What To Do When Your Husband Wants To Wear Your Skin

Transwidows speak out in a new documentary

Isolated and unrecognized, the transwidow just wants to be heard

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 lov…