Transcript part 1:
Jane Garvey: Now, as I mentioned, we are looking at the impact of transitioning on marriage and family relationships. Now yesterday if you heard the show, you'll have heard Stephanie Jones, a former fire officer and parent who, when she transitioned from male to female, became as she describes it, a stranger in her own home.
Today, the experience of a woman we're calling 'Michelle'. Now she has chosen to be anonymous and her words have been voiced up by an actor. Her ex-husband transitioned after they'd been married for 16 years. I asked her why she wanted to talk about what had happened.
Michelle: I really wanted to talk about it because women in my position currently are not heard and we're not really allowed to say how this feels. This blows our life apart and there doesn't seem to be any voice for the collateral damage. Some transactivists are frightening, aggressive. Women have been threatened for just saying that this is not a positive experience for us. I have no problem with people wanting to rewrite their own history, to relabel themselves as they wish. I don't know they have the right to rewrite my ... my life, my history.
There's a very articulate transwidow, as a lot of us call ourselves, because really, the man we knew has gone. It's a sort of living bereavement. He's gone but he's still walking around. A woman called Shannon Thrace has a TED Talk and she said, 'you know, I experienced my life with this heterosexual man, I wasn't a lesbian, and I was expected overnight to change my sexuality and rewrite my own story.' That's why I refer to my husband as 'he'. It's not to be controversial or political, but that's what I know, that's my lived experience. His feelings and experiences are valid and true and worthy of respect but I think mine should be too.
This is really equal rights. It isn't talked about. Most of the media coverage of families is about successful transitions where families stay together and there are lots and lots of us where that hasn't happened and actually, women and children are estranged from people who have done this.
JG: And you feel you have to stay anonymous?
M: Absolutely. It is terrifying that I couldn't possibly give my identity. I have had to be very careful about the details that I share. To me, that seems quite absurd that we are in a situation where I've experienced a really - and my children have - a really traumatic life event and we're not allowed to talk about it for fear of retribution, for fear of physical violence. Ironically, you know, transgender people were silenced for years and years, generations, decades, and it's strange really that now, people close to them who don't feel great about the experience, are silenced too.
JG: Just tell me a little bit Michelle about your marriage, how was it?
M: Well, I thought it was OK. It had its usual ups and downs, it was about 16 years long and at times things were difficult but I don't think that was unusual. I thought we were fairly close, we talked about quite personal things, you know, what we wanted for the future, our vulnerabilities, our childhoods. My husband wasn't a particularly macho bloke but at no point in my marriage did I see any signs at all of what was to come. And we had children, when he dropped the bombshell they were all in their early teens. So, we met in our thirties, we were very much in love, he was a kind, gentle, funny, clever man.
JG: What did happen then?
M: Well, with hindsight I now realise that he was someone who was always restless and dissatisfied and quite introspective. He didn't really settle to careers and hobbies and things like that and I did wonder why that was, and I think as a spouse you often wonder if you're the problem and you're deficient in some way. As an example, when I turned 40 I felt I'd arrived in my life, I had everything I needed and wanted, but I never had a sense that he had really reached a point of being contented. And then, I realise now that he started to detach himself from the family a bit, about six months before he came out, if you like. He started sleeping in the spare room, saying he was tired and we were disrupting each other's sleep. I didn't see it as a big deal.
The first thing that happened that caused me to wonder what was going on was on my own iPad, and I do wonder now if he deliberately did this so that I'd find it, I used to have a history bar that shows you all the sites you've visited and I was looking for a booking I had made and I found a very odd page advertising a dress that men could buy that would shape them to look like a woman. Now I only have daughters so there was only really one person who could have been looking at that, and at no point did I think, 'goodness, he must be transgender.'
I brought up with him how he was generally and he said he was very unsure about his identity. He was very vague and I didn't want to deal with that at the time, I didn't take it seriously, I'm not proud of that. So I said maybe you should go and talk to somebody different from me, you know, go and see a counsellor, which he did, and I'm an optimist and I know a lot about trans issues because of my career, I work often with transgender people.
JG: What do you do Michelle?
M: I work in the health service and it's worth saying that because I am in no way transphobic. I fear this interview will cause people to be very offended or angry, you know, I work with trans people quite regularly. So, I had a sort of list really, I thought maybe he's a cross-dresser, maybe he's a man who finds it erotic to dress up in women's clothing. There are lots of those men, it's also known as autogynaephilia. It's not much talked about and I thought, what would I do as a spouse if he was somebody who wanted to go away in private and dress up as a woman, or go to a special club or go for the odd weekend - would I tolerate that? I don't know. What would I do as a spouse if he came to me and said, 'actually this is something I find arousing and I want to do it with you involved.' Would I tolerate that? Probably not. Right at the bottom of my list was him being transgender and I disregarded it entirely. So, for a couple of months he went to counselling and again, I just got on with it. I have kids, I have a job.
JG: Can I ask, in that period of your marriage, were you intimate in any way? I don't just mean sexually, although I suppose I do also mean that, I mean were you affectionate? Were you still talking?
M: We were, and I don't think it was for the sake of the kids. We were very good at covering all of this up from our kids when it was going on. I still felt that we - I mean actually - well, into the beginning of our divorce - we were kind to each other, we were supportive, we interacted, but there was this secret thing going on in his life which, yeah, was the elephant in the room really and I was just biding my time, waiting for him to come back to me with what this all meant.
JG: And how were the children during this time?
M: Well I don't think they noticed anything. When it came to the moment where we told them, my husband said, 'It's OK, I think they'll have guessed that something's very wrong.'