Given how sick and twisted Netflix's new series, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, is, many viewers have been unsure as to what is—and isn't—true to life in the drama starring Charlie Hunnam.
Detailing the disturbing grave robbing and murderous crimes of seemingly quiet handyman, Ed Gein, during the 1940s and 1950s, the series also depicts the killer's fascination with Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman who was very much in the public eye during the time of Gein's criminality and mental deterioration.
The series includes a plot line on Gein's growing obsession with Jorgensen—but was Christine Jorgensen a real person? And was Ed Gein really fixated on her? Here's what we know.
Who was Christine Jorgensen?
Depicted in the dramatized series by Alanna Darby, the real life Christine Jorgensen was a New Yorker born in 1926 who joined the US military and became widely known as a trans woman after her gender-affirming surgeries in 1951 and 1952 (during a time when few trans people were in the public eye).
When writing to friends about her surgeries, Jorgensen spoke of how much happier she was living openly as a woman. “As you can see by the enclosed photos, taken just before the operation, I have changed a great deal,” she said in one note. “But it is the other changes that are so much more important. Remember the shy, miserable person who left America? Well, that person is no more and, as you can see, I'm in marvelous spirits.”
Jorgensen travelled to Denmark for the operations and on her return to the USA in 1953, she was widely covered by the press. She went on to work in the entertainment field as a singer and as a public speaker, and became the figurehead for conversations on gender and trans issues. She was also known for her quick wit.
In 1958, Jorgensen explained her transition and surgeries by saying: “Everyone is both sexes in varying degrees. I am more of a woman than a man. Of course I can never have children but this does not mean that I cannot have natural sexual intercourse—I am very much in the position right now of a woman who has a hysterectomy.”
Jorgensen's 1967 autobiography, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, went on to sell more than 450,000 copies.
Speaking of the support she received from loved ones, in the 1980s Jorgensen shared that her parents had been by her side throughout all her hardships. “My family were very understanding. They had a choice; I gave them only one choice. Either they were to accept me or there was a break. My family did not want to lose me, and I was very close with [my mother and father] until they died.”
She passed away herself in 1989 at the age of 62, after being diagnosed with bladder and lung cancer.
Was Ed Gein obsessed with Christine Jorgensen in real life?
The real Gein could well have been aware of and interested in Jorgensen's story, as he had a fixation on anatomy, death and gender (and Jorgensen was very high profile at the time), but that there's no solid evidence of this.
It's reported that Gein made himself a 'woman suit' out of exhumed corpses and that he had an unnatural obsession with his mother and may have been curious about living as woman himself. Some reports claim that Gein collected newspaper clippings about Jorgensen, amongst other snippets and pamphlets around gender identity.
Others, including the show's co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, felt it was important to have Jorgensen's character feature in the series for another reason: the current climate of rising violence against the trans community, and the inaccurate conflation that being a trans person is some sort of sexual deviance.
Jorgensen's character in the series clearly tells Gein he is not transgender, but is gynephilic (a man so aroused by the female body that he wants to be inside it).
“It was really important for us to make that distinction, for us to say, ‘Look, these are two very different things,’” Brennan says, as per Tudum. “And it was cool to be able to put it in the mouth of Christine Jorgensen. For him to be told that through her in his mind was a really cool moment.”
