Constructing the "Good Transsexual": Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Press

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 Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 270 EmilySkidmore 271 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 272 EmilySkidmore 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...