What is a trans narrative?  What does it mean to express transness? Does a literal embodiment of our modern sense of transness need to be present? Need the narrative be presented by someone who has the embodied experience of transness? How do we as readers, both cis and trans, take in and understand some ineffable gendered existence? Is this merely done by a literal explanation of  the material experience of being trans, or is there something more fundamental we can gain from more expressive and less literal works? What are the values of the two styles of story, and what do we prioritize when we discuss trans narratives? My background comes from a place of artistic critical interpretation; so what stories we tell, how we tell them, why we tell them, and when we tell them is both of specific interest to me, and firmly within my academic wheelhouse.

In order to explore this question I will be examining Lili Elbe’s autobiographical work Man into Woman*. This book is one of the first modern era examples of a trans memoir we have, written by the first woman recorded to have received a form of sex reassignment surgeries (SRS) in Berlin in 1930, less than a decade short of a 100 years ago. The text was written by Elbe and compiled postmortem by the researchers and clinicians who had worked with Elbe up to that point. It is a very interesting piece full of incredible imagery and specific metaphors for the feelings that accompany Elbe’s journey. We do, however, have to ask the question: are these metaphors true to Elbe’s lived experience or does she add them to her work in order to find a level of cultural intelligibility. Elbe’s writing is, after all, one of the first modern accounts of transexuality written for public consumption. In Vipond’s article; Becoming Culturally (Un)intelligible: Exploring the Terrain of Trans Life Writing, Vipond discusses the pressure on trans authors to convey their experiences in a ‘culturally intelligible way.’ When the vast majority of people who will be reading your work will be cis, especially in 1930, one may be inclined to write in a way that one imagines their audience to be more responsive to. Elbe especially had to lay a lot of ground work. This article mentions Christine Jorgeson would’ve had a great deal of difficulty making her experiences understandable to a mainstream audience, whose book was written more than 20 years after Elbe’s death, so one must imagine that Elbe would have had an even grander difficulty being culturally intelligible to a 1930s audience. A metaphor that comes up time and time again within Elbe’s work is that of dual identity and the ‘death’ of one of these identities. While these feelings certainly aren’t absent from other trans narratives they are heavily emphasized in Elbe’s work, to the point that I, as someone with my own trans experience, question if this emphasis is for the benefit of a cis audience who may not have a great understanding of gender identity or transition. Using the idea of another person within oneself may be easier to grasp than someone assigned male simply not aligning with that identification and evolving into womanhood. Join me now, as we explore what it means to craft a trans narrative, and how these methods of crafting paint different pictures for different purposes.

Man Into Woman, is an autobiographical work comprised of the writings of Lili Elbe. he book, however, was not compiled, edited, or finished by Elbe; She had passed away suddenly during a medical procedure. Thus the book was completed and compiled by Niels Hoyer, a friend and member of Elbe’s support team while receiving treatment for her gender dysphoria at the Institute of Sexology.

When we look at Elbe’s book we see the metaphor of a dual identity and the death of the masculine identity in order to free the female within, explaining the internal reality of her transness. Elbe’s writing is filled with beautiful prose and metaphor. One such selection is as follows;

“I am condemned to die. The question is if the other being living inside me, when it is freed of all the disguises of the body and soul, will be able to live life and take up the fight against it.” -Elbe (1933).

In this quote we can see that Elbe considers her transition to be the death of her male self, to allow life to her female self. It can not be, in my opinion, easily assumed however that this is necessarily how Elbe understood her transition internally. Although death of the male self is a recurring theme within the book, we must problematize this assumption for two reasons; the first, rather simply, is that the book was not completed by Elbe and we have no possible way of knowing how much was edited in its completion. The second, and more compelling reason is that Elbe may be using this metaphor to allow herself and her story to be culturally intelligible (Vipond). Elbe may be using this metaphor to allow for a wider audience to better understand her story, or it may arise from Elbe’s own need to put into words the ineffable experience she finds herself in without any preexisting cultural touchstones to guide her.

The Danish Girl is a 2015 film put out by Universal Studios and Focus Pictures. It is a dramatization of Elbe’s life, though it does not adapt directly from Elbe’s work, but rather from the exaggerated novel of Elbe’s life The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff. We will not be discussing this novel much but it’s important to note that it was written by a cis man attempting to create a more compelling and modern rendition of Elbe’s (a transsexual woman) life. This film was directed by Tom Hooper (another cis man) and stars Eddie Redmayne (another cis man) as Elbe and Alicia Vikander (a cis woman) as Elbe’s wife Gerda. Immediately a difference between Elbe’s book and the film is the loss of pseudonyms. Elbe only referred to her companions, friends, and doctors by pseudonyms in her book, but the film does away with this. Given that Elbe was worried about their safety and the film came out 85 years after this is an inoffensive change. Another massive change is inventing a ‘homosexual’ lover and male childhood friend for Elbe and the film often frames this relationship as a place of early development of the Lili identity, this plays into the conflation between homosexuality and transsexuality. The film also is much more from Gerda’s perspective than Lili’s, the title in fact is a reference to Gerda who is within the text of the film referred to as ‘the Danish girl’ by an art collector. With this shift in perspective the film invents a large amount of conflict between Gerda and Lili, painting Gerda as reluctantly supportive. Making Gerda mourn her husband as she helps Lili self actualize, as demonstrated in the clip above. Lili’s first hand account paints a very different picture, one of support, love and sisterhood. Of course Lili’s account may be biased but I am inclined to trust it over a film made by people who were not there and have no first hand knowledge of that relationship. I would put forward the idea of following the emotional journey of the cis character Gerda rather than Elbe, was made to make the film more culturally intelligible to a majority cis audience, and the change from supportive sisterhood, to reluctant support was made in order to placate fears and anxieties around transness such audiences may be experiencing.

These paintings were done by Lili Elbe’s former wife and fellow painter Gerda Wegener. The paintings allow us to explore how Gerda depicted her once husband with care, capturing the same unabashedly real depiction of the inner life of Lili as she does the cis women she paints. Due to this we lack explicit trans themes in these works which in our modern landscape we might expect. To me, this expresses a lack of acknowledgement of the ‘transgressive’ nature of trans identities. Treating a trans subject as one would a cis subject is honestly refreshing. It is common in depictions of trans subjects by cis artists to see overt signaling of their subjects’ transness as well as that often transness being sexualized, sometimes to the point of the art feeling exploitive. In Gerda’s work however, we see Lili treated as normal, yet not commonplace. Beauty and ethereality are common to Gerda’s work and can be felt in these paintings. These are traits Gerda attributes to all of her female subjects; she captures the ethereal in the normality of the female existence. Elbe’s transsexual status is never exploited or focused on. Even in the nude work Gerda did, it focuses on the beauty of the curvature of Elbe’s body, but she is positioned facing away from the audience and thus no genitals need be painted onto her body. In this narrative we see a normalization of a trans figure, but a non-explicit one. We see a trans woman captured with the same ethereal complexity and beauty as cis women by the same painter. Without the context of the work depicting a trans subject, these paintings may not communicate much about transness, however with this context the paintings become a precious expression of radical acceptance of the status of Lili as a female, deserving of the same level of artistic depiction as any other.

Through these examples, we can see a variety of methodologies can express trans narratives, though each style may fit specific purposes better than others. Elbe’s book may help an undereducated populace understand her journey and sense of self. Hooper’s work is designed to sell a story to a cis audience and to aid their comfort with trans people. Gerda’s work finally expresses the beauty and presence of a trans woman and treats her equally to her other female subjects. These methodologies all have their drawbacks and their benefits.

Hooper’s, for instance, may be the most culturally intelligible and mainstream telling of Elbe’s story but lacks authenticity, taking Elbe’s story and making it one of a cis woman losing her husband. No trans people worked on this film and it shows. In my opinion, the piece has connected with many cis audience members and even won an Oscar; however as a trans woman I find the film to feel alienating and fetishistic. The film is a viewing of my ordinary life as novel, strange, exotic, and other.

Gerda’s is perhaps the most normalized of the work. It presents Lili just as part of the world. No special attention is given to her transness and Lili is depicted beautifully and with dignity, in the same way Gerda paints her cis subjects. It is a refreshing view, to say the least. With tensions so high in our current political moment and the constant red herring question ‘what is a woman’ being asked by anti-trans figures, Gerda a hundred years ago offers a response. What is a woman? Lili is. These paintings are warm and fill me with optimism.

Man Into Woman by Lili is the most connected to the embodied experience of a trans person as it was written by one. It is, however, no longer as culturally intelligible as it may have once been. The idea of killing the old self to release the new is perhaps referenced in modern trans terms such as deadnames, but is now generally considered to be a harmful framing of transition. When I came out as trans my mother was incredibly worried she was going to lose me, that she’d have to mourn me. I reassured her; I am not dying and being reborn, I am continuing, changed. I had to reassure her that all the basic facts of myself were not going away, I was in essence the same person, just living in a new body. The harmful rhetoric of ‘mourning’ a trans person’s previous identity can also be seen all throughout The Danish Girl; it is arguably what the film is about. Lili’s book however, being much more focused on the self, gives us the view that Lili is thanking her old self for sacrificing his life so that she might live, a unique framing that is quite touching throughout the book.

Through looking at these pieces, their goods and their bads, I met three different Lili’s. I experienced the life of this woman thrice through a small keyhole, gazing into the ineffable experience of another human being. We have seen a trans narrative as told by a trans person, have seen them created by those who love trans people and those who, while sympathetic, do not know trans people. Each piece has a different value and certainly all have their weaknesses. It is possible that perhaps the very idea of turning all of one’s human experience into narrative is an impossible task. That every attempt to do so will have different flaws and intracrasies; perhaps then, we can say that trans narratives should be as varied as the trans lives and experiences they seek to explain. Ineffable on one hand, yet deeply relatable on the other, intimate yet broad and unabashed. If culture is fluid so too should our approach to intelligibility be. We will never fully understand the experiences of each other no matter what methods we use when attempting to communicate them. We never truly know one another; merely the outlines we leave behind.

So who was Lili Elbe? How do we properly tell trans stories? Who am I to say?

References

Hooper, Tom. Universal pictures. (2016). The Danish girl [DVD]. United Kingdom.

Hooper, T. (2017, January 30). The Danish girl – I need my husband scene (8/10) | movieclips. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qKySTAWpiY&ab_channel=Movieclips

Hoyer, N., Stenning, H. J., Haire, N., & Elbe, L. (2015). Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex: The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter, [Lili Elbe]. Facsimile Publisher.
Jacques, J. (2019). Forms of resistance: Uses of memoir, theory, and fiction in trans life writing. The Limits of Life Writing, 81–94. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351200394-7

Nerissa Gailey (2017) Strange Bedfellows: Anachronisms, Identity Politics, and the Queer Case of Trans*, Journal of Homosexuality, 64:12, 1713-1730, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2016.1265355

Halberstam, J. (2018). Trans*: A quick and quirky account of gender variability. University of California Press.<
Vipond, E. (2021). Becoming culturally (UN)intelligible: Exploring the terrain of trans life writing. Trans Narratives, 23–47. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003199465-2