In 2016, Ipsos and BuzzFeed developed questions for online surveys together with the Williams Institute. The aim was to understand the attitudes to transgender persons in different countries. In general, a majority of those surveyed believe that transgender individuals are a natural occurence (52%). There are, however, big differences between countries with Eastern European ones seeming to have the most difficulty in understanding the concept of transgender.
In Hungary, 43% believe that being transgender is a form of mental illness, in Serbia it is 43%, in Poland 41% (compared to 9% in Spain, 11% in Italy, 13% in France and Argentina). Among western countries, the U.S. is the most likely one to believe transgender individuals have a mental illness (32%), that they are committing a sin (32%), and that society has gone too far in accepting people who dress and live as one sex while having been born another (36%). There is a majority (60%) stating that they would like their country to support and protect transgender people more actively (70% in Spain, 67% in Argentina). Hungary is the least likely to agree (41%), followed by Poland (39%). 70% of people around the world say that their government should protect transgender people from discrimination. Argentina is the most likely to agree (84%), Poland the least like to agree (51%).
As the survey was carried out online, there are limitations to the generalisation of the results (composition of the sample). They are, nevertheless, interesting as the self-selection of participants took place in all countries. The results show the cultural impact on the attitude people have to transgender men and women. More: Global Attitudes Towards Transgender People
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photograph taken in Chicago in 1975 by the great Vivian Maier via
"I am still the same old “Brud,” but Nature made a mistake, which I have had corrected, and I am now your daughter." Christine Jorgensen
"Jorgensen eventually moved from current event to yesterday's news, but as other stories of sex change appeared and reappeared, the media reminded the public that manhood, womanhood, and the boundaries between them were neither as obvious nor as impermeable as they once had seemed."
Meyerowitz, 2002
Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989) was born George William Jorgensen Jr. and became the first "transgender celebrity" in the U.S. As a teenager, Jorgensen became aware that he was trapped in the wrong body and identified himself "as a woman who happened to be in a man's body" or was "lost between the two sexes". In the 1940s, he came across an article about the Danish doctor Christian Hamburger who experimented with gender therapy by testing hormones on animals. After having served in the Army, Jorgensen headed to Copenhagen. There, Hamburger diagnosed him as transsexual and encouraged George William Jorgensen to take on a female identity and to dress as a woman in public. Jorgensen started taking hormones in 1950 and was also assessed by Georg Stürup, a psychiatrist who successfully petitioned the Danish government "to allow castration for the purposes of the operation." After one year of hormone therapy, Jorgensen "went under the knife"; the transition was completed in 1952 (via and via).
Jorgensen took her surgeon's forename to form her own name and returned to the U.S. as Christine Jorgensen, where she was greeted with fascination, admiration, curiosity and respect by the media and the public. Hundreds of reporters were waiting for her at the airport"ignoring even the presence of a member of the Danish royal family on the same airplane". Tabloids sensationalised her transsexualism ("Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty"). She had a series in the American Weekly that ran five weeks, five weeks during which the greatest circulation boost was reported; it became the number-one story of 1953. The series was translated into fourteen languages and distributed in seventy nations (Meyerowitz, 2002). The German "Der Spiegel" was rather sceptical. Its article from January 1955 read that GI George Jorgensen was alleged to be transformed into a woman.
At the beginning, there was hardly any hostility. Jorgensen, in fact, became a celebrity with hundreds of offers to appear on stages. She became an entertainer and performer in Las Vegas, Hollywood and New York, worked with professionals who explored "the transsexual phenomenon", lectured on the college circuit, wrote an autobiography that became a movie a few years later (via and via and via and via). She managed to turn "sex change" into a household term in the 1950s and became "Woman of the Year" (an award given by the Scandinavian Societies of Greater New York). With her story, the floodgates broke and a "torrent of new stories on other transsexuals made sex change a constant feature in the popular press" (Meyerowitz, 2002).
"After a few months, it became clear that Jorgensen had no desire to be a mother, and thus many called her womanhood into question. People became angry and frightened when confronted with a sexual identity that existed on a spectrum, not the male-female binary." (via)
Her popularity did not protect her from discrimination. Some reporters called her a freak or a pervert. Others observed her searching for "markers that connoted feminine and masculine, to articulate consciously the criteria that cast the person-on-the-street as either a woman or a man." One reporter admitted: "Since I knew she had once been a man, perhaps I was looking for masculine traits." A reporter of the New York Daily News wrote that Christine Jorgensen "husked 'Hello' and tossed off a Bloody Mary like a guy", commented the small size of her breasts and continued: "If you shut your eyes when she spoke you would have thought a man was talking. But her gestures with a cigaret were gracefully feminine. Her legs ... were smooth and trim. However, the planes of her face were flat and hard ... There was no hint of a beard." It was not only reporters who were not sure about her gender. The American Medical Association said that they would study her case as several doctors had questioned whether "it actually is possible for a man to be changed into a woman." When US-American doctors expressed outrage at the "mutilating surgery", the New York Post ran a six-part series claiming that she was a woman in name only and in fact a castrated male with no added female organs. Time magazine called her "an altered male", so did Newsweek and other magazines. Hostile stories began showing up. However, they could not really damage her popularity (Meyerowitz, 2002).
In 1959, she made headlines when she was denied a license to marry since her birth certificate said she was male (via). Her fiancé Howard J. Knox, a labour union statistician, was reported to have lost his job as soon as his engagement with Jorgensen became publicly known (via).
"By the custom of the day, which few questioned at the time, only a woman could marry a man. Where did Jorgensen, who had changed her assigned sex, fit into the categories of female and male? City Clerk Herman Katz, with six staff attorneys, eventually pointed to Jorgensen's birth certificate, which designated her sex a male. Jorgensen, backed by a lawyer of her own, produced her passport, which listed her sex as female, and a letter from her doctor, Harry Benjamin, attesting that 'she must be considered female'. The city of New York refused to issue the license. On April 4 the New York Times described the situation: 'Christine Jorgensen, an entertainer, was denied a marriage license yesterday on the ground of inadquate proof of being a female." (Meyerowitz, 2002)
Jorgensen, who never identified as gay, kept emphasising the difference between homosexual and transsexual - something new at the time. Before her transition, she even found homosexuality immoral as it was "a thing deeply alien" to her "religious attitudes and the highly magnified and immature moralistic views" she entertained at the time. In addition, she also feared "social segregation and ostracism" (Meyerowitz, 2002).
"Fear became part of me. Fear of being wrong. Fear of not fitting into a pattern."
Christine Jorgensen, cited in Meyerowitz (2002)
"We didn't start the sexual revolution but I think we gave it a good kick in the pants!" Christine Jorgensen
"I read The Well of Loneliness not long ago. It made me more determined than ever to fight for this victory. The answer to the problem must not lie in sleeping pills and suicides that look like accidents, or in jail sentences, but rather in life and the freedom to live it." Christine Jorgensen
"No one is 100 percent male or female. We all have elements of both male and female in our bodies. I just am more of a woman than I am a man." Christine Jorgensen
"I think that much that has been classified as abnormal for many years is becoming accepted as normal."
Christine Jorgensen, cited in Meyerowitz (2002)
"During World War II women had temporarily taken on jobs and responsibilities traditionally held by men. And psychiatrists for the armed forces had worried publicly about what they saw as deficient masculinity in surprising numbers of male recruits. In the postwar era the anxieties surrounding shifting gender roles broke into over cultural contests, with conservatives nostaligally invoking a golden age when women were women and men were men. Popular magazines began to describe a "crisis in masculinity", noted the growing number of women in the labor force, and fretted over the fragility of "sex roles."
In this context, the press reports on Jorgensen, with their endless comments on her appearance, enabled a public reinscription of what counted as masculine and feminine. But the story itself, in which an "ex-GI" became a "blonde beauty", inevitably undermined the attempt to restabilize gender through stereotype. Jorgensen posed, more fundamentally, the questions of how to define a woman and how to define a man. The coverage could provoke anxiety about the collapse of the seemingly natural categories of male and female, and it could also incite fantasies of crossing the boundary that divided women from men." (Meyerowitz, 2002)
- Meyerowitz, J. (2002) How Sex Changed. A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press
- photographs via and via and via and via
More:
- The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970): WATCH
- From Christine Jorgensen to Jan Morris: LINK
- America's Original Transgender Sweetheart: LINK
In the US, between 0.5% (via) and 4.6% of of the population report having made a suicide attempt. This is the general population. When it comes to gay, lesbian and bisexual adults, percentages range from 10 to 20%. Prevalence of lifetime suicide attempt is even more alarming among transgender individuals: On average, 41% of them have attempted to commit suicide. Percentages rise additionally if transgender individuals are younger (45%), male (46%), not hiding that they are transgender (50%), victimised at school (50-54%), discriminated against at work (50-59%), multiethnic (54%), American or Alaskan native (56%), living with a disability (55-65%), disrespected or harassed by law enforcement officers (57-61%), rejected (refers to treatment rejected) by doctors or health care providers (60%), subject to physical or sexual violence by law enforcement officers (60-70%), subject to physical or sexual violence at school (63-78%), subject to physcial or sexual violence at work (64-65%), living with a mental health condition (65%), or experiencing homelessness (69%) (Haas et al., 2014). Translating the last figures into words means that it is only a minority that does not attempt to commit suicide.
Family acceptance is strongly connected with positive outcomes while family rejection is connected with negative outcomes such as homelessness (three times higher), sex work (twice as high) and suicidality. These figures raise when domestic violence at the hands of a family member is added: four times the rate of homelessness, four times the rate of sex work, double the HIV rate and double the rate of suicide attempts (Grant et al., 2011).
According to the findings mentioned before, 57% of those whose families chose not to speak or spend time with them had attempted to put an end to their lives (Haas et al., 2014). On 28 December 2014, Leelah Alcorn, a teenager of 17 years who was born Joshua Ryan Alcorn, walked on the Interstate 71 in Ohio at 2.30 at night and was hit by a lorry. Before, she had scheduled her "Suicide Note" on Tumblr to be published at 5.30 p.m. In this note, she described her dilemma, her isolation, what if felt like to be rejected by her family, to hate oneself, and not to see a way out. Her suicide note attracted 82.271 views within 48 hours and by 31 December was reposted on Tumblr 200.000 times (via). Shortly after it was published, a great many people started sharing their stories with the #RealLiveTransAdult hashtag (e.g. "If you're a trans teen and you can't imagine your life going forward, I'm 39, I'm a professor and blogger, and I'm happy") trying to tell transgender teenagers that they made it although it was difficult (via). Since her mother continued misgendering Leelah, a petition with 80.000 signatures called for her chosen name to be used on her tombstone in order to respect her wishes (via). The facebook group "Justice for Leelah Alcorn" was established, the Transgender Human Rights Institute started the petition "Leelah's Law" to ban conversion therapy and had around 300.000 signatures by 8 January, a candlelight vigil took place in New York City, another one in London, marches were carried out in Washington, D.C. and Auckland. According to "The Independent", her death "triggered widespread anguish and raised a debate about the rights of transgender people". The "Boston Globe" stated that the incident "served as a flashpoint for transgender progress in 2014." (via).
(...) My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. (...) Fix society. Please." (via)
- Grant, J. M., Mottet, L. A., Tanis, J., Harrison, J., Herman, J. L. & Keisling, M. (2011) Injustice at Every Turn. A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Washington: National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
- Haas, A. P., Rodgers, P. L. & Herman, J. L. (2014) Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults. Findings of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. (via)
- photograph "Hats in the Garment District, New York" taken in 1930 by Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) via, photograph "Commuters" taken by Gordon Parks (1912-2006) in 1946 via
