By Vida Ray- May 18, 2026
Famously one of the first Transgender women to undergo gender affirming sex reassignment surgery, Lili Elbe was born in Denmark around 1882. She spent her early adulthood as a painter, marrying a fellow artist whom she met in school, Gerda Gottlieb. In the 1920s, Gottleib became famous for her depictions of beautiful seductive madames by way of paintbrush, but little did they know that Lili had become Gerda’s favorite subject, and she was the one modeling for her paintings after having socially transitioned into a female presentation.
In 1930, Lili pursued surgical intervention in Germany, having experienced suicidal ideations likey brought on by gender dysphoria. There, she was evaluated by Magnus Hirschfeld and deemed eligible for a series of operations newly developed at Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. After the removal of her male genitals, her legal sex and name were changed and she was issued a passport as Lili Elbe. Subsequently, this meant her separation from Gerda, as a union between two women was not recognized under Danish law, She later entered a relationship with an art dealer named Claude Lejeune.
In 1931, Lili would undergo her fourth and riskiest surgery, an organ transplant to give her a womb. Her desire to marry and have children with Claude was known to be great, but tragically, her body rejected the uterus and an infection would kill her 3 months later. This was before the administration of immunosuppressants to organ transplant receivers, but any procedure in which a foreign organ is introduced carries possible complications even in modern medicine. Lili Elbe died at only 48 years old, but she made her mark in history, her beauty captivating the hearts of many european art critics.
Blumberg, Naomi. “Lili Elbe | Danish Painter | Britannica.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Lili-Elbe.