In 1955 Tamara Rees, a male transsexual who had undergone surgery in the Netherlands a year after Christine Jorgensen’s operation, married a man in a church in Reno. The county clerk declared himself unwilling to look beyond first impressions, saying that ‘as long as they come in here with a dress on, they’re women’. But four years later, when Jorgensen and her fiancé applied for a marriage licence in New York, her fame invited closer scrutiny. Her attorney pointed to her passport, which gave her sex as female, and a letter from Harry Benjamin stating that she ‘must be considered female’.
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