Chapter Two

There are many many different kinds of people on the spectrum of gender. Most of us, sit neatly at either end, male or female. The few thousand left over, and it is only a few thousand who have come out and sought treatment, express a myriad of feelings about their gender. Some are quite clear that their body simply got it wrong. Took a left fork instead of a right somewhere in the womb and delivered the wrong gender body. There are many more male to females than female to males. I don’t know why, these things seem to be a combination of genes and hormones and luck. I should make it clear that I am talking only about male to female transexuals, because I’m married to one and those are the transexuals I know. Others find themselves with a random selection of male and female body parts. Some of them may still feel very strongly they are a certain gender, others that they are a third sex, not provided for in the world of form filling, or toilet facilities. Whatever these people experience about gender, everyone I’ve ever spoken to has been very clear that they knew what they were as soon as they knew what a boy and a girl were. They knew which camp they belonged in and had lived with the dismay and confusion of being put in the wrong one all their lives.

Others feel drawn to express a feminine side whilst utterly sure they are male. I once met a very nice transvestite who had gone the Marilyn Monroe route. When I asked him about his gender he said, I think a little offended, that he was only Marilyn with the clothes and the wig and the make-up, take that away and he was a bloke. Still looked fabulous though! He just liked expressing that part of himself. Vicky, I remember thinking, was Vicky naked. It had nothing to do with what she was wearing. That is not to dismiss the experience of transvestites. Certainly to some it is a sexual thrill and that’s an end of it. And why not? Sex should be thrilling. But to many others it is a necessary expression of a real part of themselves. Not all of themselves, but important for their sense of well-being and calm. There is a joke in the transgendered community, it goes: What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transexual? Answer: about 4 years. Well, there’s some truth in that for some people. Certainly transvestism can be the opening gambit in coming to understand that you are in fact in the wrong gender body, but it’s by no means true for all. If you catch your husband in your knickers it’s not a foregone conclusion that he is really she. What I have found out over the last few years is, if you want to know someone’s gender, ask them, they are the best judge.

Vicky had told me she was Vicky in January 2009. I was still convinced that this would be a long drawn out process and that nobody else was going to need to know anything about it. I still found myself swinging violently between loving support and despairing anger. One moment wondering what life would be like with a woman, and the next fantasizing about escaping and starting a new life on my own away from the inevitable ridicule that would follow a woman who thought she had found her fairytale but had ended up married to a transexual. It was the ridicule and judgement that frightened me, not the actual life. If I had been on a desert island with Vicky, I don’t think I would have had a problem.

We did have a problem though. Vicky was miserable. Probably suicidally so if we hadn’t done anything, but we did do something, so thank God we didn’t have to go down that road. Many transgendered people, unable to square the circle of their reality and what seems possible, do tragically end up committing suicide. Statistically a much higher proportion than the rest of mankind. Some will never have told anyone of their suffering until it’s too late. What a sad waste of life, just because it wasn’t average.

The first stage, we decided, was that Vicky, I still called her Anthony unless we were alone, should see her G.P and get a referral for psychological assessment. Vicky found out about the clinic which ran out of Charing Cross hospital. It treated Gender Dysphoria, or unhappiness about one’s gender. It’s an odd term. It covers a very very wide spectrum of people, but some of the people it covers are transexual men and women, who are rather reasonably dysphoric about their apparent gender, as it is mismatched with their actual gender - a thing defined not by a particular set of genitalia, but by their own self-knowledge. It seems odd that such people are treated as having a problem of unhappiness when they have a physical condition. There is, as far as I’m aware, no cancer dysphoria unit. What this comes down to, is funding. Transexuals are treated as having a mental health issue which is resolved with a physical operation. The problem is, the minute you start trying to define a set of physical parameters to describe the condition you will inevitably leave someone on the outside, no longer qualifying for treatment. At least this way no one gets turned away.

Transition is the journey a transgendered person makes to function full time as the gender they know themselves to be, rather than the one that was mistakenly assigned to them at birth. I understood all this, and I never wanted to be the kind of person who would want to stop someone else being themselves. All I can say is, it is different when it’s your husband. My vision of this journey was one spread out over decades. Vicky’s trip to the doctor’s was my first experience of the high speed ride that transition can be. She came back excited, almost euphoric. Her G.P had certainly been taken aback by her request, but had managed after talking to the other doctors at the surgery, to find the correct protocol. As soon as she had had two psychiatric assessments to ensure she wasn’t suffering from schizophrenia or some other mental health issue, she could begin hormones and her breasts would begin to grow. A lot of transgendered people feel pretty offended at the suggestion they should undergo psychiatric assessment before accessing the treatment they know perfectly well they need. The trouble is, at this initial stage -gender dysphoria- there are a few people who are genuinely suffering from mental illness, who need other help which has nothing to do with aligning their gender. Obviously it’s important to redirect those people to the right treatment for them, but it does have the unwanted side effect of making transgendered people feel as though, once again, they might be ‘making it up’. Vicky was just happy and excited to be following the path that would eventually lead to her full physical transition.

I was devastated. No, I was furious. We hadn’t even told anyone that she was anything but Anthony, and any minute now Anthony was going to have breasts. Also Vicky said she needed to start living ‘in role’ dressing as a woman, changing her bank details and driving license to Victoria. This is also a very important part of the transitional journey. Some find the cold hard reality of transition, or living as a woman who looks and sounds like a man, just too hard. Sometimes they start but the reaction and anger of family and friends is just too much to bare. In their fantasy version, transition is the thing that is going to make everything all right. In reality, at least for a time, it adds a huge extra pile of troubles and does nothing to dissipate the ones you came in with. Some people give up at first, but then find that, difficult as it is, and what ever the cost in relationships and painful surgery, they just have to do it. It takes a lot of courage to sort yourself out when you’re transgendered.

I told her I needed more time. A lot more time. Well, I may have shouted that actually. I shouted a lot. I felt like I was fighting for my children’s happiness, for my world that was crumbling around me at speed. It is easy from the perspective of partner to say, ‘wait, not yet, its not the right time’ but for the transgendered person who has finally reached the point , after a whole lifetime, of saying ‘I can’t do this anymore’ waiting another half hour is too much.

How long must another few months be for a woman who has been forced to live as a man for 40 years. I got it, really I did, but I truly needed more time to come to terms with this new reality. The strength of her need to move forward and the very real need I felt for more time to understand this shuddered between us like a steel girder about to snap.

Vicky couldn’t slow down though, no matter how much I wept and shouted and begged and bullied, no matter how much I said don’t do this, the avalanche crashed on. And all through this, we still loved each other and felt lost when the other wasn’t there. We were also trying to keep as much normality as we possibly could for the children and for our own sanity. I knew by this time, that I wanted to stay and somehow, somehow make this work. That sounds like a very positive statement, but maybe the more accurate truth is I knew I didn’t want to leave and therefore somehow had to make it work. No matter how strange things were, the thought of not being a couple anymore made no sense. I couldn’t visualize it. Although some things were changing, other much deeper things were the same and I couldn’t and wouldn’t walk away from them. Is that, I wonder, how my mother felt when my father’s illness changed him so radically just a year into their marriage? In a strange mirror image of my own situation, her husband still looked like himself, though paralyzed down his right side. His mind though was very damaged. My mother sometimes described it as though all his faults and failings had been magnified by the damage to his brain, and which of us could come out of such a process as a tolerable human being? She stayed with him because she refused to believe he was gone, and she loved him. I wanted to stay because I too could not believe the person I had fallen in love with had gone, evaporated. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or as the lovely child of a transgendered women remarked, ‘same sweetie, different wrapper’. Intellectually I understood, but my heart was a long way behind.

We hadn’t told Ellie yet. I dreaded it, but she had to know what was going on, or one day she would bump into Vicky and that would be a hundred times worse. It was nearly her sixteenth birthday and we agreed we would wait until after that before I would sit down and talk to her. Vicky’s euphoria seemed to protect her from the awfulness that was unfolding around her. All she could see was the wonderful prize of freedom just ahead. She felt hurt that I couldn’t see how wonderful it was. My distress was disloyal. My requests for her to slow down were unfeeling. If I really loved her then surely I would support her. I felt just as let down, just as confused. Why couldn’t she see how hard this was? If she really loved me, she would slow down. Surely she could see how crucial that was. One thing I knew by now though. If I was actually embarking on this journey with Vicky, I couldn’t do it alone. I needed someone to talk to, someone who wouldn’t be hurt by my inability to rejoice. Eventually everyone would have to be told. That was a huge task ahead and every step off it frightened me, and this was the sort of thing I couldn’t believe anyone had ever had to tell anyone before. How on earth do you start such a conversation? I remembered the old joke of the sergeant told to inform a soldier his mother had died. “All those with a mother still living step forward...not so fast Perkins”. Maybe I could try, “ All those without a transexual sister in law step forward...”. Brutal but effective.

The first person I told was my twin sister. We were driving down to visit our dad, who was in a nursing home. After years of very extreme behaviour he had mellowed into a sweet slightly bonkers old man. His speech was not good and he was in a wheelchair. Both these things made him considerably easier to deal with than the mobile talking version. That may sound callous, but trust me, it was an improvement. It was possible to feel closeness, even love for this version of dad. Every now and then he would give you one of his knowing winks that meant, ‘you think I don’t know but I do’. What he thought I thought he didn’t know was part of his own private madness and involved a lot of numbers scribbled on any piece of paper he could lay his hands on. But it didn’t matter. Part of his madness was that he didn’t seem to know his son was dead. That he was protected from the awful pain of loosing his precious son, was an unexpected side effect of his illness, an illness that had taken so much from him over the years. At least it gave him that. So, driving down to see dad, with my twin sister as captive audience, I chose my moment. I was glad I couldn’t look at her as I drove, it was easier to tell her this extraordinary thing without watching her reaction.

I started by saying that recently Anthony had been going through some very tough personal stuff and that we had finally got to the bottom of it. My sister said she had noticed something was up and had wanted to talk to me but I’m such a private person. Well, yes, whatever I imagined about my powers of deception, my sister had been on to that one for years. The moment had come, I’d said there was something up, now I had to say what. ‘Anthony is a transexual and he is really a she. She is called Victoria and she is going to transition over the next few years. She told me six months ago and you’re the first person I’ve said a word to.’ If I’d been writing for a soap opera, I’d have been sacked for implausible plot lines. My sister was, at first, speechless, then amazed and then very very worried. I focused on the road.

It was a relief to be able to say these things out loud, but it also made it real, in a way it hadn’t been just talking to Vicky about it. Now there was no way back. All hope of talking Vicky out of being this, of keeping my life with Anthony, was gone. We talked about the best way to handle this for the whole family. Especially the children and Vicky’s mum. My sister was very concerned at the burden this would put on my children, especially as they had both already been through so much. She had hoped it would be plain sailing from here on. I agreed with her, It was all very sensible stuff. We also came up with a time frame for transition. I should ask Vicky to wait until Ellie had left home before she appeared in anything but jeans and a T-shirt. Dressing ‘more androgynously’ was code for no dresses no lipstick. It was also code for, ‘don’t actually do this - we’ll pretend we accept you as long as you show no signs of being anything but Anthony’. I thought it sounded a terrific plan.

Vicky was very pleased that I had told my sister, but a bit put out that I hadn’t told her in advance that’s what I was planning. It wasn’t the last time that I was to come up against the gap between Vicky’s dream of how things would happen and my actions. To be honest though, I hadn’t been planning it. The moment was just right so I spoke. Was that selfish? She was my sister after all, but then it was Vicky’s condition not mine. I was very attached to being in control of every aspect of our future life together. It was as though I had decided Vicky had forfeit the right to make any decisions by coming out as transgendered. Everything that followed would be as I dictated it, because she owed it to me. She had dropped this huge challenge in my lap and the price for my staying would be a lifetime of doing everything exactly as I wanted.

It wasn’t just that this idea would have changed our marriage into punishment and compensation, not a particularly healthy way of life, it would never have worked. That was one of the many dead ends I tried going down before finding the real way forward.

In April, tired of waiting for the NHS to spring into action, Vicky discovered a private clinic in London that could give her the psychiatric assessments she needed, the counselling I wanted her to have and most excitingly from her point of view, the hormones that would get her physical transition under way. This didn’t mean she was giving up on the NHS entirely, and at least what she was doing was a lot safer than the route many transgendered people took. The hormones needed for transition and other drugs that promised miraculous effects, were all available through the internet, and some took it upon themselves to self medicate, without any checks or blood tests to see what these hormones were doing to them. It was a dangerous gamble that I am glad Vicky, even at her most impatient, was not tempted to take.

About this time she asked if I would join an online support group for partners of transgendered people. The website was populated by all variations of gender dysphoric people. Transvestites, transexuals, those who felt themselves to be of a third sex, neither wholly male or female, and, I guess, guys who just liked wearing a frock every now and then and wanted to find out where the best thigh length boots size 10 could be found. Reading a few posts very quickly revealed how similar many peoples experience had been to Vicky’s. Early childhood awareness seemed the most common factor. Some were out and proud, living their lives fully as women, others dressed secretly when their wives were out, or had already divorced and found themselves in bitter battles to be allowed anywhere near their children. Some were happy, many were suffering great loneliness and anxiety. The posts were on the whole, painfully honest and pretty hard reading.

The partners board was off limits to the transgendered members, the idea being that partners could let off steam and get support from others who had found themselves unexpectedly married to a woman. So I posted:

Hi I am Emma, the wife of Victoria C. She’s been posting quite a lot on Angels, so I expect some of you know her already. Anyway Victoria told me of her true transgendered nature just over six months ago and of her desire to transition and live as the woman she truly is. I knew Vicky enjoyed cross dressing from almost the beginning of our relationship, and I’ve always been fine with that, but, the desire to transition was a bit of a surprise (much like hurricane Katrina was a bit windy!).

It has taken time, lots of discussion, lots of tears, a bit of shouting, but we are still here and heading forward together. We haven’t told my two children from my first marriage yet, but we are getting ready to - GCSEs first! So by summertime Vicky will be well and truly ‘out’.

I waited a few days and then, there were replies. I was at last in touch with at least one other woman who had been down this path and survived. She was incredibly kind and spoke of so many feelings and fears that I recognised. She was also further down this road than we were. Her partner, she no longer said husband, was getting ready for the final surgery, in which male genitalia would become female.

Let me at this point make one thing clear. In gender reassignment surgery - GCS - NOTHING gets chopped off. OK? I’m sure that any man imagining this process has nightmarish visions of his manhood being lopped off and dumped in a bin. Well that’s not what happens. If you are eating, look away now. In the UK this is the most common method. The erectile tissue is removed, the ‘tube’ is inverted. Nerve endings from the head of the penis form the clitoris. The testes are removed and the skin over them used to create labia. The end result is very convincing. Every effort is made to create a fully functioning vagina, repositioning, but not cutting, the nerves. Sometimes, because everyones body is a bit different, more tissue has to be moved about, and the more you cut and reattach, the greater the risk of tissue rejection. The urethra is also repositioned to allow a more female form of peeing and the end result should be indistinguishable from any other woman’s vagina.

It was unexpected to discover that I needed to remind Vicky that most women don’t spend their coffee breaks comparing labia size. Another side effect maybe of being raised male, where compare and contrast seems to be the law of the land. I suppose if you’ve never been in a women only changing room, it’s possible you wouldn’t be aware of the different atmosphere. Competitive discussions about vagina depth just don’t happen. Then again, when most of us discovered our bodies, we were considerably younger and ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ was quite normal. I’m supportive of Vicky’s journey of self discovery, but there, I very much draw the line.

Plenty can go wrong and it will knock you out for months not weeks and you can end up at the end of it all with no sensation at all. Not something one would do on a whim. Not something, really, I think a man would do, but then, a transgendered woman isn’t a man. Some transgendered women don’t ever have this operation, sometimes because they can’t for medical reasons, and sometimes because they don’t want to take the risk. They too, are not men.

It was a huge relief to be able to talk about how things were going to someone who understood from the inside. It was also rather worrying to note that this partners board had a membership of about three. If continuing partners of transgendered women ever had a get together, clearly a phone box would be adequate, if not a little roomy.

What had happened to all the other wives? Through the online support groups I had gradually come to see that there were dozens of other women who had married a man who turned out to be a transexual woman. For the most part they formed a huge statistic of sadness. For most of these women the discovery that their partner was transgendered meant, quite suddenly, that they had lost their husband as much as if he had died. Transition meant the very real physical end of their husband and they found themselves married to a woman. They were heterosexual women who suddenly found themselves in a same sex relationship. For the vast majority of them there could be no happy ending. The online forum was full of transgendered women bewailing their wives’ unwillingness to change, to ‘become’ lesbian. It was as unrealistic a dream as a transgendered woman ‘becoming’ a man, but they didn’t seem able to see it. You are what you are. The heart wants what the heart wants. The result was often, but not always broken families. Some couples managed to keep their love and friendship, whilst acknowledging that the physical relationship was over, but I don’t think they’re a huge group either. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I don’t think any of these people went into their marriages thinking they would get a nice family set up going and then blow it apart by transitioning. I don’t think any of their wives thought, I could be in a same sex relationship, but I won’t out of spite. Still, it wasn’t hugely encouraging to see the tiny number of transgendered marriages that survived intact. It did make me realize that we were lucky. Vicky hadn’t found that she now wanted to be with a man, and I was just as happy to be with a woman. What were the odds of that outcome? Pretty small I think.

Sometimes Vicky and I would go out for the evening to central London, and she would be able to dress up and wear make-up. I found it very very hard. I knew I had to try and get used to this new reality. In theory I would convince myself it was no big deal. If I chose not to be bothered by peoples looks or comments, they would bounce off me. My torments though came from inside myself. I could still see my husband underneath the lipstick. If I held her hand, it was his hand. I found that very difficult and I would sometimes look away so that I could imagine I was still with Anthony, eventually looking back to see Vicky and experiencing the pain of losing ‘him’ all over again. Why I kept banging my head against that particular brick wall, I can’t tell you. I just wasn’t ready to let go of ‘him’ yet, and holding hands was a way of holding on.

I rarely did hold her hand though. She looked every bit the dodgy transvestite and I was just plain embarrassed by her obviously male physique incongruous beneath the floral silk blouse and necklace. Sometimes I would be fine and other times it was unbearable. Once we got ten feet outside the car park and I just froze. It was too much, the feeling that everyone was staring, that people were pointing and laughing. I wanted to be the kind of person who would bravely stand next to Vicky and care nothing for what the world thought. I believed myself to be that kind of person, but I wasn’t. I did care. I had loved walking alongside my handsome husband noticing the envious glances of other women. Foolish and childish, but I had loved it. I felt so proud to be his, and now? Now I felt like a freak. Even if Vicky couldn’t choose who she was, I had chosen to be with her, and all these strangers were judging me. Well that’s how it felt. I’m sure a few people did have a bit of a stare, but so what? I expect I stared at some of them. That’s how I feel now. Then I was rooted to the spot with shame and the hideousness of my situation. Vicky was very hurt, why wouldn’t she be? I’d encouraged her to dress up, told her she looked lovely, waited until we were in the middle of China town and then bailed on her.

On another occasion we went to a National Trust house for a day out. In my head this was going to be an easy trip. Not in the centre of London, very little risk of bumping into crowds of jeering teenagers. National trust properties do not hold many attractions for teenagers, and if they are there, they are generally so locked in the injustice of their predicament, that they rarely look up. When we got there though I became overwhelmed by embarrassment. It wasn’t Vicky’s fault, she looked very nice, very unspectacular, but I couldn’t walk with her. I strode on ahead consoling myself that no one could tell we were together, let alone, God forbid, a couple. She was desperately hurt. I kept telling her I was staying and supporting her, and yet I only seemed able to stay and pull support from under her at every opportunity. I’m not trying to demonize myself here. I know that I was trying to come to terms with an enormous life change, which most women walk away from on day one. I don’t blame them for walking away, and I don’t blame me for finding it incredibly hard, I’m just telling you what the consequences were.

Still, practice makes perfect. We continued going out together and gradually got used to going into restaurants and correcting waiters who called her sir. An unexpected problem was that I felt ashamed at being seen as having chosen a transgendered partner. Vicky after all had not chosen to be transgendered. Most people could understand that, but I - I had chosen to be with this person. I wanted people to understand that I had chosen a normal man. THIS had happened afterwards. THIS wasn’t my fault. That, I felt was my truth, and if Vicky was going to have her truth recognised then me too thank you very much. Public spaces were a very stressful experience for me in that first year. If we could have just never gone out again I would have been happier.

Sometimes I would find the staring particularly hard because people would wait until Vicky’s back was turned and then point and laugh. It didn’t seem to matter that I was looking directly at them. For some reason petrol stations were particularly bad. I remember as Vicky walked back to the car, having paid inside the shop, the cashier called the other staff over to the window and they stood and laughed with no idea of the hurt they were causing. Well with no concern for the hurt they were causing anyway.

I’m sure people, particularly teenagers, don’t spend much time considering the pain they cause pointing out someone’s difference. I experienced it with my son, with people making audible comments and tutting when his behaviour didn’t conform. Now I was experiencing it with Vicky. To be honest I was getting a bit tired of turning the other cheek.

I amaze myself looking back at this time how very much I cared what people thought. I had always seen myself as someone who accepted the rainbow variety of humanity. I had gay friends but beyond condemning homophobia, I didn’t give much thought to what their lives might be like day to day. Did they have to put up with comments from narrow minded strangers. Did they get ‘spotted’ the fact that they were a couple. Never? Sometimes? What must that be like? To be regarded as odd just for being yourself. I had no idea, well, I’d had no idea. I was beginning to find out. Before this though, I had intellectually supported anyone’s right to express their sexual orientation, but at the same time enjoyed the benefits of being half of a heterosexual couple in a heterosexual society. Booking a hotel room, going to a party where we didn’t know anyone, walking together around the supermarket. I had never had to question my right to do those things unmolested. Big companies are certainly more switched on than small ones. Individuals put in a situation where they could ask you questions, wanted to ask questions. Most people were surprisingly kind. Well I was surprised anyway. The vast majority of people who weren’t, were young, foolish and usually drunk. Not exactly a cross-section of society.

Drunk men and women are far more likely, when in the protective cover of a group, to shout out abuse or point and laugh loudly. I hated walking past pubs. The truth is though, Vicky was at far more risk when she was out on her own. My presence, as a ‘normal’ person, seemed to signal to other people that Vicky was not a ‘wierdo’, but a normal person too. When she was on her own she suffered far more verbal abuse than she ever did with me.

One aspect of Vicky going out on her own surprised me. She was rather worryingly unaware of the dangers that a single woman might face late at night on her own. I suppose these are the things mothers teach their little girls and don’t mention to their little boys. Being conditioned to be male Vicky had never had to think in this way and responded to my anxious warnings like a stroppy teenager convinced that such dangers were the fevered imaginings of the over-protective. Vicky though, for all her plucked eyebrows and nail polish, still had the strength of Anthony. It would have been an unwise mugger who attacked her.

I wondered what it was about her that was so threatening. Partly, I think it is the misunderstanding that cross-dressing is always, always sexual and parading about in public is forcing your private sexual desires onto strangers. Following on from that misapprehension is the idea that a transexual, even if they have undergone every surgery available to make them look naturally female, is perceived as a really committed transvestite who has just gone that little bit further to ‘get the look’. There is not much public understanding of the inner life of a transexual. When we were together though I was always quick to leap to her defense. My public support of her, if challenged, was much better than my private support, undermined as it was by so many fears and reservations.

For all these reasons then, holding hands was very difficult for me at. We had always held hands and cuddled in public without a shred of embarrassment. A greeting hug at the airport or a farewell kiss, All these things were natural and acceptable from a heterosexual couple in a heterosexual society. Now I mostly refused to hold her hand. Anything more was unthinkable. I didn’t want anyone to know the nature of our relationship. I was Vicky’s friend. Her kind accepting heterosexual friend. No one need judge me. She would try to take my hand and I would pull away. I would take her arm but after a few moments give it back. I absolutely would not kiss her in public. Not on the lips, not on the cheek. No kissing. People would stare. Maybe they would attack. I was very afraid. Kissing and holding hands in public were just two of the things I was loosing. Vicky was absolutely unable to see that I was loosing anything. Why, she wondered, couldn’t I just hold hands and kiss her in public. Easy. She could not contemplate the idea that her transition was taking anything from me. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to call her my wife. She could not see that I had been the wife, the only wife, and she had been the husband. Bacon and Eggs, Beans and Toast, Husband and Wife. I didn’t want to be wife. I had been wife to Anthony. I was not Vicky’s wife and she was not mine. Some people were happy to call each other wife she told me. That’s nice, I thought, I’m not one of them.

Vicky was determined that nothing essential was changing and that I was being stubborn in refusing to move swiftly to happily ever after. What was the big deal? She was the same person I had married, it was still the same. Well, some bits were the same, but some very important bits weren’t. Sometimes I thought I was going mad, because what seemed so reasonable and obvious to me, was utter nonsense to Vicky. Our discussions always became painful and angry. We always shouted. We didn’t really get any further forward. There was just so much pain on both sides. I couldn’t see how we would ever get beyond this. It was a time of great misery, but because we had only told my sister up to this point, and more importantly, not the children, we were still trying to maintain the illusion of business of usual. Running a normal happy family for the sake of the children sounds such a good idea, but who is a good enough actor, or so detached from their feelings that they can really successfully pull it off?

We decided we needed to do something fun. Vicky was very keen to see ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert’, the stage musical based on the australian film. The story revolves around a drag queen going to meet his son for the first time. His fears about how that meeting will go, and whether or not his son will accept him. It definitely struck a chord with us as we got closer to telling Ellie. The show was of course, wonderful. More feathers and crazy costumes per square foot than the House of Lords. In between all that though, It was surprisingly moving. When we got outside the theatre Vicky suddenly pulled me to one side, collapsed into my arms and sobbed her heart out. All the fear about how Ellie might react just hit her, in the middle of Cambridge circus. As I hugged her and listened to her talking about this enormous weight of emotion I thought ‘Thank God, now we can move forward together’. Finally I felt she was facing her fears as well as her hopes. Before this I had felt like the bad part of good cop bad cop, with me delivering all the negative stuff and Vicky in danger of turning into Julie Andrews and bursting into a rousing chorus of ‘my favourite things’.

It was something of a breakthrough. I also began to understand that part of my struggle was caused by trying to move and stay in the same place all at the same time. There were only two ways forward. Stay and embrace the person Vicky was or accept I couldn’t and leave. I had been trying to do both, everyday I was questioning whether I could accept this but not deciding and neither staying nor leaving. It wasn’t fair to Vicky and it wasn’t fair to me. My body, stuck on the treadmill of my indecision, had rewarded me with coughs and colds and niggling sore throats that just wouldn’t go away. I knew I had to make my mind up and get on with it. I knew it but I found it very hard to actually do. I would think to myself, yes, I have made my decision, I’m staying, I can live like this and then minutes later be overwhelmed with fear. How could I possibly stay, how could I put my children through this. I found myself getting through the most difficult bits by telling myself that I was probably going to leave. I would call her Vicky and then in my head say ‘Anthony, Anthony Anthony’. Even if no one would know, I would secretly hang on to him. It was fairly nuts and the truth was I didn’t even mean it anymore. I knew Vicky was the real person she had always existed, with a top layer of Anthony, and I had fallen in love with all of him and that meant I had fallen in love with her. I didn’t want a life without her. This was the process of letting Anthony go. It wasn’t going to be done anywhere but in my head and it was going to be done alone. The choice was not Anthony or Vicky. The choice was let go of Anthony or leave, so at last, I began to let go.

My mood by the end of May 2009 was broadly hopeful. I felt I was getting to grips with life and that I would be able to control the telling of the children at the right time, a time which I would decide. I was still regularly entering into discussions online, sometimes with partners but more often with transgendered women. I wanted to be a voice they might hear from the other side of the fence that they might get a glimpse at how it felt being the partner.

One of the biggest issues any mother will struggle with is causing their child pain. when they’re new born you won’t let anyone with a cold near them, believing that with good enough care they will never get sick, never graze their knee, never hear an unkind word. This is called a ‘new’ parent. It passes. Thinking about asking my children to take on this challenge, I couldn’t help remembering my own journey thus far and wanting to protect them from it. The inner mother tiger engaged. I had to remind myself that challenge was not all bad. A person who never had a cold has no immune system built up. A person who has never been challenged has no idea how to cope with life.

Now we were moving forward together, in a more realistic way. I felt, for the first time in a long time, like we were a couple again. I was still very anxious about telling the children but, I trusted them to be the people I knew them to be. Not telling them wasn’t an option... eventually they would notice the tall dark woman at the breakfast table.