18 Months: A Memoir of a Marriage Lost to Gender Identity
An important part of the conversation, but overall just a really great book
I recently had the pleasure of reading 18 Months: A Memoir of a Marriage Lost to Gender Identity by Shannon Thrace. I can confidently say that it is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the trans phenomenon and get a poignant look into how it impacts the wives of the men who pursue transition, often called “trans widows.” Shannon’s story shows why the term is such a fitting one. Even though the men in question have not passed away, their unrelenting pursuit of “the woman within” erases any semblance of who they once were and who their wives married.
18 Months starts with Shannon’s husband, Jamie, expressing an interest in crossdressing. No stranger to all kinds of sexual exploration, Shannon is initially all for it. However, as Jamie dives deeper into the world of “trans” and his personality takes a complete turn, the relationship starts to unravel. Though Shannon tries everything she can to salvage the love they once had, the book chronicles those 18 months that eventually brought their 15-year relationship to an end.
What initially attracted me to 18 Months was its subject matter, as I am someone who writes and thinks a lot about gender ideology. Recently, I also connected with and interviewed a different trans widow for a piece I wrote about her own harrowing story.
But what got me hooked and instantly kept me going was the writing. Shannon is a marvelously skilled writer who draws you right in. The writing is snappy and effortlessly keeps your attention as it moves along. At the same time, the rich details paint a vivid picture that puts you right in the moment along with her. Shannon’s choice to use the present tense, which I’ll admit is not something I am usually a fan of, worked wonderfully. I quickly got over to my aversion to the tense and dove right in.
I had initially planned to read the book rather slowly as I had quite a few things on my plate, but I just couldn’t put it down and found myself breezing through it.
Additionally, while the book tells the story of a failing marriage, it also offers a much wider commentary on life itself. According to the blurb, “18 Months is a fierce defense of love in the face of loss, culminating in self-discovery and reinvention.” Here and there, when commenting on the situation at hand, Shannon reveals her deeper thoughts and perspectives, which often resonated strongly with my own outlook on life. For example, here is one particular passage that struck me early on:
Poor self-esteem, ironically, seems self-important to me…
I have good self-esteem because I’m ordinary and I know it. My shortcomings don’t call for some great penance. We all suffer frailties and temptations. We all fail. I am as bad as anyone.
But I am as good as anyone, too.
When I turned 30, I told myself to stop being insecure—not by any means because I am perfect, but because paying an unnecessary amount of attention to my imperfections seems self-indulgent. I was excited to be reading something by a kindred spirit.
A little later on, while musing about what love actually is, Shannon made a comment that also struck a chord with me:
Love arises when you recognize the good in another with an awe you can’t suppress or deny. It’s a genuine appreciation for who they are. Real love isn’t random; it’s targeted. It isn’t charity—it’s something deserved. I love you for the way you embody the values I hold dear: you’re compassionate, you’re honest, you’re brave.
It reminded me of a silly Twitter poll a friend made a few years ago asking people if they would rather “love” or “be loved.” I was in the minority that answered “love.” While being loved is incredible (and hopefully the object of your affection returns your affection), there’s just nothing like loving someone else and appreciating them for exactly who they are.
And that’s what is so tragic about this story. There was real love there until autogynephilia came and gnawed away at it, leaving no room for that love anymore.
Shannon never uses the term “autogynephilia” in her book, a term coined by sexologist Ray Blanchard to mean “love of oneself as a woman.” As she explains in a more recent Substack post:
I tend to avoid using the word “autogynephilia.” This is in line with my policy of using plain language in general. Better to let the facts speak for themselves, in most situations….
Nonetheless, autogynephilia, as described by clinicians like Lawrence, perfectly mirrors what I saw in Jamie.
In the same post, she summarizes her views on the condition:
I find autogynephilia more corrosive to a relationship than a kink—people sometimes successfully integrate kinks into their lives and relationships without undo disruption. Autogynephilia is narcissistic and anti-social, at best, and it’s psychologically unhealthy for the sufferer as well as a drain on others in his life.
This is exactly what happened with Jamie when he started to obsess over becoming a woman. Because this narcissistic quest could never actually be realized, all it did was chip away at the foundation of the relationship. Jamie became more and more obsessive and frustrated while Shannon grew more and more baffled at his behavior. She also had to deal with the insult of a man she loved as a man attempting to co-op her own sex. One particular passage captured this frustration for me very well:
Freud called a woman a person in want of a penis. Shakespeare—in Elizabethan slang—called the flesh between her legs “nothing.” They see woman as emasculated man. But that’s wrong. Femininity is not generated by subtracting masculinity. Femininity is its own thing….
So it is with your corset, your razor, your gaff. They whittle away your waist, your beard, the bulge between your legs. They make you less of who you are. But they can’t make you more.
As Jamie’s autogynephilia continued to consume their lives, Shannon found herself wondering, “Why would you need to attract yourself?” As is incredibly common in autogynephilia, the man’s obsession with the woman he is attempting to become completely consumes his time and energy. He may not really be having an affair with another woman, but his affair with himself has the same damaging effects on the partner and the relationship.
At the point where she asked that question, I began to grow increasingly uneasy. As Shannon described how Jamie would cry when she admitted she felt cute after a haircut (which turned into a discussion of whether Jamie was cute as well) and when she asked him to open a jar (because it reminded him of his male strength) my skin crawled. Having to walk on eggshells around people makes me feel like I can’t breathe, and that’s exactly what Shannon was going through, writing, “I second-guess myself before speaking now. I never know what innocuous comment will cause you pain.”
As much as I was thoroughly enjoying the book, I was not quite halfway through it at this point and dreading how much worse things could get. And boy, were things about to get worse.
The relationship continued to go downhill, and Shannon had a front-row seat to the way that buying into gender ideology can completely change a person. While Jamie had initially started off proud of being a gender non-conforming man and writing passionately in his blog about accepting his body exactly the way it was, he quickly devolved in the way most gender ideologues do. Not only did he try desperately to change his own perception of himself but to change the perception that others had of him as well.
Shannon was baffled at the mental gymnastics that were now expected of her, writing, “Thinking of you as a woman is an act of will, not an act of observation,” and lamenting, “I wish you could find your validation from within.”
She perfectly captured the way that people who fall into this delusion seek to control others:
You want me to map woman onto you. To not just say but to believe, as though I am not familiar with the crevice in a woman’s back.
But it could never really work, because:
I try to concentrate, but forbidden thoughts surface: that a woman is a thing, not an absence of a thing. That a woman is a woman in every cell of her body, too complex to fashion wholly from something else.
On top of falling in love with himself, Shannon noticed that Jamie was falling in love with his own oppression. If there is one thing that has become obvious to me about Shannon from this book, her other writings, and her presence on social media, is that she does not see herself as a victim and does not seek out oppression where it doesn’t exist. As she writes in 18 Months, “Why invent trouble in a world that doles out more than enough of its own?”
I can imagine how difficult it must have been to witness her husband changing into a completely opposite type of person. She recounts throughout the book how the story of his experience with the TSA at the Miami airport kept changing, completely morphing from the pleasant experience it really was to one in which he was the victim of abuse.
Jamie also began to turn a blind eye to the very real abuses of the trans movement, like grown men exposing their penises in women’s private spaces. In one instance, Shannon found herself feeling sick after having to explain that, sometimes, men expose their penises to minors with ill intent, and that girls have a right to their boundaries.
Eventually, Jamie’s new personality led Shannon to ask herself, “What makes a perfectly good person vanish into thin air?”
This is a reality that I’ve been grappling with lately in the context of the gender craze. It is very hard for me to intuitively accept that a good person, a genuinely good person, can change to such a drastic degree because they’ve been captured by a terrible idea. But I supposed this is what we see happen in cults, after all. And Jamie had indeed been a good person, and Shannon loved him for it.
Heartbreakingly, I have seen this complete personality change most often in kids who decide that they are trans. I have heard horror stories from parents in which the sweet, loving kids they always had good relationships with suddenly become unrecognizable. Sometimes, the kids go as far as to claim they have been abused, shattering their parents’ hearts. This is what Jamie did to Shannon as well.
It’s what led Shannon to recognize that this new person who had taken over her husband was somebody who courted tragedy and no longer had the goal of happiness. It led her, eventually, to conclude about Jamie that, “you have utterly lost your moral compass.”
When she finally left, as sad as it was that the relationship ended the way it did, I could finally breathe.
While it was obvious from the title where the book was going to go, I won’t spoil the aftermath and the real ending. I will say that the running theme of grace was brought to fruition in gratitude. This may be a story of a marriage lost to gender identity, but it’s also a story of painful yet beautiful personal growth.
The only constant is change, and it’s how we deal with it that matters. I can only hope that, if ever faced with circumstances this difficult and extreme, I could come out the other side the kind of person who could write a wonderful book like this.
Thankyiu I will get this book beautifully written review and the telling of her sounds compelling and multi layered x
Unfortunately Thrace still seems somewhat captured by the AGP, based on her online posts.