Lise Meitner has become a feminist icon both because of her successful career as a “woman in science” and because of the extensive discrimination she faced, discrimination that was multi-faceted but based primarily on her gender and Jewish ancestry. Through her research on radioactivity and nuclear physics, Meitner was familiar with the frustration of being close to a discovery but overlooking a crucial observation or being unable to interpret key experimental results. Before identifying nuclear fission as the cause of the radioactivity they were studying, she and her Berlin team had been confident that their results were evidence of an entirely different phenomenon. Meitner felt their reluctance to look at a substance assumed to be unremarkable and the limits of their experimental techniques together delayed the discovery of nuclear fission by more than a year. This paper argues that gender assignment, gender identity and sexual orientation have been similarly overlooked in biographical studies of Lise Meitner, despite being crucial to the study of identity.