✷ lili elbe, trans heroine

16 Mar, 2025

Note: I originally wrote this in February, but I suppose it's fitting it's being published for International Women's Day instead. A bit late because not having grown up with it, I still don't really know when International Women's Day is

A note on pronouns: I've chosen to stick as closely as possible to the pronouns and names that Lili herself uses to refer to her past and present selves in her autobiography, as this seems to be what she would prefer. Most of her autobiography is written in the third person, aside from a very long interlude.

This Valentine's Day saw me curled in a quiet spot on campus, reading the autobiography of Lili Elbe¹ as snow was gently falling. I'm rather enchanted with her — a Danish trans woman who transitioned in the year 1930, receiving near-unanimous support from every person in her life that she came out to. She had been a painter, and married to a fellow artist (Grete)², before her transition. One day a friend of the couple, Anna Larsen, who was modelling for one of Grete's paintings, telephoned to let her know she would be late for a sitting, commenting that "Andreas has such pretty woman's legs, can't he fill in as the model?"³ When Anna Larsen arrived in the studio, the following wholesome moment took place.

She peeped at me from every angle. I had to turn about and assume every possible position. Finally she asserted that I was very much prettier as a girl than as a man. I wore ladies' clothes very much better than male costume. 'Yes,' she maintained—and I have never forgotten these words, 'you know, Andreas, you were certainly a girl in a former existence, or else Nature has made a mistake with you this time.'

She spoke quite slowly, quite deliberately, and it was obvious that she was strangely stirred.

Grete gave me a hint to take off the clothes, as Anna Larsen could now pose herself.

I made a movement to retire, but Anna Larsen held me back. 'No,' she cried, 'I simply could not endure to meet Andreas again to-day. We won't even speak of him. Listen, and now I will christen you, my girlie. You shall receive a particularly lovely, musical name. For example, Lili. What do you say to Lili? Henceforth I will call you Lili. And we must celebrate this! What do you say, Grete?'

And Grete merely nodded, looked now at Anna, now at the child about to be christened; and then the three of us kept up rejoicings until far into the night—Lili's christening night.

From the earliest days of her emergence in her feminine identity, Lili's wife and her circle of friends welcomed her as Lili. In the beginning, the identity of Lili was something like a game, and her friends treated it as "an artist's caprice."⁴ Over time though, her identity-concept begins to evolve.

In her memoir, Lili uses the pseudonym Andreas to refer to herself prior to her transition. She describes her sense of self as the presence of two beings, Lili and Andreas, in the same body: "Lili and I became two beings. If Lili was not there, we spoke of her as of a third person. And when Lili was there—that is, when I was not there—I was spoken of between her and Grete as of a third person."⁵ In a modern lens, this pre-medical-transition stage of her existence sounds a bit like genderfluidity. Andreas cannot summon Lili, Lili simply appears or does not. When Andreas and Grete are on vacation, Lili frequently emerges – and she has such a delightful, playful personality (unlike Andreas) that not only are friends and acquaintances absolutely charmed, but she even receives a marriage offer from a man she only just met, who has no idea of her trans identity.⁶

I find this self-concept so fascinating, as Lili is inventing the concept of what it means to be trans. She explains to those she isn't out to that she is Andreas' sister, which — as she passes so completely — leads many people she meets to express doubt that this could possibly be the case, as they don't resemble each other at all!⁷

Lili recounts another story about 1920s life when you're able to pass completely successfully either as a woman or as a man. One day, Andreas and a male friend go to a bar and dance together, and the manager apologetically tells them that men are not allowed to dance with men in this establishment. When Lili arrives with the very same friend the next day, the manager says "I hope that your friend, whom I am sorry not to see with you to-day, has not avoided my establishment because he was offended," compliments Lili's dancing, and says to her friend "Monsieur will admit that his partner of yesterday cannot be compared in the least with Mademoiselle."⁸ She is a queen.

Over time, Lili writes that the balance of two beings in the same body began to change. Andreas became weaker and weaker, as Lili began to "insist with growing stubbornness on her rights."⁹ Andreas began suffering hemorrhages¹⁰ — or experiencing menstruation — and his doctor discovered the presence of rudimentary ovaries inside his body, which had never been allowed to develop fully due to the presence of his testicles.¹¹ (Some scholars believe this was Klinefelter syndrome.) Andreas became weaker and weaker, and also more and more physically effeminate, such that he starts to receive stares from passersby, and the remark from a child "Look, mamma, a woman in man's clothes."¹² An elderly painter tells Andreas that he has been watching Andreas paint in the park for many years, and that in recent years a great change has come over Andreas. The elderly painter says "If you will pardon my saying so, the effect you have on me is for all the world like that of a girl impersonating a man... It is to be hoped you will find a courageous and imaginative doctor. Everything depends on this. Of course, you will wonder how a poor painter can find the enormous fee for such an undertaking. Let us hope, nevertheless, that you will find a man prepared to assist you for humane and scientific reasons."¹³

As Andreas' body weakens, he talks with his wife about his feeling that if Lili should disappear, it would be "a murder." He sees himself as Lili's protector, and he feels that he must die so that Lili can live. He looks forward to this imagined death — surgery — from which Lili will have a body that is fully hers, and after which point he will exist no more. Lili, the phoenix, rising from the ashes of Andreas, her "dead brother."

And indeed, the surgery is successful. Lili writes — and I don't believe her — that immediately when she awoke after her first surgery she had a clear soprano voice, and that her handwriting immediately became that of a woman's. (I have trans friends; they all tell me that voice therapy is a lot of work.) She writes of her time in the clinic with the bliss and radiance of gender euphoria, and her love for the clinic with its gardens echoes the love of so many female protagonists of her time for their home.

Lili does not really contradict or challenge 1930 gender roles, other than by her very existence, and it is interesting to watch her embrace the role of not just a woman but everything that being a woman meant in 1930. In one scene, regarding one of her surgeries, in which ovaries are to be transplanted into her body, she asks why the doctor will remove the ovaries of a healthy young woman. The response that she gets is, in essence, "Oh, don't you worry your pretty little head about that."¹⁴ Lili accepts this response happily — :P — as an instance of being treated as a woman and being talked to as a woman :( even though to modern ears this is so very anti-feminist. Indeed, Lili latches on to the 1930 gender role a little too much. She sees her surgeon as a godlike figure, as a patriarch, and worships him completely. In one of the last scenes of the book, a man that she likes very much proposes marriage to her, and she happily accepts, but then tears herself away from him and declares that she has to ask her surgeon for permission first.¹⁵ What?! Much as I admire her, strong as she is, Lili is not an independent woman.

She has also bought in to the patriarchal hierarchy of women and men. When, after two years without contact (during which she transitioned), she visits her family again, things are very difficult between her and her sister. They are in their forties, approaching fifty, by now, and her parents have died, so it is just her and her sister, brother, and brother-in-law. Lili's brother-in-law is very supportive of her existence, and indeed had lent her money for her transition as soon as she asked, but Lili's sister is not. It doesn't help that Lili can hardly remember her life before, and it doesn't help that almost no one can detect any resemblance between Lili and the painter they remember, Andreas. Lili finds that the house has been converted to "a museum for Andreas," and feels a deep sense of claustrophobia. In one heated exchange, in which Lili tells her sister that she really has neither father nor mother, nor brother nor sister, and was born in Dresden (i.e. during her transition), Lili's sister lets loose a stream of toxic transphobic rhetoric¹⁶ — the only burst of transphobia to be seen in the entire book, excluding that of Andreas' doctors. Lili responds by saying that she knows that she is far inferior to Andreas, "for I am only a stupid female"¹⁷ (what?!) and goes on to say that she is a different person from Andreas, that she must live her own life.

I do wonder if there were some darker moments that Lili chose to leave out of her autobiography — if her real life as Lili was less vibrant and shining than her writing would suggest. I grew up reading a lot of literature written by women, about young women, in roughly this time period (The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables) and the tendency in this genre to downplay all ugliness in life, to portray life as saccharine and all conflicts as easily resolvable, was pretty strong. And yet Lili does write about dark things. She mentions her fear of having no friends¹⁸, her fear of crowds that point and jeer at her, and she writes about her own suicidality¹⁹. It takes bravery to write about this — especially in a time period when the expectation of perfection from women was as strong as it was.

Lili does write a bit about transphobia. When Andreas first seeks out doctors who can help him become a woman, he is rejected and dismissed so many times that he gives up all hope, and resolves to commit suicide one year from that day unless some miracle should occur. A friend of his wife's recommends a doctor, and Grete must plead with him to take this chance. This doctor turns out to be the "courageous doctor" that Lili needs, and in that sense the couple's friend has saved Lili's life. Meeting with the doctor, Lili passes a 1930 psychology test, which basically says "according to our 1930 ideas of gender psychology, you are 80-100% woman."²⁰ Lol. Because of that and the fact that her blood test results miraculously say the same thing (!!??), the doctor agrees to help Lili with her transition. Andreas undergoes an orchiectomy in Berlin, after which he is allowed to go to the Staatliche Frauenklinik in Dresden. It is here that Lili transitions, and from this point in the narrative you can feel her joy and girlishness blossoming. The tone of her writing, which previously read like it was written by a deeply depressed man (it had been dictated to a friend prior to the orchiectomy), changes into girlishness, euphoria, and swirling love for everything around her. Lili befriends another woman in the clinic, who she calls Mrs. Teddybear²¹, and writes of the pregnant women dressed in blue, looking like spring crocuses.²² You can feel how alive she becomes, in this second half of the book. You can feel her joy in life radiating off the page. It's beautiful, and it also fits so neatly into the representations of girlhood in her time. Lili may have stopped painting after her transition, but she remains an artist, and this memoir is her work of literature.

Lili died in 1931, fourteen months after her transition at the Dresdener Municipal Women's Clinic. She had written, as she was dying, that although her life might seem short to others, it had been a whole and happy life, because she had been able to live as Lili. She had gotten engaged to a man — Claude Lejeune, her dear friend, who had loved her ever since she began to present as Lili. She wanted to marry him and have children with him, and for that she wanted to have a fourth surgery — one that would allow her to possess a uterus and become mother to a child. She wrote about pregnancy as being the greatest way to fully separate herself from Andreas: to successfully achieve this most feminine thing, which Andreas could never possibly have done.²³ But 1931 medical science could not give her this ability. And 21st century medical science cannot yet give trans women this ability either. In June of 1931, Lili Elbe underwent a uterus transplant, but her body did not recover from the operation, and she died a few months later. She was buried in the exact place she had wished to be buried, in the cemetery near the clinic where she was born.

It is tragic that her short life came to an end. And yet. Had Lili lived longer, she would have witnessed the descent of fascism and the firebombing of Dresden which destroyed her beloved clinic. She might have fled with Claude Lejeune, to Paris where she had lived previously, or back to Denmark. But even had she managed to escape persecution, her life would never have been as bright and innocent as it was.

What I find most incredible about Lili's life is that she invented the trans narrative. As far as Lili Elbe knew, she was the first person ever to have transitioned through surgery to the opposite sex. And yet, her autobiography hits all these notes that I recognize from my trans friends — gender euphoria on looking in the mirror, gender-affirmation when she's casually treated as the gender she's transitioned into, and fears of being 'clocked' or being perceived by others as detectably trans. Lili doesn't use any of these words of course, but the essence of her experience is clearly recognizable placed within the trans discourse today.

I can't help but imagine the sort of wonder that Lili might feel, if she were transported to the 21st century and could meet young trans people of today. In one part of the book, Lili describes herself a bridge-builder²⁴, saying that on one bank is the present, but that she cannot tell whether the other side is the past or the future. It's the future, Lili, it's the future.

#feminism #lgbtq #vintage