This piece was written as part of my coursework at my University, and was submitted on the 6th of June, 2024. This was an attempt to create a more 'story' based method of essay.
I am often left wondering where it went so wrong, wondering who to blame every time I run out of pills and have to scurry back to my GP, desperately asking for just one more box. I take three a day, no more and no less (unless I forget, which I tend to do, and then all that brain fuzz comes rushing back). Theres 28 in a box, but my new doctor swears it’s an even thirty, and that there’s ten days inside, plenty to find a new specialist. Or, as she helpfully suggested, ‘maybe just stop taking them, see how you feel’. I don’t exactly know what those extra two pills would even help me with, but not having them makes me so incredibly mad. Her constant insistence that, unlike my antidepressants, there’s no risk in going cold turkey, and that I should just stop taking them and go crawling back to Monash, makes me even madder. But I need to remember, this woman is supposed to help me. She holds in the balance my ability to keep hair off my chest, to keep the static out of my head, to keep feeling things. Theres no point in arguing, she’s probably about as scared as I am. Who wants to be the poor sucker risking life and limb to help some poor tranny who never even got diagnosed? Never even had the decency to be referred to a psychologist for six months after years of waiting, never had to answer whether I think of myself as a girl when I masturbate, whether I imagine sex with men.
Everyone keeps telling me to go call Lifeline. Not in my own life, they know there’s nothing those hacks can do. But every waitlist, every specialist’s clinic, all the same thing. Switchboard Victoria run two phone contact lines, open every day. I’ve never bothered, they can’t exactly help me get my meds. I don’t need some underpaid, compassionate soul telling me that it’ll be alright. How dare they tell me that, those dreamy eyed idiots. How dare they tell me how good things will get and how temporary my problems are, when I’m the only one out of the two of us doing anything about it? Which of us is out on Spring Street, yelling at a bunch of crumbling old ladies and white supremacist skinheads, backing away from the cop with the pepper spray so I can go to work later? I don’t even know what this degree qualifies me to do, but I know what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to yell and scream and type and yell some more. Because this all used to be different. I don’t know if it’s better, I’ve only been manhandled by a cop a couple of times after all, and I have my boobs and my apartment and my little life. But I know it was different, and sometimes that feels like forbidden knowledge.
Lili Elbe is by no means the author to her own story, despite having done all the writing. Like many, she was appropriated by a man, used as a kind of circus oddity, to be observed and studied. Just like in her life, she became an object of male fascination, rather than her own woman. We are invited by Professor Gebhard to be ‘astounded’ by the sudden change in Lili’s voice (Hoyer 1933:126), and by Inger to marvel at the sudden change in her handwriting (Hoyer 1933:131). ‘One thing after another is pushing out’ the assistant remarks (Hoyer 1933:131), as if these sudden unexplainable transformations were a strange inevitability, a wonderful piece of medical trivia. But of course, it’s all bullshit. Small dramatizations designed to keep the transvestite as a medical topic an interesting one. Necessary to this, of course, is to turn Lili Elbe into some sort of beast, to be looked upon from the other side of a wrought iron cage. The reality, as underwhelming as it is, is that we’re not interesting. We’re just people. This dramatization, unfortunately, has become a personal form of survival technique with the creation of the gender clinic. Sandy Stone says as much in her work The Empire Strikes Back, where individuals visiting the Stanford gender clinic often showed very homogenous, and most notably agreeable, behaviour that matched what the clinic deemed as ‘standard’ transsexual behaviour (Stone 1992:8). This was, of course, a reaction to the environment in which these people found themselves, having to ‘act a woman’ to survive and progress their transition. Stone’s article, as widespread as it is in academic circles that concern themselves with the trans woman, seems to me to have done only a little to change this behaviour. I too find myself lifting my voice and pushing out my chest when I see the GP, always trying to ensure my best push-up is washed and ready for any appointments that are coming up. As unfortunate as it is, we are all still in the cage along with Lili, acting for the approval of a system that doesn’t understand you in the slightest.
So horribly haunted are we by accounts such as Lili’s, even her expectations of what transition looks like are indelibly impossible. Her reaction to the ‘…abnormal persons…’ (Hoyer 1933:51) in the Institute for Psychiatry reveals a contradiction that can be scarcely believed to be sourced from Lili’s own words. Whilst it could be understood that young Lili, so new to her queer little life, may have caught herself off guard by the ‘in betweenness’ of the others in the clinic, she never reconciles with this. In fact, quite the opposite. She goes into her first surgery fully and expressly a man and wakes again screaming with a ‘…shrill woman’s voice.’ (Hoyer 1933:128) I feel it would be quite insulting to you, the reader, to state the obvious so bluntly, but for the benefit of those unfamiliar, that is not how that occurs. Instead, many trans women, myself included, spend years and years and years in the ‘in-betweens’, fighting to strangle their vocal chords into a somewhat high pitch, having to relearn mannerisms and socialisations wrought onto a brain that has had to endure a lifetime of masculine socialisation. One could argue that such ideas are far more interesting to examine than the ‘magical’ transformation that Lili Elbe just demonstrated. Instead, there is a point being made here, that being outside the strict gender binary of ‘male’ or ‘female’, even if temporary, is wholly unacceptable. As dramatically political and anthropological such a statement is, it is also a wholly impossible request. As fantastical and convenient as it may be, that’s just simply not how any of that works, and to hold others to that standard is unfair. Existing within the in-betweens is almost a rite of passage of the trans woman, something she has to reconcile with and learn to survive. In this way, Man into Woman takes an anti-trans stance, something possibly unsurprising for anyone with a degree of familiarity to it. However, we mustn’t forget that this terrible, flawed and anti-trans book is one of the paramounts of what little literature exists about trans women. It certainly stood as one of the only openly accessible trans texts for a very, very long time.
So what to make of such a woman? Well, certainly didn’t do it on the cheap, by my estimations she spent about $30,000 on the whole ordeal[1], which is on the more common, higher end for vaginoplasty surgeries in the modern day. She certainly rushed into the whole ordeal, with five total surgeries over only two short years, though I feel that many would do the same if able. And of course, her horrible, untimely death in December 1931, due to complications caused by her fifth and final surgery, a uterus transplant. This last one leaves me wondering quite a lot, was Lili aware of the relative danger of this last surgery? Or, was she so dizzyingly blind to the danger, reinvigorated as a woman, and looking for the last, elusive puzzle piece – fertility. As a modern observer, it seems tragic. This is a surgery that, even in the current day, is wholly impossible. One that was always destined to kill her. Did Dr Warnekros know, and willingly let Lili be a fatal experiment in the pursuit of science? And possibly the most pressing question for me, would I have done it if it were me? Would the young, naive Clarity of a few years ago, a young girl who had only recently begun realising the horrors of what it meant to be in-between, have signed her name on the dotted line? I can’t honestly say. I sure did a lot of stupid things back then, and I would certainly consider myself to be a far more mature and sensible individual than she was. But there is one thing that both of us share. Neither of us have steady access to the medication that keeps us whole. For both, the idea of any surgery at all is a foreign dream. Both have been ridiculed by the doctors who try to help them, both feel like the whole ordeal is a bit useless.
Should I be saved from myself, my own naivete? I’m certainly no expert on trans healthcare, but I’ve learnt enough out of necessity. I’ve learnt that, annoyingly, the lack of a uterus does not preclude me from period cramps. I’ve learned that the world looks greyer when I’m running on testosterone, and my head gets fuzzy when I’m running on nothing at all. I’ve learnt that sex is different, feels so much deeper, so much more whole. I’ve learnt how to look pretty in front of the doctor, act sane when I need to, and stay calm when stabbed through the heart. I’ve learnt to cry, to watch out for tradies and drunk men at night, how to walk and talk and stand and dress. No doctor taught me any of this, and I lived. I find it a bit silly, then, the level of caution that the system holds about me. The amount of ‘care’ they give about my eligibility for affirming health care. Which psychologist did you see? Who referred you to the clinic? Where is this referral? Sure, Lili Elbe died, but so did Wren (De Vietri 2024). So do so, so many women on waitlists, awaiting referrals, just generally fighting the system that’s supposed to help them. In that way, poor Lili Elbe was lucky. She got the choice, she got to try. In that way, Man Into Woman is a fantasy, of the woman who got everything she wanted, and died as the woman she wanted to be. In all the years since Man Into Woman was released, Lili still remains one of the freest trans women in literature. She’s not beholden to the whims of a bottom-up medical system, that puts the power in a scared little graduate with very little understanding of why the strange little thing in front of them takes estrogen every day. She, like all of us, was beholden only to her own mortality, and she at least got everything she wanted first.
[1] Taking the estimation from Andreas’ letter of ‘…between 4,000 to 5,000 kronen…’ (Hoyer 1933:32), and using the calculator provided by Statistics Denmark (found at https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/laer-om-statistik/prisberegner), it can be calculated that Lili’s surgeries cost between 171,851.06 DKK and 214,813.83 DKK in the year 2023. Converting this into Australian Dollars, at the comparative rate of 0.14, correct as of the 6th of June 2024 at 6:00pm, we find a range of between $24,432.41 and $30,540.51.
Bibliography:
De Vietri G (12 March 2024) ‘I’m deeply sorry to hear of the death of Wren…’ [X Post], @GabrielledeVie, accessed 6th of June 2024.
Hoyer N (Ed) (1933) Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex (Stenning H J trans), E. P. Dutton & Co, New York.
Stone S (1992) 'The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto ', Camera Obscura, 10(29):150-176
TransHub (n.d.) Genital Reconfiguration Surgery, TransHub, accessed 6th of June 2024