Lili Ilse Elvenes, better known as Lili Elbe, was a Danish transgender woman, and among the early recipients of sex reassignment surgery. She was a successful painter under her birth nameEinar Magnus Andreas Wegener. After transitioning in 1930, she changed her legal name to Lili Ilse Elvenes and stopped painting; she later adopted the surname Elbe. She died from complications following a uterus transplant. Her autobiography Man into Woman was published posthumously in 1933.
Early life
It is generally believed that Elbe was born in 1882, in Vejle, Denmark. Her year of birth is sometimes stated as 1886, which appears to be from a book about her which has some facts changed to protect the identities of the persons involved. Facts about the life of her wifeGerda Gottlieb suggest that the 1882 date is correct because they married while at college in 1904, when she would have been just eighteen if the 1886 date were correct. It is speculated that Elbe was intersex, although that has been disputed. Some reports indicate that she already had rudimentary ovaries in her abdomen and she may have had Klinefelter syndrome.
Marriage and modeling
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and they married in 1904 when Gottlieb was 19 and Elbe was 22. They worked as illustrators, with Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. They traveled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman by posing as Gottlieb's sister. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling, at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d'Automne in Paris. Elbe started dressing in women's clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb's model, actress Anna Larssen, who was late. Larssen suggested the name Lili, and by the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented with that name as a woman, attending various festivities and entertaining guests in her house. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel. The model for these depictions of petites femmes fatales was Elbe. She stopped painting after her transition.
In 1930, Elbe went to Germany for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. A series of four operations were carried out over a period of two years. The first surgery, removal of the testicles, was performed by Dr. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, under the supervision of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. The rest of her surgeries were carried out by Kurt Warnekros, a doctor at the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic. The second operation was to implant an ovary onto her abdominal musculature, the third to remove the penis and the scrotum. By this time, her case was a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court annulled the couple's marriage in October 1930, and Elbe was able to have her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. She returned to Dresden and adopted the surname Elbe to honor the Elbe River that flows through the city. She began a relationship with French art dealerClaude Lejeune, whom she wanted to marry and with whom she wished to have children. In 1931, she had her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal. This made her the second transgender woman to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.
Death
Elbe's immune system rejected the transplanted uterus, and the operation and a subsequent surgical revision caused infection, which led to her death from cardiac arrest on 13 September 1931, three months after the surgery. Elbe was buried in in Dresden. The grave was levelled in the 1960s. In April 2016, a new tombstone was inaugurated, financed by Focus Features, the production company of The Danish Girl. The tombstone does not record the date of Elbe's birth, just her name and places of birth and death.
In popular culture
The LGBT film festivalMIX Copenhagen gives four "Lili" awards named after Elbe. In 2000, David Ebershoff wrote The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Elbe's life. It was an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. In 2015, it was made into a film, also called The Danish Girl, produced by Gail Mutrux and Neil LaBute and starring Eddie Redmayne as Elbe. The film was well received at the Venice Film Festivalin September 2015, although it has been criticised for its casting of an English cisgender man to play a Danish transgender woman. Both the novel and the film omitted topics including Gottlieb's sexuality, which is evidenced by the subjects in her erotic drawings, and the disintegration of Gottlieb and Elbe's relationship after their annulment.
