Chapter Ten

I’m not really bothered if people label me as lesbian, bi, or whatever. It’s ‘single’ that annoys me. It’s the dismissal of my relationship with Vicky and the assumption that I am available that insults the truth of what I have with Vicky. Love. The real deal, fought for and won through despite some pretty difficult circumstances. I don’t regard myself as having married a man who decided to be a woman instead. I married a person whom I believed to be male who turned out to be a transgendered woman. She was born that way, and that, at some level, is who I fell in love with. Unless I need T-shirts printed in the future, I don’t need any other word for that relationship than ‘real’.

Vicky and I have different experiences of the reactions to us as a couple. She sometimes finds people expressing surprise that she has a partner. Surely as a Transgendered woman she is not only abandoned and despised but obviously undesirable, seems to be the general wisdom. To me, however, the reaction has an annoying extra. Men, more often than not, seem to read, ‘ in a relationship with a transgendered woman’ as ‘not in a real relationship at all and just waiting for a proper man’. This is expressed not only in a level of flirting that I didn’t experience when I was perceived to be married to a man, but in direct questions about what I ‘surely must be missing’.

It seems to me that such reading of me as single and available is another form of transphobia. I’m not looking for sympathy here, believe me I can handle stupid comments, but I’m getting a bit tired of it. Our friends are friendly and accepting of us as a couple ( the ones that weren’t are no longer our friends) but others continue to make this dismissive assumption. This strange underlying attitude feels insulting. Vicky is reasonable for wanting to be with me because I’m ‘normal’, but I, a ‘normal’ person, am unreasonable to wish to be with her. Unable to believe it might be love, attraction etc. etc. It is decided my motivation must be failure to find anything better or worse still, not wanting to lose the pretty house and garden. All I’m saying is, It ain’t necessarily so. Apart from all of which, I resent the idea that I’m ‘normal’. Who wants to be THAT.

The truth is, we are living a life that seemed impossible two years ago. I wanted to share this experience because transition can be hell, for the person themselves, and for their loved ones around them. Writing this has helped me understand what happened more clearly. We went to hell. It wasn’t very nice, but I think we had to go, when you’re blowing up mountains nothing less will do, and it was worth it.

This is the place we didn’t believe we could get to. It seemed impossible even to visualize the outcome that would work and make everyone happy. We had lived for six years together as a man and a woman. I had been happy, Vicky had been miserable. At first it seemed as though we had just swapped roles. Vicky would be happy and I would be miserable. Neither situation would do, but how to get over the rainbow? Over the rainbow is like this. Vicky is Vicky.. all the time and I am me. Everyone we know, knows we are more in love than ever and happy and relaxed as a same-sex couple. That required quite a major shift of understanding from me about myself. It took me a while to understand that Vicky was not the only one transitioning. Then it took me a while to get over the fact that I hadn’t had a choice in ‘outing’ myself as being in a same-sex relationship. Some people respond to that by saying, ‘Oh, has she had THE operation then. The answer to that comes in two parts. Part one: None of your business. Part two: That’s not what made Vicky a woman. (Part three: see part one).

Our children are happy, this didn’t destroy their lives. Ellie, now 18 is at art college. All her friends have met Vicky, no bricks have been thrown, our windows remain intact. My son, now 22 is at mainstream music college studying rock guitar, he loves to talk rock music with Vicky and we visit every couple of weeks. Of the two of them I would say my boy generally wears more make-up. No one stares. We are living our lives. We take Ellie out to lunch and do the shopping, we feed the cat and watch Strictly Come Dancing. We are normal as the next family.

It wasn’t always like this but now it is. Life, is not a photograph, it’s a film. In fact, it’s not a film, it’s life. Many of the friendships I thought were lost forever, gradually recovered. They are not quite the same as they were before, but the really heartening thing is that people have continued to try. To understand that this is not a lifestyle choice for Vicky, but a physical abnormality that had to be put right, a medical condition that was resolved. I am very touched that my friends felt the friendship we had before was worth saving. Where before some saw only the selfishness of a person for whom self-expression, at any cost, was all, they now see courage. I think too that my friends struggled to understand why I was staying. Someone once said to me, ‘but you’re not a lesbian’. Well, I’m sleeping with a transgendered woman so that depends on what you mean by lesbian. Some feminists see transgendered women as wolves in sheep’s clothing, men who have engaged in an elaborate subterfuge to steal even the physical form from ‘real’ women creating a parody of womanhood based on male perceptions. They would not describe me as a lesbian. Some lesbians reportedly regard transgendered women as men who are trying to trick them into having sex with a man, much as some men fear they will be ‘tricked‘ into having sex with a man who ‘looks‘ like a woman. I genuinely believe that is a misunderstanding of what a transgendered woman is. For those though who do accept Vicky as female, then yes, I’m a lesbian. As far as Vicky and I are concerned we’re both spoken for, so it doesn’t really enter into it.

I was told, often, that others didn’t think they would have stayed had they found themselves in my position. All I can say to that is, I don’t think you can know what you would do until you’re here. It certainly wasn’t my plan ‘A’. For the first year at least I don’t think I knew what I was doing or what I was going to do. My planning shrank to a simple, ‘what’s next’. Sometimes I longed to be able to walk away, to imagine a life uncomplicated by transgender issues. I didn’t stay because I couldn’t leave. I stayed because I wanted to, because being with Vicky makes me happy and being without her makes me miserable. It’s all very selfish really. My understanding, even Vicky’s understanding of herself, has evolved through this process. The simple truth is, we want to be together.

I still miss Anthony, but I understand what happened to him, she survived. I survived too, and was changed by this experience. It took me, as the phrase goes, out of my comfort zone and freed me from my need for privacy, well diminished my need for privacy anyway. I am a much happier person for that. It forced me to examine who I was and what I believed. Not what I said I believed, but what I was actually willing to fight for. I regret some of my behavior. I wish I had had more wisdom and more courage, that I had been kinder and more understanding of challenges other than my own. I particularly wish that I’d understood other people’s feelings more quickly, but then I wish I had long blonde hair and fit size 10 jeans. Better to take on life as yourself than as who you wish you were I suppose.

I hope it has also shown my children that they are lovely and acceptable as themselves. Whatever they do with their lives, whoever they turn out to be, they are perfect in my eyes and always will be. Even if they end up heterosexual solicitors, married with two children and a golden retriever, I shall always love them for being them. Shakespeare was right (huge surprise) ‘to thine own self be true’. Sometimes easier said than done, but worth the effort.

We have not lost our family’s support, our mothers still love us and the house is full at Christmas. I’ve stopped counting the cards. We have many lovely friends. We know how lucky we are.

On the twelfth of May, 2012, Victoria and I renewed our marriage vows. We hired a venue, a band and a pyramid of cupcakes with butterflies on them. We both wore spectacular dresses and tiaras. We had ninety guests and sat down to roast lamb and monkfish. We kept telling everyone it wasn’t a wedding, we already had one of those thank you. The truth is though it absolutely was a wedding, because this is when I stood before all my family and friends and said, ‘Victoria, I choose you’ and this is when Victoria stood in front of all her family and friends and said ‘I, Victoria, choose you Emma’. The fact that this was a wedding only dawned on Vicky and me when we entered the ballroom in Putney and were hit by a wall of love. Everyone cheering and clapping and celebrating our love for each other, we were completely astounded and moved. Our dear friend Caroline Grayson, an interfaith minister, guided us through the words we had chosen to say to each other.

I went first. “Three years ago I thought I had lost you. I did not understand what was happening. I didn’t know where our future was or how it could be. I thought I would lose my friends, my family, everyone. But I did not lose you. I found you, and in finding you, I found myself. I did not lose my family, or my friends. We all fought through and we won. The promises I made to you seven years ago were promises. Today they are our truths. I will always love you and I will always be there for you, in sickness and in health, for better for worse, til death sends us on the next part of our journey. I am yours”

Vicky said, “Dear Emma, I stand before you in astonishment and wonder at the commitment you have given to our marriage and relationship. I pledge to love you, to cherish you, to trust you and to face all of life together with you. I vow to be loyal to you that all my memories and imagination will be shared with you. Through all the sacrifices, joy, the laughter and the tears. All I am, all I have, all I will be and all I can be I pledge to you. To love and support you, to care for you until my dying breath. Lastly, in the words from our wedding day in 2005:

Like Screws unravelling

From their bolts

Like a book trying to stand with a broken spine.

Like a cloud dissolving as

The rain pours down

Like a door unhinging

It’s bolts undone

I am nothing without you,

Like DNA, it’s matrix unspiraling

I am nothing without you

Emma, thank you for standing next to me as I vow to stand next to you.”

I blubbed, Victoria blubbed, Caroline blubbed. Everyone joined in. When we’d finished our vows we danced to Nat King Cole’s ‘Let there be love’

and we knew it was the answer.