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.