A few More Thoughts On "The Danish Girl"

      Last week after my first viewing with my sister of "The Danish Girl", the thought-provoking movie about transgender pioneer Lile Elbe and her wife, artist Gerda Wegener,

...portrayed here in a painting by Gerda,

...and in the film by Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander,

...I was talking about the movie with a friend of my sister's who posed this rhetorical question:  it's been the better part of a century since Lile Elbe received the first gender-reassignment surgery in history; what progress has been made in all the time since then in the acceptance and acknowledgment  of transgender people in society?

    Almost none, we had to admit, until last year when Caitlyn Jenner broke out as a transgender woman, her public personal liberation bringing the existence of transgender people to the consciousness of the world and starting a  movement that has been giving trans men and women everywhere the courage to step out of the shadows.

      But it  was when I went to see "The Danish Girl" a second time that it occurred to me why a similar movement of acceptance and understanding of transgenders could not have taken root, grown, and spread from the place and time of Lile Elbe's groundbreaking event.
      I was watching a preview before "The Danish Girl" of a trailer for a film set in a Nazi concentration camp when it hit me:  the Third Reich is what happened to transgenders and those who would have advanced their cause in Lile Elbe's time.  Lile Elbe's gender reassignment surgeries were performed in Dresden, Germany in 1930 and 1931;  Adolph Hitler came into power in 1933. 
    And it was in that year that the Nazis publicly burned the writings and research library of  Magnus Hirschfeld, the physician who supervised Lile Elbe's surgeries.  Hirschfeld was renowned in the 1920's and early 1930's for his growing body of research in transgender and other issues of gender and sexual orientation and for promoting a growing interest in this field of study among the European scientific and medical community. 
     But the the nascent transgender movement of Magnus Hirschfeld's and Lile Elbe's time died along with the many millions, Jews, gypsies, Slavs, Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, people of color, gays, lesbians, transgenders, and all the others, who were declared  subhuman by the Third Reich.
      Nazi Germany conquered Denmark on April 9, 1940. 

Perhaps it's just as well for Lile Elbe that she didn't live to see that day.

https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-views-of-the-nazis-on-transgender-people-and-transsexual-people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/02/brief-history-transgender-issues

http://www.bilerico.com/2008/03/transgender_history_from_germany_to_ston.php