16 Facts About Lili Elbe

Lili Ilse Elvenes, better known as Lili Elbe, was a Danish painter, transgender woman, and one of the earliest recipients of gender-affirming surgery.

Lili Elbe was the first known recipient of a uterus transplant in an attempt to achieve pregnancy, but died due to the subsequent complications.

An opera based on her life, Lili Elbe, composed by Tobias Picker, premiered in 2023.

Facts about her wife Gerda Gottlieb's life suggest that the 1882 date is correct because they married while at college in 1904, when Lili Elbe would have been just eighteen if the 1886 date were correct.

Lili Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and they married in 1904 when Gottlieb was nineteen and Lili Elbe twenty-two.

Lili Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterarsudstilling at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d'Automne in Paris.

Lili Elbe started dressing in women's clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb's model, actress Anna Larssen, who, on one occasion, had been late for a sitting.

Larssen suggested the name Lili, and, by the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented with that name as a woman, attending various festivities and entertaining guests in her house.

The name "Lili Elbe" was first used in print in a Danish newspaper article written by Copenhagen journalist Louise "Loulou" Lassen for Politiken in February 1931.

Lili Elbe returned to Dresden and began a relationship with French art dealer Claude Lejeune, whom she wanted to marry and with whom she wished to have children.

In 1931, Lili Elbe returned for her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal.

Apart from being one of the earliest recipients of gender-affirming surgery, Lili Elbe was a painter, but quit once she transitioned.

Lili Elbe had many successful paintings, including Portrait de femme, Parti Fra Capri, View from the Garden of Versailles, Costal View from France, and Trianon, to name a few.

Tobias Picker's Lili Elbe, featuring Lucia Lucas, premiered at Theater St Gallen, Switzerland.

In 1931, Lili Elbe was living in Denmark collaborating with her friend, Ernst Harthern, on a memoir of her life.

The possibility of Lili Elbe being intersex has been proposed due her reported possession of both male and female reproductive organs and the loss of medical records documenting her pre-surgical anatomy due to the Allied Bombing Raids.