{"id":47686,"date":"2025-01-26T03:18:37","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T03:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/christine-jorgensen-and-the-birth-of-trans-bathroom-panic-nursing-clio\/"},"modified":"2025-01-26T03:18:37","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T03:18:37","slug":"christine-jorgensen-and-the-birth-of-trans-bathroom-panic-nursing-clio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=47686","title":{"rendered":"Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic \u2013 Nursing Clio"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<h3 class=\"blog-title\">\u201cThe Relationship Between Public Morals and Public Toilets\u201d: Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic<\/h3>\n<div class=\"m-post-byline-with-avatar\" style=\"display: flex; white-space: preserve\">\n<style><![CDATA[.m-post-avatars{ display: flex; margin-right: 10px; }.m-post-avatar{ border-radius: 100%; z-index: 1; }.m-post-avatar img { border-radius: 100% }.m-post-avatar:not(:first-of-type){ margin-left: -7px }.m-post-avatar:nth-child(1){ z-index:1}]]><\/style>\n<div id=\"\" class=\"m-post-avatars\">\n<div class=\"m-post-avatar\" data-author-id=\"562\" data-author-type=\"user\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nursingclio.org\/author\/nikita-shepard\/\" class=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"36\" height=\"36\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?fit=36%2C36&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-36x36 size-36x36\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?w=1080&amp;ssl=1 1080w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=405%2C405&amp;ssl=1 405w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=723%2C723&amp;ssl=1 723w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=181%2C181&amp;ssl=1 181w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=768%2C768&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=70%2C70&amp;ssl=1 70w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=90%2C90&amp;ssl=1 90w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 36px) 100vw, 36px\"\/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nursingclio.org\/author\/nikita-shepard\/\">Nikita Shepard<\/a><\/div>\n<hr\/>\n<p>Christine Jorgensen was used to unwelcome attention, but this was a new level of outrage. After undergoing hormone therapy and surgeries in Copenhagen, the 27-year-old Danish-American had returned to the United States in early 1953 to an onslaught of relentless publicity. While she was not the first person to receive the combination of treatments that the media glossed as a \u201csex change,\u201d after the <em>New York Daily News\u2019 <\/em>infamous December 1952 cover featuring her picture beneath the headline \u201cEx-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,\u201d she had surged into international celebrity as the first American whose medical transition was widely discussed in the press.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-0\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-0\">[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Journalists, agents, publicists, aspiring fellow transsexuals, and many others bombarded her with questions and requests\u2014but she had never been in trouble with the law. Yet shortly after arriving in Washington, DC for a nightclub engagement at the Casino Royale in September 1953, she found herself accosted by \u201ca heavy, cigar-chewing character who introduced himself as an inspector of the police Morals Squad in Washington,\u201d in an encounter that both affronted and amused her. As she later recounted in her autobiography:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cJorgensen,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019m a police official in this city and I want to prevent any unpleasant incidents before they happen. Consequently, I\u2019m asking you not to use the women\u2019s public toilets while you\u2019re in Washington!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dumbfounded by that statement, I just stood there gaping at him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd if you dare to use a public restroom,\u201d he continued, \u201cI\u2019ll have you picked up and examined by a board of doctors.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For a moment, I thought I\u2019d been confronted by a madman and my first reaction was blind rage. It was difficult for me to see the relationship between public morals and public toilets, as to me those facilities had been more a matter of convenience than of sex. But his personal experience was no doubt greater than mine in those areas, and therefore he must have had some reason for his violently protective attitude.<\/p>\n<p>With whatever calmness was left to me, I assured him that I\u2019d try very hard to contain myself while I was in Washington. I know that if the incident hadn\u2019t been such a shock and taken me so off guard, I\u2019d have been reduced to helpless laughter then and there. As it was, I excused myself as quickly as possible, and left the hygienic inspector to brood on the gravity of segregating the toilets by gender in our nation\u2019s capital.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-1\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-1\">[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<figure id=\"attachment_34692\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-34692\" style=\"width: 380px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-34692\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Christine_Jorgensen_1954.jpg?resize=380%2C480&amp;ssl=1\" alt=\"A black and white headshot of Christine Jorgensen.\" width=\"380\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Christine_Jorgensen_1954.jpg?w=380&amp;ssl=1 380w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Christine_Jorgensen_1954.jpg?resize=321%2C405&amp;ssl=1 321w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 380px) 100vw, 380px\"\/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-34692\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Christine Jorgensen in 1954. (Photo by Maurice Seymour, courtesy <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Christine_Jorgensen_1954.jpg\">Wikimedia<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>This confrontation offers an illuminating glimpse into the potentially disruptive power of the emerging category of transsexuality to the social organization of gender and public space in the post-war United States. Historians of transsexuality have documented how medical professionals designed their surgical and endocrinological innovations in tandem with new conceptual frameworks such as gender identity with the aim of stabilizing the social order regulated by the male\/female binary. By designing protocols for persons whose anatomy or self-identification defied conventional understandings of the sexed body to assume an embodied and social existence within a fixed male or female gender role, emerging authorities such as Harry Benjamin and John Money developed conceptions of sex as something that could be changed, within a narrow regulatory framework, by a patient like Christine Jorgensen.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-2\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-2\">[3]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> However, as Paisley Currah has argued, different institutions fashion definitions of male, female, and sometimes exceptions to the binary suited to their own specific administrative purposes, focused on what sex <em>does <\/em>rather than what sex <em>is<\/em>.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-3\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-3\">[4]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> For law enforcement officials in the District of Columbia, tasked with the gendered regulation of public space and public order, the appearance of transsexuality posed a different set of challenges than those faced by doctors and psychologists\u2014with public bathrooms marking a key site of concern.<\/p>\n<p>In the early 1950s, under Lieutenant Roy Blick\u2014likely the same heavy, cigar-chewing character Jorgensen describes\u2014the Morals Division of the Metropolitan Police Department insisted that the relationship between public morals and public toilets was very strong, indeed. As David Johnson has documented, Blick\u2019s vice squad along with the federal Park Police used intensive surveillance of DC-area public restrooms to amass files on thousands of purported \u201csex perverts,\u201d which were used by the FBI and Civil Service Commission officials in investigations that led to the expulsion of thousands of suspected homosexuals from government employment. At the time of the inspector\u2019s confrontation with Jorgensen in 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower had just issued Executive Order 10450, intensifying what would later be termed the Lavender Scare by specifying \u201csexual perversion\u201d as a basis for deeming a government employee a security risk. As anxieties over the presence of homosexuals in federal employment reached a fever pitch, Blick\u2019s mandate to police the city\u2019s toilets extended not only to public morals, but national security.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-4\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-4\">[5]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Christine Jorgensen was not a homosexual, and as she flippantly observed, \u201cthose facilities had been more a matter of convenience than of sex\u201d\u2014playing on the word\u2019s double meaning as both a male\/female distinction governing access to bathrooms and erotic contact that the Morals Division was keen to eliminate from them. While both transsexuals and homosexuals were keen to differentiate themselves from each other from the 1950s forward, popular media coverage consistently blurred the two; as Jorgensen complained, disrespectful and sensationalist coverage of her transition lamented how \u201chomosexuals and transvestites\u201d were deluded into thinking that Danish surgeons could \u201ccure\u201d them.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-5\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-5\">[6]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> By ridiculing the \u201chygienic inspector\u201d and his \u201cviolently protective attitude,\u201d and distinguishing herself from the type of homosexual who would enter a public bathroom seeking sexual contact with another man, she aimed to reinforce the respectability of her identity as a transsexual woman. The priorities of the Morals Division, which primarily focused on policing male homosexuals in public spaces such as men\u2019s toilets, might imply that the confrontational police official perceived the disorder Jorgensen represented as primarily sexual rather than gendered. Yet his specific insistence that she stay out of <em>women\u2019s <\/em>public toilets indicates one of the first documented instances of state concern over transfeminine bathroom usage.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_34693\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-34693\" style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-34693 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/service-pnp-fsa-8d33000-8d33200-8d33257v.jpg?resize=640%2C499&amp;ssl=1\" alt=\"Black and white photo of women standing in line in front of wooden bathroom stalls.\" width=\"640\" height=\"499\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/service-pnp-fsa-8d33000-8d33200-8d33257v.jpg?resize=723%2C564&amp;ssl=1 723w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/service-pnp-fsa-8d33000-8d33200-8d33257v.jpg?resize=405%2C316&amp;ssl=1 405w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/service-pnp-fsa-8d33000-8d33200-8d33257v.jpg?resize=768%2C599&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/service-pnp-fsa-8d33000-8d33200-8d33257v.jpg?w=826&amp;ssl=1 826w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\"\/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-34693\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Waiting in line to use the ladies\u2019 toilet at the Indianapolis Greyhound bus terminal, 1943. (Courtesy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/fsa.8d33257\/&quot;\">Library of Congress<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Precisely what sort of \u201cunpleasant incidents\u201d the Morals Squad official hoped to prevent with his prohibition was unclear. He may have worried that Jorgensen would misbehave or pose a threat, assumed that non-transsexual women would take offense to her presence, or simply wanted to flex his authority and see a celebrity in the process. But regardless of his intentions, the encounter portended a new phase in the gendered regulation of bathrooms, as the public grappled with the trans challenge to binarized public spaces and renegotiated access on a case-by-case basis. The inspector\u2019s insistence that Jorgensen stay away from public bathrooms <em>entirely<\/em> would be reflected in advice from trans advocates in the coming years, while his particular attention to women\u2019s bathrooms would resurface in the 1970s as growing media attention around sexual assault recoded toilets as a zone of danger for women in the public imagination.<\/p>\n<p>As an international celebrity, little about Jorgensen\u2019s life would have been representative of trans experiences more broadly. Yet her extraordinary 1953 encounter with the MPD\u2019s Morals Division anticipated decades of conflicts over access to public bathrooms that would become an ordinary part of life for nearly all trans people in the decades to come. Conservative opponents began to raise the specter of trans toilet use to discredit proposed anti-discrimination legislation in 1971 as the first ordinances protecting gays and lesbians (yet not, ironically, trans people) appeared. Trans advocates did not begin to engage gendered public bathroom access as a political issue until well into the 1980s, and for many years no consensus existed over appropriate standards for access to gender-segregated public spaces among the burgeoning \u201cgender community.\u201d By the early 2000s, a grassroots, intersectional trans movement began to achieve significant policy gains and cultural shifts around bathroom access. In response, anti-LGBTQ activists expanded their toilet panic strategies from piecemeal responses to individual campaigns to a coordinated national strategy, which would set in motion the wave of \u201cbathroom bills\u201d and legislative backlash that spans the US today.<\/p>\n<p>These efforts draw on racist and anti-feminist templates anchored in over a century of public bathroom conflicts. Fears about the imagined threats posed to white women and girls within racially integrated bathrooms had prompted \u201chate strikes\u201d at military production plants during World War II and stimulated opposition to <em>Brown v. Board of Education.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-6\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-6\">[7]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> <\/em>In the 1970s, opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment cited the bugaboo of \u201cunisex toilets\u201d to discredit feminist efforts to secure legal equality.<sup><sup><a id=\"post-34684-footnote-ref-7\" href=\"#post-34684-footnote-7\">[8]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> While contemporary conflict over trans bathroom access is often framed as a more recent successor to these precedents, revisiting Jorgensen\u2019s confrontation with the \u201chygienic inspector\u201d shows that toilet anxieties had long suffused legal and medical responses to trans bodies in public. Histories of the construction of gender within medicine and law can offer valuable insights into the deep roots of contemporary anti-trans politics, shedding light on that curious relationship Jorgensen considered seventy years ago between \u201cpublic morals and public toilets.\u201d<\/p>\n<section id=\"sources\">\n<h4>Notes<\/h4>\n<ol>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-0\">\u201cEx-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty.\u201d <em>New York Daily News <\/em>34, no. 136 (December 1, 1952): 1. <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-0\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-1\">Christine Jorgensen, <em>Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography<\/em>. New York: Bantam Books, 1967: 216-217. <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-1\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-2\">Meyerowitz, <em>How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jules Gill-Peterson, <em>Histories of the Transgender Child <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Sandra Eder, <em>How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-2\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-3\">Paisley Currah, <em>Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity <\/em>(New York: New York University Press, 2002). <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-3\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-4\">David K. Johnson, <em>The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-4\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-5\">Jorgensen, <em>Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography<\/em>, 193-94. <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-5\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-6\">Bryant Simon, \u201cThe Trouble With Bathrooms.\u201d <em>Modern American History <\/em>4, no. 2 (2021): 201-207; Phoebe Godfrey, \u201cBayonets, Brainwashing, and Bathrooms: The Discourse of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Desegregation of Little Rock\u2019s Central High.\u201d <em>Arkansas Historical Quarterly <\/em>62, no. 1 (Spring 2003). <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-6\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"post-34684-footnote-7\">Gillian Frank, \u201cThe Anti-Trans Bathroom Nightmare Has Its Roots in Racial Segregation.\u201d <em>Slate<\/em>, November 10, 2015. <a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/human-interest\/2015\/11\/anti-trans-bathroom-propaganda-has-roots-in-racial-segregation.html\">https:\/\/slate.com\/human-interest\/2015\/11\/anti-trans-bathroom-propaganda-has-roots-in-racial-segregation.html<\/a> <a href=\"#post-34684-footnote-ref-7\">\u2191<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/section>\n<hr\/>\n<p>Featured image caption: A \u201cLadies\u201d public restroom sign. (Courtesy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pexels.com\/photo\/white-concrete-wall-with-wooden-signage-9615371\/\">Stephen Andrews<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><!-- MOLONGUI AUTHORSHIP PLUGIN 5.0.8 --><br \/>\n<!-- https:\/\/www.molongui.com\/wordpress-plugin-post-authors --><\/p>\n<div class=\"m-a-box \" data-box-layout=\"slim\" data-box-position=\"below\" data-multiauthor=\"false\" data-author-id=\"562\" data-author-type=\"user\" data-author-archived=\"\">\n<div class=\"m-a-box-container\">\n<div class=\"m-a-box-tab m-a-box-content m-a-box-profile\" data-profile-layout=\"layout-1\" data-author-ref=\"user-562\" itemscope=\"\" itemid=\"https:\/\/nursingclio.org\/author\/nikita-shepard\/\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/Person\">\n<div class=\"m-a-box-content-middle\">\n<div class=\"m-a-box-item m-a-box-avatar\" data-source=\"local\"><a class=\"m-a-box-avatar-url\" href=\"https:\/\/nursingclio.org\/author\/nikita-shepard\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"90\" height=\"90\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?fit=90%2C90&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-90x90 size-90x90\" alt=\"\" itemprop=\"image\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?w=1080&amp;ssl=1 1080w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=405%2C405&amp;ssl=1 405w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=723%2C723&amp;ssl=1 723w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=181%2C181&amp;ssl=1 181w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=768%2C768&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=70%2C70&amp;ssl=1 70w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=90%2C90&amp;ssl=1 90w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nursingclio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1.png?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 90px) 100vw, 90px\"\/><\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"m-a-box-item m-a-box-data\">\n<div class=\"m-a-box-bio\" itemprop=\"description\">\n<p>Nikita Shepard is a PhD candidate in the department of history at Columbia University, researching gender, sexuality, and social movements in the modern United States. Their dissertation traces the history of public bathrooms and political struggles over access to them from the New Deal through the present. Their teaching has covered LGBTQ history, sexuality studies, social and cultural theory, and histories of data and surveillance. Their writings and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Oral History Journal, Social History, Western Historical Quarterly, American Nineteenth Century History, Black Perspectives, Information &amp; Culture, Reviews in Digital Humanities, RFD Magazine, Spectrum South, and the anthology Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"wp-block-group has-border-color\" style=\"border-style:none;border-width:0px;margin-top:32px;margin-bottom:32px;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" style=\"margin-bottom:24px\"\/>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\" style=\"margin-top:4px;margin-bottom:10px\">Discover more from Nursing Clio<\/h3>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"margin-top:10px;margin-bottom:10px;font-size:15px\">Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe Relationship Between Public Morals and Public Toilets\u201d: Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic Nikita Shepard Christine Jorgensen was used to unwelcome attention, but this was a new level of outrage. After undergoing hormone therapy and surgeries in Copenhagen, the 27-year-old Danish-American had returned to the United States in early 1953 to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[1497,2692,27477,15852,28662,15851,4590,28663],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-47686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-bathroom","tag-birth","tag-christine","tag-clio","tag-jorgensen","tag-nursing","tag-panic","tag-trans"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic \u2013 Nursing Clio - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=47686\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic \u2013 Nursing Clio - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cThe Relationship Between Public Morals and Public Toilets\u201d: Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic Nikita Shepard Christine Jorgensen was used to unwelcome attention, but this was a new level of outrage. 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