“The Relationship Between Public Morals and Public Toilets”: Christine Jorgensen and the Birth of Trans Bathroom Panic

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 “sex change,” after the New York Daily News’ infamous December 1952 cover featuring her picture beneath the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” she had surged into international celebrity as the first American whose medical transition was widely discussed in the press.^[1]

Journalists, agents, publicists, aspiring fellow transsexuals, and many others bombarded her with questions and requests—but 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 “a heavy, cigar-chewing character who introduced himself as an inspector of the police Morals Squad in Washington,” in an encounter that both affronted and amused her. As she later recounted in her autobiography:

“Jorgensen,” he said, “I’m a police official in this city and I want to prevent any unpleasant incidents before they happen. Consequently, I’m asking you not to use the women’s public toilets while you’re in Washington!”

Dumbfounded by that statement, I just stood there gaping at him.

“And if you dare to use a public restroom,” he continued, “I’ll have you picked up and examined by a board of doctors.”

For a moment, I thought I’d 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.

With whatever calmness was left to me, I assured him that I’d try very hard to contain myself while I was in Washington. I know that if the incident hadn’t been such a shock and taken me so off guard, I’d 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’s capital.^[2]

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.^[3] 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 does rather than what sex is.^[4] 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—with public bathrooms marking a key site of concern.

In the early 1950s, under Lieutenant Roy Blick—likely the same heavy, cigar-chewing character Jorgensen describes—the 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’s vice squad along with the federal Park Police used intensive surveillance of DC-area public restrooms to amass files on thousands of purported “sex perverts,” 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’s 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 “sexual perversion” 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’s mandate to police the city’s toilets extended not only to public morals, but national security.^[5]

Christine Jorgensen was not a homosexual, and as she flippantly observed, “those facilities had been more a matter of convenience than of sex”—playing on the word’s 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 “homosexuals and transvestites” were deluded into thinking that Danish surgeons could “cure” them.^[6] By ridiculing the “hygienic inspector” and his “violently protective attitude,” 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’s 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 women’s public toilets indicates one of the first documented instances of state concern over transfeminine bathroom usage.

Precisely what sort of “unpleasant incidents” 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’s insistence that Jorgensen stay away from public bathrooms entirely would be reflected in advice from trans advocates in the coming years, while his particular attention to women’s 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.

As an international celebrity, little about Jorgensen’s life would have been representative of trans experiences more broadly. Yet her extraordinary 1953 encounter with the MPD’s 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 “gender community.” 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 “bathroom bills” and legislative backlash that spans the US today.

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 “hate strikes” at military production plants during World War II and stimulated opposition to Brown v. Board of Education.^[7] In the 1970s, opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment cited the bugaboo of “unisex toilets” to discredit feminist efforts to secure legal equality.^[8] While contemporary conflict over trans bathroom access is often framed as a more recent successor to these precedents, revisiting Jorgensen’s confrontation with the “hygienic inspector” 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 “public morals and public toilets.”

Featured image caption: A “Ladies” public restroom sign. (Courtesy Stephen Andrews)

Nikita Shepard

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 & Culture, Reviews in Digital Humanities, RFD Magazine, Spectrum South, and the anthology Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023).

This author does not have any more posts.