Here’s something I wrote when I was asked to speak alongside Sheila Jeffreys, who was speaking about her book “Gender Hurts”, about how transgenderism harms women. In the end, I didn’t say all this, but for those of you who are interested, here it is...Naeferty’s Story   “For the longest of time I told no-one. It is only in the past few years that I have found the words to describe my experience. Thank you, Sheila Jeffreys, and the Radical Feminist community of bloggers for the gift of words.   I used to have an online friend (also a partner of a man who thought he was a woman) who likened the experience of being partnered to a transgender to the frog who is put into the pot of water and the heat gradually turned up till cooked – a deliberate programme of de-sensitisation as each limit is compromised or ignored, and each line in the sand crossed by these men in their “journey”. Another woman once told me that “You give a tranny an inch, he will take a mile”…how true that turned out to be.   When I first met him, he spoke to me about what he called his “strong feminine side”. He confided in me that he was an occasional transvestite and that it had ruined a few relationships where girlfriends had inadvertently “found out”, or had rejected him when he told them. He told me he had a very low sex drive and instead preferred to just cuddle and kiss. That he felt more comfortable around women. He told me that he DIDN’T WANT TO BECOME A WOMAN, that he didn’t know where the urge to “dress” came from, other than a need to express what he felt were his “feminine feelings” and an attraction to pretty things. He told me he had been doing this since he was about 11 or 12….remember that detail. I felt special that he would confide this in me.   It was only later that I realised that he considered those conversations as “GIRL TALK”. He likes “girl talk”.   I couldn’t really grasp those “feminine feelings” he spoke of, since I had never really experienced my sense of self in that way. I thought women who bought into it were un-informed – certainly none of my friends were like that. I hadn’t worn heels since I was a teenager. I never wore make up. I was a conscientious objector to the femininity game.   But I believed at the time that these guys are living proof that GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. Men and women should be able to wear whatever they want, without the silly distinction of ”male clothes” or “female” clothes. To hell with gender norms….I thought it could be “edgy” and “alternative”.   Within a few weeks of him moving in, I realised that this was much, much more than just an occasional bout of self-expression for him. It was obsessive, and it had an ENORMOUS sexual component. Dressing episodes (which were at least three or four times a week) were invariably followed by “sex” (which consisted of me masturbating him by rubbing his tucked penis as he lay on his back squeezing his fake tits). On top of that, I often walked in on him masturbating. The mirror in my bedroom was moved to his side of the bed… There wasn’t a time when he “dressed” and didn’t get an erection. Even after he started taking internet bought hormones. If anything, the thought that he was chemically transforming himself into “a woman”, held immense erotic charge for him.   He was a textbook autogynophile.   It transpired that he was also a “submissive” – a very common component of this particular paraphilia – and that nothing got him off more than being “forced” to be “a woman”. Of course “woman” meant submissive, passive, always “willing to please”…..He would work this into our “sex life” either overtly or covertly.   After a time, it was impossible to ignore that I was no more than a prop in this game. I could have been anyone really. I didn’t even have to exist. As significant as a gravy stain on the table. Many of the women I spoke to in what limited support groups I could find complained of the same thing. Not just the sex part, but the entire being invisible part, and a deafness to OUR needs, views, or opinions.   I discovered that he was an obsessive user of porn, particularly “shemale” porn, and BDSM fare. I had been very clear with him about my opinions on porn, and was sickened when he tried to get me to participate in looking at these men. Time and again he would promise to stop, only to be discovered again. He would swing between crying and begging forgiveness and bold-facedly challenging me, saying it was ME that had a problem, that no-body else thought like me, ridiculing my objections and my politics, or telling me that I was paranoid, – even though the evidence was staring me right in the face.   He had no intention of stopping. A lot of his behaviours seemed compulsive, obsessive.   I discovered that he was using dating and sexual hook-up sites, saying that he was a full-time transsexual, going through the Real Life Test, willing to relocate anywhere for the right lady (of any gender – wink, wink). There was no end to his inventiveness when it came to lying about who he really is. Using his smartphone, he created an online world for himself by inventing a fictitious life. I discovered that he had a secret Facebook profile, and scores of photographs of himself in varying degrees of undress – I am convinced that trannies invented that selfie – and that he had a coterie of dozens and dozens of young women between the ages of 17 and 24 who believed that he was a full-time transsexual, single, and struggling with finding a job in this cruel discriminatory society. He had a fictitious home life, fictitious job or non-job, a fictitious social life and fictitious friends. He even fabricated a “trans bashing” – this, I found particularly repulsive.   He loved sympathy and attention, and “validation” – even if it meant lying and manipulating to get it. The young women were so “Go girl!” and “Awww poor you”, toward him. Some of them called him “big sis” and took their problems to him. Otherwise it was giggly conversations about clothes and what colour to die their hair that week, musings about becoming a stripper or a fetish model, and complaining about getting “slut shamed”.   Oh yes, he liked his women faux feminist to match his faux existence.   I was outraged that he would be so bold-facedly lie to these young women and demanded that he STOP. He cried, saying , “But these are my frieeeends…”. Ignoring the fact who THEY thought was their friend is A WORK OF FICTION. Then again, it’s not as if women are actually real to these men.   Of course he didn’t stop. It carried on as if I hadn’t said anything. Even the several times I asked him to leave were ignored. He would just get up the next day as if nothing had been said.   I felt I was being driven insane.   My sense of self, and my belief that I was entitled to set limits or boundaries was gradually eroded as the TRANS STUFF came to dominate and shape every corner of my life. I never knew where or when the next assault to my psyche was going to come, and so I existed for a long time in a state of hyper vigilance. That is, until such time as my ability to dissociate kicked in. I know from observing trans support groups that many of these men say, “My wife is fine with it – she just doesn’t want to talk about it or see it”. Many women are surviving through disassociation.   Let’s not forget that a well-orchestrated and financed propaganda machine surrounds these men. It has the effect of silencing not just those of us who oppose on ideological principles, but all women who are within these relationships who question the idea that these men are ” women trapped inside men’s bodies “, or who’s lives have been ripped apart by these men. I know from bitter experience of reaching out, that the primary concern is for the welfare of the trans partner, who must never be questioned as the most oppressed creature to walk this planet. This is a double whammy to those women experiencing abuse, intensive gaslighting, and erasure of their right to name their reality and to set boundaries. There is no such thing as a line in the sand when it comes to trans desire. He gotta have what he gotta have.   Even within mainstream services, support for female partners is tempered by the need to be sensitive to the needs of the transgender partner, and to avoid being seen as discriminatory. My doctor was happy to give me anti-depressants, but less happy to countenance the idea that what I was being put through was abuse.   Increasingly, statistics on DV within same sex partnerships count the trans partner as “female”. There is an invisiblising of male violence within these relationships, and women are suffering as a consequence. We are silenced. We are shamed. We are ereased.   A Scottish Government funded survey carried out by the Scottish Transgender Alliance (funded by the Scottish Government since 2007), is often cited as evidence of how very bad it is for trans women, who would appear to experience rates of abuse higher than actual women. Apparently a small, self-selecting sample is no barrier to credibility, nor is the fact that one of the crireria for abuse included “misgendering”. It is of no surprise to me that some women (partnered to a man for some years) might slip up occasionally and forget to call their Steven “Stephanie”, yet this is a heineous act of abuse – apparently. Yet there are no surveys I am aware of, of abuse perpetrated by trans “women in relationships. I find this a telling omission.   It often feels like no one wants to hear the woman’s story.   For example, at one point (as a means to at least get him to LISTEN to my distress) I begged him to seek relationship counselling with me. Apart from the fact that he used the trips to the counsellor as an exciting opportunity to dress in public, and spent more time stressing about what to wear (sometimes even buying entire new outfits), than any time in self-reflection, the counsellor spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on MY inability to “accept” rather than on HIS behaviour .   In one session she grasped on to an incident of “misgendering” that had happened in her presence (I had said something like “Why can’t he understand?”). He had fled from the room in a dramatic tizzy of tears. She stated to me in a firm voice that she is prohibited from working with couples where there is domestic abuse. In other words, I was being accused of being an abuser. This almost drove me mad with pain and self-doubt …what if it really is me? Am I an abuser?   I can’t begin to describe the pain this caused me. I carried that comment with me for months.   I refused to go back. He was disappointed that his daylight trips outdoors with his repulsive “cleavage” showing were curtailed. However it did give him an excuse to now appropriate the identity of “abused woman”. Sickening.   I was starting to drop or loose female friends. I would be hesitant about going out with them or inviting them over: particularly with him around. He would laugh and giggle with them and I knew that in his head he was imagining he was having “GIRL TALK” with them, and the fact that they didn’t know that they were unwittingly playing a part in his fantasy life made me feel nauseous, and guilty, so I stopped meeting female friends with him around.   Then I pretty much stopped seeing female friends at all, since when I tried to go anywhere without him, (telling him that it was “women friends only ”), he would pout and huff and often cry, “It’s because I have a penis, isn’t it?” . When I was away from him he would text and phone me constantly. When I got in he was nasty to me.   I was growing afraid of him. It was easier just to forget about having friends. So my world became smaller and smaller as his “exploration of his feminine side” took up more and more space until there was little room left for anything else. It dominated every conversation and extended to physical space too. By the time he left, my clothes storage was down to half a drawer and a box under the window.   Even everyday purchases were fraught with meaning and reminders of my erasure. I remember having an argument in Superdrug over toothbrushes. There was only one pink toothbrush left, and I don’t know what came over me but I decided that, fuck him, I am having the pink toothbrush. He “helpfully” pointed out the purple ones, and the blue ones that matched the bathroom. But no. I was having the pink one and I was going to win this tiny victory even if all the shop assistants were looking at me like I had lost my marbles.   We needed a phone. He said he would take care of it. That he had seen just what we needed. He came home with this….   We needed a phone. He came home with this. I couldn’t bear to bring it up to my ear. My flesh crawled very time it rang.   I thought that perhaps if he had an outlet, the lies and stuff would stop. Lots of partners go through a similar “bargaining” phase. The gas under my pot was turned up to full. So I agreed to escort him to a tranny club.   I secretly wanted to see if there would be other women there. I needed to find out if this behaviour is normal for trannies, and if there is anything that women had found that made their lives with these men more bearable.   He would be beside himself with excitement at going out “en-femme”. I could see his hard on starting from the moment he got out of his leisurely bubble bath (my bath’s were always rushed and fitted in around his dressing schedule). Getting ready was a ritual that took at least two hours. Of course, I was expected to “help”. I’m pretty sure now that he was working that into one of his fantasies he had running on loop in his head.   Often trips were abandoned due to some smudged nail polish, or similar “feminine disaster” that would have him stomping around in an agitated state sweating through his make-up, crying and shouting at me. Ordering me around like some demented potentate. Six foot trannies with chipped nail polish can be pretty scary, believe me. The tranny club comprised of men, in very short, very tight “little black dresses” (had they co-ordinated this? I thought), high heels, a variety of wigs (probably two third of them, long and blonde) and a weird atmosphere I couldn’t quite put my finger on. There were other men there too (not in dresses). They sort of lurked, and leered, most of them not actually talking to the men in dresses, but often sending a drink over for one of them, followed by a raised glass and a wink from their corner – the men in dresses responding with a coquettish smile and a simpered “Thank you”. I found out later that most of the men in dresses were doing each other and calling themselves “lesbians”. I know this, because I found the photographs.   And they had a certain gleam I their eye… Amy Bloom, in her article from 2002, Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses, wrote : “The greatest difficulty people have with cross-dressers, I think, is that cross-dressers wear their fetish, and the gleam in their eyes, however muted by time or habit, the unmistakable presence of a lust being satisfied or a desire being fulfilled in that moment, in your presence, even by your presence, is unnerving.”   The penny finally dropped for me about what I was witnessing… Another boundary being violated – the boundary that says “Don’t make me a part of you sexual kick, buddy”.   The experience of getting out in public seemed to turbo charge the tranny-ing at home.   Give an inch, take a mile.   When the kids weren’t around, his idea of relaxing at home was to potter about in a micro-mini and high heels, affecting a “sexy wiggle” and doing this weird thing with his hands and wrists when he spoke. I told him that women don’t go about dressed like they were about to nip down to a disco all the time . He told me that he had seen “loads” of women that do, and that anyway, he liked the “council house tart” look. I was always arguing with him about what women actually wore, and how sexist his stereotypes of women were, but he would insist that he was dressing like any other “girl” (despite the fact that he is a 47 year old man). Other looks he liked were – The “rock chic” look – think Cher in that video on the aircraft carrier. No jeans and band T shirt for this gal! The “hooker” look – I’ll leave that to your imagination. The “beauty counter girl” – extra heavy make-up and an old lab coat worn over a bra, pants, suspender-belt and stockings ensemble. I caught him once, sneaking back into the house like that at 5 in the morning after a “constitutional”. Apparently he had been taking “constitutionals” for months , sneaking out while I was asleep. Trannies are expert ninjas as well as exhibitionists.   For all his faux “girly-ness”, the feminine side never extended to practical, everyday stuff that most adults have to do to get by – like helping with housework. He literally told me “I can’t do housework because I might break a nail – my long nails are important to me”.   Turned out he couldn’t carry heavy bags or lift heavy stuff either, cos he wanted his upper body muscles to wither away so he would be “more like a girl”. I told him lots of women have muscles. He told me that wasn’t “the kind of woman” he wanted to be. Of course not – how nice it must be to get to pick and choose.   He spent thousands and thousands of pounds on clothes, make-up, “beauty products”, laser hair removal and internet hormones. I still can’t see a television ad for make-up without an involuntary shiver down my spine.He would go months without giving me any contribution to the home. Apparently he had “expenses”, and anyway, I wouldn’t have sex with him, so why should he?   The day came when he told me that he had “done an online test” and that he was “definitely a transsexual”. Self-diagnosis by internet is the tranny stock in trade. I was alarmed because I knew to the core of myself that these men are categorically not women. That I could never accept him as a woman. Like Sheila Jeffreys says, “woman is an honourific term”. His story began to change in subtle ways – aided by his community of internet advisors. Now he said he had been dressing since three years old. He now had distinct memories of wishing he was a girl from around the age of five. Many hundreds of pounds in laser hair removal and black market internet hormones later, and I was left struggling with a six foot, 14 stone hulking man with “breasts” , liable to incandescent rages one minute and tears the next. I was terrified. I began to hate him. No way was I going to wipe his arse if he had a stroke.   I was repulsed by him, his insulting attempts to emulate “femininity” and his freakish body. Being touched by him, even by accident, made my skin crawl.   I was disgusted at myself for allowing this to happen to me. I was drowning in shame. I was sinking fast.   I tried finding help online, but nobody wanted to acknowledge that these delusions are harmful. Rather, I was told I had to be educated, that I was “phobic”, that I should learn to embrace this. Women were telling me this as well as the trans borg.   Had feminism changed so much? What had happened to the idea of women being central to feminism? Why can’t women see that these are men??? I was told  that I was “homophobic” AS WELL AS “transphobic” because I refused to call myself a lesbian. WHAT?? He is a man!! What madness was this??? I went to the doctor and was given anti-depressants. Nobody wanted to hear about my problem with the trans. I was told that “she” must be suffering too.   I went to the LGBT centre and asked if they had a group for partners of transitioning males. The young man looked at me, puzzled, “Um, well we have a group for trans women and their friends and families…isn’t that enough?” he asked. I tried to explain why maybe it wasn’t a good idea for women who were struggling in their relationship with a male partner who was insisting he was now a woman for those women to be discussing their problems with their male partner in* the* same* fuckin* room*…..crickets. Eventually he said he would ask the tranny group what they thought. If they were OK with it, then they would “think about it”. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out their response…. More men telling women what they can and cannot do.   Women are often reluctant to talk about this. Whether from a sense of shame or embarrassment, or because we have seen the harassment and invasion that takes place against women who have spoken out publicly. Most commonly though, because we are GROOMED AND OBLIGATED TO CARE.   One of the saddest things for me, was that when I contacted the few women who I had met along the way (and who I knew to have been put through a variety of torments) to ask them if they would consent to an interview for Gender Hurts, they declined, stating that they didn’t want to be “disloyal”, or for [him] to find out that they had been talking to anyone outside of a tightly proscribed circle. Some didn’t want to risk being ejected from some of the only spaces they have to talk about this – compromised by male oversight though they may be.   It gets to be exhausting, pointless and depressing.   I know that for many, the greatest state of emergency will be what seems to be the almost unstoppable trend of lesbian women who are “transitioning”, and destroying their beautiful, healthy female bodies in the process – as well as erasing their lesbian herstory and identity.   I feel a deep sorrow for this state of affairs, and when I have read descriptions of what women put their bodies through, and the details of the surgeries that some go on to seek, my heart sinks at how self-hating, how female hating this is. It is misogyny written upon the bodies of women, and it is truly terrible.   The trend for “transgender children” is particularly horrifying and is evidence of how damaging the essentialist idea of “gender” that is promulgated by the Transgender cult is.   In speaking about my own experience, I hope that you understand that I don’t wish to minimise those states of emergency, and hope that what I have said will be taken in the context of how male privilege and entitlement in the guise of transgenderism, is driving a movement that has, and will continue to hurt all women as long as our voices are silent, and women remain unsupported to escape from these men, and to make sense of their oppression.   I believe that what women go through in these relationships is a form of emotional violence, and that work needs to be done to raise awareness among not just the wider public about what really goes on within many of these relationships, but also services that support survivors of male violence. This is not “woman on woman” relationship abuse, and should not be treated or recorded as such. We should not be afraid to see this for what it is – male entitlement. Male violence.   No woman who is being abused needs to be told to have compassion for her abuser.   Women’s enforced compliance with male delusions, needs to recognised for what it is. Misogyny. Abuse. Erasure. I’m standing up and saying ENOUGH.

He loved going shopping with me. I thought it was fun because most men didn’t enjoy picking out skirts, heels, and lingerie for me. He was different. Very smart, charismatic, and funny, and I felt lucky to be with him. I thought I loved him. He seemed to know exactly what I was looking for in a man, and I was hooked. When our daughter was only a few months old, I found a collection of bras and panties hidden in the bottom drawer of our dresser. My first thought was that they belonged to another woman. But, I wasn’t prepared for the truth. When I approached him about it, he told me that he used to cross-dress from time to time. He victimized himself by saying that I caused him to suppress his feminine side. He was hiding it because of me. Then over time, his story changed. It went from occasionally cross-dressing, to wanting to become a woman. He reminded me every day that he didn’t feel like he could truly be the woman he felt like on the inside because it was my fault for loving him as a man. Despite how I felt about it, he decided that he didn’t want to hide his femininity anymore, and he wanted to transition 100% and live his life as a woman. He said he didn’t want our infant daughter to know him, or remember him as “Dad.” He wanted to be her Mom. That terrified me more than anything. It was that moment when the fear, the pain, and the loss hit me like a train. Not only was I losing this man that I thought I loved, but I also had to accept the fact that my little girl would no longer see me as her mom… she would see us both as her moms. A big part of my identity was taken away from me that day, and everything changed. I never thought that I would ever need to share that identity with anyone else - it felt like I was losing something sacred and special… something that was mine. But, he was gaining something that supported this new identity. The transition went so fast (too fast for me, but not fast enough for him), and I was expected to be okay with all of it. There were many fights, lots of tears, grief, hopelessness. Every day was difficult for me. We tried couples counseling, but those sessions were focused on the steps he could take to become a woman, and the steps I could take to support him through it. We went to trans support groups where I had hoped to find other spouses in my situation who felt the same way that I felt. But, those groups were all about the trans journey - not about the spouses. There was no one to support me through this, and I felt like I couldn’t be honest about how I was feeling for fear of being perceived as transphobic. We read books together and watched videos and documentaries, but it was there was nothing that helped me through what I was feeling. His appearance and whether or not he could “pass” as a female, consumed our lives. Little by little “he” was disappearing, and was replaced by a stranger that I was expected to love, respect, and support. I was now in a lesbian relationship and referred to him as my “wife.” We both celebrated Mother's Day, our daughter called us both “mom.” I felt like I was a horrible person for having a hard time accepting this. He convinced me that I was the monster. His manipulation over our 13-year relationship ate away at my self-confidence, my identity, and my mental health. I no longer trusted myself. I became completely dependent on him so much that I could no longer make decisions for myself without him. I supported him, and encouraged him, all the while I was screaming on the inside. Over time I became desensitized to it. I called him by his new name and pronouns. I became an advocate for him and fought against anyone who didn’t understand or support LGBT issues - my own family included. I got really good at lying about my feelings to my family, my friends, and mostly to myself. The hardest part was hiding our past and lying to our daughter. He didn’t want any photos of himself hanging on the wall before his transition because he didn’t want our daughter or friends to question why he looked like a man in the photos. I removed our maternity photos from the wall and hid them in the attic. I went through our daughter’s baby album and removed beautiful memories, one by one. When our daughter was little, we would lie to her about who her dad was, and how she was born with two moms. We dodged our daughter’s questions and reinforced the idea that she is loved by two parents and that’s all she needed. It hurt me every single time to lie, but this was his decision. This was how it was going to be. Throughout our relationship, he made it a routine to pile on the guilt and made the past feel different from how I remembered or experienced it. I was the villain in his story because I struggled with his transition. I hurt him because I had a hard time accepting him as a woman. He blamed me for not wanting to have sex often enough. He made me feel guilty for not being attracted to him as a woman so I was guilted into having sex with him for years to avoid those confrontations. He made me believe that I chose this life. It was my choice to stay. But, in my mind, leaving was never an option. I never recognized the control he had over me, the narcissism, the gaslighting - I was trapped, and I believed that I put myself there. It’s been five years since I’ve been on my own. Every day is a struggle. I never recognized it as domestic violence because he never hit me. There were no visible bruises. But, the emotional abuse, PTSD, trusting my own judgment and reality, and making my mental health a priority has been an uphill battle, which I imagine will be with me for the rest of my life. Our daughter is a teen now. My ex tries to be a “supermom,” lots of love-bombing to build her trust, and telling her lies about me. It kills me when my daughter goes to him when she has questions about puberty, women’s bodies, or her development. My ex has made sure that our daughter sees him more as her “mom” than me. He knows how much this hurts me, and he takes full advantage of it. That is his weapon. We share joint custody of our daughter. Trying to co-parent with my ex is very difficult. Communicating with my abuser regularly has its toll. On days when my daughter switches houses, my anxiety is so overwhelming. Every text message I receive from him, every email, school events where we need to be in the same space, it feels like I can’t escape him. I don’t know if I will ever be completely free from this trauma. And, I am doing my best to raise my daughter to be self-aware and recognize signs of abusive relationships. I am thankful to read your stories and know that I’m not alone. It’s extremely validating to know that my experience is shared by many women around the world.

My story is from almost 40 years ago.  I married a man who wore blue jeans and t-shirts. We met in Washington,DC.  When we dated we had so many common interests in music, ballet, hiking and playing chess.  After getting married things started to change abruptly.  Suddenly, he treated me like I was his property.  He also started to belittle me in front of people and did things to keep me separated from my friends and family.  But he was always so charming to my friends that they thought I was exaggerating.  When we went to rock concerts, he used to try to dress like a rock star--platform boots, spandex clothes, big jewellery and eye makeup.  I was uncomfortable with this, but was afraid to say anything. Soon he started dressing like this more and more often.  He even took to wearing clear or black nail polish.  In DC, it is not uncommon for straights to go to gay clubs. At these clubs, he made friends with a lot of very effeminate males - they shared clothing and makeup ideas.  I was just left to stand there and be ignored.  He treated me like his dog.    He got more and more comfortable with criticizing me in front of everyone.  When we were alone, he would call me stupid and hide things (like my car keys).  If he didn't like some clothing item I wore, it would disappear.  In hind sight, it is silly that I let these comments get to me.  I was the one who finished college-he dropped out.  Also, he couldn't even read music or play an instrument - he just liked to dress like someone who could.  His whole life was play acting.  When he got dressed up to go out he would primp and primp in front of the mirror. He had me convinced that I was some old fashioned, small town stick-in-the-mud who got lucky enough to marry one of the 'cool kids'.  I cringe when I think about it now.   He would pick fights with me -- I think it was just so he could go be with his friends without me hanging around.  I had to get a separate checking account because he would spend my entire pay check on clothes for himself.  Since he drove by my workplace on the way to his place of work, he suggested we ride together and he would drop me off.  But since I separated my money from his, he charged me gas money!  I broke up with him many times, but he would always come back and say and do 'all the things' and I would take him back.   I was with him, on and off, for almost 10 years--only 1 1/2 as his wife.  What got me to leave, was when his violence kept increasing from slapping and hair pulling to punching me so hard he knocked the wind out me.   One of those times, he stood over me laughing as I gasped for air.   When I was able to get up, I ran to the bathroom and locked the door.  He broke it down, punched me some more and left for work.  I packed what I could and left...I never looked back.  I had to hide from him for years because he said he would kill me.  A therapist once told me his behaviour was because I had what he wanted -- female body parts. The therapist said it made my ex very angry that he wasn't a woman so he took it out on me.   His one sister and I were friends for a long time after the divorce and she told me he started transitioning years later.  She had some childhood stories about growing up with him that are hard to hear.  His cruelty started when he was very young.

Like many women I stayed too long. I was raised to have a faith which I have passed on to my child, and it led me to stay in our marriage long past the point of healthy emotional and mental self-preservation.   I stayed despite the hardcore pornography, the cross dressing, and the constant sense that as a woman, I failed to match up to some construct in his mind of what his ideal female was - which, as it happens in some nightmarish way, I now understand was probably himself. The transgression of boundaries in my decades long relationship was gradual but unrelenting. I had a constant sense of looking over my shoulder at something that was just out of sight. He would often ask ‘what are you thinking’?  Not in a normal way - it felt a bit obsessive and I now think, slightly cuckoo-like.   I reached out to our wider friendship circle and to his family regarding aspects of our private life with which I struggled. Nothing can be more embarrassing than revealing your private life to a ‘faux amie’, only to be met with scorn. Word to the wise - if your friend manages to talk to you about her husband’s violent porn addiction or cross dressing - for God’s sake don’t freeze her out or worse still, laugh at her. The enabling by so many of my well-educated, middle class, friends really messed up my mental health. I sleepwalked into something controlling, where my confusion, anxiety, the cognitive dissonance at the heart of things, the embarrassment, all contributed to an erosion of my bearings. Like many other trans widows I also felt I was on my own in my experience - shame is a great silencer and as I’ve noted above, “Be Kind” was and to many still is the zeitgeist. Things got progressively worse after my child’s birth. I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that it is post children where middle aged men seem to transition. That makes me so sad. I think he knew me better than to ever think I would tolerate the relationship once he transitioned. By that stage he probably had the measure of me and the memory of his hatred, his fury that I didn’t play into his narrative still makes me shudder. But - please don’t underestimate the lifelong impact on me - nor on my child. He came out to my child before me - that child wasn’t given a choice - and still isn’t.   Women like me can’t ‘move on’ easily - there is always that point where I have to disclose to anyone I meet.  My child has had to deal with a loss they can’t even properly name or process, since to do so would not affirm the new ‘reality’. I do quietly rebel in my own way... I may be the last woman on Earth to be able to call him a man, but I believe I’ve the C-section scars to prove it.   For women of the post internet generation, aligning the view that long term relationships are there to be worked on, that marriage is the most stable place in which to raise the child you hope for, alongside the increasingly bizarre behaviour of a spouse - is incredibly hard. I see parallels with the darkness at the end of the Sixties, within my own generation. Too much, too far, too fast - with too many guys calling the shots and frankly, thinking with something other than their intellect...  The internet of Tim Berners Lee, of the beginning of this millennium, born in idealism with the hope of equality - has born some bitter fruit - in men’s acceptance of pornography, the degradation of women, and the ‘tech bro’ idea that anything is essentially a construct that can be morphed, monetised, fetishised.   There is a lot of money to be made now - from confusion, from pornography addiction, from a sense of men’s isolation within their lives and their society. And through all of this runs a profound and inherent misogyny - which rears its head if men’s right to appropriate what is female are questioned.   Motherhood, women’s bodies, the entire construct of and necessity for privacy - what does that even mean to many, in the era we live in?  I am grateful we have begun to speak of these things. Past generations lived in the physical world where biological truths were largely inescapable - which in turn fostered a common understanding and respect for sex based differences.   But it is the very essence of the metaverse, to turn people’s faces away from reality. There are also massive commercial imperatives to doing so. We shouldn’t be surprised that women’s rights and children’s rights are being eroded in such a world.   One thing which keeps me going - I have had great support from a handful of other mothers after my divorce. Often they’re the ones who are more down to earth. People whisper support. At the fringe of a kid’s party, in passing in the supermarket, that sort of thing. It’s crazy that acknowledgment of what is actually, physically, female - that that is now the taboo.

I was in a relationship with a man, Matt. We shared political ideals, as these ideals were very important to me in my close relationships. We dated for about five years when I became pregnant, but I lost the baby due to having a blighted ovum. There were many red flags in the beginning of our relationship, both in relation to his later trans identity, and also because of his propensity for violence and his self-centered lifestyle. I stayed with him for so long, because I was broken. I had so many failed relationships, both with men and women, friends and lovers, that I just wanted a relationship to work. I had many relationships with narcissists in the past. I don't know for certain whether Matt is a narcissist or not, but his mother is one, and at the least he has fleas, or tendencies. In the beginning of our relationship, I recall him breaking down, crying and so upset, because his parents didn't call him on his birthday. This triggered me to a past relationship of an identical situation. That relationship was with a man who was so many things that fall under the penumbra of evil. The similarity was a red flag, but of course there are many people who experienced unloving parents. I was one. I know that my mother loved me, but my father, also a narcissist, had made my mother believe that I was a daddy's girl, and that was the side I had picked. But, this was not the truth. I was a truth seeker in my family, and I know from the young age of 3 or 4 that my father didn't love me. He was emotionally and verbally abusive. He gave me one side of himself, and gave everyone else the funny, happy guy self. He would always praise my accomplishments to everyone else, and demonstrate how good of a father he was. But the same breath was used to tell me I was lazy, stupid, and I would never accomplish anything in life. The only compliments he would pay me were those attributed to his parenting or genes, and they were rare. My mom, because of her past traumas, was not emotionally bonded to me. She gave me food and shelter, and advice that never knew me. So, I kept getting in relationships that were toxic, because I never knew what it was like to receive unconditional love. So, with Matt, I stayed, in part because I was afraid of failing, yet again, and because it was comfortable to feel needed by someone. The breakdown on his birthday was just one issue. To be honest, I didn't want to date him in the beginning, but he wouldn't get the hint. He came to my apartment that had security where you had to ring the bell to be let in. When I didn't answer, he would ring everyone else's doorbell until someone let him in. That should have been another red flag. He also used drugs, like marijuana, and while I do not begrudge anyone to use substances in this depressing world, it played a part in the toxicity of our relationship. I left him a couple of times when we fought. He couldn't keep a job to save his life, primarily due to his depression and other mental health issues. He couldn't focus on his job, perhaps because he didn't care to, and he was more of a liability than anything else. He would break things, damage things, and kill things, though never on purpose. He had accidentally killed fish by feeding them the wrong food. Since his job was to feed the fish, once the fish were dead, he had no job. This type of behaviour was extremely common. I had left the home when I was pregnant due to some conflicts. I returned home close to the time I was about to give birth. I had a midwife, a doula, and support from friends. But Matthew was so self-interested that I could not rely on him as a support. Before a year past, he became violent with his words, threatening all of our lives, and also threatening family suicide. I left for good that time. I don’t recall specifically what made me think he may be trans, but I recall that he did want to cross dress. He also seemed to advocate for women in a way that seemed outside of the norm of what a male should do, as though it was personal to him, but yet, he didn’t see my position in the relationship as that of requiring a feminist perspective. After all, I was the one doing most of the work of taking care of the domestic chores, the primary caretaker of the family, and the one paying the bills. Not to mention doing the emotional care-taking of him. My daughter recently, within the past year, began really advocating for trans rights, particularly in relation to pronouns. But this could be from her education, her peer group, or any other places. But she has given some indication that he may be trans. I have also consciously raised my daughter with a critical thinking skills and to question things. She understands the value of women’s privacy, the issue around sports, and women’s spaces. Recently he contacted me and started blabbering incoherently about his trans identity, and basically stated he was trans all along but just didn’t have the language to say so. This is false. There has been language, he just chose to hide it from me, I believe, because he suspected that I would not accept it. I was not coddling or accepting of his wearing women’s clothing when we were together, and I suspect he didn’t continue down that path because I wouldn’t have accepted it. Since then, he has began changing his outward appearance by wearing more makeup, nail polish, and so on. And, he recently told me about a bunch of women who were all around him telling him all about the uses of makeup, and he learned about the armour that it provides for women. I wonder what other women’s secrets he is learning, and whether at some point, he will use this against us? Other than masking, he doesn’t exhibit social norms that any woman would. He is a large man, not afraid to yell or scream at a woman or threaten her, though I have never seen him stand up to a man in the same way. There was a time that I was in a domestic violence shelter because of these threats to our lives, and because of his mental state. He is also very persistent as my story reveals, and isn’t afraid to push women to do things that they wouldn’t feel comfortable doing. I wonder how he will use the secrets of women to forge into his new identity. When I look back, unlike others, I don’t think my male partner died. I think our whole relationship was a lie.

My husband of 20 years dropped his trans bombshell abruptly, without warning or preparation, and with complete assurance. He had spent several years secretly researching transition and making supportive contacts, so that by the time he told me, he was poised to pursue full transition. He had virtually no appreciation of my distress and shock, and had not anticipated that either I or our teenage children, would find this horrifying or, in my case, a marital deal-breaker. I’m several years on now, and it’s been the most stressful, distressing and overwhelming experience of my life. It has cost me – hopefully temporarily – my health, and some friends, and I now look back wondering how I came through it. My children lost their father. I lost my husband, my domestic stability, my confidence in my own judgement, my identity as a spouse, and my hopes for the future. But I’m moving on, putting this firmly into my past. Each week I spend less time thinking about him and less time feeling angry, sad, bewildered and broken. I am starting to accept that this was part of my life story, not my fault, not something I could have predicted, and thinking about restarting my life again as a middle-aged woman. I wanted to write about what helped me get here, in the hope it helps other women in this monstrous position. I tried to identify what I wanted and needed You may not know, you may need some time, you may very quickly decide. I knew within a few weeks that I didn’t want to stay with my husband, and that drove my rapid divorce. You may just need to ask for time from your partner, while you decide what you want to do. But, taking them out of the equation, what do you want? How do you want the future to look? Assuming your partner is committed to their new lifestyle, and you can’t stop him, what do you want to happen? I set some boundaries Many women experience cross-dressing and transitioning partners refusing to negotiate, compromise or agree boundaries regarding behaviours within the home and relationship. You may be happy to allow all behaviours to continue, or you may want to ask for limits so that the situation can be tolerable for you, perhaps while you consider your options. Being very clear about what you need (examples are no demand to have sex with a dressed-up partner, no spending on further clothing, a pause in the process to respect your needs), and whether there are any behaviours you cannot tolerate. When I communicated these to my husband, I was not only asserting my needs, but quickly found out whether I was dealing with someone who could consider my feelings, and meet me half-way (I couldn’t, and he didn’t). I told supportive people I struggled to tell close friends and family what was going on. I felt irrationally ashamed, and unsure of their reaction, embarrassed and tainted by my husband’s behaviour. But I knew very quickly that I needed to tell people close to me. I felt so much less alone when I shared what was happening, and did a lot of reading online, which is where I found the wonderful women who had been, or were also going through, this nightmare. I prioritised key things I could do I decided to focus primarily on stability for my children, keeping my home and job, and making sure life continued smoothly, as well as us having fun. I very much neglected my own health for several years in order to keep my job and home, and put my children absolutely first. I phoned friends from walks so that I could cry without the children seeing, and drank a lot in the evenings to deal with how stressed I felt. I slept terribly for several years. You can’t do everything, and something has to give; mine was my health and my social life. Try to cut yourself slack about what can wait/not be done, and what your main priorities are. I tried to hold onto the truth that this was not my fault, or my failure I wondered whether I was partly responsible for this. I raked my memory for clues I should have noticed. I felt a fool. I felt stupid. But my husband admitted to knowing for years that he intended to do this, and only told me at the very end of his process of secret research, experimentation and networking. I meanwhile had been working and bringing up children, and had no idea. It still blows my mind, but it is his responsibility and problem, not mine. I got legal advice I pretty quickly went to see a solicitor to find out my rights and options. Even if you feel you will probably stay with your partner, you may benefit from a one-off meeting with a lawyer, to ascertain your financial and legal position. You may never need that advice, but it gives you some protection if the situation deteriorates and you need or want to leave. I found it comforting to know where I stood, while I made up my mind what to do. I found counselling I was so lucky. I found a wonderful counsellor who was genuinely non-judgemental. If you can afford to go private, it’s worth every penny; if not your doctor may be able to direct you to services, and many employers offer workplace schemes. It was a great relief to me to have somewhere I could go to offload my fears and shame and pain. It saved my sanity, and I have revisited it at difficult times even years later, as recovery from this experience isn’t linear and distress, anger and grief can pop up later on quite unexpectedly. Unless you’ve decided to stay, I’d avoid organisations supporting trans people as they have a very clear bias and ideology, and a drive to educate partners to accept and stay. I informed myself My husband gave me a book on transitioning, which was written by a trans lobby group. Try to find information which is unbiased and includes lived experiences of women in your position who have both stayed and left. There is a lot of information which is inaccurate and unbalanced and may tell you that anything other than celebratory ‘staying’ is wrong and bad, and you are a deficient, or ignorant, or intolerant person to do otherwise. Hopefully this website and the stories within will show you that is nonsense. I let it out I started writing down how I was feeling, and sharing online with others. You may find this empowering and helpful. I certainly have, writing this piece. Thank you for reading. If you have also been affected by any of the issues in this story, please view our Resources page.

Trans Widows & Counselling Thanks to improved awareness and resourcing, there are now multiple counselling and support services for individuals contemplating gender transition, at whatever age. Some services also offer support to family members and loved ones affected by an individual's transition. But the experience of many partners seeking help is that these primarily offer, after an acknowledgement of the trauma and loss involved for many partners, re-education and encouragement of acceptance. For many partners this is of limited help, and can compound their feelings of anger and isolation. Many partners do not feel positively about gender transition, and do not want to stay with their partner; it is estimated that around half of relationships break down at this point. Finding a counsellor who was non-judgemental of my situation and my negative feelings about my husband's decision, proved difficult. One tried to convince me that I was simply in denial of a factual truth about his womanhood; another appeared bewildered by my unusual circumstances. And it is very difficult to find peer support, as partners who do not accept transition and do not stay in the relationship, tend to hide in isolation for fear of criticism or being labelled transphobic. Many seek peer support online, in informal networks, and report experiences of unhelpful counselling from various sources, which questions their decision not to stay with their partners, or their definition of their own history and experience. Such experiences are ultimately damaging and isolating and can be a deterrent to seeking further help. When my husband announced his intention to transition after 20 years of marriage, quite unexpectedly, I was very fortunate. I accessed counselling through a workplace scheme, and was allocated to a counsellor who skilfully and rapidly formed a very productive therapeutic relationship with me. From the outset she worked with my situation as ‘a loss, not a rejection’, without judgement or any drive to educate me about my misconceptions or state of denial. She held and contained my rage and distress and I never felt that my feelings were invalid or shameful. She repeatedly reminded me that ‘I feel as I feel’, and that accepting these difficult feelings was a starting-point for change. It was a revelation to have my feelings accepted. They were feelings I had learned, as a partner of someone planning to transition, amidst a media storm of positive messages about transition, that I was not meant to feel, or share. I was shocked and felt profoundly betrayed and lied-to. I was overwhelmed with anger at what I perceived to be my husband’s selfishness, terrible timing in my children’s lives, and lack of consideration for our feelings. I felt revulsion at the physical aspects of his planned transition, and shame at this secret, and that I had not at any point in my marriage suspected it. Perhaps worst of all, I felt a fool, ashamed and embarrassed that my circumstances were so ‘weird’, and that perhaps there was something wrong with me. I felt utterly lost and at times mad with grief and rage. A gentle, key message from the counsellor was that my husband ‘believes he is a woman even if you don't' . While accepting my feelings of disbelief and scepticism that my husband was in fact female, she reminded me that my husband's erratic and at times reckless, boundary-pushing behaviours following his announcement might be driven by his absolute conviction that he was a woman, and had no choice but to rapidly pursue this. From our first session, the counsellor explicitly named my grief; we talked about the experience as a living bereavement. My husband had in my eyes disappeared, behaved in ways that made me feel he was a completely different person, and seemed to break away from me, our history, our marriage and the family, as soon as he had dropped the bombshell. We revisited together the Victim/Persecutor/Rescuer triangle, and she gently challenged my victim role. She also challenged my rage at the unfairness of my situation, and – to our mutual amusement despite my distress – my notion that life was or should be fair! Much of the counsellor’s work, I imagine, was similar to any work with people experiencing loss or divorce, exploring assumptions and unhelpful thinking, and the non-linear nature of bereavement. She showed me the revelation that I can be okay even if my situation is not okay. That I can choose that, and that by choosing ‘being okay’, it doesn’t mean I condone another person’s behaviour. I was not chastised for 'misgendering' him as other women in my position report when seeking counselling support from trans organisations. I was allowed to call 'him' 'him', as that was my lived experience and the reality of my personal history and self-definition. I was not re-educated; I fully understood the thinking on transgenderism, and what the experience is like for individuals coming to that decision. My counsellor did not take a stance of needing to correct my thinking or outlook, nor needing to keep me in my marriage. And crucially, she helped me notice that my life was otherwise wonderful and full of positives and possibilities. And reflected with me that whatever happens, I can cope with it. She reconnected me with my sense of being a good person, a good mother, and good at my job and at no time strayed into judgement or correction of my beliefs about my husband’s transition or status as a woman. There is growing interest in the support needs of partners of transitioners; people in this very isolated and unusual position need non-judgemental and sensitive support, whether they accept and want to stay, or are unhappy and unwilling to join the transition journey. That is how I survived what is a life-changing, devastating experience for many people and reached peace in my new life. If you have also been affected by any of the issues in this story, please view our Resources page.

When he shattered my remains The vase broke into shards That spoke louder than trite words In that crystallised moment I know that his ways are not semi Just permanent ink Inscribed in my marble His soul was dark Those eyes remote Uncaring laughter My cringe and anger Nothing to bridge I turned back into myself Found my own way His path laden with thistle A voice sounded like thunder Promise and unknown The enemies lay at my feet His ego was the epitome The last palace in his soul I saw him erect, bold and beautiful This man who has no love It ran like sand out to sea What I did not understand How these shifted Quick and slow Churning No outstretched hand The wedding ring lay off his conscience So my consciousness rose Like the blush of a flower My cheeks my own This dark thing of beauty Becomes a screw tightening I am myself and he stands alone In the jet black curls Of the remains of youth Pillaged in a fireplace Where I sent my love In the days after As the beginning of the end Painted the night to a close Now that I am just a woman Not his lover Or a friend Afraid of vulnerability Bravery still cloaked my bones I am my mother's daughter I possess strength and resolve These twisted guts Laid on fresh stones So hard for me to believe Where the lament lies How long I lasted Cast aside Like discarded clothes His masculinity, too Starved by him Many years of pain Torment carved into my tree Not the interwoven Initials of S and R On the beggary of his love Rhythm of mothering Sustain and remorse Echoing like children Who I birthed Close in age Like morse code These blessings of life Carry me alive only What drags on from today Is a toll and resonant sound It gathers a threatening message The funeral of a friend Now that he is trans Who am I Without him Is a void I will be able With any remains of strength To stand on the inscription of The former world Of him and I Bisexuality and this great divide As breathtaking Valour reveals my true feelings About love, loss and fraud I have found myself in the process For feminists have deep roots He is a coward With shallow views Of what women are When I married I sought to Marry my equal Not a pale version Of being a good person In his mind he rides his own boat These swells of arrogance That show his cards Laid down He is a joke and A joker in one Not I I am Semper Fidelis He broke up my careful dreams Like cutting a pie crust Digging into the filling With male relish Finally and begrudgingly He told me his new body New sexuality Predates our marriage This die was cast in doom Rewriting our vows Now To fit his own agenda This narrative I reject I refuse to accept This is the stance Defiance lines my spine After years of trying to be The person he required As he changed each tune I am a dancer In the middle of a bog Suspended by pressure My dew was fresh and pure Now that I have fallen Into a fire The privilege of being My husband Carries no weight I am beset with grief Disbelief rakes my older face Only tears barely break In this moment Lashes are my only recent memory Laid on my selfhood He is a tempest of destruction The greed of his needs Overshadowed those of his kids I stand corrected I am the past glory Or a vassal He expects to come running Now that the Spring awakens My tired body Stirs on as before Where the day holds joy Only if I bring it in Clouds sift through My mind Until I clear it of him Where is my safety The net I misplaced I need only love This blanket I wrap Around my kids Crafted by my great-grandmother's hand There is nowhere near Trust or truth The bitterness overcomes A sweet smell of blossoms That flirt with the British sun There is no tonic That can relieve abject misery Now that the season has shifted He is a worm Glutton on my soil He infiltrated my body My life's work and time Time lost The big interior of empty Is so wide It pains like a splinter Slipped on my ring finger Now shed of commitment I command myself to break down The tether of his fate Set to drown out My feelings and needs Are my own Last month and next week For all times to dawn The frolicking taste of My new freedom Now that he is a she This is the venom Dark disease of lies For twenty years of us As partners and allies Grownups came into our own And five years of living As boy and girl Teenagers are lofty Found each other so young Only he can know What he is How he will be His bleaching effect of the sun Fell on my own bones Laid down lower So he can travel with his Epiphany of being feminine While cravenly clinging To his male form That he will not shed Because male privilege Is more valuable than being a girl This is the best truth That I can ever receive As I have always Known in recent years That he will cut me Deeper than deep And longer than cruelty that Escapes from his lungs His honeymoon of sexual frivolity Now I can be me and He can walk the desert Of nowhere That serves as his home No fixed compass to lead This ridiculous quest A fantastic pledge To destroy all that we had Could have possessed As one

This essay was first published in The Radical Notion and is reproduced here by permission of the author. There’s a burn mark on my right breast. Up high, a little in toward my sternum. I did it to myself, although I suppose that makes it sound as if I did it on purpose. I didn’t. I woke up with it one morning. I’d just moved out on my husband the month before. It was late March, but still wintry, and I was sleeping in a small room in the basement of the apartment I’d moved into, the bottom half of an old house. The main floor was spacious and the rooms full of light, so I’d chosen to sleep in the basement because it was cool and dark and private down there. The furnace thrummed softly at night, making the small room I’d made my bedroom feel like a ship’s cabin. It felt like a safe place to ride out the storm of my divorce. But, as I say, it was still winter, so I used a heating pad to warm up the bed, and then laid it over my chest while I read myself to sleep. That night, apparently, I’d turned it up too high, or maybe I’d gone to bed naked, without my usual T-shirt to cushion my skin from the heating pad. I woke up the next morning with an elongated burn on the tender skin of my right breast, an angry, raised red blister full of fluid, maybe an inch and a half long. It was a tough time, those first months after I’d finally left to move into the apartment. On weekends, without work to distract me, I wandered the rooms crying, stopping to prop myself up against a wall and sob, and at first the burn seemed to me like an outward manifestation of the pain I was feeling over having to leave after thirty-five years of marriage. Oddly enough, the burn itself didn’t hurt, although I had to be careful of the blister. I kept it under a bandage for some weeks, and each time I had to maneuver a bra gingerly over it, or position myself carefully in the shower to keep the full force of the water from striking my breast, it felt to me exactly like the care I was taking to shield myself from feeling the full force of the preceding few years. About six months after I burned myself, in November, my divorce was final, after a single court hearing that began with the irony of my answering the court officer who asked if I swore to tell the truth with the same words I’d spoken at my marriage ceremony all those years ago: I do. My husband wasn’t there; I’d asked him not to be, and I was okay, composed, until the judge leaned forward to ask what were to her the last routine questions in a series of them. “Is the marriage irretrievably broken?” she asked. “No chance for reconciliation?” My voice was unexpectedly full of tears even though I replied as she expected, while I reflected privately that when your husband comes in one day and declares he’s decided he’s a woman in a man’s body and wants to transition, then yes, the marriage you thought you had is over, even if you don’t want it to be, even if you pretend for three years that it isn’t, even if your husband eventually decides to live a closeted life. But I knew she didn’t want to know these details, so I worked to suppress them, only half-hearing as my lawyer and the judge went on to discuss the date for recording the dissolution with the clerk. Then my lawyer steered me out of the courtroom, a divorced woman. There’d been an unseasonably early snow the night before, and when I returned to my apartment I went out to wander around in it. The snow-coated trees, still resplendent in red and yellow leaves, looked as if they, too, had been caught out unawares. I reached out to shake branches free of their freight of snow, as if I could similarly dispel the strangeness of my morning in court: the courtroom itself, a hybrid of church sanctuary and theatre-in-the-round; the spot-lit judge at her elevated dais; that mirror-image book-end promise of “I do.” That night we had such a hard frost that the ginkgoes did as they do and dropped all their leaves at once, and when I looked out the next morning and saw them carpeting the snowy ground, and all the branches bare, I thought, yes, now it’s well and truly done. It took a long time for the blister to subside and the burn to heal, and it left a scar, slightly raised and pink. One day, looking at it as I showered, I realized with a kind of shock that my now ex-husband would never see this mark on my breast. The man who had known my body intimately for decades would never know this new thing about it. Anyone who might see this scar would be someone not my ex, and given my age, I didn’t think a new lover a likely possibility. I vacillated between sorrow that this unseen scar marked the final rupture between my now ex-husband and me, and anger that the scar would be mine and only mine—barring my doctor—to know. Women’s breasts are for better and worse a kind of common property, and mine had been no different. Boyfriends and then husband had caressed them, my child had hungrily claimed them for himself. I had not wanted that divorce, even though I initiated it. And now here I was, aging and alone, carrying a scar of my own making. Above all, my husband desired breasts. Before I understood the full implications of my husband’s desire to be a woman, when I still believed I had relevance, when I so desperately sought to stay relevant, to stay coupled, I’d offered him the use of my body to imagine himself a woman. One night I’d sat him down on the edge of the bed, both of us naked, and positioned myself to stand in front of him, between his legs, my back to his chest, then reached for his hands and lifted them up to cup my breasts. “Imagine,” I said, “that these are yours.” Use me, I meant, to fulfill your need. But of course one’s hands on another’s breasts don’t feel at all like one’s hands on one’s own, and that is what he wanted. To caress breasts of his own. The breast forms he bought felt weighty and alien, he said, and served only to remind him he was not the woman he wanted to be. He decided he was glad he was fat, because the fat gave him what he referred to, coyly, as “kinda, sorta” breasts. He bought new bras, satin and lace but made for men, modeled on the website by nubile gay men. They fit better and felt more natural, and he enjoyed cupping his “kinda, sorta” breasts, or seductively lowering a shoulder, sliding a strap down to expose himself to play with—or invite me to play with—a nipple, and he sent me selfies of himself in such poses with come-on subject lines that I learned not to open at work. I remember particularly the morning after I shaved his legs for him, another of his long-nursed desires. Having gathered up the razor and towel, I turned around to see him standing with his eyes closed, his hands to his chest; with a jolt of recognition I remembered the caption on a photograph I’d seen on the website of a Thai clinic specializing in gender affirmation surgery: “Trans woman communing with her breasts.” In time I grew to feel as if my husband had taken a mistress, whom he brought into our bed, and his hands on himself were also his hands on her. After I gave birth to our son I chose to breastfeed. Breastfeeding felt like a continuation of the intimacy of pregnancy; I knew him inside and out. I knew from his movements inside me his waking and sleeping times, which would remain constant after he was born, and laughed over his preferred position, from which he never deviated after adopting it at six months, head tucked down and pushing against my pubis, bottom to one side, his legs stretched out long sideways—“lucky ‘7’” I called it—and I would often fondle the places on the sides of my belly where could be felt the hard knots of his heels and the muscular curve of his buttocks. In the first weeks of his life, our son, Connor, slept at night in a bassinet near our bed, and to feed him I lifted him into bed with us, dozing off as he suckled. When we moved him to his crib in another room, I’d sit with him in a rocking chair there, making up silly rhymes—Connor Bonnor, Conster Bonster, Conster Bonster Monster—and songs to sing to him as he fed. Bonster, Bonsteration, caused some consternation, all across the nation, Bonster, Bonsteration. He would grip my finger or rest his open hand lightly on my breast, and it seemed to me his sucking would echo the pace of my singing. My husband liked to watch me breastfeed, and one day he asked to photograph our son at my breast. I was privately reluctant, because the prospect made me self-conscious, a feeling not conducive to let-down—I was always worried I couldn’t supply enough milk—a feeling heightened by my husband leaning in with the camera for a close-up. But I put my hesitation aside, and told myself that opening the bond between my baby and me to include his father was an opportunity for the three of us to bond as a family. When I left home I took with me the baby book, the one containing those close-ups my husband had taken of our son at my breast, and before I set it on a shelf in a closet in my new apartment I sat down and paged through it, and it struck me in an entirely new way how in those photos my face is absent. They show only my breast and the baby’s face as he suckles. In one of the photos, my son’s mouth is latched on to my nipple, and he is looking up. In my mind’s eye, I enlarged the visual field to supply the context for the image, what wasn’t shown in the photo. The baby wasn’t just looking up; he was looking up at me, I was looking down at him, and our eyes were locked on each other’s. In light of what my husband had told me about himself, I sat wondering. When he framed and focused that photo to show only my breast, when he’d looked at it over the years, had he been substituting himself for me? “Imagine,” I’d said, “that these are yours.” Use me, I’d meant, to fulfill your need. Maybe, as with the bras and panties he’d filched from me without my knowledge, he’d been doing just that for years. Tucked into the front of the baby book, in a folder of its own, was another photo, this one of me seven months pregnant, taken by a friend and office mate from graduate school. Diane and her partner Marilyn lived together in a big old house, and in her small upstairs study Diane had taken a series of black-and-white portraits of me at six and seven months pregnant. In this one, a nude, I was seven months along, seated up on the back of a futon, photographed from below, my breasts and belly the focus of the shot. My breasts are lifted above the swell of my abdomen, the areolas of my nipples dark, the faint line of pregnancy above my navel leads the eye upwards. My face is at rest below a homburg my father had worn when he worked in New York City, my eyes and lips unsmiling, my expression darkly unapologetic. This was my favorite of the portraits she’d taken, but I’d never felt I could display it in the baby book. I thought it might embarrass my son to see his mother naked, and so had kept it separate. But now it seemed the only photo I could trust, the only one I knew to be untainted by my husband’s closely guarded secret, and I took it from the baby book and propped it up open on the bookshelf. About a year after I’d moved into my apartment, and burned myself, my feelings about my scar began to change. The scar now seemed more like a tattoo deliberately sought out to mark a difficult passage, a recovery from injury, or victory over some adversity, commemorative, and I even began to feel satisfaction, that he, my ex, would never see what had become of my breast, that his memory of my breasts had been rendered inaccurate. That my breasts, my woman’s breasts, were out of his reach and his knowing. It’s been almost two years now since I moved into the apartment, although for the past five months I’ve been living a thousand miles away from that home, such as it became. I’m back in the Colorado mountains where I grew up, and where I’ve returned to care for my 93-year old mother, taking my turn after my younger sister, and now making arrangements with my older brother for a care-giver to step in when I return home in a few months, the many hours and daily acts of care slowly effacing that difficult past. My son, who did indeed over the years “cause some consternation,” is grown up. The burn mark on my breast still reddens and swells in the shower, but it’s smaller now, and looks like nothing so much as the touch of a milky fingertip. My ex-husband lives by himself, with himself, who is sometimes her, in the house I used to call ours.

No preparation. No warning. No clue. Just the announcement: “I’ve decided I’m transgendered.” We’d been married for thirty-three years. The details come out: for the past several years he’s been fishing my discarded underwear out of the trash, trying them on when I’m not home. Reading lesbian romance novels on his e-reader, a private account he hid from me. Watching “Transparent” at night after I’ve gone to bed. He’s already talked it all over with a mutual friend. He thinks he’ll transition, but not just yet. For now, he says, he’s not planning to come out. Just like that, I’m pulled into his closet. More revelations. He wants to “act the part of a woman” in bed. He wants to wear women’s lingerie, satin and lace. He wants to lie back, spread his legs; he wants me to lie on top of him between his legs. He wants to be penetrated. He thinks if he’s sexually submissive he’ll feel “like a woman.” For him, I do these things, although we’re not trading places, because I’ve never worn what he’s wearing, felt what he’s feeling. He also wants us to be two women together; he wants to “act as a lesbian” to me. When he buries his face between my legs he moans with the pleasure of accessing what he wants for himself: I can’t get enough of you. I’m so in love with you, so grateful; I’ll never forget the wonderful gift you’ve given me. At first, it’s wildly exciting. Then it isn’t. I want my husband back; I want our two bodies to talk together as they used to do. Out of the question: that’s now forbidden. He tells me he hates his male body, rejects male sexual response. He loves “being taken,” “giving himself up.” I don’t recognise his version of female. He shaves off his beard. He shaves off his chest hair. He shaves under his arms, between his thighs. He says hair is male, and women are smooth. But he won’t shave his legs, because someone might “guess.” I have hair, too: on my legs, under my arms, on my face. When I shave my face I begin to feel shame; as a woman I’m clearly a failure. He buys himself women’s clothes to wear around the house: a white slip, a swishy skirt. He adopts new mannerisms: simpering, dipping his chin, he coyly drops a slip strap. He grows emotional, makes a show of crying openly. A caricature of woman. When I express my discomfort, my doubts, my pain, he tells me I’ve shamed him; he calls me cisgenderist, transphobic, a TERF. Yet living in his closet—where I never agreed to live—I have no one else to talk to. I can’t tell my family, my friends, my colleagues; to do so would be to “out” him. No preparation. No warning. No clue. Just the announcement: “I’ve decided I’m transgendered.” We’ve been married for thirty-three years. If you have also been affected by any of the issues in this story, please view our Resources page.

Where do I start? I met my husband, we’ll call him Bill, who was a real gentleman and treated me very respectfully. He was completely without judgement. When I look back, he actually had no opinion on anything other than music. We had been going out for about 6 months when he came round one evening with rather a large bottle of wine. I should have known something was happening that evening, but I wasn’t expecting to be handed a letter telling me that he was a cross dresser. It had taken him all that time to tell me he liked wearing women’s clothes and he had done from being a very young child. He needed to be drunk to tell me this and only told me because he could see a future with me. Now personally I don’t see an issue with this. Clothes are clothes. For him clearly it was a huge thing to be disclosing. He must have been relieved that I didn’t see it as an issue for me. Ultimately, we did get married and spent about 13 years together. We also had a child. He was an amazing Dad; I used to get quite jealous of their relationship. I didn’t have one with my dad. I could never fault him as a dad or as a husband. He was kind and considerate and worked hard. All through those years I would go shopping with him to buy women’s clothes, go out to clubs. There was a secret society that we had to be vetted to enter so that this large group of men could get together and dress up and dance. I felt sad to see that they couldn’t do this with their wives and family. There were very few women in this group. They were men who liked to wear women’s clothes. I still don’t see an issue with this. I used to speak to transwomen when out with my husband, most of them told me they had childhood trauma. I felt that some of them had really dark unresolved mummy issues or had been abused. On the whole they came across as nice people. Sadly one of them committed suicide due to mental health issues and his realisation that he “shouldn’t have transitioned” because that “wasn’t the right answer” for him and “there is no going back”. I felt very sad to see someone going through that process of realisation and thinking their only way out is death. It was odd that I didn’t fancy Bill when he was dressed in his women’s clothes, I did try. It felt fake. His personality changed too. He wasn’t quite so anxious in his alter ego; he was more confident, which was great for him and I appreciated this. It worried me though that he couldn’t be this confident all the time, and why couldn’t he wear any piece of clothing all the time and go about his day? It never stays that way though. He has an addictive personality so women’s clothes on their own wasn’t enough, he felt it stopped him from being his true self. We had discussions about Transwomen and how that related to him. He went through therapy and made the choice to be my husband and not transition. We bumbled along for another year or so and eventually we broke up. He moved out and we kept in touch. He was my friend as well as my husband and my child’s father. We talked about reconciling, and then he had a health scare. Once he recovered from that he went full on into transition. I told him that if he went down this road, that would be the end of our marriage as I had married a man. I was still supporting his choice. We were still friends and shared a child after all. We agreed a strategy to tell our then 12-year-old child. He went off and told them on his own after having a Daddy Day (Sunday) with them. They came home devastated. They thought they were going to lose their daddy. My friendship with their Father ended that night. I have been forced into the same room together for our child’s birthday etc, no other contact though. I remained civil and will continue to do so, that is my nature. I hate him for what his choice did to our child. I have spent the last nine years supporting my child into adulthood helping them* slowly coming to terms with what their Dad is going through and helping them to understand. At the same time trying to keep their confidence up so that they never feel that his choice is anything to do with them or anything they have done, this is completely their Dads’ choice on his own, independent of them. This was exhausting. He has chosen his road without considering our child and the impact on them at such a crucial time in their lives. Typical man really! Our child didn’t cope with the transition at all well even with my support. I have brought my child up to decide not whether they should have boundaries, but rather what their boundaries are, as they grow into adulthood and relationships. They are truly an independent thinker. What impact has this had on me? Well……. That’s easy. After all these years I now have time to reflect. I no longer trust men to be honest with themselves so they can be honest with me. I have come to the conclusion that although transwomen profess to be women, they have all the empathy and compassion of a stone. My husband was with me when I gave birth to my child. He still won’t have a clue how that felt. I had a hysterectomy due to Endometriosis. He will never feel that physical or the emotional pain, of what felt at the time like me losing the essence of me as a woman. He has never, and will never possess a womb. In fact when I came out of hospital he felt that was the time to take an online test to see how female his brain was as I hobbled up the stairs after the hysterectomy, mourning the loss of my womb. On occasions, usually Pride events, he wears one of those t-shirts saying transwomen are women. What an insult to women! Being a woman is more than putting on feminine clothes and make-up, something most women don’t do as much as transwomen think we do. What frustrates me most is that they feel so hard done by. They don’t have all the misery of being female, they only have the nice bits of being a woman, but then they claim to be just the same as any other woman. I remain calm and kind because that is who I am. I feel that as soon as I let them make me lose control, they have won. I’m not letting that happen. They go low. I go higher. And I will continue to call him a him, because no matter how he presents he will always be male. Women cannot father. Humans cannot change sex. *Jessica has used neutral pronouns for her child to help maintain their anonymity.

We weren't married. We were only together for a few years. But even recently, many years later, I have still found myself missing... I once told a friend that I couldn't imagine a future without him, and that has still somehow rung true. For a long time after the break-up, it felt like I was swimming in lava. My ex-partner told me early in our relationship that he was neither male nor female, but also that his thoughts were purely "psychological". I was like a frog in a pot of increasingly hot water, looking on with concern but a false sense of security as the hormones were taken and the breasts grew, until the day he was referred to as "she" by a mutual friend, and the gates of hell opened. For around a year, the pain of the sudden detachment from who I thought I had been sharing my life with was excruciating and constant. I went to my GP because I thought I was having heart palpitations 24/7. It was anxiety. The person I had fallen in love with no longer existed but had "he" ever existed? Is that a philosophical question? A gender-science question? It is a question I must not openly ask. Even today I have moments of reverie, a fantasy of us together, the future - I hadn't consciously acknowledged at the time - I wanted deep down in my soul. I still have moments where I forget I live in the twenty-first century, I forget I live in a world where "transgender" exists, despite the constant reminders in the media. I forget that he is not a he. I forget the searing pain of the truth that kicked in the door of my heart all those years ago and forced my eyes open to the blinding reality. I don't like the side of myself that feels bitter. I don't like the anger that rises up in me when my brain starts functioning properly in the space-time continuum again and I read just like I've just woken up on a strange boat in the middle of the ocean before watching a quick highlight reel of what has actually happened in the intervening years like some Kafkaesque horror-satire of a romantic comedy. Yet how are you supposed to process that the person you loved doesn't exist never existed? I imagine the pain and confusion is similar for the spouses of people who suddenly come out as gay, except this isn't sexuality; who someone is or isn't attracted to. It's gender. My boyfriend was never a boyfriend. ... has always been a woman. That is what we are being educated to believe. I was in love with the facade of a man? Is it more like catfishing? I don't want to be bitter or intolerant. I don't want to be "in denial". But sometimes my mind needs respite.