Ruben Goldsbrough
The Danish girl
I had been waiting a very long time for the Danish girl to come to cinema screens, realised on the 1st January 2016 the Danish girl, directed by Tom Hooper The Danish girl is a movie is about the artist Einar Wegener ( as played by Eddie Redmayne) prepares to undergo one of the first sex-change operations with support from his loving wife Gerda ( played by Alicia Vikander).
Before going to watched the film I decided to do my research and find out more about the story the inspired the film and what resources Lucinda Coxon used when writing the screen play.
The tragic true story behind The Danish Girl
Lili Elbe (left), Eddie Redmayne (right)
Credit: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
Einar Wegener would kill himself in the spring. He had chosen a date May 1, 1930 after a year spent in torment. The cause of his suffering was quite simple: he was sure he was a woman, born into the wrong body. Or perhaps it was more complicated: sometimes Wegener, whose life is soon to be portrayed on film by the Oscar-winning British actor Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, felt he was two people in the same body, each fighting for supremacy.
One was a Danish landscape painter, a steadfast man who, in his own words, “could withstand storms”. He was married to a woman whose strength and talent matched, or perhaps even surpassed, his own: Gerda Wegener, a successful Art Deco illustrator who produced portraits of fashionable women for magazines such as Vogue and
La Vie Parisienne.
The other shared none of these qualities. Lili Elbe was, as she set down in letters and notes for an autobiography, a “thoughtless, flighty, very superficially-minded woman”, prone to fits of weeping and barely able to speak in front of powerful men. But despite her womanly defects, by February 1930 she was becoming too powerful for Wegener to resist. “I am finished,” he wrote at the time.
“Lili has known this for a long time. That’s how matters stand. And consequently she rebels more vigorously every day.”
Einar Wegener, the Danish painter (left) and Lili Elbe (right) the woman he became
Credit: The Wellcome Library, London
As it turned out, Wegener did not commit suicide on the appointed date. In February 1930 he was told of a doctor who might be able to help him – who did, in fact, perform a series of groundbreaking operations that allowed Einar to become Lili. But all the same, by September 1931, Elbe was dead, the victim of a misjudged surgery to transplant a womb into her body.
(Side note: Ciclosporin, the drug that prevents the rejection of transplanted organs, was first used successfully in 1980, almost 50 years after Elbe's death.)
In the year before her death, Elbe had divorced Gerda, given up painting, and was embarking tentatively on a relationship with a French art dealer. “It is not with my brain, not with my eyes, not with my hands that I want to be creative, but with my heart and with my blood,” she wrote. “The fervent longing in my woman’s life is to become the mother of a child.”
According to her own telling, Wegener’s transition into Elbe began by chance, when one of her wife’s life models failed to turn up. The couple’s mutual friend, an actress named Anna Larsen, suggested that the slight Einar might step in instead. At first she resisted, but eventually she gave in to Gerda’s pleas. “I cannot deny, strange as it may sound, that I enjoyed myself in this disguise. I liked the feel of soft women’s clothing,” she wrote. “I felt very much at home in them from the first moment.”
A portrait of Lili Elbe by Gerda Wegener, a watercolour from 1928
Credit: Wellcome Library, London
Extraordinary as it may seem, this accidental awakening unlocked such deep feelings that Wegener continued to dress as Lili - the name with which she was christened by Larsen – with the encouragement of Gerda, who used her as a model for her illustrations.
In 1912, the couple moved to Paris. There, Gerda accompanied Lili – or rather, “Einar’s sister” – to balls, and watched as she flirted with the unsuspecting officers they met there. In Elbe's later telling, it was Gerda who became Lili’s greatest advocate, and for the next decade and a half they forged on with their unconventional marriage. There are suggestions that Gerda may herself have been gay; she certainly depicted women with women in her erotic drawings.
As the years passed, Wegener became increasingly unwell and depressed; she applied to doctors for help, but they responded with “headshakings” and “disdain”. Some diagnosed her as hysterical, others as gay. “I said to myself that as my case has never been known in the history of the medical art, it simply did not exist, it simply could not exist,” she wrote.
As the years passed, Wegener became increasingly unwell and depressed; she applied to doctors for help, but they responded with “headshakings” and “disdain”. Some diagnosed her as hysterical, others as gay. “I said to myself that as my case has never been known in the history of the medical art, it simply did not exist, it simply could not exist,” she wrote.
Wegener lived at the dawn of understanding of human sex and gender. In 1918, Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician who also founded the world’s first gay rights organisation, opened the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Having spent the previous 30 years documenting the experiences of homosexual men and women around the world, Hirschfeld’s intention was to turn sexology into a rigorous academic discipline. It was Hirschfeld who came up with the term “transsexualismus” for those who wanted to become, rather than simply appear to be, a different sex. (This is distinct from being transgendered, which does not necessarily imply a desire for physical transformation.)
At the turn of the century, doctors had conducted experiments which aimed to work out the biological basis for gender in animals. Professor Steinach of Vienna grafted ovaries into male rats castrated in infancy, and noted the growth of breasts and nipples. When they reached puberty, these “feminised” animals showed no interest in females in heat, and did not display male mating behaviour. The reverse, meanwhile, was true of female rats whose ovaries had been replaced with testicular grafts. Only decades later would scientists isolate, and ultimately synthesise, the sex hormones oestrogen and testosterone.
The procedures by which the then-47-year-old Wegener became Elbe are not precisely known, partly because the library and archive of the Institute for Sexual Research were destroyed by the Nazis in May 1933. In the biography Man into Woman, which incorporates many of Wegener/Elbe’s diary entries and letters, as well as conversations with the book’s “editor”, Niels Hoyer, details are elusive.
Certainly she underwent a series of operations at the Dresden clinic of Kurt Warnekros – a doctor described breathlessly in the book as a man of limitless masculine potency, Lili’s saviour and creator. These cost around 5000 kroner – around £12,000 in today’s money – which Wegener raised by selling off a number of paintings.
Aside from the fatal womb transplant, and the removal of Wegener’s testicles and penis, the ovaries of a young woman were also grafted into Wegener’s body. (Elbe suggests in her memoir that when she was operated on, an existing pair of shrunken ovaries was found in her body.)
Lili Elbe with Claude Lejeune, the man she hoped to marry
Credit: Wellcome Library, London
Lili’s new surname, Elbe, was chosen for the river which flows through the city of her rebirth. After her initial operations, she seesawed between a feeling of astonished joy and moments of deep despair, when she feared she would never be accepted by the world at large. Many of Wegener’s male friends refused to see her, and she had the sense that she had “murdered” Einar. She abandoned painting, rejecting it as a relic of her former existence, and found herself increasingly detached from memories of Einar’s life.
On returning to Denmark, her older sister gave her a faltering welcome home. “Don’t be angry with me if I cannot yet properly call you by your name of Lili,” her sister said on their first meeting, “if I only seek for my brother when I look at you, in your eyes, at your mouth, at your hands, and at your forehead. For I loved his eyes and his forehead so much. I kissed his forehead so often.”
Her past life was disappearing into a fog. The Danish king agreed to annul her marriage to Gerda, and their divorce became official on October 6 1930. (Gerda later remarried an Italian officer who burned through her savings; she died penniless in 1940.) Lili was granted a passport in her new name. When she visited her sympathetic older brother, she told him that she could no longer remember where their parents were buried. Perhaps, she felt, she had no father and mother at all.
This sense of rootlessness came hand in hand with a passionate desire to create new life. In September 1931, after she underwent the womb transplant that would kill her, she sent a letter to her sister. “Now I know that death is near,” she wrote. “Last night I dreamt about Mother. She took me in her arms and called me Lili…and Father was also there…” On September 13 1931, Elbe died.
That summer, she had written a letter to another friend, reflecting on her life. It was weighted with the anticipation of death, but filled too with an aching sort of happiness. “That I, Lili, am vital and have a right to life I have proved by living for 14 months,” she wrote. “It may be said that 14 months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life.”
My Review.
Before I start my review I just want to say that I will not be discussing the issue of Eddie being cast in the role of Lili, there is plenty of discourse out there already on this problem, and if you think it’s not a problem then the director of the movie will point out why it is. This review will also heavily contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film I advise you stop reading now.
As a LGBTQ activist and youth work I’d like to think that I am accustomed to the media and its portrayal of trans people. I’ve seen a lot of trans films, from Boys Don’t Cry to Transparent and I genuinely believe that I’ve seen it all. The biggest issue with media portraying trans people, and an issue that The Danish Girl only goes to reinforce, is the reliance on cultural memes and tropes in an attempt to make the story as understandable and/or as palatable as possible to the primary audience: cis people. I completely understand that for anything to be successful it needs to hit as many eyes as possible which ultimately the goal. It begs the question though: why in 2015 when it was released, which was supposed to be a banner year for trans visibility, must we still rely on concepts that perpetuate misunderstandings?
The first of concepts takes place only about 15 minutes into the movie. Up to this point in the movie, without any foreknowledge, you’d think that the movie is a period piece about a painter. Lili is presented to the audience as a well and truly cisgender, heterosexual man. It is not until Gerda, Lili’s wife, has Lili wear stocking, shoes and hold up a dress that Lili has any inkling as to the fact that she may be a women. If anything before that scene Lili seems to quite enjoy being a man.
The first issue that appears is the point of force feminization and sexual kink as a leading or corrupting factor in gender identity. Gerda is presented to us as a sexually liberated and even dominant woman, stating to a man that she’s painting that “a man submitting to the gaze of a woman can be unnerving”, much to his implied interest. Even her approach to having Lili hold the dress is forced in nature:
Gerda: “I need the dress.”
Lili: “No.”
Gerda: “I need to see how the hem works.”
Lili: “No I’m not wearing the dress.”
Gerda: “Well I haven’t asked you to.”
Pushing the dress into Lili’s hand she holds it up, and in a very slow pan we see Lili’s confused yet excited face as her fingers trace the seams and collar of the dress. The context of this is obvious, by being forced into women’s clothing Lili’s understanding “awakens” and she suddenly has feelings that she never had before.
Why is this a problem? Because that not typically how it works. While not every trans person knew from the moment they exited the uterus that they were trans a lot of them had some sort of understanding of who they are, or at least that they weren’t precisely the gender assigned to them at birth. The portrayal that you can be forced into clothing and POOF you suddenly start feeling like the opposite gender. There is no history in the discussed in the movie that Lili ever felt different before this moment, chances are that she would have likely would have felt different for a long time before touching the cloth. It is noted in the dairy I spoke about earlier that Lili felt comfortable when approached to wear women’s clothing.
In the next scenes Lili comments on a new nightgown Gerda is wearing. Shortly after this scene Gerda discovers Lili wearing said nightgown underneath her dress shirt. Immediately the sexual tension spikes, with Gerda running her had down Lili’s chest, and after pulling Lili on top of her she pushes her onto her back, taking a dominant position.
Now I’m not here to kinkshame. Yes, people do get off on cross-dressing, forced feminization play and so on. Given the context however that this is supposed to be the story of a trans woman’s self-discovery this is an obvious play at explaining ones transgender inclinations as being rooted in or birthed from sexual desire. The connection between gender identity and sexual orientation is one of the most persistent misunderstandings that cis people seem to have.
With it established that Lili has a propensity to dress in “women’s clothing”, we come to the presentation of trans women as the deceiver. Not wanting to attend a social function, Lili is again prompted by Gerda to present as a woman, this time in public. After many scenes of Lili being overwhelmingly anxious and concerned about whether she “passes” or not she is forcibly kissed by a man named Henrik, which is seen by Gerda and causes a argument between the two. In this argument Gerda prompts Lili to stop presenting as herself. In response Lili runs out of their home, performs a very unnecessary tucking sequence, and then is shown to continue to present, and on top she is shown to pursue Henrik further.
In what is perhaps the most bizarre twists leading to a massive issue is the point where Lili has a “period nosebleed” something I only learned about after talking to some transwomen after watching the film. I wish I were making this up, and I’m not aware as to the historical validity to it. After falling to the floor with stomach cramps Lili sees a doctor for “nosebleed and stomach cramps that appear on a monthly cycle”. After her cross-gender expression is revealed to the doctor Lili undergoes a medical radiation treatment for a “chemical imbalance”, which of course is failed to be cured by whatever device they aimed at her genitals. Not to jump time in the movie too much but later on she yet again seeks medical treatment, seeing a raft of doctors, receiving various diagnoses and almost being taken away in a straitjacket.
While this is set in the past and up until that point trans medicine pretty much didn’t exist at all, the reason the presentation of this is troubling is that it may impart the impression to cis viewers that this is a quaint historical footnote and that the casual treatment of a person undergoing a this kind of treatment is a thing of the past. Sadly, it is not. It was only up until a few years ago that being transgender was considered a diagnosable disorder by the mental health community, and even still today those seeking help are misdiagnosed, dismissed, or even attempted to be dissuaded from pursuing transition by a medical community with limited interest and understanding of the lived experiences of trans people.
With talk of the medical community comes the biggest and most critical issue of all with this movie. It is stated directly in the movie:
DR.Warnekros: “I’ve met another man like you. I pursued his case, against the wishes of my colleagues of course, and told him I could operate. Make him fully a woman.”
There you have it. The most pernicious and damaging concept faced by trans people. That whatever is between your legs is the ultimate dictator of gender. Yes, Lili was the first recipient of said surgery and that is a key point of her story, but displaying it as the ultimate end goal that finally validates a person for who they are is the greatest harm that can be done. Trans people are their gender regardless of what’s in their pants, and the continued reinforcement that a person’s genitals must match their presentation is the greatest threat to the fair and respectful treatment of trans people there could be. The obsession by cis people on the surgical or medical transition of trans people undermines our identities.
While this is all been very easy to state what the movie got wrong, there is one sequence the movie got very right. In between her radiation treatment and her surgery Lili and Gerda traveled to Paris, where at one point while crossing through the park Lili is assaulted by two men who demanded to know whether she was a girl or a boy. This example of both verbal and physical violence is very real and the threat that trans people live under every day.
So there it is, my experience and time watching The Danish Girl.