Christine Jorgensen was originally identified in the media as a “hermaphrodite,” or intersex person, with a rare physical condition in which her “true” femaleness was masked by an only apparent maleness. But she was soon relabeled a “transvestite,” in that older sense developed by Hirschfeld, in which the term referred to a wider range of transgender phenomena than it does today. That difference in usage results largely from the efforts of Virginia Prince in the 1950s and 1960s, partly in response to Jorgensen, to redefine transvestitism as a synonym for heterosexual male cross-dressing. Harry
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