Lili Elbe

While a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Wegener met his future wife Gerda Gottlieb, a fellow student and budding painter. The couple fell in love and got married in 1904, when Gottlieb was 19 and Wegener was 22.

After having travelled far and wide together, in 1912 the couple decided to settle in Paris. The open culture of the city offered Wegener the much desired opportunity to live explicitly as a woman, and his wife as a lesbian.

In the form of a woman, Elbe got involved in a romantic relationship with Claude Lejeune, a French art dealer. She longed to marry and have a family with him. She hoped that her last surgery involving a uterus transplant would make her dream of bearing children true.

Lili Elbe was born on 28 December 1882 in a small fjord-side town of Vejle, Denmark. He was raised as a male child with the name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener. According to some reports, he may have been born as an intersex child but there is no absolute proof.

Wegener was a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Having graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, both Wegener and his wife Gerda Gottlieb worked in the same field. While Wegener was an expert in landscape paintings, his wife sketched for books and fashion magazines.

Wegener’s transition to being a woman began accidentally. One day, he dressed up as a woman when Gottlieb's model didn’t turn up. He was required to wear stockings and heels to appear more akin to the model. Strangely, he didn’t feel awkward in the dress. Soon, it became the norm and he increasingly began dressing and identifying as a woman.

This transition proved to be beneficial for the couple. Gottlieb’s paintings of her husband in the disguise of a beautiful woman became quite famous. Until 1913, people remained unaware that the subject of the paintings was actually a male person none other than Gottlieb's spouse.

By the 1920s, Wegener had almost transformed his personality, attending public events with his wife in the characteristic traits of a woman. He was introduced to others as Lili Elbe, Einar Wegener's sister. No one else other than his wife and closest friends knew who Lili Elbe actually was.

Around that time, Elbe came to know about an option to biologically transform her body. The procedure, though at an experimental stage, was possible at the German Institute for Sexual Science, Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.

Though a professional illustrator, Einar Wegener is more famous in history for transforming into a woman named Lili Elbe. He was the second transgender woman to benefit from sex reassignment surgery performed in the early 1930s.