Elbe, Lili (1886-1931)

Lili Elbe (1882 - 1931) was one of the first identifiable recipient of male to female sex reassignment surgery. She was born in Denmark and was identified as male at the time of her birth. Born as Einar Mogens Wegener, she identified as male for most of her life and was a successful artist with that name. After the surgeries, however, she took the name Lili (some sources state Lily) Elbe.

Elbe's birth year is sometimes referred to as 1886. This appears to be from the book about her, which has some facts changed to protect identities. Lili before her transition was married to Gerda Wegener, who was her partner and legal wife. Both of them were famous painters and illustrators. Gerda though had a better commercial success and is still recognized in nowadays as one of the leading artists of the Art Deco during the first decades of the 20th century.

Lili Elbe was "born" one day while filling in for Gerda's absentee model; Gerda asked Einar to wear stockings and heels so that she could substitute Einar's legs for those of her model. Einar felt surprisingly comfortable in the get-up.

Over time, Gerda became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting almond-shaped eyes dressed in chic fashions. However, around 1913 it was discovered that Gerda's women were in fact Einar himself. No one had suspected before then that the petite femmes fatales of Gerda's work could have been modeled on anyone other than a woman, but Einar had acted as Gerda's chief model for years.

After that, in the 1920s and 1930s Wegener regularly dressed as a woman, attending various festivities and entertained guests in her house as Lili Elbe. One of the things "Lili" liked to do was to disappear, wearing her modeling fashions into the streets of Paris in the throngs of revelers during the Carnival (interpretation of quote).

She was apparently very well accepted as a woman and even received a request for marriage many years before her surgical transition. Only her closest friends knew that she was transsexual and to others, Elbe was introduced by Gerda as Einar's sister.
In 1930 Elbe went to Germany for surgery, which was only in an experimental state at the time. A series of five operations were carried out over a period of two years.

The first surgery, removal of the testicles (Orchiectomy), was made under the supervision of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin.
The rest of Elbe's surgeries were carried out by Dr. Warnekros in the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic. The second operation was to remove the penis, and transplant ovaries, which were taken from a 26-year-old woman. These were soon removed in a third and fourth operation, due to rejection and other serious complications.
The fifth operation was to transplant a uterus and was intended to allow Elbe, then nearing the age of 50, to become a mother


At the time of Elbe's surgery her case was already a sensation in newspapers of Denmark and Germany. The King of Denmark invalidated the Wegeners' marriage in October 1930, and Einar managed to get his sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Elbe. She also stopped painting believing it to be something that only Einar did.


Gerda Wegener went on to marry an Italian military officer, aviator, and diplomat, Major Fernando "Nando" Porta, and move to Morocco, where she would learn of the death of Elbe, whom she described to a friend as "my poor little Lily [sic]." (By contrast, she described her second husband as "a magnificent, splendid and peerless hunk of man".)

The First Transgendered in the world

After living for several years in Marrakech and Casablanca, the Portas divorced, and Gerda returned to Denmark, where she died in 1940. After the dissolution of the Wegeners' marriage, Elbe accepted a proposal from another unknown man, which she intended to follow up as soon as she would be able to "become a mother"

Lili Elbe died in 1931, due to complications three months after her fifth and last operation. This operation was designed to "allow her to be a mother," and entailed the transplantation of a uterus. Her cause of death is believed to have been transplant rejection. She is buried in Dresden, Germany.