http://goodknews.com/entertainment/2012/11/30/story-of-a-sex-change-pioneer

News of a pioneering sex change operation, one of several first involving both surgery and hormone therapy, was announced in 1952 – exactly 60 years ago this weekend.

“Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty!” screamed one headline as newspapers within the Usa broke the scoop.

A quiet boy from Big apple, George Jorgensen, shocked a nation by coming back from a visit to Denmark transformed into the glamorous Christine.

As the slender, blonde 27-year-old woman wrapped in a fur coat stepped out of the plane directly to the tarmac in Long island, her long eyelashes, high cheekbones and entire red lips betrayed little of the shy man she had once been.

Jorgensen grew up within the Bronx in an oversized close-knit family.

Despite a contented childhood, as a teen he became convinced he was trapped within the wrong body.

“In photographs from the time Jorgensen looks as if a really gay man, which might were a controversy,” says Teit Ritzau, a Danish doctor and documentary maker who got to understand Christine Jorgensen when he made a movie about her within the 1980s.

“The young Jorgensen never identified himself with homosexuality but rather as a girl who happened to be in a man’s body,” he says.

In her autobiography Jorgensen says that, while she was still living as George, despite being drawn to men she felt physically sick when a guy propositioned her.

* What a time to wear women's clothes, too. I love the 1950s period.

A true pioneer for us all