He was a cross-dressing fetishist

^This.

I got the feeling that Einar identified himself more as a woman. Today he would be called a transsexual.

Apparently the real Einar wanted a man, he wanted to be a woman who was loved by a straight man.

The movie wasn't honest about that, they portrayed Einar as 99% attracted to women, and in love with pretty feminine things and definitely not dick.

I did read some interesting (but very disturbing) stuff about this guy. For one thing, his wife was a closet lesbian (remember, this was the early 20th century), so she already knew people within the secret circles of society in Denmark who practiced the lifestyle. It was why she had no issues encouraging her husband to do this crazy stuff. Cross-dressing has been done for centuries in Europe, but it was either done in secret, or as a novelty in royal courts.

Einar also was one of the first guys to offer himself as a test patient in sex-change surgery, but due to how crude it was in his day, he croaked from it. It was also discovered during his autopsy, that he was a hermaphrodite. He apparently had been born with both sets of sex organs (I think they call people like this "intersex"), but the extra female sex organs were shriveled, small, and inactive his whole life, while his male organs were functioning normally. Keep in mind that such a condition is super-rare, and more often than not, such people will spend their entire lives like Einar and have no idea they have this. The only time intersex people become aware of their condition today is by accident, when a doctor is examining them for an entirely different medical reason.

God yes. This movie romanticised gender fetishism to breaking point, pushing the idea that trans-widows should continue to love and support their spouse by changing their own identity (and possibly sexuality) to find true happiness.

Loathed it. What an offensive and degrading message.