Chapter Six

As the Autumn went on, Spring arrived. The effect of not living together all the time and regular sensible counselling began to work. There were signs of the person I knew and loved re-emerging. Vicky began to face the painful consequences, not just of her condition, which she couldn’t help, but of her actions, which, up to a point, she could. She saw that the people she loved had been hurt. She also began to understand that everyone around her was not against her but actually trying to help get her through this process with an intact family.

For the first time in months I felt I could see our future together again. I wasn’t kidding myself. We weren’t through the tough stuff yet, after all we were still living apart, but Vicky I think, was beginning to see our separation as a temporary situation necessary to undo the damage caused previously. Sometimes she even seemed to understand that her step-daughter did still love her and even, sometimes, missed her. That understanding, transitory as it was, helped relieve the fear that fueled so much of her anger.

If it hadn’t been for Vicky’s terrible fear Ellie was lost to her, life might have begun to get back to normal, but she just could not leave it alone. Nor could she see the solution as in anyone’s control other than Ellie. It was a terrible responsibility to lay at the door of a teenager. As much as she shouted, ‘why can’t she understand, nothing’s changed, I’m the same’ I wanted to shout back, ‘everything has changed how could it be the same?’. These dual convictions, that Ellie was lost and only Ellie could put it right, were the hurricane that continued to tear through our family.

Ellie would open up to me about how distressed she felt to have lost the only father she ever felt proud of, and how much she missed him. She missed rock climbing with him, going to the movies, playing carpet football. These were huge huge steps and it required insight beyond her years to even begin to attempt them. I tried, more fool me, to share this with Vicky but her response was always the same - ‘she hasn’t lost anything, when is she going to understand that?’. What Vicky couldn’t understand was that however many things she could still be to Ellie, Dad wasn’t one of them.

My family certainly thought enough was enough. If Vicky wasn’t willing to give anyone time to adjust to her reality, they were certainly giving her no more time to ‘get it right’ with Ellie or with me. Standing outside the situation, the solution seemed clear to them, and if I didn’t see it, then I needed to have it explained to me.

My sister decided to explain it to me a week later. I had driven her husband and her to a local hospital where he was having minor surgery. Once he was admitted we went for for lunch. As we waited for our food to arrive my sister began to tell me how worried she was. Not so much for me, I was of course entitled to do whatever I wanted, but my children, specifically Ellie, because she was stuck in the middle of it all. For her, my sister was adamant, there was only one right answer. She was worried that I was putting my own happiness in front of my children’s and, blinded by my false belief that Vicky loved me, was going to ruin my children’s lives by ‘forcing’ them to accept her. I should have tried to explain to her that I didn’t see accepting a transgendered step parent as a bad thing for my children, rather as a positive experience that would help them to become more open loving people themselves, I should have said that I didn’t believe Vicky’s love for me or the children, was false, but I didn’t. I just sat there fuming with indignation, righteous or otherwise.

I pointed out in that over polite way that says, ‘I’m only speaking like this because I don’t have a baseball bat’, that Vicky and I were still living apart, though we missed each other dreadfully, that we were attending counselling together and doing everything we could to allow Ellie to come to terms with what had happened in her own time. I’m sure she could hear the anger in my voice.

My refusal to hear what she was saying or consider that I might be mistaken only emphasized to her how trapped I was in the belief that there was a future with Vicky. That was where I was wrong. The question to her was clear. Why a previously devoted mother should be so willing to forget her children’s well being could only mean that I was either unutterably selfish, and she wasn’t willing to think that of me, or possibly mentally unstable, which she considered possible. All of this had been said to me because she really loved me, she was trying to be as gentle as possible, but enough. Leave Vicky for the sake of my children or she didn’t feel able to continue having contact with me. Just as so many months earlier I had delivered my final trump card to Vicky, so my sister delivered it to me. If you really love me, you will leave.

I understand the sincerity of her concern and how painful it must have been to put everything we shared as twins on the line. I understand how genuinely worried she was. She could not see a way forward and she saw her much loved niece very distressed. Looking at it calmly from a distance I can see that. At the time I was furious. Outraged that she felt entitled to tell me how to live my life, how to raise my children, who I might love. But we were in a restaurant in Epsom and her husband was in surgery. I couldn’t leave. Instead I sat there in undisguised fury. That was our lowest point. She had put everything she had on the line for me and I had refused to conform. We would not speak for another three months.

For some people not speaking to a sibling for three months would be a quite standard state of affairs. For my twin sister and me it was traumatic. Being a twin is like being married from the very beginning of your existence. When we were born my mother put us in separate cots but we wouldn’t settle, finally she put us into the same cot and we apparently looked at each other as though to say ‘oh, there you are’. It had always been like that. We had, of course, quarrelled our way through childhood, but were utterly loyal to each other. We briefly went our separate ways in our early twenties, more to establish our individuality than anything, but we spoke regularly, even if we didn’t get to meet up. By the time our children arrived we made sure we saw each other nearly every day, and we certainly spoke every day. We ended up living very close to each other and felt we had the perfect arrangement. I was always there for her and she was always there for me. It is hard to explain to someone who isn’t a twin, the closeness of the relationship, or the pain of feeling it was compromised.

A few days later my mother repeated the message to me as I was driving her home. Again, no way out, I was a captive audience. I was, she said, putting my own needs in front of my children, the definition of an unfit mother. I was very hurt and so angry I couldn’t speak. When we got to her home I let her get out, slammed the door and drove off. Heavy on the accelerator. My mother is in her eighties, it wasn’t an OK thing to do. I regret it, but I was only feeling my anger, it blanked out anything else. My mother had said she would never reject me, no matter how wrong my choices were. Right then it didn’t seem much consolation.

So for the time being I had no support other than my friend Caroline who lived in Dorset. She gave me the best advice I have ever received. She said. ‘They love you but they’re angry and afraid. Don’t buy into their drama’. No indeed, I had quite enough of my own. Don’t buy into their drama. Step back and stop trying to control how other people feel. To these words of wisdom I added, ‘It’s all about the self’, ‘Life is a film not a photograph’, ‘keep speaking your truth’... These concentrated nuggets kept me going. The thing is, trite as they may seem, they are true. I had been doing all the things I was angriest at Vicky for. Trying to control how everyone felt and feeling let down when they had their own opinions. Ridiculous really.

My mother was very upset. The next day my sister told me over the phone, that my mother felt as though I had died. I suppose her image of me had been severely dented, but I didn’t feel I had done enough to be considered dead. I sent her an email and tried to explain, to apologize, to make it right again. I wanted my mother’s support and I was unused to not having it, but I couldn’t base my decisions on it, I loved her but I also loved Vicky and I didn’t want to have to choose. I’m sure that was a very unhappy time for my mother and I’m sorry I didn’t have an instant solution. We would get there in the end but it was a strange time in all our lives, we were so used to functioning as a family that loved and accepted each other and then there was this. It didn’t fit.

At the same time Ellie came to me and said she was ready to start calling Vicky, ‘Vicky’. She had given it a lot of thought and saw this as the next step to moving on. I was deeply impressed that she had thought all this out herself. When children are tiny their knowledge of the world is so linked to your own understanding, and then bit by bit, almost imperceptibly they start working out their own ideas, their own view of the world. It’s a miraculous process, like watching a butterfly emerging. Ellie was working this out, not because I had explained it to her, or told her how or what to think, but because she had her own thoughts on the subject. Well, I was amazed anyway.

My mum phoned me that evening and I told her again how sorry I was that she had been hurt. I had always been aware and indeed proud of how open minded my mother was. She challenged bigotry and prejudice wherever she found it. Suddenly I found my choices excluded from the list of things she would tolerate and I could not make sense of it. Especially as the reason I had the kind of heart and mind that could accept my husband becoming my wife, was because of her and the way she had brought me up. Well, when you think someone is wrong and they’re making bad decisions, I guess you have to tell them. Especially if they’re your daughter and you want their happiness very much. I don’t think she could see my life with Vicky as a realistic outcome. What else could she have done? What else would I have done if it were my child making a decision I absolutely believed to be wrong?

Although there are some women who make it through their husband’s transition with an intact functioning relationship, the vast majority do not and there’s no getting away from that. Most who have chosen to commit to a relationship with a man do not want and are not able to have, a relationship with a woman. The heart wants what the heart wants. Many of those partners would not even see their transgendered partner AS a woman, but rather as a man suffering from some extreme form of mental delusion.

I posted this at the time, not that I expected anyone to come up with a solution.

The last week has been really really disappointing. My family, who I thought were behind us are, it turns out, behind me as long as I dump Vicky. I can’t begin to describe how painful this is. My first clue was when my twin sister started ignoring any comments I made about things Vicky and I had done together. She would then simply continue talking about life as though Vicky had evaporated. My mum then decided to tell me that not only did she not trust Vicky because of how this situation has come about (Vicky suspecting she was trans but not telling me until after we were married) but now doesn’t believe that Vicky ever loved me or loves me now. She also told me this is how my other sister feels and they are all concerned that I will ‘weaken’ and let Vicky move back in ignoring the unspeakable disaster this would be for Ellie and Rob.

When I tried to say that Ellie is actually talking to me about her feelings and we are moving forward and of course both Vicky and I put Ellie’s needs top of our list, she said ‘things’ were said in France (when Ellie was on holiday with my sister). Well I know what ‘things’ were said in France, and Ellie was perfectly entitled to say them and we are moving forward. My family seem to have decided on some marvelous sacrifice that I must make in order to still be a good mother. I must not see Vicky until Ellie leaves home, then, if I’m lucky, I’m allowed to try and start a relationship. In the meantime I should live as a single parent, steering Rob through his suicidal moments and steering Ellie through A levels and into university, and then sitting on my own in a corner until I am needed again.

I don’t think so.

The bottom line is, as well as loosing all but one of my friends, again most will support ‘me’ but not ‘us’, I now lose my family. If I sound bitter, that is because I am. All I am doing is standing by the person I love in sickness and in health, better or worse etc etc, as promised. For this I am now dumped by my friends and family. Yes I can make new friends, but not a new mum or a new twin.

Looking back I cringe at the level of righteous self-pity I poured into every statement. My own feelings had become so much more important to me than anyone else’s. I had in mind the response my family ‘should’ have been giving me. I had chosen a difficult life, staying with a transexual partner through transition, now I deserved unending support and understanding. Like a teenager trying to change a lightbulb, I waited for the universe to revolve around me.

Logically I could see that most people had a weaker imperative to find their way through the barriers because Vicky wasn’t their partner, just a member of their extended family. Even Ellie said that ultimately this wasn’t her life and she understood that the acceptance of someone as a life partner is different from the acceptance of someone as a step-parent. So it would probably take them longer, and, as we had found with some friends, that might mean never. The level of loss for them was on the scale of ‘that’s a shame, what’s for dinner?’.

So much for the majority. I wanted to stay with the person I had married even with a new name and gender. I would sometimes repeat that sentence in my head and think ‘how extraordinary, who would have guessed I would be ok with such a thing?’, but I was. The bottom line was I loved this individual human being and I wanted to be with her, so I had to find my way through the barriers of expectation and conformity and remember what was important.

My family seemed to have decided that a happy relationship with me was possible as long as we didn’t mention Vicky. Not a long term solution, but we would have to work that out in our own time. All I could do was not let myself get upset by their decision to ‘never’ see Vicky again and trust that ‘never’ was never as long as advertised.

I was certainly hoping it wouldn’t last all the way to Christmas. I define myself as Christian, while my family are all atheists and Christmas had always been at my place. Faith aside I have always embraced festiveness with unashamed childlike excitement. Those around me have indulged my desire for cosiness and tinsel on an industrial scale, able to go safely to their own homes once they’d had enough. The best part had always been the gathering of family and friends. If I got wind that someone was looking at a solo December 25th I asked them to join us. The more the merrier. Now I write this down it seems rather intimidating, this deranged woman accosting every passing stranger like an over-reformed Scrooge, but I never gave anyone mulled wine and minced pies against their will. As far as I know. The thought of not being able to spend Christmas with all my family, and Vicky and my children was too awful to contemplate. How would that even be Christmas? Once again I found myself not in control and much as I tried to get it into perspective, my longing for everyone together and happy, was a physical ache I couldn’t fix.

I looked at the post I made on line about this most painful subject, and noticed it was only mid-October. Like I said, Christmas is a big deal for me.

For a while there was a new life. It didn’t involve daily contact with my sister, which I missed dreadfully. I really began to struggle with the isolation. My mother would call, but wouldn’t come over if Vicky was going to be there. She would chat about anything but Vicky and talked about me as though I were single. It was loving but surreal. I had also lost contact with my oldest friend. She had been very honest and said she had tried to come to terms with knowing a transexual, but she just couldn’t. I came as a pair that was no longer acceptable in her world, so what could either of us do. We too had been used to calling each other regularly and that too just stopped. What I didn’t know was that she kept trying, and thinking and working it through. It was a long time before we made contact again, but we did and now that moment that seemed so permanent, like the Berlin Wall, is just a footnote in the history of our friendship. At the time though, I thought my friend was lost to me and it hurt like hell.

All this meant that on a daily basis I was alone. Only my children spoke to me, but of course that never involved Vicky or how I was feeling, and quite right too, your children are not the right people to dump your emotional struggles on. It was very lonely.

I felt like I was suffocating and no one even noticed. Or worse, maybe they did notice but they didn’t care. We were in some hellish limbo, when Ellie and I both got flu, Vicky could only help by dropping groceries at the door. It was insane. I wanted my family back. It was an unusual family I’ll grant you, a mother, a transexual step-parent, an autistic son and Ellie, but it was mine and I started to feel that if my family could have supported us and actively helped us to deal with the challenges, we would not be living apart now. Finding a home for my resentment I decided to try not caring what my family thought. I wasn’t very good at it.

All this was confusing for Ellie who was being asked to accept Vicky while her extended family didn’t. In fact they wouldn’t speak to Vicky or acknowledge her existence. How, I wondered, was my child supposed to work this all out on her own in the face of such attitudes?

By the middle of November Vicky and I decided that I should talk to Ellie about ending the separation. Despite my efforts, she had been perfectly able to see how miserable I had been, and she no more wanted to sell our home and move away from the area than I did. Vicky was not a monster and she understood the behaviour of the summer had been temporary. She was willing to give it another go. So we all decided we were ready to try again.

On the 16th of November, Vicky came home. There were hugs and tears all round. We were a family again. Two days later I broke the news to my mother. She came over in the daytime while Vicky was out and she was not pleased. In her mind Vicky was no longer trustworthy. She was concerned that Vicky could ‘turn’ at any moment and might even physically harm Ellie or me. The extreme behaviour of the previous summer was the ‘real’ Vicky, and all this calm thoughtfulness an act. I think we managed a sensible discussion but we were obviously not going to agree. In the end she went to have tea with my sister nearby. They wanted me to join them but not with Vicky. It wasn’t a hugely tempting offer. I’d already had a day of having my ill-judgement described in minute detail and I didn’t fancy more of the same. Tea with a family who are nobly standing by you despite your unacceptable life choices is not as much fun as it sounds. Really. Imagine how much fun it is then halve it. It’s less fun than that.

This would have made me miserable were it not for the fact that my family proper - Vicky and the kids and me - were a family again. My son had asked Vicky and me to take him to a Goth gig and Ellie seemed happier and relaxed with Vicky back home. That’s all I had wanted, so why spoil it by being greedy and wishing for things that were out of my control?

Another partner of a transexual once described her memories of her husband as like a fondly remembered ex. At the time I found it hard to imagine being able to look at my wedding photos, or remember times we had spent together as husband and wife without the almost unbearable heartache that seemed to accompany such memories.

I decided I was ready to spend some time looking at a particular picture of ‘us’ before any of this had happened. We looked so very happy, our arms wrapped around each other, smiling like nothing could hurt us ever again. Knowing that somewhere inside Vicky was trapped changed some of that apparent happiness, but not all of it. We really had been in love, we really had found our souls mates. I’m not saying I didn’t have a jolly good cry, remembering all the things I loved about ‘him’, but at the same time it was looking at someone who I had known, but I didn’t know anymore. ‘He’ had died and I would never forget him. I would allow myself to remember ‘him’ and cry if I needed to, but I was also ready to embrace what I hadn’t lost. I had put the picture on the mantle-piece over the last few weeks, but now I felt able to put it away with our wedding photos. That was my past, Vicky was my future. I had memories with ‘him’ and I would never forget them, but I was now building memories with Vicky that I could also look back on with happiness.

I think this was at least the beginning of genuine acceptance. There had been several false dawns, but this time it was real. I wrote online at the end of November:

Yes I want my Love to be happy and true to herself, but I loved the man she was and she didn’t, so the happiness I thought we had was, ultimately, an illusion. The happiness we have now is the only happiness available, so there’s no choice, and maybe that’s why I sometimes feel angry and even cheated. I don’t feel like I chose this life with all it’ challenges - but I would rather this than lose my love.

Add into this the confusion of children, and Vicky often becomes overwhelmed with guilt at what she has ‘done’ to us. It’s then I have to remind her that she didn’t ‘do’ this to us, nature ‘did’ this to her and we face it as a family, as we would any other challenge.

Sometimes it’s easy and everything feels very peaceful, other times I want my husband back and it makes me so very very sad, but the truth is I haven’t lost my husband - she just went through a metamorphosis which she couldn’t stop. Which is why my nickname for her is ‘butterfly’

Unsurprisingly the butterfly is an international symbol for transgendered people. Maybe not just because a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but maybe too because of the struggle involved in breaking free from the cocoon. To transition requires a huge amount of strength and persistence. I suppose if you know you’re a butterfly it’s no good staying in the cocoon, you have to fight free. It is eventually, an inspiring experience to watch someone break free. It is one of the things I love and admire about Vicky.

We lived quietly like this, getting back to normal, accepting the areas that were unresolved and healing from the year so far. About a week before Christmas a crisis hit. Suddenly what gender Vicky was became supremely unimportant. Far from being a problem she became a rock of support and that didn’t go unnoticed. I don’t know how we would have coped if it had happened 6 months earlier, we would have been in no position to be a help to anyone. The crisis involved several people very dear to me and it is not my story to tell, so I won’t, but it focused our minds entirely elsewhere.

My mother rallied round and agreed to spend Christmas with us, despite her continuing reservations about Vicky. It made me very very happy to know she would be there, but my sister and her family would not come. We hadn’t spoken for weeks and all information came through my mother. I didn’t understand. We needed all hands on deck right then. I kept hoping that at the last minute they would change their mind and turn up. I promised my mother there would definitely be enough food if they did. Or they could come for tea. I know it’s only a day, but it’s amazing how it has the power to define how your life is going. If you’re lonely, you’ll be ten times more lonely on Christmas day. Everything gets magnified. Or maybe that’s just me.

Our Christmas card count was suffering, despite my sending out a shed load. We were down to about twenty. I made the mistake of moaning about this online to the transgendered community and got a sharp reality check. People told me how they would be spending Christmas on their own, separated and ostracized from their entire families, parents, partners and children, who they were prevented from contacting. Suddenly my twenty Christmas cards seemed pretty damned wonderful. The online support group was such a necessary thing. Vicky and I now had each other, but so many people transitioned in complete isolation forced to lose everything and everyone from before they came out. Anyone who thinks you would ‘choose’ to bring such a fire storm down on yourself just so you could wear a skirt has seriously missed the point.

Christmas day came and we celebrated. Vicky’s mother was also there. She had proved a bit of a dark horse. My own expectation had been that she wouldn’t tolerate anything so far from her narrow Spanish-Catholic view of the world. When Vicky had gone over to her house to tell her I had waited to pick up the pieces following the ‘you are no longer my child’ speech. I knew that had happened to other transgendered people and I was braced. Instead she had told Vicky, ‘you are my child and I will always love you’. She didn’t understand why this was happening, I’m not even sure she really got what was happening, She thought, maybe even thinks, that her son liked dressing up in ladies clothes and wanted to play at being a girl. but that made her acceptance all the more important. It didn’t stop her popping the odd masculine pronoun into conversation or telling her friends that the size 11 ladies heels in the hall were mine. Still, she never ever turned her back on us and for that, I thank her.

The one aspect of Vicky’s transition that seemed to upset her was the name change. Why not Antonia? She wanted to know. It’s a tricky one. Many transitioners do simply feminize their name, signifying, I suppose, that it’s still them. Same sweetie, different wrapper,. For others, and Vicky was certainly one of those, the choice of a female name was a deeply personal statement about how they were not that male person. Not Anthony with an extra ‘A’ or a man with one less appendage.

I kept hoping my sister would drop by on Christmas day, but she didn’t. One of my sister’s best and worst characteristics is she is stubborn as a mule. She would tell you this is a quality we share and I would not disagree. She had said she wouldn’t come for Christmas and she didn’t. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was however very hurt. My mother stuck between two people she loved could do nothing. I shed tears over it and I told my mother that no matter what my sister did, what decisions she made I would never ever have done this to her. Then again, she’s never done anything that worried me as much as she clearly found our situation, so I haven’t ever had to prove that statement.

A year previously we had been living a lie. Pretending that Vicky wasn’t Vicky. We had had months of real pain ahead of us and we had had no idea how hard it was going to be. We saw in 2010 together, we were ourselves, both of us. Vicky was well into her hormone treatment and her breasts were developing. She hadn’t worn male clothes since August and everyone we knew, knew who we were. We had both screamed and shouted, we had questioned and struggled, but here we were, still a couple. We had received much counselling, much advice and much criticism. Still, we received it as Emma and Vicky.

Could we have done it better? There’s an unanswerable question. I know couples who have been married for twenty-five years before one of them has admitted to being transgendered and others who are not even married yet, but trying to get there. Can you choose someone when they’re not quite themselves yet? Ask anyone who fell in love as a teenager. We had been together for six years when Vicky spoke out. Would timing have made a difference. I suspect if on that first evening Anthony had said, ‘by the way I expect to be undergoing corrective surgery soon because I’m actually a woman’, I wouldn’t have married her. My instinct says life without Vicky is unthinkable. It would certainly have been quieter.

Within the transgendered community the debate about when and indeed if to tell a sexual partner of your medical history, is not just a question of manners. Once a transgendered person has slept with someone and not mentioned their biological, social history, it is too late. Some do tell partners after this crucial moment, but the ones who do so in a public space are safer than the ones who do so in private, or worse still get ‘outed’ by some old photograph or bank statement accidentally discovered. It is dangerous to assume you know how another person will react. Statistically more walk away than stay at that moment, and a few do a lot worse. There’s also the problem of men who would specifically like to date a transgendered woman. Not a problem if both parties are happy with that, but definitely a problem if it is insulting to be identified as fundamentally different from any other woman. Like being sought out because you’ve had a growth removed. “Tumors turn me on” is not a phrase any girl wants to hear, and also, “It turns me on that your vagina had to be constructed out of a penis” may not do it for everyone either. When I look at all the perils and pitfalls of dating for the transgendered woman, I think Vicky is luckier, and safer, with me.