Sofia Kovalevskaya
Sofia Kovalevskaya was the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics, and went on to become the first female appointed as a professor in the field.
Tag Archives: Queer
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Lili Elbe
Lili Elbe was a Danish painter – successful under her birth name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – and transgender woman who was an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery.
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and they married in 1904. They worked as illustrators, Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. The couple travelled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman and posed as Gottlieb’s sister-in-law. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automne in Paris. Elbe stopped painting after her transition.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb’s model who was late for a sitting. By the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented as Lili, attending various parties and entertaining guests in her house. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel, petites femmes fatales with Elbe as model.
Elbe went to Germany in 1930 for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. She underwent four operations over two years and her case became a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court annulled the Elbe and Gottelieb’s marriage in October 1930 and Elbe was able to have her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. She returned to Dresden and adopted the surname Elbe in honor of the Elbe River. In 1931, she had her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal, which made her the second transgender woman to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.
Elbe’s immune system rejected the transplanted uterus, and the operation and a subsequent surgical revision caused infection, leading to her death from cardiac arrest on 13 September 1931, three months after the surgery.The US and UK English versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. In 2000, The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Elbe’s life, became an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. In 2015, it was made into a film of the same title – although critically acclaimed, the film was criticised for casting an English cisgender man (Eddie Redmayne) to play a Danish transgender woman.
Lucia Lucas
Lucia Lucas is a baritone opera singer who made history in March 2018, when it was announced that she would be the first female (transgender) baritone to perform a principal role in an American opera production. The premiere performance on May 3 2019 saw Lucas singing the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni with the Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma; it is the subject of the 2020 feature documentary The Sound of Identity.
Lucas is also the first transgender baritone to appear with the English National Opera in London on 5 October 2019, singing Public Opinion in Orpheus in the Underworld. She has performed all over the world, including in Dublin, London, Brussels, Berlin, Torino, Essen, Daegu and Korea. She has performed roles including Hagen in the world premiere of Surrogate/Götterdämmerung, Monterone in Rigoletto, Tchelio in Love of Three Oranges, Komtur in Don Giovanni, and the Ffour Villains in Les contes d‘Hoffmann all with Oper Wuppertal; Sharpless in Madama Butterfly with Lyric Opera of Dublin, and Escamillo in Carmen with Staatstheater Karlsruhe. As a five-year festival artist with Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Lucas also performed roles including Thoas in Iphigénie en Aulide, Ford in Falstaff, Marcello in La bohème, Varlaam in Boris Godunov, Kothner in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Dr. Teller in Doctor Atomic, Sprecher in Die Zauberflöte, and Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro.
Una Vincenzo
Perhaps best known as the the long-time lesbian partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, sculptor and translator Una Troubridge was an educated woman with achievements in her own right.
Wanda Landowska
Wanda Aleksandra Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist and pianist whose performances, teaching, writings and especially her many recordings helped revitalize the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 1900s.
Mercedes de Acosta
Mercedes de Acosta was an American poet, playwright, and novelist who wrote almost a dozen plays, only four of which were produced, and published a novel and three volumes of poetry.
Mary Applebey
Mary Frances Applebey was an English civil servant and mental health activist.
Pat Parker
Pat Parker was an American poet and activist who drew from her experiences as an African-American lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke to her difficult childhood growing up in poverty, coping with sexual assault, and the murder of her sister.
Mary L Bonauto
Mary L. Bonauto is an American lawyer and civil rights advocate who has fought against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English musicologist, novelist and poet, known for works such as the novels Lolly Willowes and After the Death of Don Juan, the poetry collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull and several short story collections.