The Danish Girl

Greta arranges a second meeting with Professor Bolk, at a café, in the fall of 1929. He is irritated when she arrives late, but he is still willing to help Einar. Drawing an anatomy textbook from a bag at his feet, he shows her a drawing of a man. He explains how he can move aside Einar’s intestines to make room in his pelvis for transplanted female sex organs.

Professor Bolk trained in Vienna and Berlin and honed his surgical skills in the crucible of World War I. He tells Greta that he’s famous for saving 500 lives by performing 500 amputations. As he says this, he remembers one of those surgeries, which he performed on a young soldier with grievous abdominal wounds. It was a brutal battlefield surgery, but Bolk was confident that if he could just rearrange the intestines enough, cut away the wounded bits and reattach things, that the boy would survive, even if he’d never be quite the same. So he’d operated on through the night, in the cold and with the sound of shelling growing ever closer.

Greta is hopeful but hesitant. She thinks back to when she first met Einar. Although he was in his 20s, he looked like he hadn’t even hit puberty yet. He’s always been this way. Does he need to be fixed? And then she wonders which of her husbands she loved more, Einar or Teddy. She doesn’t know. Maybe it’s neither, maybe it’s Lili she loves the best, she thinks, as Professor Bolk invites her and Lili to Dresden. But Greta has many excuses for delaying the trip, including an upcoming auction of Lili paintings.

Carlisle has decided to stay in Paris at least through Christmas. One day he confesses to Greta that he’s been taking Einar to see doctors. He tells her about Dr. Buson’s promising lobotomy procedure (which Greta thinks sounds barbaric), which Einar is seriously considering. She retorts that she’s already found a doctor (Professor Bolk) who can turn Einar into a woman through a series of operations. Both options are risky and experimental, and Carlisle reminds Greta that Einar must make the choice for himself. Greta agrees, even though it means more delay as she waits to catch Einar in one of the rare, good moods that will allow him to properly consider his options.

But Greta also hesitates because she isn’t ready to lose another husband. Twenty years ago, after she and Teddy lost the baby, they moved back to Pasadena and tried to pick up their lives. Teddy’s cough and his night sweats got worse and worse, although he refused to see a doctor. By the time he ended up in a tuberculosis sanitorium in the spring of 1918, it was far too late. Greta remembers her helpless feeling, how much she wished someone—Mrs. Waud, the family doctor—would intervene and make Teddy better again. But no one could. At the very end, Teddy, in tremendous pain, asked her to smother him with a pillow and put him out of his misery. She threw the pillow out of the window, unable to comply. He died alone in the night instead.