Lili Elbe

Born Lili Ilse Elvenes in December 1882, she worked as a painter before transitioning in 1930, when she changed her legal name and stopped painting. She went on to receive a uterus transplant in an attempt to become pregnant—a frontier procedure that led to fatal complications. She died in September 1931 at forty-eight. Her semi-autobiographical narrative, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, was published posthumously in 1933. Decades later, a film inspired by her life, The Danish Girl, appeared in 2015, followed by an opera in 2023.