London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1933. First edition in English. Third edition overall, following a Copenhagen edition (Fra Mand til Kvinde, 1931) and a Dresden edition (Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht, 1932). The first edition in English has appeared at auction twice, and only once in its original binding. This is the only copy currently on the market. The previous editions are rare: OCLC records only two copies of the Copenhagen edition (Royal Danish Library and Harvard) and four copies of the German edition. The Copenhagen edition has never appeared at auction and the German edition has only appeared twice.

A Near Fine copy in Very Good dust jacket. Publisher's black cloth boards. Endpapers foxed and toned, and some occasional light foxing throughout. The rare dust jacket with quite a bit of wear to edges, splitting to folds, and tape repair to verso. Still, a remarkable survival of a crucial piece of transgender literary history.

Man into Woman is the autobiography of Lili Ilse Elvenes, better known as Lili Elbe (1882 – 1931), the Danish painter who, in 1930, became one of the first people to receive gender affirming surgery. The work, which was written by Elbe and edited by her friend Ernst Jacobson under the pseudonym Niels Hoyer, records Elbe's personal reflections on her gender identity and the story of her medical transition at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, a groundbreaking transition medicine clinic. Man into Woman is "the first popular full-length (auto)biographical narrative of a subject who undergoes genital transformation surgery" and one of the earliest published personal accounts of transgender life (Bloomsbury).

Elbe began presenting as a woman in the 1920s, both as a model for her wife, the painter Gerda Gottlieb (1885 – 1940), and among her social circle. In 1930, Elbe became a patient of the Institute for Sexual Science, and went through a series of gender affirming surgeries over the course of the next two years. During the course of her transition, Elbe was able to legally change her name and gender and live as a woman: "That I, Lili, am vital and have a right to life, I have proved it," she wrote in her autobiography. She lived in Dresden, where she met the French art dealer Claude Lejeune, and dreamed of having children. Unfortunately, following complications from her fourth surgery, Elbe passed away in September 1931. She has since been immortalized by this autobiography, and by the extraordinary portraits painted by Gottlieb, which capture an image of Elbe as the modern woman, a symbol of independence and self-determination. Elbe's transition was also depicted in the widely acclaimed film The Danish Girl (2015), which was adapted from the 2000 novel of the same name.

Man into Woman is also a crucial record of Hirschfeld's work and the blossoming trans community that existed around his clinic. In the words of Susan Stryker, "Hirschfeld was the linchpin, and his institute the hub, of the international network of transgender people and progressive medical experts who set the stage for the post-World War II transgender movement" (Transgender History, p. 39). Hirschfeld coined the term "transvestite" (a predecessor of later terms like "transsexual" and, eventually, "transgender"); published "the first book-length treatment of transgender phenomena" in 1910; and, through his Institute for Sexual Science, provided healthcare, legal resources, social support, and even employment opportunities to a blossoming community of trans people in Europe (ibid). Tragically, the Institute for Sexual Science was dismantled by the Nazis in 1933 in a series of raids, book burnings, and arrests and attacks of clinic staff; Hirschfeld was out of the country at the time and escaped arrest, but many of his records were destroyed. Elbe's biography, then, is a crucial record of trans life and community – an aspect of history that has been (and continues to be) intentionally erased by far-right governments around the world.

Note: Though it is difficult to trace the early history of trans biography and memoir, the first published personal account of medical gender transition may have been Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years (1907), a semi-autobiographical account by Karl M. Baer, an early patient of Hirschfeld. Baer's work was followed by Jennie June's publications Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female Impersonators (1922), which record the writer's personal experiences of gender and involvement with the Cercle Hermaphroditos, one of the earliest examples of trans community organizing. Therefore, Man into Woman might be the fourth published trans memoir. Importantly, all of these publications long predate more popular midcentury memoirs published in the wake of Christine Jorgensen's highly publicized transition in 1951, including her own Personal Autobiography (1967). Trans memoirs became much more common throughout the 1970s and beyond; any work predating World War II is notably early and is likely quite scarce.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History (2008). Near Fine in Very Good dust jacket. (Item #8121)