To Wives Discovering their Husbands Wear Frocks
By: Antoni A, Deziak Ceballos
Tags: Gender, Crossdressing, Gender Identity, Marriage, Transgender

When I met my second wife, I laid it all out on the table. And to make sure I couldn’t opt out of telling her, I showed up to a lunch date with my nails painted — she complimented me and asked me about it with genuine wonder. She excitedly asked if I would wear eyeliner for her some time. So, I am blessed and rewarded by that honesty. My wife LOVES that I embrace my own femininity and androgyny, that I don’t see feminine things as shameful, less-than or demeaning to myself. But again, I lucked out because she was already into men like me. Just as there are women who are into the idea of androgynous men or men with feminine inclinations, there are women who aren’t, it is what it is. Really, that’s okay. In fairness, there are also men who don’t find women in pants and short hair attractive. Those qualities in others for which we either feel attraction or aversion are neither good nor bad, they just are.

If you are a wife or long-term partner and this is new and unexpected to you, you’re probably trying to figure out what it all means and how it affects you, what it might suggest about your own sexuality or you as a woman. And while it would be great and wonderful if you were to embrace and support your husband as a crossdresser sans hesitation, it will more likely than not take some work and you may never arrive in a place where you are okay with it. He also needs to understand that you chose him for being a masculine man, that that is what he presented to you, and that you are attracted to masculinity, attached to his masculinity. It’s a reasonable expectation that you get to be the woman in the relationship. He needs to accept that you might have an aversion to his crossdressing and to lay aside the sociocultural criticism for a moment and understand it is totally okay for you to feel that way. It doesn’t mean you mightn’t tolerate, accept or even learn to embrace it one day but it is a shift in the paradigm you agreed to. It’s An agreement you made without all the known facts laid forth. Maybe you’ll not be able to get past that sense of betrayal or your aversion; your view of him will likely be forever altered in one way or another.

Mind you, he’s still the same person. The crossdressing and/or gender incongruence were always there, they’re just not kept from you now.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. — Quentin Crisp

Now, I think you really get to call the shots around how he does it when you are around. Some wives will say, ‘have at it but I don’t want to see it,’ or ‘I will not go out with you in public while you are en femme,’ or ‘you must keep your hands off my things.’ All fair. If he knowingly went into a committed relationship with you without putting it all out on the table, you get a stake in the parameters around his crossdressing and then you two can negotiate from there, if you feel it necessary. My wife is a part of my gender bending and crossdressing – She is a fierce defender and protector and while she embraces and loves it, often encourages it, it isn’t only mine anymore, it is a part of myself that we share. From that, I’ve been able to integrate it into my daily and public life rather than keep it compartmentalized. I don’t even think about it as crosdressing anymore, it’s just my androgynous and gender transgressing style often more in the vein of early 1970s Keith Richards than Eddy Izzard. The only reason any of it is an issue within broader society is that it is seen as transgressive and taboo breaking — but really, it’s just me being honest and authentic.

My wife and I talk about my drive to gender bend, how I feel about my ‘identity’ as ‘trans,’ and precisely what that means to both of us. We talk about my feelings of dysphoria and the fact that I wonder if a lot of my anxiety, withdrawal and depressive episodes, might go away were I on cross-sex hormone treatment (HRT). I do wonder if my brain would function more clearly, if the white noise, the constant awareness of my gender dissonance, would finally dissipate. We’ve talked about what that might mean and how it would affect her. My drive isn’t to ‘become a woman’ because in my opinion, I can’t. It is too late in my life — I do think transitioning would have been a choice I made when young had it been an option available to me at the time. Now, because I have aged so physically masculine, I wish I could be more androgynous. I wish I could choose to present as a woman one day, then present as male the next and pass as either — but that is a fantasy. That is not the reality of my physique and facial structure and I haven’t the will to suffer long surgical recoveries and drag my wife and I into debt. With hormones, I’m not there right now and I probably never will be because I don’t believe I could achieve what I really want — better to figure a way to live as I am and embrace my inner feelings. Still, HRT it is a thought I have and a discussion my wife and I have openly . She says, “You told me everything from the beginning, I knew what I was doing.” She also tells me her fears and aversions to the idea. She has caveats. I get it, I listen to them and respect them.

Marriage is nothing if not a contractual agreement and constant renegotiation in the face of change. You each state what is and is not acceptable to you and if you can’t agree, then you either find professional help to find common ground and negotiate an updated agreement or you deal with the fallout and potential collapse of the marriage. In the end, you simply cannot maintain a marriage without trust, honesty, vulnerability, and respect shared between you. You also both need a clear understanding of what is and is not acceptable to both of you to sustain a marriage and what constitutes a deal breaker.

For my wife and me, those deal breakers are what most would expect:

Infidelity , which encompasses lying and betrayal, withholding affection or sex without a clear statement of why… which constitutes abuse.

, which encompasses lying and betrayal, withholding affection or sex without a clear statement of why… which constitutes abuse. Abuse . Physical or emotional.

. Physical or emotional. A chronic addiction or mental illness, one or the other refuses to seek help for resulting in harm to the other’s right to health, safety, financial security, freedom and happiness.

Let me be abundantly clear here, I am not suggesting crossdressing or being trans is a mental illness; I do not believe that, nor do most experts. In my experience, decades of the act of keeping my cross gender thoughts and behaviors compartmentalized and closeted, living a double life, where what was not healthy. Much of what one likely saw of me was a mask that did create depression and a certain obsessiveness within me. Mind you, I have an attention deficit and as a result, can hyper-focus, obsess on my perfectionism, and as long as I remained closeted and ashamed, that manifested unhealthily in my crossdressing.

Moreover, because it was hidden and something I should have allowed to be out in the open, I sought every way, every private moment I could to sneak doing it. And when I did, it was an enormous relief, like a ton of bricks was lifted from me — Imagine the rush of pleasant chemicals that released in my brain. It didn’t help that I also denied and made constant attempts to suppress it. The down side was that I had to have a very dialed-in system of rituals to cover my tracks. Those moments of giving in to the compulsion were always followed by intense shame and self abuse for being a liar to both myself and others. Living like that sucked!

When I came out to my first wife, it was because she had a kink about men in fishnets and heels that she shared with me and asked if I’d do it for her – What a boon (I thought)! This was my opportunity to finally come out! After that, when I grabbed that opportunity to tell her my secret, practically my entire life became about crossdressing…with the doors and curtains shut. Ultimately, while she had initially embraced and encouraged it in me as just a cool wee kink, it grew to the point she loathed and couldn’t accept it, especially when I began to share the secretive hell that I’d been living in since childhood and openly begin to identify as transgender. She encouraged me to do it but then insulted me when I did. That marriage was fraught with myriad problems and my crossdressing certainly wasn’t the only issue we had, but it was ultimately one of the nails in the coffin for her.

It turns out, that was a gift because it opened up the space for my wife now to come into my life. She has been amazingly supportive and embracing of my gender incongruence as an open and proud part of who I am. My wife takes the time to ask me questions and read about it. She tells me she thinks I am Two-Spirit. While I understand and can perhaps identify with much of that tradition conceptually, I don’t feel right claiming it as an identity. While I am significantly Native North American via Northern Mexico, I refuse to own that name because I was not raised within an indigenous tribal community where Two-Spirit is an accepted identity; it’s not mine to claim. To me, even though I’ve a Mexican background, it would be like saying I am a Muxe when my family isn’t from Oaxaca and I’ve married a woman.