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THE DANISH GIRL

PP1: TRANSGENDER, SEXOLOGY AND THE 19TH CENTURY: THE CHEVALIER D’EON
AND JAMES MIRANDA BARRY

Notes for Ann Heilmann’s talk

My paper seeks to contextualise The Danish Girl historically by

• outlining how transgender came to be conceptualised through a shift in thought from 19th to early
20th-century sexology
• placing Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe in relation to two earlier transgender individuals, one from the
long 18th century the other from the 19th century
• 3 parts:
1. Sexology and the conceptualisation of transgender
2. Gender fluidity and the ‘gender outlaw’: The Chevalier D’Eon
3. Transgender: James Barry

1. Sexology and the conceptualisation of transgender

• Once Einar has recognized his identity as Lili, the film explores Lili’s difficulties in finding a
doctor who doesn’t either pathologize her or sees her as homosexual
• This reflects way in which medical science / sexology of the late 19th/early 20th century moved
from \n understanding of homosexuality as ‘inversion’ to a recognition of transgender as a
separate category
• PP2: Late-19th-century sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Psychpathia Sexualis),
Edward Carpenter (concept of the ‘intermediate sex’) and Havelock Ellis (Sexual Inversion)
defined homosexuality in transgender terms: a gay man was likened to a ‘female soul’ trapped in a
male body; a lesbian a ‘male soul’ trapped in a female body = reason why transgender was long
seen as synonymous with homosexuality
• PP3: In David Ebershoff’s novel Einar/Lili reads up on 19th-century sexology but dismisses both
the literature’s and later a doctor’s suggestion that she is gay; she knows the issue is not about
sexual orientation. Instead she becomes convinced that she is intersexual (discussion of which he
comes across in some of his reading). In the film this isn’t made explicit, but in the novel (and in
Lili Elbe’s memoir, Man into Woman), evidence of intersexuality is discovered [ovaries damaged
by radiation treatment].
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• The early 20th century saw the first explicit conceptualisation and discussion of transgender issues.
The work of two sexologists was foundational to this conceptualisation: Magnus Hirschfeld
(Germany) and Havelock Ellis (UK)
[Lili Elbe’s first operation, removal of the testicles, was conducted under Hirschfeld’s supervision
in Berlin; the doctor who treated her in Dresden was Kurt Warnekros]
• Hirschfeld, in Transvestites (1910), defined the impulse to dress in opposite-sex garments and
identify in the gender of the opposite sex as independent from sexual orientation.
• Havelock Ellis went further in emphasizing that ‘[t]here is no indication of any sexual tendency
… whether heterosexual or homosexual’ in the history of transgender individuals.
Ellis took issue with Hirschfeld’s term ‘transvestism’ as this placed all the emphasis on cross-
dressing (which he said didn’t always manifest) and it didn’t place enough emphasis on the self-
understanding of an individual who identified as the opposite sex.
Ellis also discounted the late-19th-century term ‘inversion’, even though his own first volume in
his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928) had been titled Sexual Inversion (a study of
homosexuality, co-authored with John Addington Symonds, himself a gay man.).
Instead of ‘inversion’ and ‘transvestism’ Ellis proposed ‘Eonism’. This is the title of his 1928
book about transgender. ‘Eonism’ is named after a historical transgender person, the Chevalier
d’Eon.
• PP4: The Chevalier D’Eon is a counter-example to Einar/Lili because here it wasn’t a case of a
‘man’ identifying as a female but, instead, the Chevalier moved seamlessly between the genders.

2. Gender fluidity and the ‘gender outlaw’: Charles- Geneviève, the Chevalier D‘Eon (1728-
1810)
• Registered at birth as male, the Chevalier transitioned between the sexes, dressing and identifying
sometimes as woman, at other times as man. In today’s terms, the Chevalier represents Kate
Bornstein’s concept of ‘gender outlaw’ or ‘gender transgressor’.
• Duality and gender-fluidity represented in contemporary illustration [PP5]
• Since D’Eon presented her/himself alternately in both sexes and refused to identify either as the
‘true’ identity, s/he prompted great excitement but also profound anxiety. When D’Eon lived in
Britain as a diplomat, bets were placed on her or his ‘real’ sex and there was even a court suit.
• The uncertainty of D’Eon’s sex proved so unnerving that her/his sex was officially (in a court
decision) declared female in Britain. When D’Eon returned to France, there was an identical move
to stabilise the Chevalier’s fluidity and D’Eon was forced by royal edict to live as a woman.
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• It’s notable that when gender-fluidity is stabilised, the identity that is imposed is femininity not
masculinity - as if any kind of deviation from normative masculinity feminizes the individual.
• While in The Danish Girl Lili does not want to resume her life as Einar (see references to Einar’s
‘death’), the Chevalier was deeply unhappy about being forced into one fixed gender identity.
• On death, D’Eon was discovered to have a male body. But does that tell us anything much about
D’Eon sense of identity?
• This is where my final example about an earlier transgender case comes in: James Barry.

3. PP6: Transgender: James Barry (1790-1865)

• Fluidity here not so much of gender but of age in self-representation: gave three different ages (at
his youngest, he would have taken up his medical studies at 10 and graduated with a doctoral
thesis at 13; passing as younger served to conceal gender).
• Graduated in medicine from Edinburgh in 1812 and subsequently served as a medical officer in
the British army.
• Posted to the tropics from 1816 (South Africa, Mauritius, Jamaica, St Helena, Malta, Corfu).
Quickly gained a reputation for his fierce promotion of sanitary conditions, exposure of corruption
and commitment to the humane treatment of minority groups: prisoners, hospital patients, lepers,
slaves, lunatics, prostitutes.
• In 1826 he became the first doctor in the British Empire to carry out a successful Caesarian section
(where both mother and baby survived – and under pre-anaesthetic conditions).
• Barry’s insistence on the importance of hygiene, fresh air, regular baths, frequent change of
clothing, healthy nutrition and balanced alcohol intake made him a pioneer of hospital and prison
reform thirty years in advance of [PP7] Florence Nightingale. (Barry and Nightingale famously
clashed at Scutari – to Barry, it seemed that Nightingale had gained her reputation on the basis of
the very reforms that he had implemented decades before she came on the scene.)
• It wasn’t only Nightingale with whom Barry clashed. His fiery temper brought him continually
into conflict with authority. This led to frequent demotion and relocation and a court-martial (in
which he was cleared of all charges and found to have been in the right in challenging the military
authority at St Helena about lack of hospital supplies).
• Rose to highest medical rank in the British Army: Inspector-General (Canada). Ill health forced
him into retirement in 1859. In 1865 he died in an epidemic in London. After he was buried, the
charwoman who had laid out body claimed that it was that of a woman.
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• In 1980s Barry’s female birth identity was discovered (Margaret Bulkley, niece of history
painter James Barry, PP7). Barry assumed his male identity at age 20, in 1809, passing as 10-
year-old in order to pass as male.
• If the gender fluidity of Chevalier D’Eon inspired sexologists to conceptualise transgender, James
Barry was invoked by late-Victorian feminists in their search for role models. However, feminists
saw Barry not in sexological terms, as a transgender person, but as a pioneering woman, a feminist
before the days of feminism. Barry’s promotion to Inspector-General and his later years coincided
with the rise, from the later 1850s, of the British women’s movement; his death in 1865 coincided
with the first woman formally to graduate from medicine, Elizabeth Garrett (Anderson [PP7]).
Barry is cited (alongside the cross-dressing French writer George Sand) as the protagonist’s
inspiration in Sarah Grand’s 1893 novel The Heavenly Twins, PP8. The novel is named after an
opposite-sex pair of gender-swapping twins; in their young adulthood the girl, Angelica, assumes
her brother’s guise and passes herself off as a young man.
• To feminists, Barry was a woman who passed herself off as a man in order to obtain the higher education,
professional training and career she was barred from as a woman. As a military man, Barry constituted a
woman warrior. The woman warrior became something of a trope in feminist discourse: in the early 20th
century the suffragettes adopted Joan of Arc as an icon and patron saint [PP8].
• By contrast, to sexologists like Havelock Ellis, Barry was an Eonist, a transgender person.
• While Barry has since inspired a range of biographies, novels, short stories and plays, the majority of texts,
even in the contemporary period, conceptualise him as a woman who cross-dressed rather than as a
transgender man. The only exceptions are the most recent biography, by Rachel Holmes, and Patricia
Duncker’s James Miranda Barry.
• The case of earlier transgender individuals like the Chevalier D’Eon and James Barry and the way they are
re-imagined today suggests that we may not have come all that far since they struggled to make themselves
understood. This is explored in depth in The Danish Girl.