Rainbow Revolutionaries by Sarah Prager

Author:Sarah Prager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2020-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Lili Elbe

The female model for the painting Gerda Wegener was working on was running late, and Gerda really needed to work on painting the folds of the dress draped around the shoes. She begged her spouse to step in and help by putting on stockings, a dress, and high heels as a temporary model. Gerda had no idea this would change her spouse’s life forever.

Her spouse was a painter as well . . . a male painter, they both thought at the time. After much begging, Gerda’s spouse reluctantly agreed and donned the women’s clothing for the first time, having only dressed as a man up to then. When the model arrived, she suggested Gerda’s spouse go by the name Lili, and it stuck.

Everything clicked for Lili as soon as she looked in the mirror. It was like she was always meant to be this way and had always been this way at the same time. Nothing was the same after that day in the early 1910s. Lili began borrowing her wife’s clothes and dressing as a woman more and more in private, and then in public too. Over time, she began to want to transition in a way that had never been done before—getting a surgery to give her female external organs.

When she first went to doctors to explore this possibility, they threatened to lock her up for insanity. She was seen as sick, not as a patient deserving of the help she wanted. Thankfully, she found a clinic in Berlin run by Magnus Hirschfeld, who was pioneering such physical transitions. Trying the surgeries was dangerous—they were highly experimental. The risk was entirely worth it to Lili—she only wanted to live if she could have the surgeries.

Over a few months in 1930 in Germany, Lili underwent three surgeries between her legs, with Gerda supporting her the whole way. They were a success, and she was delighted! She was one of the first people to ever change her physical sex.

But a year later, she still felt like there was something missing. She wanted a uterus and decided to get a fourth surgery to give her one. Sadly, this procedure was not a success, and Lili passed away from complications due to the surgery. Lili wrote that while fourteen months might not seem like a long time to live fully as yourself, to her it felt like a full lifetime, and she had no regrets.

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