Lili

The story of Lili Elbe is recreated from her 1930 diaries written during the time that she became the first known woman to undergo full realignment surgery, examining the challenges of living as a trans person and the need of the trans community to find a positive role and image in society. Developed in a series of workshops by an entirely trans cast, the cast includes Simona Continente, who was born as a boy and raised by nuns in Italy, and Stephanie Collins, formerly a male soldier fighting in Iraq who made headlines when she was became embroiled in a dispute with Sainsbury's over her right to use the female toilets. The show is set in the last years of Lili's life as she adjusts to her new life as a transwoman, and re-establishes the connection with her former life as a painter.

Lili Elbe was born Einar Mogens Wegener in Denmark in the 1880s. She married fellow painter Gerda Gottleib and discovered when standing in for an absentee female model that she was comfortable in heels and stockings. The couple moved to Paris, where Elbe lived openly as a
woman, often introduced as Einar’s sister. In 1930, she underwent a series of surgeries for sex reassignment, which were experimental at the time, becoming a sensation in German and Danish newspapers. After the King of Denmark invalidated Lili and Gerda's marriage, she remarried an unknown man, and died shortly after in an operation to transplant a uterus in her desire to have children with her husband.