Christine Jorgensen Biography

Important LGBTQ+ Activists

Christine Jorgensen

Education:The Progressive School of Photography | Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant School

Know For: Pioneering gender reassignment

Birth Date: May 30, 1926 | The Bronx, New York City, U.S.

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Early Life of Christine Jorgensen

Jorgensen was the second child of carpenter and contractor George William Jorgensen, and his wife Florence Davis Hansen, and was given a male name at birth. She was raised in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City and baptized a Lutheran. She later described herself as having been a "frail, blond, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games".

Jorgensen graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in 1945 and was soon drafted into the U.S. Army at the age of 19. After being discharged from the Army, she attended Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, New York, the Progressive School of Photography in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant School in New York City. She also worked briefly for Pathé News.

Christine's Gender Transition

Returning to New York after military service, and increasingly concerned over, as one obituary later called it, a "lack of male physical development", Christine Jorgensen heard about sex reassignment surgery. She began taking estrogen in the form of ethinylestradiol and started researching the surgery with the help of Joseph Angelo, the husband of a classmate at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant School. Jorgensen intended to go to Sweden, where the only doctors in the world who then performed the surgery were located. During a stopover in Copenhagen to visit relatives, she met Christian Hamburger, a Danish endocrinologist and specialist in rehabilitative hormonal therapy. Jorgensen stayed in Denmark and underwent hormone replacement therapy under Hamburger's direction. She chose the name Christine in honor of Hamburger.