#transwidow

I married a man who fathered my daughter in the conventional way.  Ten years later he decided that he had been a woman all along and so our marriage ended. I left the marital home, taking my daughter with me.  The man I married, no longer exists and I am forbidden from referring to him by his former “dead name”.

Having your boundaries gradually and forcibly broken down and compromised over a period of time until your marriage becomes nothing like the arrangement that you signed up to, feels exactly like Sarah describes-  a slow death with everything you thought you knew about yourself being gradually crushed out of existence.  But with the support of other women, we trans widows can rise again.

My experience is becoming more and more common and I have spoken to many women who have found themselves in a similar situation.  Women who previously felt completely alone in their struggle.

What can you do to help women like me?

Don’t call my ex “she” when you talk about him to me.  Call him what you like when you speak to him, but describing him with female pronouns to me, makes my life not make sense and my daughter’s life not make sense.

Don’t, under any circumstances, refer to him as my daughter’s mother.  She only has one mother and it is not him.

Seek out and share the stories of trans widows.  Help our voices to be heard.  Late transitioning men leave women and girls in their wake- wives, mothers, daughters and sisters who are asked not only to rewrite their past but to celebrate a new future that they do not recognise.

Many trans widows report feeling gagged by everybody else lauding their partners as “stunning and brave”.  Our ex’s are often celebrated twitter personalities, newspaper columnists or the subjects of documentaries, but those of us wives who leave are forced to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. Support those women who put themselves and their children first.

When you hear of a late transitioning male, let your first thought be for these women and how they are affected. If it is somebody in your circle of acquaintance, seek out the wife or the mother and let her know that she has your support.

Defend our use of the term “Trans Widow” as some people question its appropriateness.  However it is the name that we have chosen for ourselves and it is enabling us to find each other and to share our experiences. Women talking to each other is a powerful weapon.

Don’t exclude some women from feminism in the interests of inclusiveness. Imagine seeking support from other women, only to find that your husband or father had got there first?

When you allow our ex partners space in your feminism and give them platforms in your organisations and at your meetings, you exclude their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers from accessing these spaces and making use of resources that were set up to support women like them.  Prioritise women over your desire to have a “get out of jail free” card to hold up against hostile accusations of bigotry

I don’t think I was ever really aboard the trans train, though I made a valiant effort to understand, as the good little liberal I was.

At age 18, I hit peak trans living in a terrible house with terrible people, including a “trans woman” who was James at work and “Taryn” after hours. Taryn’s entire wardrobe consisted of stripper clothes, which I mean literally—they had Velcro up the sides for easy removal. She was a living, breathing stereotype in 8” heels and a bad wig. “Her” boyfriend was a homophobe, who quickly informed everyone he met about the fact that he “wasn’t gay,” that it “was okay because she was actually a woman and would have surgery soon,” and emphasized that HE was the one who always did the penetration. He had a huge collection of porn magazines lying around featuring women with cartoonishly enormous breasts—not just your standard porn-implant fare, but specifically focused on grotesquely enlarged women. It could not be more clear that they both had no respect for actual women, rather, they saw “womanhood” as being properly embodied by over the top pornified caricatures of femininity and fuckability.

At 23 I hit peak trans again, after I made the naïve mistake of believing that my boyfriend’s attraction to cross-dressing meant that, like me, he wished to challenge and abolish gender roles, and would make an ideal partner what with being less attached to notions of masculinity. I got pregnant and married in short succession, and only then realized how wrong I was. Now that this narcissist had his “supply” firmly in hand, the mask could come off, and the appalling behavior began. But I felt stuck, and without other options. Caught up in the whirlwind of pregnancy and parenthood, I simply tried to make the best of things.

He could not possibly have behaved more like an entitled stereotypical white male if he tried, and then he’d secret himself away, put on some ridiculous lingerie and masturbate to the thought of what a pretty, pretty girl he was. And so it went for nearly 20 years of emotionally abusive bullshit.

[Will spare you the details of the repeated absurd conversations around womanhood and his distorted picture of what it was; skip the fact that he constantly spent nights playing the “poor me, I never got to be that pretty girl wearing pretty things that men look longingly at” game any time we were around young women. Skip his disdain for my post-pregnancy body and weight gain and how quickly sex turned into just an utterly one-sided playing-out of his distorted fantasies. How the house became a place where my daughter and I were constantly on edge wondering when the next time he would go off was. And how I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because he was closeted and wanted no one to know of his proclivities.]

Peak trans. Over and over. Ridiculous conversations where he’d dismiss feminism because look how HARD being a boy was for HIM. Contributing nothing to the running of the household beyond a paycheck. On and on. Michfest were evil, evil women for not making it all about dick.