WE have added an article about Lili Elbe née Einar Mogens Wegener to the Books pages of this website. It is a book review, of the memoirs of Lili Elbe, titled Man into Woman, written in the early 1930s, and re-published in 2004 by Blue Boat Books Limited.
Einar, 1929, and Lili, 1930.
Published autobiographies written by intersex people are rare. Socially-imposed guilt and shame at being born intersex have led to fewer such books being published than one might wish for – we can learn so much from how others like us have lived.
I’d always known Lili Elbe as being one of the few earliest publicly known intersex people, after Herculine Barbin, but beyond the salient facts that she had been an artist, as I am, and died just before the Nazis came to power, I knew little more. …
Then, when it was announced that Nicole Kidman was to co-produce and star in a movie based on Lili’s life, The Danish Girl, and the media portrayed Lili as “the world’s first post-operative transsexual,” I decided to see if I could dig up some facts. …
