, a middle child with five siblings. Feminine even as a child, Olmos played with dolls and did female chores, and had a first sexual encounter with a man at age 13. After a denouncement from the father, Olmos moved to Mexico City and at 21 was working as a men’s fashion clerk.
In November 1952, just weeks before the Christine Jorgensen story first broke in New York, Olmos was suffering from chronic This was treated at the clinic of Rafael Sandoval Camacho and his team. They treated the colitis, but quickly realised that there was another issue to be addressed.
Sandoval, a graduate of the prestigious , specialised in public sanitation and school hygiene, and also practised surgery at the Sanatorio Flemming and had developed interests in treating homosexuality surgically.
Olmos was interested in medical treatments that would bring out her essential womanhood; Sandoval and his team, Antonio Mercado Montes, Carlos Dupont Bribiesca and Marco Antonio Dupont, were thinking in terms of the gender binary and how to make their patient heteronormative. They completed a clinical case study, diagnosing Olmos with an ‘intersexual syndrome’ manifesting in homosexuality and feminine mannerisms, habits and libido. They researched Olmos’ biography, noting childhood illnesses, a cousin suffering ‘oligophrenia’ (‘interrupted mental development’ associated with hysteria and homosexuality), a preference for flashy masculine attire, and desires to cross-dress. They conducted anthropometric examinations; Binet–Simon and Raven intelligence tests; Rorschach, Szondi and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) psychodiagnostics; and blood tests. Marta as a brunette
From preceding sexologists, Sandoval concluded that homosexuality was pathological but could be converted. However a reorienting towards heteronormativity left an irresolvable, ‘implicit antagonism between the psychic and the somatic’. In addition, too few competent analysts existed. Contrariwise Sandoval also rejected such therapy that would help such men accept themselves, adjust to societal hostility and live openly. He thought that this would leave worrisome structural and functional issues unresolved.
What the team found with Olmos was perhaps an artifact of their research tools and their presuppositions. What they did find they regarded as pathologies: sexual complexes causing insecurity and anti-societal aggression, hysteria and ‘feminine sexual tendencies accompanied by the need to constitute as a love receptacle, and an intense desire to receive tenderness, strong depressive and hysterical states’, thoughts of suicide, pubic hair with a ‘feminine’ triangle pattern. They diagnosed ‘degeneration’ and ‘passive homosexuality’.
From this perspective, they provided Olmos, Marta as she was now addressed, with what she wanted. Over a period of 18 months, 1952-4, Marta was treated psychiatrically, hormonally and surgically. The first surgery was a penectomy in May 1953, and a final vaginoplasty in March 1954: six surgeries altogether, four in private clinics, and two at Marta’s home. The pioneering Mexican pharmaceutical company, , provided oestrogen and progesterone, and in effect Marta was a test subject for their untested product. Syntex later marketed the product as - used for birth control and menopausal therapy. Syntex re-located to California in 1959.Marta as a blonde
The involvement of Syntex led to support from the then president, (1952-8), who also extended the vote to women in October 1953, and two lawyers close to Ruiz, Manuel Rangel y Vázquez and León Méndez Berman, who provided both funding and moral support. This was expected to be Mexico’s next scientific triumph.
Sandoval’s team photographed Olmos’ body as it changed, recorded their procedures, extolled their methods, presented to the press and screened surgical films for colleagues.
The eminent criminologist who regarded homosexuality as dangerous but imprisonment as ineffective, expressed interest in Sandoval’s proposal.
Some of the family objected, and even tried legal objections. However Marta’s sister Soledad was supportive, and her mother Refugio Romero relented.
In May 1954 the story was in the press, at first the Mexican, and then internationally. Excélsior interviewed Marta and published restrained reports, an editorial cartoon and a letter to the editor, but the articles in its tabloid Últimas Noticias, supplement Magazine de Policía, were splashy, front -page and with lots of photos. The modern Mexican term for gender surgery, ‘operación jarocha’ (‘Veracruz operation’) is a memory that Olmos was originally from Veracruz.
Marta and Soledad, her sister
Marta’s story was compared to that of Christine Jorgensen which had been in the press the previous year, and that of which had been published just weeks before. Marta’s operation was regarded as the first of its kind to be performed in the Americas. Press accounts quoted Marta proclaiming “Now I have found myself, and I am happy”. She also said: “‘I felt feminine impulses. I liked to cook, sew, and keep house” - the kind of sentiment expected of women, trans or cis, in the 1950s. She dyed her hair blond, and spoke of marriage, and men, strangers, proposed to her. She also spoke of having children and returning to work, this time selling female attire. After the devaluation of the peso from MX$8.65 to 12.50 per US$ in April 1954, and the subsequent inflation, Marta presented herself as a bona fide Mexican woman, somewhat conservative and Catholic. She had chosen her name after praying to (sister of Mary and Lazarus). She hoped to be re-baptised, but the Church dismissed the idea, saying that she was an unnecessarily mutilated healthy male.
Initially, some Mexican commentators and officials near the Ruiz Cortines government celebrated the operation as proof that Mexico could stand with “advanced” nations in medical science.
While initial coverage in the press was sympathetic, it changed quickly. Physicians, politicians, clerics, and cartoonists turned on the case, denouncing the surgery as a fraudulent “cure”. They wrote about her as an afeminado, a Mexican term from the 19th century for men who were not heteronormative. The coverage of Christine Jorgensen led to the term Cristinas being used, not just for trans women, but also for queer men in general. Marta was compared to the foreigners Jorgensen and Cowell.
As Ryan Jones says: “Marta’s trans womanhood was thus an ‘import’ at a time of nationalism, indigenismo, modernising patriarchy, and scepticism towards foreign ‘contamination’. She evoked earlier cases where the ‘national’ was defined against a foreign, queer, grotesque other. After initial enthusiasm, the conceptual space for considering trans(sexuality) as a Mexican state of being – and transitions as legitimate for achieving it – withered. Marta instead epitomised an afeminado/‘Cristina’ defrauding the public”
Marta had briefly made public appearances and there was even talk of potential film work. However the state was moving to maintain its moral authority against youth culture and rock ‘n’ roll, and prohibited Jorgensen from performing in Mexico. Fernández Bustamante – director of Mexico City’s Oficina de Espectáculos – banned Olmos from appearing in vaudeville revues, decreeing no ‘spectacle exploiting morbid interest’ would be tolerated. Rómulo O’Farrill’s XHTV stated its ‘Tele-Síntesis’ programme would not interview Marta. The Asociación Nacional de Actores, led by Congressman Rodolfo Landa, refused her membership; which removed all stage, radio or TV performances because she was not a ‘bona fide actor’.
Direct reporting on Marta diminished, but her case persisted in debates about homosexuality, “degeneracy” and the bounds of modern medicine in Mexico.
Her later life is not recorded.
Ryan Jones found a death certificate dated 29 December 1972 for ‘Martha Olmos Romero’, referencing her mother, Refugio, which is likely hers. If so she died age 40 from a myocardial infarction and twisted, occluded intestine. She never did marry.
“Un mexicano se convirtio en mujer y dice que tendra hijos”. Los Angeles La Opinion, May 6, 1954: 1
“Hopes to ‘Make Some Man a Good wife’: Husky Mexican clerk is transformed into woman in series of operations”. Lubbock Morning Avalanche, May 7, 1954: 39.
“La cirugia ha logrado de nuevo convertir a un hombre en mujer”. Phoenix El Sol, May 14, 1954: 3.
“El Lic. Jose Vasconcelos condena la intervencion medica en estos casos”. Phoenix El Sol, May 21, 1954: 3.
Juan Morales. "Mexico's Hush-Hush Clinic: Sex Surgery While You Wait!". Whisper Magazine, 8,6, 1955:24-5.
Rafael Sandoval Camacho, Una contribución experimental al estudio de la homosexualidad. 1957.
Emily Skidmore. “Constructing the "Good Transsexual": Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Press”. Feminist Studies, 37, June 2011,
Fabrizzo Mc Manus. “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Biomedical Sciences in Twentieth Century Mexico”, Sexuality & Culture, 18,2, 2014.
Omar Durán-García. Aesthetic Misdiagnoses: Biomedicine, Homosexualities, and Medical Cultures in Mexico, 1953-2006, Phd thesis, Columbia University, 2021: Chp 2.
Omar Durán-García interviewed by Analia Lavin. “Mexican Homosexualities and the Distortions of the Medical Gaze”. Medical Health Humanities, July 26, 2022.
Ryan M Jones. “‘Now I Have Found Myself, and I Am Happy’: Marta Olmos, Sex Reassignment, the Media and Mexico on a Global Stage, 1952–7”. Journal of Latin American Studies, 55, 2023.
As is normal in hispanophonic countries, Marta had two surnames, Olmos from her father and Romero from her mother. She is sometimes referred to as Marta Olmos Ramiro, but in common usage more frequently as simply Marta Olmos. Skidmore refers to her as Romero but not as Olmos for some reason, and, strangely, Mc Manus, who argues that Olmos never properly consented to transitioning, does not give her a name at all but refers to “an unidentified 21-year-old boy from Veracruz”.
