Op-ed: How The Danish Girl Helped Me Discover Myself

http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/08/31/op-ed-how-danish-girl-helped-me-discover-myself

The Advocate/BY David Ebershoff August 31 2015 8:00 PM ET 

"When Vanity Fair released its first photo of Caitlyn Jenner earlier this summer, it made me think of another trans woman who introduced herself through a painted portrait roughly a hundred years before: Lili Elbe.

In 1930, Lili traveled from the Paris studio she shared with her wife, Gerda, to Germany, for a series of surgeries at the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic to complete her transition. While there, she liked to sit on the sunny banks of the Elbe River pondering her past, when she lived as Einar Wegener, the male name and gender she was assigned at birth, and her future as herself. (The Elbe would inspire her new last name.) ."