What To Do When Your Husband Wants To Wear Your Skin
What To Do When Your Husband Wants To Wear Your Skin
Transwidows speak out in a new documentary
Imagine the person you marry wanted to wear your skin. Then imagine that all of society, judges, police, social services, and the education bureaucracy, had been groomed to accommodate them and silence you. This is the lonely experience of the transwidow, subject of a new documentary by Vaishnavi Sundar. Some of the subjects of her documentary are so afraid to come forward that they appear only as animation.
“In a marriage where your partner started to use drugs or cheated on you, you would find therapists, support groups and other women who would say ‘this is not your fault,’” says an anonymous woman in Behind the Looking Glass. “But on this topic, people are very quick to question whether or not you responded to it correctly.”
During the 1980s, daytime television shows presented the married transvestite as a normal man compelled to wear female attire. Wives were brought on sound stages to mouth the new catechism of loving support. Long before ‘transgender’ took over as the paradigm of male sexual cross-dressing, when Ray Blanchard was only just propounding his typology of transsexualism, women were already becoming transwidows, losing their husbands to social contagion and unhealthy ideation.
Behind the Looking Glass is the first full-length documentary on the topic of transwidows. That alone makes it historic. Sundar says she has plans to eventually release the full stories of more than forty women over a period of as many months after the film’s release. Historians of the transgender trend will consider Sundar’s collected work to be primary sources of the transwidow experience.
Two of those primary sources are already friends of The Distance. I read and reviewed Ute Heggen’s beautiful memoir The Curated Woods: True Tales From A Grass Widow. Her title uses the 14th century term for a woman whose husband was alive but unseen, leaving her “the grass, but no grave” to mourn him.
From the moment his paraphilia affected their intimacy, the man she calls “Neddy” was replacing her, becoming her. It was a shocking moment of “female erasure,” not the first, she soon realized, and not to be the last. After reviewing her book, I interviewed Ute at length about her curated woods and the naturalistic style of her prose. She uses a pen name for fear of her husband.
Neddy was a narcissistic abuser who had found the ultimate cheat code. Once he became transsexual, “it was as if Neddy could say just about anything, making the excuse of being a man who imagines he is female. Any self-absorbed statement is an inconsequential part of the picture, any and all expressions of this mindset are appropriate, because we have new understandings of words.”
Like Ute, Shannon Thrace first understood something was wrong during sexual intimacy. Eva Kurilova read and reviewed her memoir, 18 Months, about the rapid coming-apart of a once-happy marriage after cross-dressing stopped being sexual play and turned into something far more insidious. Eva and I then interviewed Shannon about her book, which we both enjoyed. It is “snappy,” to use Eva’s word, alternately disturbing and darkly comic.
According to Sundar, she found her sources through the Trans Widows’ Voices website, which is hosted in the UK. Ute Heggen also found “some kind of comfort, some kind of voice” through the website and realized “that we transwidows have a great deal of difficulty even putting into chronological order what happened and how things evolved after either the discovery or the husband’s revelation.”
Polling her new associates intensively, Ute found dismaying patterns. “One third of us, a little over a third of us … were sexually assaulted by [our husbands],” she explained in our podcast. Transwidows report financial abuse, false reports made against them to law enforcement, gaslighting of friends and family and children, and physical assault — in short, they receive all the usual violent and psycho-social abuses of angry male partners, except that these men are wearing lipstick as they abuse.
Vaishnavi Sundar has put together a compelling documentary about the unhappy flip side of all that ‘euphoria’ that married men are celebrated for discovering when they encounter their transgender ‘true selves.’ For all their protestations of being women trapped in the bodies of men, their behavior is driven by purely male ego, and they treat their wives like ghosts of what they wish they could be, what they are angry for not being.
The full documentary at YouTube:
Aaaaand cross-posted!