The Following is a letter I wrote Dr. Laura some years ago in response to a call from a woman who had discovered that her husband of 35 years was transgendered.

Dear Dr. Laura,

I caught your show yesterday, when the woman called who had discovered a month ago that her husband of 35 years was “transgendered.” I’m a long time fan and was surprised that your usual good advise kind of fell flat. After some consideration, I determined that perhaps you weren’t able to meet your usual standards because you were out of your area of expertise and were just as shocked as your caller. Well, maybe not just as shocked, after all it wasn’t your husband. Being transgendered myself, I thought I may be able to give you some useful information about transgendered people.

First a little background about myself, so you know where I’m coming from. I’m happily married. 40 years to the same woman. I sometimes suspect she was source material for your book “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands.” Like the caller’s husband, I knew at a very young age (8 or 9 for me) I was different. I discovered girl’s clothes at that age and the need to wear them. Aside from that I was a “normal” boy. Played with my friends, join Boy Scouts, went camping, fishing and did all the “normal” boy things. I married at 22 and we raised two daughters. I can honestly say, and my wife agrees with me, that we are more in love each day and we have a good, growing marriage. By the way, she discovered my secret 35 years ago.

Now about transgendered people in general. First of all, transgendered isn’t just transsexual. Transgendered includes all people whose self-perceived gender doesn’t fit the societal norm. Gender is not binary as is sex; not either or. In sex there is male and female and that’s pretty much it, but in gender, masculine sits at one end of a spectrum and feminine sits at the other. Very few people really fall exactly at either end of that spectrum. The vast majority of people are some small distance from one end or the other. Most are near the end that matches their sex. Transgendered individuals are those that are some considerable distances from the end that matches their sex. Transsexuals are close to the end that is farthest from their sex. Other transgendered fall varying distances closer to their sex. To be truly transsexual, one must fall very close to the feminine end.

There is a whole medical field oriented toward discovering just which of the transgendered are actually transsexual called the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care. I’ll let you look that up if you’re interested in the particulars. I’ll just say that the Benjamin Standards are in place to be sure that someone doesn’t just go out and have Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS) because they think they are a transsexual.

Even among transsexuals, it is not uncommon for them, for various reasons, to forego the surgery. Those who have married (I’ll talk about why we marry a little later) and are honorable will most often forego the surgery because they made vows and aren’t willing to break them for their own satisfaction. In short they sacrifice for the woman they love and the children she bore them. They work hard, provide a home and all the amenities that their non-transgendered counterparts do. I believe that you say that real men are those who sacrifice for their families. Considering that, it seems to me that the husband of your caller had done just that for 35 years. To spite his being transgendered, I say that he is a real man.

Now as to why we marry. 35 years ago, (40 for me) there was no Internet and scant other ways to garner information about what it was to be transgendered. As a matter of fact, the word transgendered didn’t even exist. Dr. Virginia Prince coined the term in 1979. As a result of information being so hard to come by, most of us at that age thought we were the only man in the world to feel the need to dress in feminine clothes or otherwise express anything feminine. We knew that we weren’t like other guys and we also knew, instinctively, that we would not be understood. The whole thing just was too weird to even talk to anyone about, so we just hid that part of us away. It seems almost universal that we thought that once we got married that this aberrant behavior would simply go away. The reasoning goes something like this: I really want something feminine in my life and what could be more feminine and more in my life than a wife? Why, surely, once I’m married I’ll not need this anymore. My wife will take its place. By all means, I should get married and “cure” this thing; be done with it once and for all.

Imagine our surprise when that just wasn’t so. OK, we’re married, we’ve made vows and we really do love the woman who married us; what do we do now? We are sure that if she had known about this aberration she would have never married us. So, we reason, at all cost we can’t let her know. We must bury it and deny its existence. We try, really we do. We repeatedly throw out all the feminine gear we’ve collected only to go out and buy more a short time later, because we feel we’re going to lose our mind if we don’t just put on a dress. Each time we promise ourselves it will be the last time. We hide, we lie, we spend money secretly and we suffer guilt because we can’t be honest with our soul mate. We curse ourselves for being so weak, so unmanly, so deviant and dishonest. We learn to hate ourselves and we live in fear of being discovered, because we know it will be the end when we are. In short, we live our lives in quiet desperation, expressing our feminine nature for scant moments of time always in fear that we’ll make some small mistake that will be our undoing.

My heart goes out to the wife, like your caller, who finds out her husband is transgendered. Especially if he didn’t tell her but she stumbled upon it by accident. She feels betrayed, lied to and defrauded. All understandable; it’s all true. After all, her husband isn’t as advertised. The very thought of loving someone who’s as feminine as he is masculine, maybe more, makes her feel like she’s some kind of freak. The thought of holding him in her arms makes her feel like a lesbian because she can’t get the image of him in a dress (even if she’s never really seen him in one) out of her mind. If he’s lied about this, what else has he lied about? Is he really gay? Does he dress up because he wants to have sex with a man? Has he already had sex with a man? Just how much of the family resources has he burned up buying women’s clothes? This is worse than him playing around with another woman. That she could fight. But in this case, he is the other woman, and that other woman can fulfill a need she can’t even come close to.

She somehow, mistakenly, blames herself. She’s just not woman enough, she reasons. If she were, he wouldn’t need this. She begins to hate herself because she just doesn’t have what it takes to bring out the man in her man. She’s obviously not pretty enough, not sexy enough and not loving enough. In short, she sees herself as a failure as a woman and stupid to boot. She regales herself for being so stupid for thinking he was just a genteel man who appreciated women but in reality he was something abhorrent instead. What’s wrong with her that she didn’t see it? What’s wrong with her that a man like that would be attracted to her?

Truth is, nothing could be farther from the truth. What’s wrong amounts to a birth defect in him. No matter who he married or even if he never married, he would be who he is. Odds are, he’s not gay. (Some studies [Dr. Virginia Prince and Dr. Richard Docter] show that the incidence of homosexuality is slightly less among transgendered males than among the population at large.)

What is he really guilty of? Well all these years, he’s lied about it. He’s hidden a crucial fact about himself. Even worse than that, the bastard loved her and provided for her and her children just as if he was the man she thought she married all while lying about who he really was. What a terrible thing he has done. He made a mistake about himself and involved another person (his wife) in that mistake. He vowed to love, honor and cherish her and he had the temerity to deny, as best he could, his true nature and instead, honor his vow and play the part of the man she wanted. What a terrible thing it is he’s done. (Ouch, I think I bit my tongue trying say that with it in my cheek.)

I would have expected you to tell your caller to take some time, maybe up to a year to wrap her head around this information and to do some research on just what she was up against before she decided to do anything. What she has experienced is very much like the death of a loved one. The husband she thought she married is gone. People who have lost love ones are usually advised to not make any major decisions for a while.

She needs time to get to know this person who’s taken his place… to discover if she can learn to love that person… to grow and examine the real reasons she’s having problems accepting this. I don’t mean to make it sound as if she is at fault some how. Certainly she didn’t do anything and doesn’t deserve to have this in her life. However, it’s not the end of her life and it’s not necessarily the end of her marriage. As you say, we all have to deal with what is.

It wasn’t easy, but over time (it took nearly ten years) my wife has come to accept me as I am and, though she still says that she’d just as soon not have ever known, she has learned to love the feminine man who turned up in her husbands body. The whole process took a lot of work on my part, convincing her that I really did love her and that I had her best interests at heart. I did the work, but she deserves the credit, because had she kicked my butt to the curb as she’d have been justified in doing, I could never have proven myself. I don’t know what gave her the strength to tough it out until I could prove myself but 35 years later, we’re both glad she did.

Your loyal fan,

(For this letter)

Patricia Marie Allen