Lili Elbe née Einar Wegener was intersex.
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Please don’t colonize intersex history.
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What is Intersex?
Intersex people are people who, as individuals, have genetic, hormonal and physical features that may be thought to be typical of both male and female at once. That is, we may be thought of as being male with female features, female with male features, or indeed we may have no clearly defined sexual features at all.What is OII Australia?
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{ 5 comments }
Someone wanted to know a source to verify that Elbe was intersex. I’m not saying she wasn’t, but I’d like to be able to prove it.
Hello! David Ebershoff would be a good source. He wrote The Danish Girl novel which was based on Lili’s life, memoirs and other documents about her, and researched the archives in Europe firsthand.
Lili wrote her memoirs during the course of her surgeries – an extract is still available for purchase online – click the image in the post to be taken to a purchase page. She consulted Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin and even though his library and papers were burned by the Nazis, much remains in other locations than Berlin though little if any has been translated into English.
Bearing in mind that intersex is having the biological characteristics of male and female, someone who describes having those characteristics and whose treating physicians confirm that she has them is intersex by definition. They and their doctors may not always use the word, given how medicine is still trying to cover up the existence of intersex to this very day by using all sorts of euphemisms and substitute terms, but the evidence is there in their observed biology.
You will find that other women like her who came after her also had the biological characteristics of both male and female. For example, Roberta Cowell is another who wrote her memoirs and they can be found online.
Hope that helps!
Lili Elbe lived her changes in the early part of the 20th century. Intersex as a term was proposed by Richard Goldschmidt in the first issue of Endocrinology in 1901.
The term was in common use amongst biologists and animal endocrinologists by the 1920s.
Intersex in humans was then still considered something of a mental oddity. There being no surgical or medical remedy known then, the psychobabblers had a clear field. Psychobabblers and their allies used terms based on ‘hermaphrodite’ well into the late 20th century and, as is evidenced by recent reporting on intersex athletes, they continue to use it today along with the ill-informed media.
Lili Elbe was referred to as intersex in her own lifetime. She was also referred to as many other things, often derogatorily. She was never referred to as a transsexual, a term that was introduced into common use by Harry Benjamin in 1953. Transgender came into use in the 1970s and is claimed to have been introduced by Virginia Charles Prince.
Although Hirschfeld was involved in Lili’s ‘treatment,’ the ‘terms’ and treatment paradigms were in their infancy and Hirschfeld’s understandings of intersex were far from complete.
It is interesting to note that one of the prime psychobabblers of the time was Australia’s own Norman Haire, a prominent London-based sexologist who was inspired to take up the specialty by Havelock Ellis and then by Magnus Hirschfeld himself.
Haire wrote the introduction for Lili’s memoirs in its 1933 English edition. Our review of the latest re-issue of her memoirs comments on Haire’s beliefs about intersex and Lili at the base of the page.
The problem with assessing these historical cases is the way nomenclature often diverges from the historical facts. A prime example of that is the way Janet Raymond’s transsexual hate book The Transsexual Empire is now consistently reinterpreted as The Transgender Empire by transgenderists.
I can’t be sure whether Lili was intersexed or not. I can be sure that many intersexed women, who are mistakenly raised as males, undergo the same process Lili pioneered. The one thing we can be certain of is this: that changing gender would not have been a remedy.
Sometimes the demarcation between intersexed and transsexed seems more artificial than real. I wonder if Lili Elbe isn’t such a case?
Kiaora
Joanne
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