Lili Elbe

I've always been a person who has been taught to respect everyone without any
distinction, and effectively, I respect everyone I meet, all the ways of thinking and
all the ways of being. Nonetheless, when we talk about the LGBTQ community, I
not only respect it, but I more than support it.

The fact of supporting all this has motivated me to investigate a lot, and with that, I
discovered a character who was born as a man and died as a woman. She is the
person I will talk about and her name is Lili Elbe.

Lili Elbe, a woman capable of challenging her own body and discovering her true
identity, is an icon within the transsexual community. Her courage helped her to
accept before the world that she was a true woman trapped in the body of a man.
In that historical, social and cultural context (in the 20s), it was an absolute
aberration to decide by conviction, to change sex. Thanks to her strength, Lili
managed to face the whole world, showing her feminine side in an authentic and
genuine way.

In his teens, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and there he
met Gerda Gottlieb. They fell deeply in love and therefore decided to marry later
when Einar was 22 years old.

For years, they both worked as illustrators, traveling the world and painting for
magazines and books. Einar was renowned for his landscape paintings, and he
even won a series of awards for them.

Einar and Gerda seemed to have a very close and sincere love relationship.
However, everything changed when one day, the model that Gerda had hired to
portray in one of her paintings, did not show up.

Gerda Wegener, the young illustrator who had made herself a niche with her
stylized female portraits, wanted to finish her sketch and, at the suggestion of an
actress friend who was passing by, asked her husband, who had always been thin
and slender, to put on the dress with pleated skirt, heels and stockings. A moment
of posing would be enough for Einar to discover something important about
himself.

For a long time, no one knew that the woman in Gerda's paintings was her
husband. For years Einar only wore stockings and dresses when his wife needed a
model, but he felt comfortable in the clothes he wore to pose; in fact, he had never
felt so authentic and alive that when he dressed like that. Little by little, she began
to spend more time as Lili than as Einar. When the couple realized the importance
of Lili they moved to Paris, where she was able to attend social events calling
herself Einar's sister.
Lili knew that her body should be that of a woman, and with the passage of time
Einar disappeared. She sought a doctor to help her and found a man who
immediately understood her problem.

In 1930 he traveled to Berlin and at 49 years of age had a surgical intervention;

from this Lili legally became the woman she so longed to be, and so she was also
the first transsexual person (or at least the first recorded in history) to go through a
sex reassignment procedure. However, Lili was unable to overcome her end
operation and died 2 days later, shortly before turning 50 years old.

On the other hand, Gerda with the passage of time made the decision to remarry;
In spite of herself, the things that happened with Einar and Lili made things with
someone else different, and for that reason she divorced soon after. He died
approximately 10 years after Lili.

The admirable story of Lili Elbe was only known among scholars and activists of
the LGBTQ community, until Davis Ebershoff told it in her novel "The danish girl"
(2000) and some time later, the film producer Tom Hopper, decided to take her to
the big screen and so give light of hope to many transgender people.

The life of this woman occurred 85 years ago, but the data shows that things have
not changed and there is still a long way to go. Just seeing the fact that 41% of
transgender people try to commit suicide because of the discrimination and
harassment they suffer, we know that the world still does not assimilate that we are
all different and yet we have the same rights.

A pioneer woman capable of facing adversity and controversy, such as Lili Elbe,
must be recognized and admired by the world. His heroic personality that
uncovered his true essence, invites us to live in freedom, being who we really are.