Lili Elbe: Transgender Pioneer

 

 One evening in Paris, the mid-1920s, at the end of the day, the young married couple sat in the living room of their apartment, talking quietly. The pair had met whilst art students and had married in 1904. Gerda Gottlieb was one of the leading illustrators of the day, in the Art Deco style. Her husband, Einar Wegener, painted cityscapes. Tonight, as often before, Gerda, who was a lesbian, turned to her husband and said, “I’m bored. Let’s have Lili visit us.” Einar replied, “Yes. I’ll go and fetch her.” He went to the bedroom. A little while later he returned dressed as his alter-ego, the beautiful Lili.

    Einar had been dressing as a woman for many years. The Danish couple had moved to Paris so that he could live openly as a woman there, and Gerda could actively pursue same-sex relationships. Einar’s public cross-dressing began one day, during a life-drawing class that Gerda was conducting. The female life model failed to turn up and the roomful of eager students was getting restless.  Gerda asked Einar to fill in for the model – the female costume was all ready to slip into, after all. Einar found the petticoat, silk stockings and heeled shoes irresistible and felt completely comfortable in the garb. In fact, Einar had always thought of himself as both a woman and a man. Since that life-drawing class, Einar had regularly appeared in public and at parties in women’s attire, and Gerda would introduce him as his own sister. Because of his soft features and feminine body shape, Einar passed easily as a woman. When he dressed in male clothes people sometimes thought he was a woman dressed as a man.

    Einar Wegener was born in Denmark in 1882. He was an accomplished artist who had won the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and he showed his work at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling, Vejle Art Museum and in the Salon d'Automme in Paris. His wife, Gerda Gottlieb, was a fashion illustrator and painter. She had become famous for her images of beautiful young women dressed in the height of fashion. It came as something of a shock to the public when they discovered that the willowy women in her works were actually images of her husband. Because she was such an influential illustrator, who set fashion trends with her images, it is interesting to speculate whether the fashion into the 1920s for thin, flat-chested women may have been spearheaded by the fact that she had used her husband in the poses.

    After several decades of cross-dressing Einar decided that his transition should be permanent. With his wife’s full support he travelled to Berlin, in 1930, in order to be examined by the eminent sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. It was decided that a sex-change operation could be undertaken – one of the world’s first. It was a dangerous surgery and nobody knew what would be the end results. The entire process would need five operations and would take more than two years to complete. In the first surgery the testicles were removed. Months later, at the Dresden Women’s Hospital, under Dr. Kurt Warnekros, the penis was also removed. Ovaries from a 26-year-old woman were also transplanted. However, the body rejected the organs and serious infection set in, so they were later removed.

    In October 1930 Einar, now a woman, was living permanently as Lili Elbe. The King of Denmark annulled the Wegener’s marriage of nineteen years as being ‘insufficient’, and Gerda and Lili went their separate ways. Lili was now having an affair with her doctor. In a landmark act she managed to get her name and sex officially changed on her passport. She no longer felt she could be an artist - the paintings she had produced belonged to the world of Einar. She never picked up a brush again.

    In 1931 a man proposed to Lili. She accepted, but only on the condition that she first had a fifth operation which would transplant a uterus into her body, as she wanted to be able to have intercourse with her betrothed. The surgery was undertaken but there were complications and she died a few days later, aged fifty. Ex-wife Gerda was shocked at the news of Lili’s death. She divorced her husband immediately and shut herself away in a small flat. Her art career diminished and she took to drink and slipped quietly into obscurity.

A film about Lili Elbe is currently under production, starring young British actor Eddie Redmayne in the title role. [Update: the film, The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne, was released in 2015, to mixed reviews]