Involuntary celebrity: the outing of Christine Jorgensen

In 1952, Christine Jorgensen became the first modern trans celebrity when news of her transition caused a media frenzy. But this fame was imposed on her by the pressure of an often hostile media, and radically disrupted the course of her personal and professional life. The insistence of the media in uncovering (and sometimes fabricating) details about Jorgensen’s history evokes, in a celebrity studies lens, the fascination with the exposé as a mechanism for producing truth beneath the surface; at the same time, it forms part of a politics of trans representation that has included not only the selective erasure of gender-diverse people but also their hyper-scrutiny. In this article, I draw on archival data to illustrate how the undercurrents of non-consent inherent to the production of celebrity news selectively shape the possibilities for trans visibility. I argue that the risk of forcible outing that runs through the public lives of gender-diverse people is driven by the intrinsic tension between the logic of the exposé and the right to autonomy over gender identity; to accommodate the demands of authenticity, trans celebrity news needs to perennially cycle back to the past history of transition to the detriment of the present.