folder 2), KI.
36. Ibid., 25.
37. Ibid., 25.
38. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 7-8.
39. For a discussion of the feminization of Asian males in U.S. culture, see, for example,
David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001); and Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized
Asian in Gay Porn Video,” in How Do I Look? ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press,
1991), 145-68. For examples of literature on media exoticizing of Asian women, see
Marina Heung, “Representing Ourselves: Films and Videos by Asian American/
Canadian Women,” in Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities, ed.
Angharad N. Valdivia (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 82-104.
40. Honolulu’s Star-Bulletin was founded in 1882 by J.W. Robertson and Company, and
from its inception, its political views were aligned with the interests of white capital
rather than of indigenous Hawaiians. In 1964, the paper was owned by a group of
local investors headed by Elizabeth Farrington, a former Republican representative.
For information on newspapers in Hawaii, see Patricia Leigh Gibbs, “Alternative
Things Considered: A Comparative Political Economic Analysis of Honolulu
Mainstream and Alternative Print News Communication and Organization” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Hawai’i, 1999).
41. Honolulan, “Unhappy as a Male, Becomes a Woman through Surgery,” Sunday Star-
Bulletin and Advertiser, 1 Nov. 1964, A14, in Transsexual Vertical File (folder 2), KI.
42. See, for example, Willie Sabb, “My Mother Was a Man,” Ebony, June 1953, 75; “Male
Dancer Becomes Danish Citizen to Change His Sex,” Jet, 25 June 1953, 26; “Male Shake
Dancer Plans to Change Sex, Wed GI in Europe,” Jet, 18 June 1953, 24-25.
43. Display Ad 12, Chicago Defender, 26 Mar. 1966, national edition, 4.
44. Delisa Newton, “From Man to Woman,” Sepia, April 1966, 9.
45. Sherilyn Brandenstein, “Prominent Roles of Black Womanhood in Sepia Record, 1952-
1954” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1989), 77-78.
46. Delisa Newton, “From Man to Woman,” Sepia, May 1966, 66.
47. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist
Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185-229.
48. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 11-12.
49. See John W. Williams and Mrs. M.L. Anderson, letters to the editor, both in Sepia, July
1966, 6; and J.A. Wilmington, letter to the editor, Sepia, May 1966, 6.
50. Delisa Newton, “My Lover Beat Me,” National Insider, 20 June 1965, 4-5, and “Why I
Could Never Marry a White Man,” National Insider, 18 July 1965, 17.
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51. For a discussion of the construction of the pathological black female in the 1960s, see
Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 15-42, 78-102.
52. The National Insider was founded in 1962, and while its weekly readership averaged
between 65,000 and 70,000 throughout the mid-1960s, millions more people viewed its
headlines while waiting in line in supermarkets. See Bill Sloan, “I Watched a Wild Hog
Eat My Baby!” A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact (New York:
Prometheus Books, 2001), 69.
53. Although many scholars have discussed the murder of Emmett Till, Davis Houck’s
“Killing Emmett,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 225-62, does an excellent job
of discussing the role of newspapers in shaping the conditions that allowed both his
murder and for his murderers to be acquitted.
54. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentricism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 137-204.
55. Emi Koyama makes a similar claim in her essay, “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? The
Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed.
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 698-705.
56. Hillary Harris, “Failing ‘White Woman’: Interrogating the Performance of Respect-
ability,” Theatre Journal 42, no. 2 (2000): 185.
57. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 50.
58. Dan Irving, “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as
Productive,” Radical History Review, no. 100 (Winter 2008): 39.
59. Susan Stryker, “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity,” Radical
History Review, no. 100 (Winter 2008): 153.
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