The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [32]
With his status as a sexual intermediary validated by Hirschfeld, Wegener was castrated, his testicles removed—probably by Hirschfeld’s colleague Felix Abraham (called “Dr. Arns” in the book). “The first operation, which only represents a beginning, has been successful beyond all expectations. Andreas had ceased to exist, they said. His germ glands—oh, mystic words—have been removed. What has still to happen will take place in Dresden under the hands of Professor Kreutz. The doctors talked about hormones; I behaved as if I knew what they meant. Now I have looked up this word in the dictionary and find that it refers to the secretions of internal organs which are important for vital processes. But I am no wiser than I was before. Must one equip oneself then, with wisdom and knowledge in order to understand a miracle?”
The “miracle” of sex reassignment continued in Dresden a few months later, when “Kreutz” removed Wegener’s penis, opened his abdomen, and found the rudimentary ovaries that provided physical confirmation of the patient’s intermediary status. In keeping with Steinach’s theories, the doctor then implanted healthy ovarian tissue from a young woman into Wegener, tissue that was rejected, requiring further surgery. Nonetheless, Lili Elbe had successfully ousted Einar Wegener, a coup for which she apparently felt both relief and guilt. “I feel like a bridge-builder. But it is a strange bridge that I am building,” Wegener (now Lili Elbe) writes. “I stand on one of the banks, which is the present day. There I have driven in the first pile. And I must build it clear across the other bank, which often I cannot see at all and sometimes only vaguely, and now and then in a dream. And then I often do not know whether the other bank is the past or the future. Frequently the question plagues me: Have I had only a past, or have I had no past at all? Or have I only a future without a past?” These were questions that would echo in the lives of later generations of transsexual people who crossed the bridge that Lili helped construct.
According to Hoyer, when Wegener’s surgeon in Dresden opened his patient’s abdomen he discovered “withered” ovaries. Einar/Lili was, in medical terms, a true hermaphrodite, possessing both testicular and ovarian tissue; this explained Wegener’s feminine mannerisms, slight build, and small breasts, and also the genital “underdevelop-ment” noted by Norman Haire in the introduction to Man into Woman. After recovering from surgery, Wegener was issued a new passport by Danish authorities, in the name of Lili Elbe. The king of Denmark declared the marriage between Wegener and his artist wife, Gerda, “null and void.” (The faithful Gerda, who had supported Wegener throughout the transformation, married a mutual friend shortly thereafter.) Another friend, called “Claude” in the book, who had known the secret of Einar/Lili for many years, then proposed marriage to Lili. She accepted, under the condition that he wait until she underwent one final surgery, one that would make her fully a woman in her own eyes.
A “womanly woman,” Elbe wanted to become both a wife and a mother. “All that I desire is nothing less than the last fulfilment of a real woman; to be protected from life by the sterner being, the husband,” she wrote to a friend in August 1931. “You must sympathize with me in my desire for maternity, to have a child, for I want nothing more ardently than to demonstrate that Andreas has been completely obliterated in me—is dead. Through a child I should be able to