She was surely a trailblazer, was Lily Elbe. A couple of decades before George Jorgensen became Christine in 1953, there was Einar Wegener, a Danish artist who longed to be a woman. On the left is a photograph of Einar, looking dapper, every bit the decadent artist, a little cynical, perhaps, stylishly effeminate, world-weary, and consumed, surely, by his feeling that he was born to be a woman. On the right is Lily, in 1930, in Berlin with her nurse, after the transformative surgery--sexual reassignment surgery (SRS), we call it today. It wasn't enough. Lily wanted to be able to have children. A surgeon apparently believed it possible. This second operation killed her.
     Let us remember her. And the nurse in the picture, her face darkened, let us remember her, too, for the comfort she seems to have given, the acceptance. An elderly lady--what a miracle this must have seemed to her!