Christine Jorgensen was born George William Jorgensen Jr. in the Bronx, New York City, on May 30, 1926.
Christine Jorgensen was born George William Jorgensen Jr. on May 30, 1926, in the Bronx, New York City, to a working-class family of Danish descent. She was raised alongside an older sister in a modest household headed by her father, a carpenter and building contractor.
From an early age, Jorgensen later recalled feeling a persistent discomfort with the male gender she had been assigned at birth, though the language and medical understanding to describe this experience did not yet widely exist in American culture. She attended local schools in the Bronx and was described by contemporaries as a shy, sensitive child.
Jorgensen would go on to serve in the U.S. Army during the final years of World War II before pursuing the medical treatments in Denmark that would make her, a few years later, one of the most famous women in America. Her birth in a modest immigrant-descended family in New York City stands in stark contrast to the international fame she would achieve by her mid-twenties, making her early life a foundational chapter in twentieth-century LGBTQ+ history.
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