GI Christine Returns Home (1953)

Christine Jorgensen talks to reporters in “G.I. CHRISTINE RETURNS HOME,” a 1953 British Pathé newsreel featuring the trans trailblazer when she returned to America after receiving her gender confirming surgery in Denmark.

Before returning home to the USA, Jorgensen’s story was leaked to the press and was featured as the front page story on New York Daily News in December 1952 with the headline:

“EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY”

She arrived at New York’s Idlewild Airport on February 12th 1953 to a sea of pushy reporters and photographers. Jorgensen had said that she was planning on coming home and living a quiet life, but she hadn’t anticipated that all of the publicity would prevent her from getting a regular job – and also prevent her from getting married.

Jorgensen was a clever woman; she navigated the ignorance of the public with wit and charm and paved her own way in the process. She earned a living booking theatre engagements, singing in nightclubs, acting, and giving interviews and lectures educating the public about what it meant to be a transgender woman. She published her story, “Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography” in 1967 and the book was a huge success, it was later adapted into a film in 1970.

“Can you realize what success for me will mean to literally thousands of people?” She wrote in 1950. “For I am not alone in this affliction. It may mean new hope and life to so many people. I think we (the doctors and I) are fighting this the right way--make the body fit the soul, rather than vice versa.”