Lili Elbe: Google doodle celebrates the Birthday of Danish painter & an icon of LGBTQ+ community
- Country:
- Denmark
Happy birthday Lili Elbe!
Google doodle celebrates the 140th birthday of Lili Ilse Elvenes, a former Danish painter. She is considered one of the most significant painters of her time as well as an influential figure in the LGBTQ+ community as one of the first recipients of gender affirmation surgery. Today’s doodle artwork was illustrated by Amsterdam-based guest artist Hilde Atalanta.
Lili Elbe was born in Vejle, Denmark, with the name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener. She moved to Copenhagen and enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts when in her teenage. Lili Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb in Copenhagen.
They enjoyed painting together, fell in love, and married before Lili Elbe transitioned. One day when Gottlieb’s model didn’t show up for a portrait, Elbe put on a dress and posed for her wife instead. Elbe said she was surprisingly comfortable wearing the dress and stockings and began questioning her gender identity. Through these experiences, she began to envision living life as a woman, and she began living authentically as herself with the name Lili.
In 1912, the couple moved from Copenhagen to Paris, where Lili Elbe could live as her true self with less criticism. Lili Elbe learned about the possibility of gender-affirming surgery in the 1920s when the process was highly unknown and experimental. While risky, Elbe knew she wanted her body to match her gender identity and received a series of surgeries in Germany. The procedures allowed her to be legally recognized as a woman and she was granted a passport with her name. She chose the last name Elbe after the river flowing through Dresden—where she got the surgeries and was affirmed as a woman. At the time, the law did not recognize marriages between women, so the pair divorced amicably.
Lili Elbe remarried and had hopes of becoming a biological mother, so she sought a uterus transplant procedure. Sadly, she never achieved her dream of motherhood as she died soon after the surgery from her body rejecting the organ.
Her legacy lives on through the two books about her life and through the LGBTQ+ film festival MIX Copenhagen, which presents Lili awards to the winner of Best Feature, Best Documentary and Best Short Film. Man into Woman is adapted directly from her diaries and became one of the first widely published books about a transgender person’s life, while The Danish Girl is a fictional book and film inspired by her life.
After transitioning in 1930, she changed her legal name to Lili Ilse Elvenes and stopped painting. She died from complications following a uterus transplant.
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