Over 30 years ago the Beaumont Society noted that around 100 women a year were being delivered into psychiatric care as a direct result of being trans widows - it's an entirely different experience to splitting up with your partner because you happen to have just grown apart.
"In 1998, Diana Aitchison remarks about women who called the Women of the Beaumont Society helpline after discovering their husband’s cross dressing/transsexuality that “in some cases…the wife is already too tired and weary to fight back, especially when there are young children to consider. Some are calling from phone boxes so that their spouses do not discover that they have made a cry for help.” Naefearty notes, “I felt I was being driven insane” noting that her “sense of self” and ability to set limits “came to dominate and shape every corner of [her]life.” She adds, “I never knew where or when the next assault to my psyche was going to come, and so I existed for a long time in a state of hyper vigilance. That is, until such time as my ability to dissociate kicked in.” These do not sound like women in happy, non-abusive relationships.
In a speech entitled “The Psychological Effect on Wives and Partners of Transsexuals,” Aitchison, the co-ordinator of Women of the Beaumont Society, informed the Gendys Conference in 1998 of the hard facts behind this growing phenomenon:
It is estimated that some 100 hundred women per year are delivered into psychiatric care as a direct result of their experiences [of being wives or partners of transsexuals]. Many remain silent, too traumatised to describe what has happened to them. It is my intention to try to describe hitherto unrecognised mechanisms at work within a relationship where Gender Dysphoria is present, which reinforce female disempowerment and which can ultimately destroy their psychological well being.
Aitchison also detailed specific cases at this conference:
One wife described to me that, just prior to her breakdown, she discovered her husband lying on her side of the bed, dressed in her nightie having adopted what she instinctively recognised as her own sleeping position. “He had stripped from me the last of my exclusivity,” she declared. “I had turned a blind eye to many of his mannerisms although they irritated me to distraction sometimes. If I complained he sulked and ignored me, sometimes for days. I found that it was better to say nothing, just put up with it.”
These women ended up fully dehumanised and possessed by these men as they recount being slowly manipulated to accept ever-increasing violations of their personal boundaries. Farah relates her experiences of guilt and shame surrounding her experiences:
If I had stayed with him, there is no question that I would have had a complete nervous breakdown. As it was, it took 4 years of counselling to come to terms with what had happened, and many more years before I felt it no longer defined me. I chose to be secretive about it because I was humiliated that I found myself in that position; I did not want people to gossip about me behind my back, I didn’t want to be seen as somebody who had been so misguided to have married a man who wanted to become a woman – or worse, that I had driven him to it. Today, I still have those feelings of guilt and shame.
These women are internalising the message that it—be it their partner’s “transition” or the relationship breakdown—is their fault. It isn’t. One woman describes how “It felt like a battlefield: you would make decisions that affected us both and lob them at me like grenades, unspoken ultimatums that told me I needed to shut up, or leave.” That is the clinical definition of controlling behaviour, that fits the legal definition of domestic abuse.
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