Lili Elbe - Transsexual

[Liv]

Lili Elbe - Transsexual

by Liv Site Admin Published on Mon Nov 20, 2006 6:50 pm Rift: eTransgender :: Transgender Forum

Lili Elbe was born in 1886 in Danemark (birth name: Ejnar Wegener). Lili before her transition was married to Gerda Wegener, who was her partner and legal wife. Both of them were famous painters and illustrators. Gerda though had a better commercial success and is still recognized in nowadays as one of the leading artists of the Art Deco during the first decades of the 20th century. Her book and magazine illustrations included both high fashion designs, as well as lesbian and straight erotic thematography. In fact, Lili was one of Gerda's favorite models, wearing women's high fashion or nude. As a fashion designer in Paris, Gerda was influential in setting fashion trends. It would be interesting to suppose that the ’20s small breasted female ideal may have been influenced by Lili's figure. Lili Elbe was leaving a double life, half-transitioned, from c. 1910 to 1930, where she had her series of operations being performed to her. In fact some people (other than her close friends) knew her by one of her personalities at time. She was gaining many people in her correct persona as a woman, and had many admirers and some lovers, due to her irresistible and life-devouring personality. Anyway, she must also have been tasting the drama of duality, which is known by its sweet-and-bitter taste (glykypikros, as Sappho of Mytilene would have pointed out in her lyrics) to every true transsexual person. Someone even proposed to marry her before her operation, something impossible at that time, where she was considered legally as “male”. Her marriage to Gerda was declared inefficient in 1930 by the King of Denmark.

It’s highly probable that Lili Elbe was an intersexed transsexual woman, for it’s certain that a hypogonadisn was present, together with a hormonal imbalance towards the female range (as her medical examinations proved), and her body-type was also feminine, allowing her to pass quite easily. Perhaps her caryotype was XX with an SRY gene transfer, or she had a XXY caryotype (Klinefelter syndrome), a case which is less probable for she was very clever (while Klinefelter subjects have in general a lower IQ –just like XXX females– and a significantly higher body height). Lili Elbe was under the care of Dr. Warnekros (in the Dresden Women's Clinic), who was a pioner in the field of gynaecology of that time. All of Lili's surgeries were of a rather experimental nature. Her first surgery removed the wrong male genitals. This first surgery was performed in Berlin after Lili was examined by the famous sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Her second surgery, performed by Dr. Warnekros, was to transplant healthy ovaries (taken by a young woman 26 years old) into her abdomen. A third operation, though with unspecified purpose, was performed a short time later. The fourth operation was an emergency surgery, performed some weeks later, in response to severe abdominal pain, that probably consisted of removing the rejected ovaries. Earlier reviews of Lili Elbe’s case in transsexual research literature leave us the impression that she died as a result of complications from the failed ovarian transplant. However, her reported death was not until over a year and a half later, three months after her fifth operation intended to allow her to “be a mother”... Lili was buried in Dresden with her correct female name in 1931. The touching story of Lili Elbe was written in sincere and loving terms by herself, in her autobiography: Man Into Woman (Niels Hoyer, ed.) 1933. On the other hand, Maurice Rostand, having been inspired by her rare and rich life wrote his novel L’homme qui devint femme. Lili Elbe is undoubtedly one of the most favourite and lovable personalities of the early 20th century transsexual community.