Who Was 'The Danish Girl?'

There's a moment early in the new film "The Danish Girl" when the celebrated artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) is asked by his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), also an artist, to pose for her. Gerda's model - a ballerina - is late for the sitting and a bemused Einar agrees to stand in, slipping into silk stockings and ballet slippers. He halts, though, at putting on the gown; instead holds it against his body.

But upon doing so, Redmayne unexpectedly trembles in a quiet epiphany that echoes a sentiment later found in Wegener's diaries: "I cannot deny, strange as it may sound, that I enjoyed myself in this disguise. I liked the feel of soft women's clothing. I felt very much at home in them from the first moment."

This reverie is quickly interrupted when Gerda's model appears carrying lilies. Seeing Einar partially in feminine attire, she hands him a flower and christens her Lili. Interestingly, it was later said that Gerda's real model, a famous Copenhagen actress, said to her at that moment: "You were certainly a girl in a former existence. Or else Nature has made a mistake with you this time."

Becoming Lili

What follows in the film is how Einar rectified that mistake by becoming Lili Elbe, the first recipient of gender-reassignment surgery some 85 years ago. It is an extraordinary journey, movingly told by director Tom Hooper and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon (adapting David Ebershoff's biographical novel), in which Lili struggles against the confines of being trans before the word existed, as a woman assigned male at birth. As the film points out in its final moments, Lili's diaries of her transformation became an inspirational tome for generations of transgendered individuals.

But who was Lili Elbe?

Born in a remote region of Denmark in 1882 - the landscapes of which she would later paint to much acclaim, Lili attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. There she met Gerda Wegener, a fashion illustrator two years her senior with aspirations of becoming a serious artist. They married in 1904 and both were successful in their mutual careers - Lili (then Einar) painting landscapes and Gerda illustrating books and magazines.

It was a few years into their marriage that Lili's fateful realization occurred. Immediately Gerda embraced her husband's new identity, encouraging Lili to join her at social events and, more tellingly, to become her model for a series of portraits. At the time many wondered who Gerda's subject was; little did they know it was her husband in women's clothes. Lili became her wife's muse and the portraits soon attracted the attention of Parisian dealers who offered her show. Encouraged by the offer, the couple left Copenhagen for more cosmopolitan Paris in 1912 where they unknowingly settled in same room in the H�tel d'Alsace where Oscar Wilde died a few years before.

Lili comes out

It was almost as if the bohemian spirit of Wilde infected the couple. Gerda's career soared, in part with the success of her Lili portraits; while her husband came out of her shell. Lili lost her inhibitions about appearing in public and soon became a fixture of Parisian nightlife, as well as in the various galleries where Gerda's portraits were shown. Seen today her playful portraits often caught Gerda in (then) shocking situations. In one, "A Summer Day," a nude Lili lies between two women with a not-so-subtle gay subtext. In another, "Lili Elbe," Gerda captures her partner sitting in a restaurant with bobbed, blonde hair, a sleeveless dress and large, almond-shaped blue eyes staring off in the distance. In this canvas, reminiscent of the more celebrated paintings of Polish artist Tamara?de Lempicka, Lili is the epitome of Art Deco chic.

"For her part, Gerda seemed to have no problem with Lili," reported a story published in the Copenhagen Post 15 years ago. "Gerda lived openly as a lesbian, so alternative sexual orientations were something she understood well. The married couple lived together quite comfortably. According to Nikolaj Pors, an expert on the couple, 'They were both the parents of Lili. They both wanted her around. Some nights when things were a little boring, Gerda would say, 'Let Lili come over tonight', and Einar would hop into women's clothes.'"

For Gerda, Lili was something of a bff; for Einar, she was the person at her core, and the fact that she couldn't live as her authentic self led to depression and even thoughts of suicide. She even planned the date: May 1, 1930. "I am finished," she wrote that winter. "Lili has known this for a long time. That's how matters stand. And consequently she rebels more vigorously every day."

A revolutionary procedure

Hope came when Lili learned of revolutionary, though highly risky surgical procedures that could allow her to no longer live a double life. "... something happened which sounds almost like a miracle! I had a consultation with the famous surgeon and woman's doctor Professor Werner Kreutz, of Dresden," Lili wrote to a childhood friend named Christian in February of that year.

After consulting with Kreutz, who pioneered a multi-staged procedure became the model for gender-reassignment surgery in the future, Lili agreed to the first of a number of operations. "He wants to remove the dead (and formerly imperfect) male organs, and to restore the female organs with new and fresh material. Then it will be Lili who will survive!," Lili wrote Christian.

"It seems so like a miracle that I dare not believe it," her letter continued. "One thing however consoles me that were it otherwise I must soon die. Grete (the name Lili gave Gerda in her letters and diaries) and I believe we are dreaming, and are fearful of waking. It is too wonderful to think that Lili will be able to live, and that she will be the happiest girl in the world and that this ghastly nightmare of my life is drawing to an end. This wretched comedy as a man!"

A new life

The first operation was a success and Lili gave herself the last name of Elbe, after the river that flows through Dresden, the city where Kreutz's clinic was located. According to a Daily Telegraph article, Lili returned to Copenhagen both elated at her new self and apprehensive as to how she would be accepted. "Many of Wegener's male friends refused to see her, and she had the sense that she had 'murdered' Einar,'" the Telegraph reported. "She abandoned painting, rejecting it as a relic of her former existence, and found herself increasingly detached from memories of Einar's life."

She attempted to sell her canvases to raise money for further operations, and, after being outed by the press, began publishing her account of her transformation (which would later become the book "Man into Woman: The First Sex Change.") Lili became a curiosity in Copenhagen - someone to be gawked at. At one of her exhibits, she was approached by an older woman with a question. "Tell me," the woman asked. "Don't you think that lady over there with the large feet and the necktie, who looks like a man, is Lili Elbe?"

"Yes," an amused Lili answered, "most decidedly that is she."

Complications

Lili and Gerda ended their marriage amicably. (Their marriage was annulled in October, 1930 by the King of Denmark.) Both went onto to other relationships: Gerda with an Italian military officer and Lili with an art dealer named Claude Lejeune with hopes of marriage and the possibility of having children. But a year after the first operation, Lili agreed to a second set to construct a uterus, but she died from complications on September 13, 1931 shortly before her 50th birthday.

Shortly before her death she wrote a friend: "That I, Lili, am vital and have a right to life I have proved by living for 14 months. It may be said that 14 months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life."

After her death her letters and diaries were compiled into a book, "Man into Woman: The First Sex Change," first published in 1933 (with many of the names altered as to protect the identities of Lili's contemporaries). In 2000 novelist David Ebershoff wrote a fictional biography of Elbe, "The Danish Girl," from which the current film was adapted.

A pioneer

In writing about the film in the Advocate this past summer, Ebershoff acknowledges the debt he (and society) owes Lili Elbe.

"Lili is now recognized as an icon in the trans movement. Her life, both as she lived it and as she described it by coming out in interviews and in 'Man Into Woman,' the partially fictional biography she helped write before her death, expanded the public's understanding of gender identity at the time. Since then she has inspired many of us, both trans and cisgender, to be ourselves.

"Lili knew that a false life is no life at all. Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

"Almost a century ago, Lili conquered these questions for herself. She posed for a portrait in an artist's studio and said to the world, This is me."

"The Danish Girl" is in limited release. Visit the film's website (insert hyperlink) to find out when the dates of its wider release.