Sandra Dodd, November 2, 2017:
In creating a set of questions about transgender issues, I went to look up some dates. I know Wikipedia is shifting quicksand, but the article on Christine Jorgensen, who had a "sex change" in Denmark in 1951 is changing quite extremely.I don't have the patience to read through the history "backstage" at Wikipedia, to see who changed what when. I went to the Internet Archive's WayBack machine to peek at a few of the 151 saved versions they have, from 2004 to last week.
This paragraph has been removed. I found it in a 2008 capture:
________________That paragraph is gone.
Research into the work of Dr. Hamburger and his colleagues has uncovered a more complicated approach to transsexualism and sex-reassignment surgery, according to "Transvestism", a paper that "Jorgensen's Danish clinicians, Drs. Christian Hamburger, Georg Stürup and Dahl-Iversen, wrote for the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1953." Danish scientists "Preben Hertoft and Thorkil Sorensen who have studied the medical files and interviewed psychiatrist Dr. Georg Stürup claim that 'the original intention of the medical team was not to change a man into a woman, but to help a man who suffered from his homosexual impulses'. Hamburger and his colleagues revealed their anxiety about homosexuality when they commented: 'At any rate, from a eugenic point of view it would do no harm if a number of sexually abnormal men were castrated and thus deprived of their sexual libido.'"[1] This same research has determined that Hamburger and his colleagues argued against the creation of a vagina in a post-operative transsexual, which scholar Christine Crowle has stated as evidence that the team intended for their sexual reassignment surgeries "to produce a gender performance not a sexual performance".
_________________Much else is, too, though the article keeps getting longer.
At first the article described Jorgensen as "famous for being one of the first people to have sex reassignment surgery - in this case being male to female," and then for a a few years it said, "the first widely-known individual to have sex reassignment surgery—in this case, male to female."
In late 2013, the description became "Christine Jorgensen (May 30, 1926 – May 3, 1989) was an American trans woman who was the first person to become widely known in the United States for having sex reassignment surgery."
The term "transgender" crept in other places, too. "She became an instant celebrity using the platform to advocate for transgender people—" sends tendrils back into history in a way that doesn't seem quite honest to me.
In the section where the long paragraph about homosexuality is missing, this appears:
"Jorgensen chose the name Christine in honor of Dr. Hamburger. She became a spokesperson for transsexual and transgender people."It seems to me to be painting history with a modern political brush. Perhaps that's inevitable, but it will make it harder to see history if people are out there tweaking it.
(Changing it? Embroidering it? Falsifying it?)
Building a Transgender History
Julian Vigo article on "Why Do We Feel the Need to Transgender the Dead?"
Transgender index page
Links and commentary (originating in an unschooling forum)
Public facebook group
(if it's still there)
