Malcolm Clark Profile picture
TV science writer who campaigns against puberty blockers. Trans identified males are men. Subscribe: https://t.co/iD2gZ0E5x7

Nov 25, 2021, 12 tweets

1./ Should #EddieRemayne regret his portrayal of Lili Elbe? Yes, but not for the reasons @PeterTatchell from the Gender Stasi suggested. Truth is 'The Danish Girl' is full of unheeded warnings about the dangers of today's uncritical acceptance of gender identity ideology.👇

2./ The movie not only is steeped in ridiculous gender stereotypes, it avoids all the difficult questions about Lili Elbe's conviction 'he' was really 'she'. Take, for example, Lili going to a sex show in Paris to discover how to pout and pose like a woman.🤮👇

3./ That was symptomatic of how Lili embraced not some deep inner feeling of being a REAL woman but a sexualised stereotype of a woman. Lili was born Einar Andreas Wegener. Funny how Einar didn't use a peasant working woman as his examplar but a "sex bomb". Plus ça change.👇

4./ The movie also ignored many of the more bizarre elements of Lili's biography, published in 1931, based on "her" diaries. In those Lili described a strange divided self in which Einar was not just a different sex but a different personality. Mental health issues perchance?

5./ Tragically, when Lili chats with a female doctor they agree that even by 1920s standards Lili is an old-fashioned stereotype of a woman who longs to be controlled or "tyrannised" by "lords" and is utterly submissive and "coquettish". What does AGP stand for again?

6./ The film also skips over the fact Lili sought refuge with charlatans at the Magnus Hirschfeld clinic in Berlin who said she could achieve happiness thru castration and having a "neo-vagina" constructed. "Her" surgeon would become a leading Nazi medic.👇

7./ Hirschfeld and the other dodgy doctors (like Herr Gohrbrandt) would convince Lili she could have a womb transplant, something never attempted before and which was, in an age before antibiotics and knowledge of organ rejection, fantastically dangerous. It killed her.

8./ But before that they'd experiment on Lili by surgically implanting slices of ovary. These implants we know now are utterly useless but Lili was convinced they were not only making her female but making her younger. They were doing neither. Delusions?

9./ The worst thing about the movie is that it ignores the obvious signs that Lili was quite frankly mad. When she visits Dresden to have her final operations she finds her way to the clinic by telepathy and shouts out to the cab driver when she is convinced she's there. Mmm.

10./ After her castration "she" was convinced she'd achieved a menstrual cycle. It manifested, she said, in err...nose bleeds every month.🙄 What Lili needed was support and tolerance. Instead, she got ideologically driven medics who fuelled her delusion. Sound familiar?👇

11./ After her menstrual nose bleeds Lili, said "A complete revolution in my character began". Formerly she'd "been imperious". Now an impulse to obey and submit unconditionally "has seized hold of me". Welcome to a full-blown sexualised fantasy of S&M.

12./ So feel ashamed if you want to Eddie about portraying Lili Elbe. But the real problem isn't that you weren't "trans". It's that you censored the mental fragility and internalised homophobia that drove so much of Lili's self-destruction; and thereby validated the same today.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling