Lili Elbe was a transgender Danish painter who was among the first-ever documented recipients of gender confirmation surgery.
Elbe was born in 1882 in the town of Vejle, Denmark. Her artistic talent was obvious as a young child, and as a teenager she travelled to Copenhagen to study art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. While at the Academy, Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb and the two began a romantic relationship. In 1904, at the age of 19, she married the 21 year old Gottlieb. The couple enjoyed painting together, Elbe was an illustrator and landscape painter and Gottlieb specialised in book and fashion magazine illustration. On one transformative occasion, Elbe was asked to stand in as a model. From the moment that she put on the high-fashion clothing she knew she had discovered her true gender identity. Gottlieb continued to use Elbe as her model, and would create beautiful paintings of her showing the woman that Elbe knew she was supposed to be, with Gottlieb becoming famous for her paintings of a beautiful women with almond-shaped eyes.
In 1912, after first travelling through Italy, the couple settled in Paris, where Elbe felt comfortable enough to live openly in clothing that reflected her true gender, although she pretended to be her own sister until she was ready to come out. In 1907, she received the Neuhausens prize and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists Fall Exhibition), at the Vejle Art Museum, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automme in Paris. Simply living as a woman wasn’t enough for Elbe, and she became unwell and depressed with her situation. Doctors would not help her, simply diagnosing her as either hysterical or gay.
In 1918, Magnus Hirschfeld, the German doctor who founded the world’s first gay rights organisation, opened the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Hirschfeld was determined to make sexology into a rigorous academic discipline, and coined the term “transsexualismus” to describe individuals who needed to become, rather than simply appear to be, a different sex. In 1930, Elbe sold off a number of her paintings and travelled to the Institute where she underwent the first of four experimental operations that would correct the physical anomalies from which she suffered. Her next three surgeries were conducted in 1930 and 1931 at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic, after which she was allowed to legally change her name and receive a passport under the correct gender.
Elbe felt conflicted after her operations, feeling both joy at being a woman and fear that she wouldn’t be accepted. Many of her male friends refused to see her, and she stopped painting, feeling that it was part of her former identity, not her current one. In 1930, The Danish King annulled her marriage to Gottlieb and soon after an old friend proposed to her. Elbe was determined that she be able to have children with her fiancé and in 1931 she returned to Dresden for her final operation, a womb transplant. Elbe died while recovering from the operation, just before her 50th birthday.
Elbe was a pioneer of gender confirmation surgery and also of some modern transplant surgery and was able to live happily for 14 months as the person she knew she was meant to be. She wished to tell her story, and after her death her life history was published by Ernst Ludwig Harthern-Jacobson (under the pen name Niels Hoyer) using her personal diaries. The book, Man into Woman was one of the first widely-available books about a transgender person’s life. It provided inspiration to those who were struggling with similar gender issues. Her story has also been told in novel The Danish Girl (2000) by David Ebershoff, which became a major feature film by the same name in 2015.