In This Broadcast

Art made her a muse. Science made her immortal.

Lili Elbe and Gerda Gottlieb were a married pair of painters whose art blurred the lines between fantasy and flesh — until Lili stepped from the canvas into her own life.

Dany and Claire explore the story of Lili Elbe — one of the first people to undergo gender affirming surgery — and trace her journey from the art salons of Paris to the operating rooms of Berlin and Dresden. Through her transition, Lili defied the medical, moral, and social boundaries of her time, working closely with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science — the same institute that would be destroyed by the Nazis only years later.

Her story is as much about love as it is about liberation: Gerda’s portraits of Lili made her both a muse and a mirror, and their relationship — part artistic, part romantic — captured the complex beauty of becoming. Lili’s final journals and letters reveal a woman aching to live as herself in a world that had no language for who she was. Though her life was cut short by medical complications in 1931, her courage lit the path for transgender healthcare and representation decades before those terms even existed.

Lili Elbe’s life remains a work of art — unfinished, brilliant, and eternal..