PANTY HOSE: HIS, MINE, AND OURS
When secrets emerge like Mr. Madoff’s financial deceptions or Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affairs, the partner suffers profoundly. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the result—being battered by unwanted intrusive thoughts about the betrayal, nightmares, emotional numbing coupled with unpredictable explosions, sleep disturbances and hypervigilance as the partner or spouse searches for yet some other betrayal.
—“The Clueless Wives Club,” Julie Gottman, New York Times, July 5, 2009
It began with a pair of purple cotton underpants. A woman’s underpants. I pulled them out of the dryer amid the rest of the usual laundry produced by a man, a woman, two children, and one baby. I had never seen these purple underpants before. Tracey came upon me in the basement, standing before the dryer with them in my hand, staring at them. Trying to figure out and at the same time understanding what they were. We stood there, both of us staring at them, in silence.
“Oh, sorry,” he said finally. “Did I put those in the laundry? I’ve been trying to keep them out of your sight.”
“That’s okay,” I whispered.
This was the first time I had ever seen an item of female clothing that belonged to my husband. It was also the end of Tracey trying to keep women’s clothes out of my sight.
* * *
I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to know. Then again, I was terrified of what I didn’t know. I was afraid of what might be happening behind my back. Of what others might see. Each time he did something new, something further, took another step, made another change, each time I discovered that yet another person had been brought into his confidence, I had to suffer all over again. As if it were possible to stop or even to contain this thing once it had begun. I wanted to understand and yet I didn’t. Understanding meant believing it was happening. A kind of acceptance. I couldn’t accept. I couldn’t. This is one of the hardest things to remember now and to convey: the difficulty I had bending my mind around this thing.
* * *
Generally speaking, people wear women’s clothes because they are women. Or they don’t because they are not. I can’t back my opinion with statistics, so I’m going to go out on a limb here. My guess is that few people announce that they are going to begin wearing women’s clothes as a radical departure from what the world has known them in before. I’m going to guess that most people live entire lives without ever becoming recipients of such announcements. To date it has happened only twice to me.
The first time in my life I heard someone announce a switch to women’s clothes, I was a child. I was in Catholic school, a Catholic schoolgirl as uneasy in the faith I’d been born to as I would later feel at home in the Jewish world I chose. The speaker was the mother superior of our convent. She came into class one day, presumably a stop on a round of visits to all sixteen classrooms in the school. (Did she repeat her planned remarks word for word from the two first grades through the two eighths? My class was somewhere in the middle.) She stood before us in the floor-length full-skirted habit of her order.
“Children,” she addressed us, a thin smile playing around her lips, “do you think that nuns have no legs?” She meant to be funny, but Mother Superior was not a funny person, any more than she was a mother, in the least what is thought of as motherly, or possessed of any perceptible claim to superiority. She was humorless and cold.
We children, stony-faced, responded in unison, “Nooo.” We knew that she had legs. Smiling her waxen smile, she told us not only that she had legs, but that we were all going to get to see them. She and the other sisters at the convent would thenceforward abandon the habit in favor of ordinary clothes. In practical terms, what she meant but didn’t say was that the nuns would immediately begin to wear polyester dresses, and after we’d had some time to get used to it, they would go completely hog wild and appear in polyester pants suits. In metaphoric terms, what she meant but didn’t say was that throwing off the habit, the sisters would reveal the female bodies hiding beneath them all along. Also the legs. Coming from Mother Superior, this abrupt uncovering of bodies sounded almost aggressive.
When Tracey announced to the world that he liked to wear women’s clothes and would now do so all the time, he was aggressive, too. He didn’t ask. He told. He did. He assembled a treasure trove, a trousseau, of feminine things, and he eloped with himself.
Currently surgery to remove the 11th and 12th ribs on both sides of the trunk is the only way to permanently minimize the waist measurements and create a more feminine torso.… To take measurements of the waist, the hips, the derriere and the breasts is very important. To appreciate progress, even a small amount consistently each time the measurements are recorded is very encouraging.
—Feminizing Hormonal Therapy for the Transgendered, Sheila Kirk, M.D.
The unfolding, the ripening, that is female adolescence can be a beautiful thing when it happens to a twelve- or fourteen-year-old girl. When it is embarked upon by a forty-something-year-old man, it is something else again. Female adolescence was Tracey’s way of explaining the process he had entered into, an umbrella term to cover the series of things he was doing to himself. Many young girls experience this period in their lives as hellish, and most adult women would rather shoot themselves in the head than go through it again. Tracey was gleeful.
I’ve been told that when it comes to gender transformation, it is easier to add than to subtract. A small-muscled, not very hirsute woman takes testosterone and finds herself developing biceps and a beard, hears her voice deepening. (This rule can be taken only so far. The adult female-to-male transsexual doesn’t get any taller, and the addition of a working penis is another, much more complicated matter altogether.) Estrogen works as grow-potion for the male-to-female transsexual desiring breasts, but it doesn’t dissolve obvious signs of maleness. Tracey had quite a few of these to get rid of.
The first and easiest things to ditch were not symbols of manhood. They were symbols of Jewish manhood. Tracey doffed his kippah, or skullcap, and the garment called tzitzit, or tallit katan, the ritual fringes that he had worn visible at the bottoms of his shirts at all times. We were not part of a religious community in which the wearing of these garments was a given. They represented Tracey’s personal commitment to his Jewish identity. In a sense, they represented our family’s commitment to our faith, because whenever I or our children appeared with him in public, these bits of cloth and thread told the world that we were a Jewish family who practiced some degree of religious observance. Who were actively engaged in religious life. Everywhere we lived or visited outside of Israel during the years Tracey wore these garments, we stood out in this way; we were different.
Tracey hadn’t always worn these things. At a certain point in our marriage, he began to wear the kippah when he was at home, then all the time. Then he added the fringes. (It seems typical of Tracey now, a kind of foreshadowing of things to come, that he didn’t discuss with me his decisions to wear these garments, not even to inform me that this would now be his [forgive the pun] habit. When I asked him about the kippah, it had already dug tracks into the curls on his head and I had more or less gotten used to it.) Tracey explained his decision by saying that according to tradition, as a Jewish man he was supposed to have his head covered when he said a blessing or any other kind of prayer. Which was why he had always worn a skullcap in synagogue and to the dinner table on Friday evenings and holidays. But in fact the occasions for blessings and prayers occurred all the time, everywhere. He had to be ready.
To be prepared, always, for holiness; to acknowledge the divine in a mouth full of bread or first sight of the new moon. This answer struck me then, and strikes me now, as very beautiful. It was also another foretaste: the explanation of a public gesture as a necessary reflection of inner being. When Tracey wore the kippah and tzitzit I felt proud of him, proud and happy that we were Jews. When he abandoned them I experienced a terrible sense of loss, the first of many. With this simple gesture, he was throwing off our Jewish family.
* * *
Outwardly that family continued. We handled together what we had to: home repairs, the scheduling complications entailed by three children. From paying bills to baking birthday cakes, I had always managed much of our domestic lives on my own. Now “much” gradually became all.
We had dinners together as a family when Tracey was at home, but the noisy conversation that once bubbled over at our table dwindled to a strained trickle. The children witnessed Tracey’s undisguised misery, felt the tension they couldn’t name. In Tracey’s presence I found there was very little I needed to say. Once I would have chatted about work, the events of my day, the endless pleasures and concerns occasioned by the children. Now the stuff of my life, of the children’s lives, never seemed to grab Tracey’s attention. A single subject absorbed him. When we weren’t talking about that—and we weren’t, in front of the children—it was as if Tracey and I had nothing in common.
* * *
Female clothes—tarty and juvenile, conservative and middle-aged—metastasized in our home. After the incident of the purple underwear, our bedroom closet—for a time it was still, excruciatingly, “our” bedroom, until Tracey began sleeping in the living room—filled up with his women’s clothing, side by side with his male wardrobe and the female wardrobe, mine, that had always hung there. His new things came from the thrift stores where he openly shopped for himself in our small community and from a growing network of women who saw my closet as the repository for their castoffs. Hanger space grew tight. My clothes were crushed into a corner until there ended up being no room for them. Tracey acquired garments from all over the fashion map, ranging from things (most) that I would know weren’t mine if I was struck blind to the occasional item that resembled something I wore. I felt ill handling his women’s wear, but sometimes I had to examine the family laundry closely to separate what was his from what was mine. He acquired a black T-shirt that looked similar to one belonging to me; I memorized the label in his so I’d recognize it and could quickly stuff it away. One day I found myself in a particularly agonized wrestling match with a pair of navy blue panty hose. Without thinking, I put them in my panty hose drawer. Then I remembered. I got worried. Took them out again. Scrutinized them. Tried to recall if I’d worn blue hose since the last time I did laundry. Put them away in the drawer with his (men’s and women’s) underwear. Took them out again and put them on top of the chest of drawers. I went through this routine several times until I finally showed them to Tracey.
“Are these yours?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, vaguely apologetic.
On another occasion, we enacted our bizarre struggle in silent pantomime. Tracey was allowing his once very short, mostly gray hair to grow out. It looked terrible, but of course that was beside the point. He brought home a hairbrush to use on it which he kept in the bathroom closet. On the day in question, he walked into the bathroom while I was combing my hair. He took out his brush, positioned himself next to me before the bathroom mirror, and began to brush his hair. When he was done he smirked knowingly at his reflection—as if he liked what he saw and at the same time as if sharing a joke with himself—and, after tracing an exaggerated arc with his hand, very deliberately dropped his brush into a basket I kept for my personal things beside the sink.
Such moments—I could describe so many, two years’ worth of them—packed a breathtaking array of meaning and emotion. All at once there was the pathos of witnessing a middle-aged man—that middle-aged man being the husband I loved and had admired—taking pleasure in gazing at the woman he evidently saw when he looked at himself in the mirror. His satisfaction with himself. His in-my-face “I’m going to do this and you have no choice but to accept it” attitude toward me. The painful fact that such moments represented his departure from our marriage and from the person he had been, and that I was forced to watch that departure not once but over and over again. The terrible feeling of intrusion—violation will sound over the top but is actually closer to the truth—into my space, my privacy. Like a rebellious teenager, he wanted me to know: You aren’t the only woman around here anymore. He wanted me to know: Absolutely nothing will be left to you. My basket of personal care items had become a public receptacle marked “All Women’s Things Go Here.” Like womanhood itself, it was no longer my domain. More than one would-be wit has quipped that my husband left me for another woman—himself. At moments like these, it seemed that he’d actually invited another woman to move in with us. A woman voracious in pursuit of my life.
We fought daily, endlessly. I begged him to stop or at least slow down his transformation. Tracey complained that it was already taking far too long. During one such argument, seated side by side on the sofa with all the children off in their rooms, Tracey suddenly and bitterly exclaimed, “We could have been doing this together!”
Now, this was an odd moment. Tracey was right. I—at any rate, a different me—could have accompanied my husband, been his guide, into the forbidden, longed-for world of womanhood. There could have been shopping expeditions, Henry Higgins–esque tutoring of speech, walk, body language. From the glossy magazines he collected, he’d learned that women, young girls especially, used clothes and hairstyles to try out different images of themselves. And that they liked to bounce these images off one another even more than they liked to bounce them off their mirrors. He wanted to become a woman, or at least learn to look like one. He wanted me to help him. What was odd was that I felt sad when he said this. Sad that helping him was entirely outside the range of possibility. At the same time I was astonished, given the well-known strength of my revulsion for his activities, that such an idea could even occur to him, much less that he would voice it.
I couldn’t express the sadness I felt. By this point in our marriage’s demise, such an admission would have been painfully personal, as only revelations between former intimates can be. So I expressed the astonishment. “Would you like us to be sisters now?” I said sarcastically. “Would you like us to be friends?”
“Yes.” He nodded, not ignoring the sarcasm so much as butting against it. “That would be great.”
* * *
If I couldn’t play adolescent girlfriends with my husband, there were plenty of other women who could. In the endeavor to remake himself, Tracey found a circle of women to sympathize, encourage, and dress him. Once he left his laptop open—inadvertently, he claimed—to a message from one of them that read, “Your wife has to accept losing you.” He reported that another had urged him to “do it all quickly!” at the very start of his explorations. Even when he was with our children, his cell phone kept their voices perpetually in his ear.
We had always enjoyed making a fuss over each other’s and the children’s birthdays. Roughly nine months into the first year of his transformation, his birthday fell on a day when he and I were home and the children occupied, so we would have some time alone together. Against the odds, I decided to try to give him a nice day. Since the slow morning in bed that would have begun such an occasion just a year before was no longer in our repertoire, I took him out for breakfast. The meal was strained. The food at a favorite café was tasteless. We, who had always talked and talked as though we could never get to the end of all there was to say, found ourselves unable to carry on a conversation. We stared at each other across the table, each confronted with a person whose company we had recently cherished and now found excruciating. Back home, I drew a deep breath and decided to take on the elephant instead of pretending it wasn’t in the room. Tracey had told me he’d been writing down his thoughts about what he was going through. “Why don’t you read some of it to me,” I suggested. He’d read only a few sentences when we were interrupted by the ringing phone. It was the proprietor of a local florist shop, wanting to check the address of a woman whose first name I had never heard but whose last name was Tracey’s. I fumbled the call in confusion. The florist was amused that I wasn’t sure who lived at my address. Humiliated, I finally got it. A little later, a bouquet was delivered to the female persona whose name I don’t recall but was something other than the name Tracey currently uses—perhaps he was trying on names along with different dress styles. The flowers had been sent by a woman who evidently had a thing for male-to-female transsexuals. Tracey had “met” her online; he wasn’t the only transsexual in her life.
“I had no idea she was planning to send me flowers,” he protested. “I just mentioned that it was my birthday. I’ve never even given her my address.”
But he had called her from our home phone, and for anyone with caller ID, a published address such as ours was a piece of cake. Some months before, I had read this woman’s postings on a transgender support site Tracey sent me to and found her odd enough to comment on in conversation with Tracey. He had agreed that she was weird. We had laughed together. The only thing he’d neglected to mention was that he’d been having a telephone relationship with her for months.
Passover arrived the following month with another delivery. My children and I, preparing for a holiday I was determined to make joyous, ran to the door to receive a UPS package of what we assumed were their yearly Passover goodies from their grandmother. It turned out to be a box of women’s clothes sent by yet another confidante who had outgrown them.
From Tracey’s cheerleaders I learned that in the new political correctness, female solidarity is out. A man in a dress is in. Among women who consider themselves feminists, a man who declares himself a transsexual trumps another woman any day. Women, feminists, Jewish feminists, rushed to embrace Tracey. I found it peculiarly painful, even when it was entirely impersonal. For example, later on, when the kids and I were newly on our own, we attended a dinner party at which a fellow guest, a close friend of a close friend who was meeting my children and me for the first time, was warmly sympathetic to our single-parent situation, the evidence of the children’s traumas and emotional turmoil. When she got wind of the reason behind all the chaos, her sympathy stopped on a dime. About-faced. A divorced woman and a mother herself, she immediately began to moan about poor Tracey, “This must be so hard for him!”
A new twist on women’s age-old abandonment of one another.
One of Tracey’s supporters, a member of my Jewish community, would eventually sum up this perspective most explicitly. Upon hearing what Tracey had been up to with the children and with me, she had one thing to say: “He’s a transsexual. Anything he does is what he needs to do.”
Most people stopped short of actually saying these words. Instead it was the implicit attitude of the women who assembled themselves around Tracey in transformation, their hearts as stirred by his triumphant embrace of femininity as they were untouched by the actual woman, the three children, in his way. These career women told Tracey, and some would later tell me, that my wifely role was to support my man’s gender-bending and to get my children on board with the project. My responsibility was to Tracey. Tracey’s responsibility was to Tracey. In the Valley of the Politically Correct, being a transsexual means never having to say you’re sorry.
Tracey’s ladies were a various crew. A few were lesbians, most were straight. Some had husbands or female partners, children, placid domestic lives untouched by chaos and destruction. Some were considerably younger than Tracey, some older. They were local and far-flung. What they had in common was that they were certain they were right to urge him on. The fact that Tracey had a family didn’t concern them. They weren’t troubled by his state of mind, a rejection of self I found scary. “Body hair makes me feel like a repulsive, furred animal!” Tracey exclaimed during the first months of changing his appearance.
Not surprisingly, the fur was among the first things to go. He shaved off the beard he had been wearing when I met him at the age of seventeen. He shaved off body hair, taking a razor to obvious targets like calves, then to the chest hair I had loved to run through my fingers. While body hair made him feel like an animal, his preoccupation with removing every last bit of it—even the bits commonly found on women—struck me as an eradication of humanity, not an embrace of it. He shaved his forearms, and when we gathered around the dinner table with the children, his shirtsleeves fell back to reveal eerily bald, dead white skin, while on either side of him sat our young daughter and me, our arms covered in normal fine dark hair that had never caused me to doubt our species. One day he came home with his eyebrows plucked within a fraction of an inch of their lives, a style choice I tried unsuccessfully to convince him no actual woman had made since the 1940s.
He paid for a series of laser sessions to get rid of all this hair on a permanent basis. This was at a stage when his transformation was still supposed to be a secret from the world at large, from almost everyone in our geographic area, and in particular from our children.
“Couldn’t you at least have gone to a salon in another town?”
My distress shouldn’t have surprised him, though it did, when he chose to have the laser work done in our town, refusing even to travel to the next one over. Likewise that he shared his plans for gender makeover with the staff there, including employees we were acquainted with in other aspects of our lives (by this point, were there any other aspects of our lives?) in a small community. Without the beard his face took on an angularity I had never noticed before. Had his chin really always been so sharp? Ironic that facial hair had been softening the contours of his face all along.
In our joint checking account, I saw that payments to a voice coach were being recorded. I discovered that he carried a portable tape recorder with him during solo drives, so that he could work on raising his pitch, eradicating the deep and melodious voice that I had always considered one of his most attractive qualities. I found this out when he let our toddler play with the tape recorder, a button was hit, and out of the machine came a weird, feminized lisp that neither the children nor I had ever heard before: Daddy’s new voice.
Did the kids notice Tracey’s gradually rising cadences? They didn’t say and I didn’t dare ask. Many men add or subtract facial hair from time to time, so he just told them he’d decided to try shaving. Neither the kids nor I would actually see him dressed as a woman during the two years his transformation took place under our roof or for many months after. We didn’t have to confront him modeling the new threads, but I, for one, couldn’t forget that they were there.
Panties that weren’t mine were now regulars in our laundry. I also caught glimpses of their lace edges peeking out of his jeans when he bent over to help one of the children. By this point he had long ago stopped wearing the skullcap that wouldn’t have sat well on his bourgeoning hair. The ritual fringes were replaced with a bra, whose outline was sometimes visible underneath his (man’s) shirts. The bra didn’t come of fleshly necessity; he said it made him feel better. Presumably the falsies I found around the house also made him feel better. The only problem was that they made me feel worse. Much worse. Again, I was like a woman encountering the presence of an intruder in her marriage in the traces of infidelity among her husband’s things. Only the lipstick smears weren’t on my husband. They were my husband.
Each of these things felt like exciting steps in the right direction to him, the direction of his true self. Each of these things felt to me like the willful destruction of a person I loved. One of the many metaphors I employed to explain how all this felt to me, not one of his favorites, was this: A stranger had entered our home, murdered my husband, and expected me to accept—indeed, to welcome—him in substitution. Good luck.
Again and again Tracey promised he would do nothing further; again and again he broke this promise. To my anguished and outraged, “But you said—,” he’d tell me, sometimes in anger, sometimes icily cold: “That was yesterday. I didn’t say anything about today.”
* * *
Once upon a time, I grew up in an unhappy family. A normally unhappy family. No exploding skeletons. Just discontent, mutual dislike, a general absence of love. I’d spent a childhood learning that arriving at one’s own doorstep didn’t necessarily feel like coming home. Since Tracey and I had moved into our first apartment together at nineteen, home had meant sanctuary and affection. Not to put too maudlin a point on it—domestic happiness. These were the connotations I had been certain my own children would grow up associating with family and home. Now all that changed. Leaving the house felt like escaping a nightmare. As I drove back up the curved, climbing roads to our home, my heart would grow leaden, my foot lighter on the gas. During the second year of our ordeal, when he returned to his job in another state, his absences for the first time in our long marriage meant relief. Alone with my children I could relax and enjoy our time together. But whether I was out for a matter of hours or Tracey was gone for a few days, I dreaded the reunion, the changes that might have taken place while we’d been apart.
Easily as painful were the moments when my mood was lifted by a trick of mind or memory. Once I overheard him speaking on the telephone in another room to an assistant. Suddenly, mysteriously, I was caught by a feeling that had become, along with my husband, a stranger in recent months: hope. The crash followed hard on the hope when I was able to put my finger on its source. Talking to his assistant, he had adopted his old voice. What I would call his real voice. Or, simply, his voice. The sound of his familiar cadences carrying through our house was like the momentary return of the man I had loved.
* * *
Why did I go on this way?
Here are my explanations, my answers. I will try to make them sound reasonable. I thought at the time that they were reasonable. They weren’t reasonable. They were decisions based upon a bedlam of love, grief, fear, and rage—perhaps I’m leaving out an emotion, but those will do—experienced all at once and sequentially, over and over again in the course of two years. I was standing on shifting sands and I kept falling when they caved beneath my feet. Falling and falling and falling until I finally learned there was no bottom.
I have said, and it is true, that from the moment Tracey told me he’d been thinking a lot about his gender identity that June night, I knew our marriage to be over. At the same time, I never believed that Tracey would actually do the things that he proceeded to do. I never believed that he would choose the life of a middle-aged transsexual over his children, over our family. Over me. I thought that he had made his choices when we married and had three children. I couldn’t believe those were revocable choices for Tracey for two simple reasons. Because I thought I knew Tracey. Because they weren’t for me.
* * *
When people ask how I continued to live so long with a man who was no longer my husband, the truest answer I can give is this: a boy, a girl, a baby, aka my children. Day by day and week by week, I begged Tracey to grant our children a little more childhood. For over a year and a half I put off telling them. As anyone who knows kids will guess, this ultimately proved a losing strategy, as their growing awareness, despite my efforts to shield them from it, that their father was changing and that something had gone terribly awry in their parents’ marriage erupted in confusion, fear, and stress. Still I couldn’t let go of it—the beautiful family I thought we had made, the intact happy family in which my children felt loved and secure. I had not lived in this family in a don’t-it-always-seem-to-go-that-you-don’t-know-what-you-got-till-it’s-gone fool’s paradise. I had consciously considered myself—us—blessed. Once, having lunch at a now defunct coffee shop in our town, I had looked from my family around the table to the street outside and understood that I had realized my childhood dream. I now had exactly the kind of family in the kind of life in the kind of town I had longed for as a small child. At the point I experienced this revelation, our financial circumstances were precarious and we did not yet even own a home of our own, something that was terribly important to me. It didn’t matter. We had everything. I knew it. I didn’t want my children to lose this family, this life that to them wasn’t a life, it was life. I didn’t want them to lose their father.
I took it for granted that if Tracey was really going to live as a woman, he would move away, or the children and I would move away, or perhaps he would head off in one direction and the children and I would take another. I couldn’t yet reimagine my life alone with my children, but I was beginning to understand that that was what I was going to have to do. I was going to have to re-create myself, ourselves, just as Tracey was eagerly re-creating himself. It went without saying that I wasn’t going to attempt a fresh start in the small town in which we had lived together as a happy family, passing Tracey on the street in a dress.
One night during that first year, something snapped. I don’t remember what precipitated this particular crisis; there were so many. I only remember lying on the living room sofa after the children were in bed, overcome with grief. Sobbing. Realizing this was it—this was real. I had to believe Tracey when he said that he must live as a woman. That he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t have to. That his happiness, perhaps his life, depended upon it. Even if I couldn’t understand it, I had to stop fighting him.
Tracey wandered into the living room. I sat up, pulled myself together, and delivered the little speech I had prepared. “Okay,” I told him. “Go for it. If you know you really want to do this, go ahead and start your life over somewhere. If you aren’t absolutely sure, go away for six months or a year and try it out. We’ll wait for you. I won’t even ask you to support us.”
I expected him to react with appreciation. Gratitude. Wasn’t this, after all, a generous and encouraging offer? Wasn’t he relieved that I was finally giving him my blessing to do what he wanted to do?
Wrong. None of the above.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving this house. I’m going to do what I want to do and I’m going to do it right here.”
“But you want to make a fresh start,” I spluttered. “We need one, too.”
“You’re not making a fresh start!” He was furious. “You have no legal right to the house or the kids. They belong to me. If you want to leave, go right ahead. I won’t stop you. But you’re not taking the kids with you.”
I was—once again!—stunned. This wasn’t just the first moment that I feared Tracey’s intentions. It was also the emergence of the new Tracey, the one I would come to know very well over the next several years. The one who intimidated and threatened, who laid down the law and expected me to abide by it. If Tracey was becoming a woman, he had never seemed so male—a tyrannical bully he had never been in our marriage. His statement that I had no right to custody of the children or to our joint property was, of course, not factual. I suspected that even at the time, but it was said on the accurate assumption that I knew absolutely nothing about my state’s divorce laws and that he could frighten me by saying it, even if only temporarily. It was a statement straight out of an outraged husband’s playbook of the past. Spoken like a man.
Many conversations followed from that one, and in this respect Tracey remained consistent—one of his very few consistencies. The new life, the choices and decisions, were his. The children and I would live with whatever he decided.
This is the kind of moment in which a woman with financial resources would have taken the children, moved out, gotten a lawyer, and filed for divorce and custody. Barring that, a woman with parents or an extended family would have gone home to them. I had none of those things. I stayed. I stayed and continued to live in an agony that I shudder to recall. As time passes and I reflect on this period in my life, I understand less and less how it is that I survived it.
Throughout these two years, Tracey’s activities and the demise of our marriage were kept largely under wraps. Loosening wraps. He told more and more people. I told a few. He was gradually feminizing his appearance—for example, growing out the hair on his head and removing the rest, but not actually dressing as a woman in our neck of the woods. That wouldn’t come until after he moved out of our home, and neither my children nor I would be forced to confront him dressed as a woman for many more months after that. But in the second of the two years we lived together during his gradual transformation, he returned to commuting to his job in another state. There he could cross-dress nights after work. He’d come home each week after a few days away sporting his old casual men’s business wear. Or sometimes he’d appear in a style best described as male-with-a-glitch—for instance, khaki trousers and a tailored shirt rounded out by a pair of high-heeled white patent-leather sandals.
Yes. High-heeled white patent-leather sandals. Very strappy. They affected me like objects from a nightmare, invested with the power to make me sick with fear and … well, just sick. Later I could laugh, sorta, about these things, at least when I had other people to laugh with. For example, after Tracey went public, a woman I knew slightly told me about a family member who had also taken a middle-aged shine to women’s clothes.
“He had terrible taste,” she recalled, shaking her head at the memory, “a terrible style.” This man, my confidante’s relative, had a chronic illness and for the last decade of his life spent his days mostly at home, grooming himself and making his wife miserable. “‘Why don’t you wash the dishes?’ I told him. ‘You want to be a woman? Well, that’s what women do.’”
Around our town Tracey began to wear gender-neutral clothes, which in actual fact meant female but not overtly feminine: women’s jeans, a blouse kept zipped inside a navy-blue sweatshirt. He could wear this outfit almost everywhere because he didn’t go out much. Our public appearances as a couple were rare, dwindling to nonexistent. He socialized very little on his own. In his life outside the house, such as it was, he went about looking pale and dreadful and speaking in an exceedingly odd high-pitched whisper, so some people concluded that he was ill. Others apparently bought his story that he was very tired. Continually tired. For months on end. But what were they supposed to think? The truth?
I wanted desperately to contain the truth for my sake and my children’s, and the indications were that Tracey was itching to alert the media. By continuing to live with him, I could at least forestall the day he would appear in full female regalia in front of the children or in our community, because Tracey had grudgingly come to realize that for the time being, forcing me or the children to see him, as he put it, “dressed” would not be wise. Again, my delays were a losing strategy. Tracey was not trying out a possible lifestyle. He was making permanent changes. By the end of the first year, his most valuable beauty tool was a daily dose of female hormones. Which meant that he was growing little breasts. And though I didn’t see for myself, my information is that the hormones also do an irreversible number on the penis, shrinking and rendering it useless as a sexual or reproductive tool.
* * *
It is inescapable: for me there is something slightly creepy and more than slightly sad about a man in women’s clothes. Male legs in sheer stockings. Male feet in high-heeled canoes. A man’s face coated with makeup, topped by a wig or feminine hairstyle. A man speaking and moving in a way that suggests not femininity but a man trying to approximate it. I think of the time I’ve already described when I brought a summer school class of journalism students to hear a transgendered speaker. The man, in late middle age, would never be taken for anything but a man, and I don’t think he imagined otherwise. It wasn’t about “passing” for him. It was about comforting himself. When he described how he had comforted himself by wearing a flowered bathrobe that morning, I felt sorry for him. When he described how he had walked outside for the newspaper in that robe at just the moment his wife’s friend was driving past, I felt sorry for his wife.
Feeling this way, I am a product of my childhood, neither original nor alone. But I am hopelessly retrograde. Hopelessly, viscerally outside the pale of political correctness. These—admittedly terrible—feelings are not especially activated by male-to-female transsexuals to whom I have never been married. Gut-wrenching questions such as “What was I doing for twenty-some years of my life and who the hell was I doing it with?” are not aroused by the outfits of other male-to-females as they are by the sight of Tracey in an exact replica of a skirt that was once my favorite and that, yes, Tracey used to say he thought I looked so good in. It is creepy for one woman to copycat groom herself to look just like another, the stuff of thrillers. Creepier for a man to do the same. Creepier still if that man was your husband.
But aside from the effects of our personal history on my experience of Tracey, Tracey himself was not a poster child for the transsexual lifestyle as good clean healthy fun. He lied, he threatened. He sometimes seemed scarily out of control. Once, he arrived home late at night after several days away. From my bedroom I heard him burst into the house giggling and chatting giddily. It sounded like a party. For some minutes I lay in bed frozen with fear. Thinking of my sleeping children, I finally forced myself to go out and confront him. Lights were shining in the kitchen and dining room. The dining room door leading to the driveway was open and I could see that Tracey’s headlights had been left on, the car doors open, and the radio on as well. I heard his excited voice in the basement. The evidence suggested that two or more revelers had made a dash from the car to the basement. Who had Tracey brought home with him?
No one. With echoes of Hitchcock’s Psycho, I gradually became aware that the giggling and chatting sprang from but a single source. Tracey was talking to Tracey.
The next morning I told him, “I was really freaked out last night.”
“What do you mean?” he asked me.
“I mean when you were talking to yourself like that! I thought you had brought someone home with you. Even once I realized you hadn’t, I was afraid the kids would wake up and hear you.”
Tracey was baffled. “I wasn’t talking to myself.” Either he didn’t remember or he hadn’t been aware of what he was doing at the time. Which was more disturbing?
* * *
Whatever else went on in the basement, one of its rooms became Tracey’s makeshift boudoir. At some point he moved himself to the living room sofa and his fast-growing woman’s wardrobe—the gauzy white miniskirt, the dowdy businesswoman’s suits, the long flowery dresses—to the basement. His male wardrobe continued to be housed in my bedroom. When he moved out at the end of these two years, that was where it remained, a collection of slacks, shirts, sweaters, jackets, and ties hanging in my closet, underwear and socks in my drawers. Beautiful clothes, clothes I had loved and in some cases given him: forest-green pleated corduroy trousers, a black suede baseball jacket, an expensive light brown shirt in its dry cleaner’s bag. On top of my chest of drawers, two pairs of his prescription glasses. People generally take their clothes and their eyeglasses with them when they move out, but of course the man I had married wasn’t moving out. That man was long gone. It was as if he had left the bedroom expecting to come back. As if he had died suddenly. These personal effects were the detritus of his life. Along with the now unnecessary falsies and the dozens of empty pill bottles I found scattered in the basement, the disposal of my late husband’s clothes formed a small part of what I had been left to cope with.