A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Archive

Mystery instructions, disappearing SD cards, and hidden elevators make my job feel like espionage

I posted this story for the first time right after it happened. I wanted to bring it up again, partly because it’s a comedy of errors… partly because I have an update. The book I was researching is complete, and the object of my desire, so hard won? Well. There’s a bit of news about that, too.

I am a historian author. That means I belong to a group of secret super-heroes responsible for upturning the soil on past misdeeds and brushing the dirt from forgotten pioneers. Historians aren’t flashy. We don’t James-Bond around in Aston Martins (not on our salaries). We’re the agents you’ve never heard of, the ones you didn’t know were there. But we’re also the ones who get things done, often with a single-minded devotion that borders on obsessive behavior — and truckloads of patience.

This story starts several years ago, when I first heard about Dora. She was, you see, the first male-to-female transgender person to have a full transition surgery. Wasn’t that Lili Elbe in 1931? The name became familiar to many after the film The Danish Girl, but no, Lili was not the first. Or the second (that was Toni Ebel). So why haven’t you heard of Dora?