Fixing the Unfixable
The Peiss piece “Transformation of Transsexual Jorgensen” poses a question that Cal in Middlesex must answer for himself. How xan people who are different be “cured”? And of course, we must ask ourselves not how they can be “cured,” but rather if they should be — and if the word “cure” should be used in the first place.
Cal was supposed to be cured, fixed, made “right,” by being treated with hormones to make him look like a girl, look the girl he was raised to be. Christine Jorgensen should have been cured by hormonal injections that would have kept her masculine. But both of them tried something else. No one else had caught on yet, except perhaps the Copenhagen doctors. The U.S. psychiatrists thought Christine & Cal could not possibly live the way they wanted to. But, interestingly, doctors did not think they would not be able to live like that because they were doing something unnatural, or immoral. No, it was because “the disappointment and frustration are likely to make their last state worse than their first” (376). I wonder how much of the frustration would come from the society-driven ostracism and misunderstanding. Obviously the Amsterdam doctors thought so, because if people would have been “able to slide quietly into society…the prognosis would be much more favorable” (376).
