Do Feminine Men Make Better Housewives?

An excerpt from my new book, out today!

Today is launch day for HOUSEWIFE: Why Women Do It All and What to Do Instead! Buy it at evil corporate giants or your local bookshop! Request it at your library! Hate-buy it for the feminists you despise, or the conservatives you despise, or the friends you love who’ve just become parents, or…just buy it! And: please come to the launch party on March 7! So many exclamation points!!

Some of you will remember that I wrote a chapter about autogynephilia, looking at whether men who transition take on the traditional female gender role. (Short answer: no.) That chapter didn’t make it to the book, although there are a few remnants of it, including a bit at the end of this excerpt, which also details gender roles in “lesbigay” marriages.

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When Lucy Stone was born on August 13, 1818, on a farm in rural western Massachusetts, her mother said, “I’m sorry it is a girl. A woman’s life is so hard.” But Lucy was determined to make women’s lives easier than her own mother’s had been. At the age of sixteen, Lucy started teaching school for a dollar a week, and it took her nine years to earn enough money to attend college.

Her goal was not just to be educated for her own sake, but to correct the moral ills of the world into which she was born, including slavery. Stone wrote to her mother, “I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.”

Eventually, she made her way to Oberlin College, where girls were allowed to earn a degree but barred from public speaking. Though Stone was invited to write a commencement speech, she declined, as it would have had to have been read by a man. She read in a college textbook the words “women are more sunk by marriage than men,” and became determined never to marry.

After college, Stone made sure her voice was heard, writing—and delivering—abolitionist speeches for William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. She was an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist, but she also railed against the sexist institution of marriage, which she compared to slavery, for it required women to give up their rights and submit to a husband’s demands. Two years after the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, Stone organized the first national women’s rights convention in Massachusetts, delivering a speech that was syndicated even in international publications. Hers was an example of the liberated life a woman could live if she fought for her rights and defied expectations.

There was one problem. Stone fell deeply in love with a man named Henry Blackwell, who wanted to marry her and vowed to “repudiate the supremacy of either man or woman in marriage.” He was the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell—the country’s first woman to earn a medical degree—and she and sister Emily, also a doctor, convinced Stone to marry him, insisting that egalitarian marriage was possible.

When she finally caved to Blackwell’s request, sobbing through the ceremony on May 1, 1855, the minister who married them, Thomas Higginson, said, “I never perform the marriage ceremony without a renewed sense of the inequity of a system by which man and wife are one, and that one is the husband.”

Their marriage was a protest of sorts, in which they vowed to love and honor but repudiated the word “obey,” and refused to utter it. They published a pamphlet explaining their resistance to the institution of marriage, even as they entered into it. They wrote:

While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it our duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.

Early women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton described Lucy Stone as “the first woman in the nation to protest against the marriage laws at the altar, and to manifest sufficient self-respect to keep her own name, to represent her individual existence through life.”

All the while, Stone continued her civil rights and women’s suffrage activism, never giving up her work to tend to house and home, always sharing domestic work with her husband.

How much of this relentless inequity that Lucy Stone fought, and which couples are still negotiating today, is about the expectations we attach to biological sex—our ideas of masculinity and femininity—as opposed to other confounding factors? One way to find out is to look at same-sex families, which made up more than a million households in 2019 (as compared to almost 70 million opposite-sex married and unmarried partner households). Some 191,000 children live with same-sex parents.

The general assumption is that same-sex partnerships are more egalitarian than those of different-sex couples, and some studies do suggest as much. Because lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are less gender conforming than heterosexual people—homosexuality itself is a gender nonconforming trait—and gender nonconformity is related to perceptions of power-sharing, this all adds up. Disparities would be lesser when there’s no difference in sex. In theory.

But once again perception and reality have a complicated relationship. First of all, gender dynamics seem to differ in gay partnerships than in lesbian ones. Some research shows that the more gender-conforming partners in male couples were—the more they enacted traditional masculinity—the stronger their sense of shared power. But in couples where one man was more feminine than the other, trouble brewed. The partner “who does not meet masculine ideals of paid labor is expected to conduct more ‘feminine’ tasks at home, and couples struggle to reconcile these divisions as equal and fair,” Pollitt wrote. Gay men “may be constrained by masculine norms and the devaluation of femininity.” Devaluation of feminine traits, it turns out, is a problem for people regardless of sex. Men who take on most of the domestic labor—those activities which are viewed societally as feminine—might feel they hold less power in the relationship.

Gender conformity in women, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to affect the perception of shared power. Women in same-sex couples tend to be more flexible about power-sharing, less aggrieved when they have to take on traditionally feminine work, perhaps because there’s no man around to compare themselves to. Being the breadwinner or the caretaker aren’t readily thought of as gendered roles, or the duties may be more evenly distributed. That doesn’t mean lesbians are more likely to achieve marital bliss; a recent study found that they’re more than twice as likely as gay men to divorce.

One study asserted that in Black lesbian stepfamilies, biological mothers of the kids did more household work than non-biological mothers, perhaps based on the assumption that the biological mother should do more. Sometimes gender roles are layered over a partnership based on who earns more, with the low-earner being expected to take on the “feminine, unpaid labor at home.”

In his book No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men, sociologist Christopher Carrington described egalitarian “lesbigay” marriages (as he called them) as a myth. Of the families he studied, only 25 percent achieved some hazy interpretation of parity in their division of labor. They used chore charts or other measures to make sure each person understood his or her obligations, while the wealthier families outsourced labor like cleaning and cooking. But many of them described their families as egalitarian, even though Carrington’s recording of their familial goings-on revealed they weren’t living that way.

He suggested that lesbigay families feel more pressure to appear equitable, so as not to mimic the sexist architecture of heterosexual families, especially because they are quite new in American society. They want to appear high-functioning “to provide a respectable image of ourselves in a society often bent on devaluing and marginalizing us,” he wrote. In other words, they are just as prone to being affected by the “shoulds” as different-sex couples.

How does gender transition affect roles? The short answer is: in any number of ways. Dawn Ennis is a former ABC news producer who’d married and had three children before coming out as a trans woman in 2013, then retransitioning briefly to male, claiming an episode of amnesia. The transition had sparked a news frenzy, and Ennis had been unable to handle being the subject of tabloid gossip. Though Ennis and wife Wendy never divorced, they separated after Ennis transitioned. At first they co-parented, but eventually Ennis relocated to Los Angeles for work while Wendy stayed behind in Connecticut with their kids.

Then, in 2016, Wendy died of cancer, leaving Ennis as their kids’ primary caretaker—not their mom, as Ennis envisions it, but a mom, and a single one at that. Ennis quit the job, and the family lived off the insurance money. In the documentary about Ennis, Before Dawn, After Don, Ennis laments the pain caused to “the love of my life.” “I cheated this woman out of the last ten years of her marriage,” Ennis tells a friend. (The friend replies: “That’s why you marry someone for better or for worse,” and notes that people get divorced for all kinds of reasons.)

Later, standing in a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, Ennis realizes the sheer amount of physical and emotional labor associated with being the mom. Ennis thought this was living the life of a woman but then realized that vision edged out so much of the reality of the female gender role.

“As I come into my momhood, for lack of a better word, I feel like I’m pissed off,” Ennis says in the film. “I’m pissed off that I didn’t step up more before. That I didn’t share in the cooking, because I love cooking, and I could have made this much more of an equal partnership. I knew already that I wasn’t doing enough around the house in terms of scrubbing toilets, in terms of doing the laundry, in terms of keeping the house clean. These were things that Wendy just did because she did, and it’s completely unfair that this all falls to the woman.” Ennis called the new role “domestic engineer,” and said, “I think the job is totally underrated.”

I also spoke to several women who refer to themselves as “trans widows.” They’d married men, not realizing those men harbored secret feelings that they were or should be women, and things went downhill after their husbands transitioned; the women they now identified as bore little resemblance to the lived experience of most women.

When Madison first met her husband, Will, for instance, he rekindled her faith in men, in marriage. He was solicitous, gentle and kind, and good with her tween daughter. “After the first date, I knew he was the one,” she said.

For the first few years in their small southern city, it was bliss. “When other people would talk about their relationships and the words that they would say to each other like, ‘Fuck you’ or ‘Shut the fuck up’—he would never have said that to me. Ever. And we hardly ever fought. It would be like one fight a year.” He was her safe place: helpful around the house, an equal partner in the life they’d created.

But slowly, Will let it be known that he wanted to wear women’s clothes and underwear during sex, to make up his face. Madison works in healthcare, often leading workshops about sex-positivity, on everything from safe sex to BDSM—bondage, discipline, dominance/submission, and sadomasochism: erotic preferences and practices, including roleplaying, that often involve contracts and consent. It was important to her to have a healthy sex life and a clear communication channel, and so she supported him. She took Will to drag shows, which was risky in their conservative, southern part of the country, and her daughter even taught him to do his makeup better when he occasionally “dressed,” as he called it.

But the more he wanted to live full-time in the identity he was exploring, the more his behavior curdled. When she’d ask him to help out around the house or go grocery shopping, as he always had, he’d grumble or yell or insult her. Once she asked him to load the dishwasher, and he stomped outside with the plates, scraping them against the brick sides of their house.

The more he lived “as a woman,” the less compassion he seemed to have for women’s actual lives, for the uneven emotional and physical labor that characterizes our existence. “He went from being a very compassionate, generous, loving, doting husband to a verbally abusive wife.”