~~January 21, 2016~~
THE DANISH GIRL
I finally went to the movies today.
I think it’s the last day that they will be showing it in a theater near me. I wanted to watch it in the big screen.
I must confess that I didn’t know that it was a true story.
I got the impression that it was when the movie noted that it was taking place in 1927.
I can’t say enough of the story, the screenplay, the directing and the acting!
I think it’s a amazing story to bring to life in light of the current importance of transgender issues.
I can barely begin to imagine what Lili Elbe went through in her lifetime to become who she knew she was.
HortyRex©
Lili Elbe defied convention and pushed the boundaries of medical science to become the first transgendered woman
Horatia Harrod
8 December 2015
Einar Wegener would kill himself in the spring.
He had chosen a date – May 1, 1930 – after a year spent in torment. The cause of his suffering was quite simple: he was sure he was a woman, born into the wrong body. Or perhaps it was more complicated: sometimes Wegener, whose life is portrayed on film by the Oscar-winning British actor Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, felt he was two people in the same body, each fighting for supremacy.
One was a Danish landscape painter, a steadfast man who, in his own words, “could withstand storms”. He was married to a woman whose strength and talent matched, or perhaps even surpassed, his own: Gerda Wegener, a successful Art Deco illustrator who produced portraits of fashionable women for magazines such as Vogue and La Vie Parisienne.
The other shared none of these qualities.
Lili Elbe was, as she set down in letters and notes for an autobiography, a “thoughtless, flighty, very superficially-minded woman”, prone to fits of weeping and barely able to speak in front of powerful men. But despite her womanly defects, by February 1930 she was becoming too powerful for Wegener to resist.
“I am finished,” he wrote at the time. “Lili has known this for a long time. That’s how matters stand. And consequently she rebels more vigorously every day.”
~~GRAPHICS SOURCE~~
Google Image
The Danish Girl Facebook Page
https://www.facebook.com/TheDanishGirlFilm/?pnref=story
~~GALLERY~~
As it turned out, Wegener did not commit suicide on the appointed date.
In February 1930 he was told of a doctor who might be able to help him – who did, in fact, perform a series of ground-breaking operations that allowed Einar to become Lili.
But all the same, by September 1931, Elbe was dead, the victim of a misjudged surgery to transplant a womb into her body. (Ciclosporin, the drug that prevents the rejection of transplanted organs, was first used successfully in 1980, almost 50 years after Elbe’s death.)
In the year before her death, Elbe had divorced Gerda, given up painting, and was embarking tentatively on a relationship with a French art dealer.
“It is not with my brain, not with my eyes, not with my hands that I want to be creative, but with my heart and with my blood,” she wrote. “The fervent longing in my woman’s life is to become the mother of a child.”
According to her own telling, Wegener’s transition into Elbe began by chance, when one of her wife’s life models failed to turn up.
The couple’s mutual friend, an actress named Anna Larsen, suggested that the slight Einar might step in instead.
At first she resisted, but eventually she gave in to Gerda’s pleas.
“I cannot deny, strange as it may sound, that I enjoyed myself in this disguise. I liked the feel of soft women’s clothing,” she wrote. “I felt very much at home in them from the first moment.”
The procedures by which the then-47-year-old Wegener became Elbe are not precisely known, partly because the library and archive of the Institute for Sexual Research were destroyed by the Nazis in May 1933.
In the biography Man into Woman, which incorporates many of Wegener/Elbe’s diary entries and letters, as well as conversations with the book’s “editor”, Niels Hoyer, details are elusive.
Certainly she underwent a series of operations at the Dresden clinic of Kurt Warnekros – a doctor described breathlessly in the book as a man of limitless masculine potency, Lili’s savior and creator. These cost around 5000 kroner – around £12,000 in today’s money – which Wegener raised by selling off a number of paintings.
Aside from the fatal womb transplant, and the removal of Wegener’s testicles and penis, the ovaries of a young woman were also grafted into Wegener’s body.
(Elbe suggests in her memoir that when she was operated on, an existing pair of shrunken ovaries was found in her body.)
“As it appears in …. full read/full credit”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-danish-girl/true-story-lili-elbe-transgender/
#MovieTime #TheDanishGirl #LiliElbe EDefiedConvention #PushedBoundaries #MedicalScience #FirstTransgenderedWoman #OscarWinning #BritishActor #EddieRedmayne #HoratiaHarrod #AliciaVikander #Biography #ManIntoWoman #DresdenClinic #KurtWarnekro #FatalWombTransplant #Drama #RemarkableLoveStory
#WeAllAreOne #ItIsWhatItIs #DrRex #hrexachwordpress
~~The Danish Girl Official Trailer~~
Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander
~~Published on Sep 1, 2015~~
The remarkable love story inspired by the lives of artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener.
Lili and Gerda’s marriage and work evolve as they navigate Lili’s groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.
We ALL are ONE!!
