# Lili Elbe Born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener on December 28, 1882 in Vejle, Denmark; died September 13, 1931 in Dresden, Germany. **One of the earliest documented recipients of gender-affirming surgery**, undergoing four operations in Dresden between 1930 and 1931 under the care of [[Magnus Hirschfeld]]'s Institute for Sexual Research and surgeon Kurt Warnekros. ## Career Before Transition Elbe was a working Danish landscape painter in the early 20th century, married to fellow painter **Gerda Wegener** in 1904. The two were a successful art-world couple in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s; Gerda's portraits of Lili — many painted before Lili's transition, with Lili as the model in conventionally feminine dress and presentation — are now recognized as significant early-20th-century portraiture of a transgender subject. ## The Surgeries and Death Elbe began publicly presenting as a woman in the late 1920s and traveled to Dresden in 1930 to undergo a series of gender-affirming surgeries — at the time, an experimental medical undertaking with extremely high risk. The first three procedures were considered successful. A fourth procedure in 1931, attempting a uterus transplant (a surgical concept that was not viable with 1930s medical capabilities), caused her death from complications. ## Legacy Elbe's posthumously published 1933 memoir *Man into Woman* — assembled from her letters and journal entries — was one of the earliest mainstream-published trans autobiographies in any language. Her story reached a much broader contemporary audience through Tom Hooper's 2015 biographical film *The Danish Girl*, starring Eddie Redmayne (the casting of a cis male actor in the role was widely criticized by the trans community). ## Place in the Vault Lili Elbe sits alongside [[Christine Jorgensen]] as one of the canonical early-20th-century transgender historical figures, demonstrating that gender-affirming medical care has a documented history going back nearly a century before the contemporary anti-trans rhetoric that frames the existence of trans people as a "new" or "recent" phenomenon. Her case is also a marker of the **Weimar-era Berlin medical and sexual-research milieu** centered on Magnus Hirschfeld's institute — destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 in one of the first major Nazi book-burnings. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Christine Jorgensen]]