11 
The Denial of History
A quarter of the way through The Danish Girl I was just about ready to get to my feet and give the late-night audience my best Hermione Granger impression. I was tired, angry, and sick of seeing the same old story play out on the screen in front of me. Admittedly, I had not gone in with high expectations: responses from trans audiences had been extremely poor, and friends had warned me not to expect too much. I had read part of the script already and, as someone fascinated by the period of history during which the film is set, was horrified by the factual inaccuracies I saw. Still, in my defense, I had hoped for the best and, after a long day teaching and given the price of the ticket, I wanted to enjoy myself.
It was not to be. This being London, I squashed the desire to lecture those around me on what really happened, and settled for scribbling furiously in my notebook, cringing every time the audience laughed at Eddie Redmayne’s attempts to present himself as a woman.
Visually, dramatically—even orchestrally—similar to Tom Hooper’s previous award-winner The King’s Speech, The Danish Girl was a strange experience for me. A “based on a true story” biopic, drawn from the book of the same name, it purports to loosely tell the story of Danish painter Einar Wegener, wife and fellow artist Gerda Wegener, and the woman Einar reveals herself to be: the beautiful and ill-fated Lili Elbe. The film itself is gorgeous, of course, with that lush yet muted aesthetic that screams “classy period piece”: Downton Abbey on a bigger budget. Everything, from the restrained and unobtrusive directorial style, to the pre-credits reminder that the diary Lili is shown writing was turned into a memoir, points to the telling of an underlying truth. The marketing—posters, puff pieces, interviews with the actors—makes it explicit: here is the real life story of a transgender pioneer, and what you’re about to see next will shock and amaze you. Failing to support this film is failing to support trans history, trans visibility, and trans acceptance.
But the problem is that what this film is passing off as “real life” is nothing more than a collection of stories.
THE BASIC FACTS: before Lili Elbe was known as Lili Elbe, she was known as Einar Wegener. Born in 1882 and trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, she married Gerda Gottlieb in 1904, while both of them were still students. As painters, both Einar and Gerda enjoyed some initial success, with Gerda’s career quickly outstripping her partner’s. They moved to Paris, they moved back to Copenhagen, they loved and supported each other, and eventually they parted ways to pursue other marriages, remaining close and loving friends.
What makes their story of interest to outsiders, of course, is the fact that Lili became posthumously famous as one of the first people to pursue a surgical transition. She died in 1931, two months on from her fourth (or possibly fifth) and final operation, a uterine transplant. Man into Woman appeared in 1933, and Lili’s name was made. While touting itself as a memoir, Man into Woman was actually written by Danish journalist Loulou Lassen and German writer Ernst Jacobson, who took the pseudonym Niels Hoyer and the title of editor. Jacobson fleshed out his third-person narrative with extracts from Lili’s letters and diary entries. Nerissa Gailey and A. D. Brown explain, in their 2015 essay “Beyond Either/Or,” the many ways in which Man into Woman is closer to fiction than fact: discrepancies between the book and the original documents it refers to, lack of verification of its contents due to the destruction of records in the fire-bombing of Dresden, and the number of alterations and exaggerations found throughout the text.
Information about Lili and Gerda can be found in a scattering of sources: contemporary accounts written in trans(vestite) magazines, academic papers that have collated and analyzed medical accounts, wider media accounts, and papers left by the pair. There are many aspects of their shared life that we cannot know and can’t guess at. What we do know, though, is at odds with how The Danish Girl presents the world.
There are the general problems with the biopic format, and this film after all claimed it was based on a book which itself only claimed to be loosely inspired by Lili’s story, and perhaps we could shrug them off as a necessary aspect of artistic license. The compression of years to create a tightened narrative, for example, is standard Hollywood practice. But when the topic—transition—is relatively unknown, these standard practices introduce troubling inaccuracies and distortions. The shortening of timescale makes a gradual realization and multistaged, multifaceted transition look like some kind of overnight fancy. It may be easier on the audience’s attention span, but it props up the popular myth that trans people transition on a whim. There are the usual insertions of fictional characters, some clichéd writing, and some heavy-handed pathetic fallacy; par for the course, but aggravatingly faithful to the usual trans tropes. But, beyond these features, there are four specific changes made to Lili and Gerda’s story that I just couldn’t get my head around, changes that felt so regressive, so oppositional to what actually happened, that it made me wonder what the filmmakers were trying to say about women in general, and being a trans woman in particular.
One of the most shocking moments of the film, one most likely to garner the sympathies of a general audience, is the point at which Lili first seeks help for her “problem,” and is forcibly strapped down and subjected to a radiotherapy cure meant to restore her to a state of normal manhood. Gerda is present to encourage her, to enforce the idea that this painful, excessive response is what’s right, is what’s needed to save their marriage. The cure fails, of course, but leaves Lili wary of seeking help. In reality, the radiotherapy treatment Lili undertook—with the full support of Gerda—was designed to stimulate the ovaries doctors suspected her of having. Radiotherapy, as a new and exciting development in the field of medicine, was often touted as a revitalizing cure-all. In this instance, it was thought that the beams would kick-start ovarian function and that a natural bodily transition would follow. Lili began to bleed on a monthly basis afterward, and both she and Gerda felt this akin to menstruation, a sign that the treatment was working.
Returning to the movie: following the failure of radiation treatment, Lili shutters herself away, unable to trust doctors, unable to confide in Gerda, and unable to withstand public scrutiny as either Lili or Einar. There is no mention here of Lili’s actual life: her consultations and treatments with Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute, her (supposed) disdain for the other patients, her first operation, her love of walking through Paris while drinking life in. Lili does, admittedly, go for a Parisian stroll in The Danish Girl, only to be assaulted by two strangers—another invention. Where in reality we have a single trans person as one of many—a pioneer, to be sure, but a pioneer in community—we are shown instead a lone martyr. She becomes someone who cannot be understood, who cannot seek understanding or companionship, who cannot find release even in the solitary pleasures of anonymity.
Lili’s final operations and death scene are, inevitably, played for maximum effect. All trace of Hirschfeld erased, Lili and Gerda try a last-ditch consultation with maverick surgeon Kurt Warnekros. He warns them how dangerous his proposed treatment would be. He tells them that Lili would be the first to try. Lili doesn’t care; she needs surgery more than the security of a long life. The surgery undertaken is reduced to two procedures, from the likely four or five the real-life Lili underwent: first, the removal of original tissue and, second, the creation of a vagina. Lili is meant to rest properly between procedures, get her strength back—she doesn’t. Asking her surgeon if she’ll be able to have children after her second operation, she gets the patronizing reply: “One thing at a time.” You can guess the rest. Gerda conveniently arrives at just the right moment for the big death scene, caused by loss of blood and post-surgical fever, and Lili gets in a final, saccharine line before the delicate closing of her eyes. Gerda cries. The audience, presumably, cries. Lili pays the ultimate price for trying to go against nature—but wasn’t she brave to do so?
The reality is far less operatic. The details are somewhat murky, after the destruction of medical records by both the Nazis and by Allied firebombing. What we know is that Lili wanted children, and that Warnekros was less ethical than the more cautious, and qualified, Hirschfeld. Successful organ transplants would not become a reality until the production of powerful immunosuppressive drugs in the 1970s. The insurmountable problem of rejection was well known in medicine by the point of Lili’s final operation, but Warnekros told her he could do it. Her immune system rejected the transplant—she died on September 13, 1931.
It surprised me, then, that the cinematic change that made me even angrier than this melodramatic surgery and death sequence was the overall treatment of Gerda. Gerda Wegener—whose income from her art outstripped her partner’s by a considerable amount, who won two gold medals for her work at the 1925 World’s Fair in Paris, who had lived in Paris since 1912 with Lili as two women together, who funded the majority of Lili’s surgery, whose best works are some of the most romantic and erotic depictions of lesbian attraction and of lesbian lovemaking I have ever seen—is reduced and changed to become a character straight out of central casting. Gerda’s career only lifts off with Lili’s transition, and she becomes, by turn, frustrated, angry, and shrewish about the loss of her husband. Gone is any attempt to accurately portray the Bohemian world of independent women, artistic freedom, and gendered authenticity, replaced instead by a portrait of a marriage ruined by transition, identical to every other telling of that story from HBO’s Normal to the join-the-dots tabloid staple. Some, but by no means all, marriages do falter in the face of transition. But attempting to impose that story onto the real lives of Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe is an insult to how they lived, how they loved, their courage, and their artistry. Alicia Vikander brought home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress: another remarkable chapter of women’s history publicly erased.
I WAS RANTING about all of this online—I try, but I’m only human—and I had an interesting response from an ex-pupil of mine. She commented that it wasn’t the film’s fault that it was so tragic, because that’s simply what life was like for trans people in the 1920s. I don’t blame her for thinking so: it’s what I thought, before I fell down the rabbit hole of historical research. We’re still struggling for LGBT acceptance now, so it makes sense that the situation would be much worse nearly a century ago.
Without doubt, tragedy existed, and many, many people suffered. But the story is not quite so bleak as The Danish Girl would have you believe. Sometimes, it even manages to be quite wonderful.
It’s difficult to pinpoint where to begin—with the birth of the science of sexology in the nineteenth century? With the ball, bar, and party scenes in Paris, in Holland, in Berlin, where dancers could present themselves as any gender they liked and flirt with whomever they chose, twice a week in Berlin with police permission? Maybe with the 1882 case of Herman Karl, previously known as Sophia Hedwig, who, after chest and genital surgery, was granted a legal change of name and gender by the Prussian state?
Or maybe with the fact that people who flouted gendered conventions, who insisted on determining their own gendered selves in opposition to how the world categorized them, were so well-documented that contemporaneous researchers could argue over whose definition best described them. In addition to the words “transvestite” (a much broader term, closer to “transgender” now) and “transsexual” (appearing in the 1920s), we had “eviration” and “defemination” from Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Geschlechtsumwandlungstreib (drive for sex transformation) from Max Marcuse, and “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion” from Havelock Ellis—in addition to the complex and conflicting meanings of “invert,” “Urning,” and “homosexual.” It was Magnus Hirschfeld’s words—transvestite and transsexual—that stuck, and Hirschfeld’s work that is behind so many of the extraordinary medical and societal advances that paved the way for the modern trans movement today.
A doctor, researcher, and all-round campaigner for the rights of sexual and gendered minorities, Magnus Hirschfeld was described by Adolf Hitler as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” In 1897 he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, most likely the first campaigning group for what we would call LGBT causes in the world. He published a journal, Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries, featuring scientific studies, news, reviews, letters, and pictures. In 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, and in 1928 he founded the World League for Sexual Reform. In between treating patients, acting as an expert witness, petitioning the police and the courts for fairer treatment, and writing and distributing political and informational pamphlets, Hirschfeld found the time to write and publish his groundbreaking book Transvestites in 1910. Hirschfeld used the word to describe those who felt “peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being” when presenting as the sex other than which they were assigned at birth—and made it clear that such people could come from all walks of life, could be assigned female or male, could be of any and all sexual orientations (including none)—and that they were not mad nor, as many people think even now, pushing a kink too far.
Lili Elbe was neither the first trans woman to undergo medical treatment, nor was her “memoir” the first in the field. Karl Baer’s story, Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, was published in 1907, and served as the basis for a 1919 silent movie adaptation. Earl Lind, self-described androgyne, published Autobiography of an Androgyne in 1918 and The Female Impersonators in 1922. There are several reports, and rumors, of surgical treatment of what we might now call trans men from the 1900s and 1910s. Alan Hart, an American scientist and novelist, underwent his surgical transition in 1917. The first formal Western medical attempts at “male-to-female” surgery followed in 1920: “These early surgical techniques were developing hand in hand with reconstructive and cosmetic surgery methods for war veterans, and in some cases were accompanied by early attempts at hormone therapy. Although there are few detailed accounts within the contemporary medical literature, possibly due to the laws prohibiting castration, there is evidence that multiple surgeries of this nature were performed.” These surgical efforts were well enough known, and considered safe enough that, following Lili Elbe’s death, an editorial appeared in community magazine The World of the Transvestite. This editorial reaffirmed to its readership the potential of such surgery, noting promising signs coming from Hirschfeld’s institute, and included an update from an unnamed transvestite, currently enjoying a postoperative holiday, “needless to say as a complete woman.”
IT ISN’T JUST that this erasure of our past is untruthful, although that is a part of it. More, that in nearly every telling of the trans narrative, we are subject to the shock of the new. It’s always “first trans person to” have surgery, publish a book, be employed in profession xyz, serve in the army, have their documents updated, get married in their true gender. It’s not about not caring about our milestones, but it is caring about the way in which the need for these firsts overrides the accurate recording of our history. I have heard so many candidates named as “the first” to have surgery, but even the earliest account I could find, of Herman Karl, is simply the earliest currently known record of modern surgery in a Western context; humans have been modifying their own bodies through self-surgery for thousands of years, and many other cultures have their own accepted forms of modifying the sexed body. Every achievement of the past is cancelled out by the need to label the next achievement “the first,” making the framing of transness the framing of something exotic, different, a symptom of the modern age, rather than as just another aspect of human nature as old as humanity itself. There is no story to sell in that second framing—but there is hope for trans people looking for reassurance of their unremarkableness in an often hostile world.
What would it mean, to trans people now, if our history were common knowledge? By this I do not mean a history of people who are exactly as we are, regardless of the dictates of historical and social context, but of the people whose lives and efforts helped to create the categories, the structures and cultures through which we now move. What if we knew of these figures, these communities, in the same way we know of Oscar Wilde? It’s a terrible cliché but, as a young adolescent, I was obsessed with Wilde. I didn’t know how to describe my sexuality, and I didn’t know how to describe my gender, but I knew that I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be that witty, and that unapologetic—and when the film Wilde came out, and I saw that first kiss between two beautiful, passionate men, my body knew that that was what it wanted for itself. Just that little slice of history gave me an insight into myself, and a role model, the comfort of companionship, when I was invisible and alone. What a tremendous gift it would have been, to have known that there were people in that history who might now be called trans, people who lived as the genders they knew that they were, regardless of what society had told them. To know that they had claimed their own lives with honesty and courage, and that maybe I could follow their lead and do the same.
The shock of the new doesn’t just impact on the telling of our history: it’s deeply embedded in the media handling of any trans-related enterprise. So much has been made of the “groundbreaking” nature of The Danish Girl’s approach, and the representation of a trans woman by a cis man has been excused by the reasoning that the film’s success would ultimately pave the way for the casting of trans actors. It is, apparently, astonishing to have a mainstream movie with a trans subject matter at all, and the trans community should shelve their objections and be grateful for the increased publicity. As a bit of a movie buff, I didn’t buy that explanation, and it made me curious: is it really so rare for a film to feature the role of a trans woman that Redmayne receiving his Oscar nod is a step forward?
So I decided to watch The World According to Garp by way of comparison. I had loved the book when I was younger, but had never got around to seeing the movie. Like The Danish Girl, here is a film with a cis man playing a trans woman—like The Danish Girl, that man was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal. Thirty-four years ago, John Lithgow played Roberta, an ex-professional football player who now works in the feminist movement and becomes the main character’s best friend and anchor of sanity in a mad and often grotesque world. It’s not a perfect film, and much of it is firmly of its time. Still, I was struck by how natural Lithgow was in the role, and how firmly Roberta is accepted and celebrated as a woman by all the other characters. Not as a man trying to be a woman, not as a particular subset of “woman”—but just as herself. It was so utterly different from Redmayne’s performance, the whole of which seemed to hinge on the open acknowledgment of performance, of gesture, of the sense of being on display. Constantly quivering, seemingly either on the edge of tears or orgasm, wrists held at uncomfortable angles, Redmayne’s approximation of what a trans woman is was one of the most uncomfortable things I have been witness to in recent memory. I’ve always been ambivalent about the casting of cis actors as trans characters, feeling that the more pressing question was the casting of trans actors in all roles. Redmayne changed my mind. The entire edifice felt precisely that—an edifice. Here was transness depicted from the outside, a man disguised through outer trappings, rather than a woman revealed by her own honesty. Shot after shot of stockings, shoes, makeup and wigs, but nothing of the heart of what it is to be trans. It felt almost parodic in its display, and it hurts that that parody will be taken as truth by people who do not know better.
Every project needs a hook. Every artist wants to feel that they have added something new to the cultural landscape. But, in the case of The Danish Girl, there is nothing new, simply the recreation, the restaging, of “the new” by those ignorant of, or unfeeling toward, the history and people they claim to be serving.
Hirschfeld’s institute was pillaged by the Nazis in 1933. One of the most famous images of Nazi book-burning is the documentation of the destruction of his research, his case files, his painstakingly gathered evidence in support of sexual minorities. Hirschfeld died in France in 1935; we do not know exactly how many homosexuals, transvestites, and other “anti-socials” were rounded up and sent to the camps, but we know that the numbers were considerable. Many of those few who survived the war were not freed, but sentenced to further punishment for their “crimes.” The magazines, bars, and organizations that supported the lives of sexual and gendered minorities were gone. The destruction of both Hirschfeld’s work and the thriving subcultures that supported and benefited from it set the emerging LGBT rights movement back by decades, if not more so. The drives—legal, social, scientific—toward investigation, knowledge, and compassionate acceptance were erased.
We have a chance to relearn that history, and to benefit from and honor that legacy, if we have the will to do so, if we can stand to look at our past without prejudice. I hope that we do.