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Lili Ilse Elvenes (28 December 1882 – 13 September 1931), better known as Lili Elbe, was a Danish painter, , and one of the earliest recipients of gender-affirming surgery (then called sex reassignment surgery).

Elbe was a painter under her birth name Einar Wegener. After transitioning in 1930, she changed her legal name to Lili Ilse Elvenes, stopped painting,

(2025). 9783839431801, Verlag. .
and later adopted the surname Elbe. She was the first known recipient of a uterus transplant in an attempt to achieve pregnancy, but died due to the subsequent complications.
(2025). 9781544393827, Sage Publications. .
(2025). 9781838670443, Emerald Publishing Limited. .

The UK and US versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex.

(2025). 9781350021495, Bloomsbury.
A film inspired by her life, The Danish Girl, was released in 2015. An opera based on her life, Lili Elbe, composed by , premiered in 2023.


Early life
It is generally believed that Elbe was born in 1882, in , Denmark, the child of Ane Marie Thomsen and spice merchant Mogens Wilhelm Wegener, according to the registry at St. Nicolai Church. Her birth year is sometimes cited as 1886 by a book about her in which some facts have been changed to protect the identities of the persons involved. Facts about her wife 's life suggest that the 1882 date is correct because they married while at college in 1904, when Elbe would have been just eighteen if the 1886 date were correct. She and She: The Marriage of Gerda and Einar Wegener. The Copenhagen Post. 3 July 2000

It is speculated that Elbe was ,

(2025). 9780954707200, Blue Boat Books. .
although that has been disputed. Some reports indicate that she already had rudimentary ovaries in her abdomen and may have had Klinefelter syndrome. Based on Brown, Kay (1997); Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001.


Marriage and modelling
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 nineteen and Elbe twenty-two. Gerda came from a conservative family, as her father was a in the . They worked as illustrators, with Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines.

They travelled throughout Italy and France before settling in in 1912, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman by posing as Gottlieb's sister-in-law. Elbe received the in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists' Fall Exhibition) at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d'Automne in Paris. The Arts and Transgender. renaissanceblackpool.org

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 , who, on one occasion, had been late for a sitting. 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 was Elbe. Gerda Wegener. get2net.dk Elbe stopped painting after her transition.

Lili Elbe by Gerda Wegener.jpg|alt=Watercolor painting of a woman with blonde hair, wearing a flapper dress sitting at a table with a glass of champagne.|Portrait,
Szív királynő - Lili portéja.jpg|alt=Oil painting of a woman with dark hair wearing a red dress, looking at the viewer while smoking a cigarette in front of a card game table|Portrait,
     


Surgeries and dissolution of marriage
In 1930, Elbe went to for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. She contemplated suicide before learning of these options. While in Germany, Elbe stayed in the Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. Prior to commencing any surgical procedures, Elbe's psychological health was evaluated by German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, through a series of tests. A series of four operations were then carried out over a period of two years. The first surgery, performed in Berlin, was the removal of the testicles, carried out by . The remainder of her surgeries were carried out by , a doctor at the Municipal Women's Clinic.Brown, Kay (1997) Lili Elbe. Transhistory.net. All of Lili Elbe's medical documents were ruined as a consequence of the Allied bombing raids that destroyed the clinic and its archives. The second operation was to onto her abdominal musculature and the third to remove the penis and the scrotum. By this time, her case had become a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court in October 1930, and Elbe was able to have her sex and name , even receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. The name "Lili Elbe" was first used in print in a Danish newspaper article written by Copenhagen journalist Louise "Loulou" Lassen for in February 1931. Elbe returned to Dresden and began a relationship with French art dealer Claude Lejeune, whom she wanted to marry and with whom she wished to have children. Gerda went on to marry an Italian man after separating from Elbe, although the marriage ended in divorce shortly after.

In 1931, Elbe returned for her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and . This made her one of the earliest transgender women to undergo a surgery, a few weeks after Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on .


Death
Following Elbe's fourth surgery, her rejected the transplanted uterus, leading to due to of the uterus from the female donor, and ultimately a decrease in immunity. This ultimately caused an infection, which led to her death from on 13 September 1931 in Dresden, Germany, three months after the surgery.

Elbe was buried in in , Germany, but the grave was leveled in the 1960s. In April 2016, a new tombstone was erected, financed by , the production company that produced The Danish Girl.


Paintings
Apart from being one of the earliest recipients of gender-affirming surgery, Elbe was also a painter, but quit once she transitioned. The majority of Elbe's painting focused on landscapes. She had many successful paintings, including Portrait de femme (1923) , Parti Fra Capri (1921), View from the Garden of Versailles (1922), Costal View from France (1918), and Trianon (1920) , to name a few .


In popular culture
The LGBTQ+ film festival gives out four Lili Awards each year, named after Elbe.

In 2000, wrote The Danish Girl, a fictionalized account of Elbe's life. It was an international bestseller and translated into many languages. This novel provided one of the earliest fictional accounts of gender affirmation surgery, which shaped LGBTQ+ literature. In 2015, it was made into a film of the same name, produced by and , starring as Elbe. The film was well received at the Venice Film Festival in September 2015, though it has been criticised for casting a man to play a transgender woman. Both the novel and film omitted several 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.

's opera Lili Elbe, featuring , premiered at Theater St. Gallen, Switzerland. Based on the life of Lili Elbe and the book Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex,

(2025). 9781350021495, Bloomsbury.
the opera premiered on 22 October 2023, and received "Best World Premiere" in the 2023 Oper! Awards.


Publications
In 1931, Lili Elbe was living in Denmark collaborating with her friend, Ernst Harthern, on a memoir of her life. Fra Mand til Kvinde was published by her German friend and editor under the name of Neils Hoyer following Elbe's death. The narrative provided details of her life as Danish painter and her gender confirmation surgery. The possibility of Lili Elbe being intersex has been proposed due her reported possession of both male and female reproductive organs and the loss of medical records documenting her pre-surgical anatomy due to the Allied Bombing Raids. However, this theory has been disputed. The narrative was published four times, in three different languages over the course of two years. The UK and US versions, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex were both published in 1933.

Man into Woman: An authentic Record of a Change of Sex brought attention to new medical interventions as the story of Lili Elbe was circulated through American publications. American publications, such as "A Man Becomes a Woman” and “When Science Changed a Man into a Woman”, published in the popular magazine, Sexology, associated the story of Lili Elbe with cases of intersex sex changes. These narratives promoted a binary view of gender, reinforcing gender stereotypes among Americans.

Lili Elbe and her memoir became well known in European media, publicized by Paul Weber. The story encouraged political action and brought awareness to the challenges faced by gender non-conforming people.


Further reading
  • Man into woman: an authentic record of a change of sex / Lili Elbe; edited by Niels Hoyer i.e.; translated from the German by H.J. Stenning; introd. by Norman Haire. London: Jarrold Publishers, 1933 (Original Danish ed. published in 1931 under title: Fra mand til kvinde. Later edition: Man into woman: the first sex change, a portrait of Lili Elbe – the true and remarkable transformation of the painter Einar Wegener. London: Blue Boat Books, 2004.
  • Schnittmuster des Geschlechts. Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft by Dr. Rainer Herrn (2005), pp. 204–211. . German study containing a detailed account of the operations of Lili Elbe, their preparations and the role of Magnus Hirschfeld.
  • "When a woman paints women" / Andrea Rygg Karberg and "The transwoman as model and co-creator: resistance and becoming in the back-turning Lili Elbe" / Tobias Raun in Gerda Wegener / edited by Andrea Rygg Karberg ... et. – Denmark, Arken Museum of Modern Art, 2015.


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