My Q&A at Broadview with Lisa Selin Davis - Part 2 of 2

The Questions I Didn't Get To

Thanks again to Lisa Selin Davis, author of the book Tomboy, for hosting an impromptu Q&A with me at Broadview last week. That thread can be accessed in its original form here or in my edited-for-clarity reprint here.

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

This week, I’ll address some of the questions from that session I didn’t get to.

Lisa Selin Davis: Why do you think trans widows are either ignored or impugned? Why are they treated so badly, not just sometimes by their husbands, but by researchers, the press, etc.?

Me: I think I’ll take that in two parts. Why are we treated badly by our partners, and why are we treated badly by everyone else?

In my book, following my separation from Jamie and his subsequent attack on my reputation, I write this:

[My therapist] says I’m a testament to the past—a past you want to disown. It seems she’s right. You can’t assimilate me into your story. And you can’t give up on your story. So, like your old blog, I must be erased—and rewritten.

I don’t know why a certain kind of trans person wants to rewrite the past—call their birth name a “deadname,” scrub their home and the internet of photos from their past, forbid stories about the old days, claim they were always their preferred sex, even before they transitioned. But they do.

I think my therapist was spot on. Even if I didn’t go out of my way to expose Jamie’s past, I knew about it—intimately. I knew he once wore a huge beard and was proud of it, that he found his identity via porn, that his “feminine” mannerisms weren’t natural but practiced in front of the mirror. That made me too much of a risk. If Jamie threw away his old photos and deleted his old blogs, of course I had to go, too. But he couldn’t just let me linger in his periphery, where I might say the wrong thing to his friends. So he had to make me into a villain.

Why are we treated badly by the press, and others? I guess people like Jamie have so successfully recast their experience as a civil rights struggle that the well-meaning, liberal, minority-ally press doesn’t want to entertain anything that makes them look bad. And as another trans widow in our Q&A session pointed out, the stories of trans widows are very similar, and they aren’t flattering. Our spouses are too often porn addicts, narcissists, financially dependent upon us, dishonest about their experiences and sexually dysfunctional.

CB: Shannon, I imagine that threading a needle between wanting to be open and accepting with your partner's sexual interests and needing to draw your own boundaries is difficult for many people. Any thoughts or advice on that?

Me: I think I’m unusual in that I’m sexually adventurous enough to not be freaked out by gender-bending dress or role play. So although I have definite boundaries, it may have taken longer for Jamie to cross them than if I’d been more conservative.

That said, the important boundaries aren’t the specific kink-related ones, they are the general human decency-related ones. No matter what our individual tastes, our boundaries are, or should be, something like these: No means no. I don’t do anything I’m not comfortable with. Sex should be reciprocal; I’m not going to accept all take and no give. I don’t have to allow what I didn’t sign up for. If you fundamentally change the rules, I have the right to bail.

I’d also add that while being “open and accepting with your partner's sexual interests” was arguably in mine and Jamie’s unspoken agreement, it isn’t obviously in everyone’s. If you’re “vanilla,” for lack of a better word, and had every reason to assume you were marrying (or partnering with) someone who shared your tastes, you don’t owe him/her some forced expansion of your sexual horizons. You can just say no.

In my particular case, Jamie crossed my boundaries mainly by becoming interested in only one approach to sex, at the cost of what we’d enjoyed in the past, and what I preferred; and relatedly, by neglecting to keep it reciprocal. My response was first to ask him to correct the situation, and then to ask a time or two again, and when he did not do so, to refuse to subvert my interests to his. Which, along with other things, ended our relationship.

Lisa Selin Davis: Did you ever make contact with other trans widows? If so, how?

Me: While married, I joined the one and only online support group that I could find, a group for the partners of crossdressers and trans people that I believe is now defunct. That was of use to me, but of limited use. While the women in the group (there was only one man) were able to talk about their husbands’ sexual dysfunction, lies, spending, and so forth, and were even able to “misgender,” the group was overshadowed by the same cloud of political correctness that hinders discussion on these topics in other liberal spaces. I corresponded with a couple of women outside the group, but those conversations didn’t blossom into real friendships.

Since my divorce, I have met other trans widows in feminist groups, in heterodox spaces, and through my book, and I keep in touch with many of them.

Lisa Selin Davis: What should a woman know if her husband comes out, and she had no idea he had these proclivities or feelings?

Me: This is a question I get a lot, and I’m not sure how to answer it. After all, my story doesn’t end well. I know women who went much further to support their partners than I did, and still saw it end poorly, and women who drew the line much earlier, and also saw it end poorly. Talking some sense into someone with gender dysphoria who has bought into modern transgender activism isn’t much of a thing. I tried showing Jamie well-reasoned articles, appealing to the length of our relationship and breadth of our love, yelling, and all the rest. I’m not sure that knowing about the proclivities or not knowing about the proclivities is a relevant factor to the outcome.

So my advice to a woman is less about how to manage the relationship, and more about how to be true to herself. This is your life, and you deserve to live it as you see fit, socially, sexually, authentically, free of drama and in line with your values.