Autobiography has proved a key genre for the representation of transgender lives, especially in relation to narratives of medically or surgically assisted gender transition. In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser describes narrative as ‘a kind of second skin: the story the transsexual must weave around the body in order that this body may be “read”’, declaring every transsexual an autobiographer, ‘[w]hether s/he publishes an autobiography or not’. At the same time, autobiography is recognised as a ‘fraught practice’, to use Kadji Amin's words, because of its complex relationship to dominant discourses of sex and gender and the clinical contexts in which they prevail. David Ebershoff's 2000 historical novel The Danish Girl is a late-twentieth-century reworking of the life story of Lili Elbe (1882-1931), whose reputation as one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment treatment was assured by the 1931 publication of Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Sex Change, the True Story of the Miraculous Transformation of the Danish Painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). Indeed, Man into Woman has assumed a significant place in the history of transsexual life writing, acting as a generic precedent for authors of subsequent autobiographies. However, Man into Woman is a ‘memoir’ whose status within the canon of transsexual autobiography is complicated in two ways: firstly, by its generic hybridity as a narrative composed by an author other than its subject, and secondly, by the fact that its subject may have been an intersex person. In Man into Woman the discovery of ovarian tissue in Elbe's abdomen is offered as proof of her female sex; her subsequent surgeries are then presented as correcting a disparity between sex and gender and, in doing so, preserving the categories of identity which her ambiguously sexed body might otherwise challenge. Underlying this rationale is an evident presumption that sex has a causal relationship to gender and that both sex (male or female) and gender (masculine or feminine) are binary constructions. Man into Woman is an important historical source text for The Danish Girl, which reproduces its recurring motif of ‘two beings’ competing for ‘possession of one body’.