Christine Benvenuto - Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On

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For the kids team

CONTENTS

Oh, hey, a friend says conversationally. We are sitting at my kitchen table. I was at the checkout counter in the supermarket and there was this ugly woman who looked vaguely familiar on line behind me. Then I realized thats no ugly womanthats your husband!

The two other friends drinking coffee with us look up expectantly. One of them jumps up to run interference with our four preschoolers playing nearby.

Ill tell you what was really creepy, my friend continues. What was really creepy? I wouldnt want to miss that. What was really creepy was that he was dressed in clothes identical to yours. It was like he was trying to be you.

Picture two photographs. In the first, a happy family of five snuggle close: a man and woman who love each other and the three children they adore, a family who smile like theyll last forever. In the second, a blur of fragments: that same family blown to smithereens because the mans decided that hes a woman.

Welcome to my family.

For six years my life has been about change. To say I didnt welcome the changes that came my way, particularly when they began flying at me, is a laughable understatement. To say that they caused me engulfing grief and rage is a laughable understatement. What I can say is that I clung to stasis like a fraying lifeline, kicking and screaming as it slipped through my fingers. But against my will and finally because of it, my life changed, and changed me with it.

At the time my youngest child celebrated her first birthday, my husband always wore the skullcap that is a symbol of religious Jewish manhood. Ritual fringes, another such symbol, brushed the bottoms of his shirts. Otherwise his look was secular: hair, beard, and mustache kept trim; jeans with T-shirts whenever he could get away with it. When his hazel eyes sparkled he was almost as boyish as when we met in late adolescence and unquestionably more handsome.

Two years later, he didnt look like that anymore. His eyes hadnt changed color, but they no longer sparkled, at least not in my presence. The skullcap and fringes were gone. The beard and mustache were gone, and the sessions to laser-burn them off left him looking raw, pink, and greasy. His hair had grown into a long gray-brown hank of scrub brush. As for his clothes, the old ones no longer fit since hed lost thirty pounds. At home he still wore jeans, smaller ones, with piles of sweaters that didnt seem to warm his perpetual chill so much as contain it. When temperatures climbed into summer, the sweaters peeled away and his baggy polo shirt revealed hairless forearms, a V of shaven chest, the outline of a sports bra. Away from home, he told me, he preferred conservative suits, jackets, and skirts. Apparently his greatest ambition was to be taken for a nondescript middle-aged businesswoman. Or maybe it was to not attract any notice at all.

For two years I watched my husband die. I listened to the fading echoes of his voice as he reached up up and away from his natural register, adopting a faint, high-pitched singsong that suggested he was continually on the verge of fainting. I watched him wither from a deeply ethical man with wide interests and a brilliant sense of humor into someone sickly and self-absorbed, incapable of pleasure, seemingly devoid of moral bearings. A person he called Who I Really Am. A person he called a woman.

His explanations for this transformation varied from the dire to the trivial. Either I live as woman, he threatened regularly, or I die.

On other days he said, I need to expand my clothing choices. Once he got even more specific: The narrow palette of colors available in a male wardrobe is just too unfair!

Stunned, I could only manage, Our children are going to suffer for this wider palette.

To which he responded, Many children suffer.

We were so young when we embarked on our lives together that even in the milieu of an Orthodox neighborhood, where early marriage isnt rare, we stood out. In the close, crowded pocket of a Washington Heights kosher butcher shop, we bought dinner, me with a blue wool seamans cap pulled down over my head, my long hair tucked inside. The men on both sides of the counter were charmed. Are you brother and sister? they wanted to know. Or husband and wife? We were twenty, twenty-one. I thought we were forever. Once hed embarked on his transformation, he told me we were never. He told our then twelve-year-old son that for him, divorce was always an option. He said the person I had loved for so many years was not him. In fact, he never existed at all. Erasing his own past, he rewrote the whole of my adult life as a love affair with a phantom.

In the triumphant coming-out tales told by transgendered people, Ive missed the story of the bereft spouse who loses her marriage and her husband, the present she enjoyed, and the future she imagined. Who loses her past. These lossesthat last one in particularthrew everything I thought I knew about myself into question.

In earlier, happier days, my family once spent half a year in Israel. I picked up the minutiae critical to functioning in my daily life, the bus routes, the words I needed at the elementary school and at the corner grocery, the customs associated with celebrating on a national scale holidays Id known only within the confines of our American Jewish community. When babysitter Asaf greeted us ashen-faced because hed feared wed been killed, I learned that in the thick of hamatsav, the situation, you always call to say youll be late. When the bus doors closed on an elderly woman trying to reach the street, I heard myself shouting to the driver along with the other passengers in Hebrew I hadnt known I knew. And when the time came to leave the country, I had accumulated this store of knowledge and skills I could not take with methat were now useless. I lost a place and the reason for knowing the things I knew about how to live in that place.

It was like this when my marriage ended. Everything I knew about my husband and our relationship: useless. Everything I knew about myself: equally so. I had lived in this marriage not for half a year, but for the whole of my adult life. Then that life, that me, was over . It is clich to speak of the segments of a life as chapters. The disjunction Ive experienced seems to require a whole new book.

Im thinking constantly about my gender.

Thats what he said. Seconds after making love. The instant our bodies broke apart. Im thinking constantly about my gender. The hinge between before and after. Everything to come spins out from it. So much pain, so much destruction. And in the end, astoundingly, so much joy. As postcoital murmurs go, this one was a doozy. Sex, among other things, would never be the same.

Throughout my marriage I was shy, intensely private, even secretive. Our relationship, for reasons I didnt really understand, intensified an inherited inclination. I grew up in a family and a culture in which, if something bad happened, you didnt advertise (shame made certain of that), and if something good happened, you didnt advertise (for fear of shamelessness or its appearance, a dread of calling attention to oneself, of drawing down malocchio, the evil eye, the spirit of revenge reputed to hover over every source of happiness). The things that happened during the last two years of my marriage drove me into an even deeper furtiveness. There were daysthey happened often, increasingly over timewhen I took my children to school, talked with professional contacts, went through the motions of social occasions, in a state of shock. I felt like a woman whose husband had died the night before and no one knew. I was obliged to keep my sudden widowhood to myself. My husband had died, but even to say it aloud, My husband died last night, would have been the grossest impropriety. It was like a nightmare, a recurring one throughout my life, that something was terribly amiss and I had to act as if everything were fine. The pressure to say nothing grew and grew as our home life became more surreal.