IT WAS meant to be a private affair, a quiet series of operations that would change the 26-year-old Bronx photographer into a woman and, in the process, exorcise the personal demons that had haunted him since childhood. But even before she left the Copenhagen hospital in February, 1953-transformed from George Jorgensen Jr. the 98-pound ex-GI, into Christine Jorgenson, "the convertable blonde"-word had leaked out. Overnight, it became the most shocking, most celebrated surgery of the century. By Michele Ingrassia

" I could never understand why I was receiving so much attention," Jorgensen said in a 1986 interview. "Now looking back, I realize it was the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, and I just happened to be one of the trigger mechanisms."

Christine Jorgensen-with her sleek hair, smokey voice, slender body and smart clothes, exploded into the nation's consciousness in the halcyon days of the post war Baby Boom, in the placid I-like-Ike, I-love-Lucy era when issues of sexuality, much less transsexuality, were strictly taboo. It didn't take much to propel her private, two-year odyssey from man to woman into the object of international debate and ridicule. "EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BOMBSHELL," screamed the headline in the Daily News, which broke the story on Dec. 1, 1952, after it was leaked about the second of Jorgensen's three operations.

Unwittingly, Jorgensen's surgery proved to be something more than the lurid tale it was made out to be at the time: It was also the begining of greater candor and understanding in the way the world looked at issues of transsexuality. According to the International Gender Dysphoria Association, by 1980 an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 American adults had undergone hormonal and surgical sex changes. Among them, tennis pro Renee Richards and British-born writer Jan Morris.