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When the person who was once a husband comes out as a wife, it doesn’t have to mean the end of a marriage, and plenty of men won’t descend into the headspace that Madison’s husband Will did, disparaging her and no longer pulling his weight. Some wives (or husbands) are tolerant, supportive, or happy when the man they married expresses the woman he’s always secretly felt himself (or herself) to be, and some of those husbands-turned-wives continue to be loving toward their spouses.
In 2020, writer Lauren Rowello detailed in an essay in The Washington Post how little effect her now-wife’s transition had on her, or their marriage. In the beginning, she “struggled with my own internalized transphobia, expecting to mourn her body hair, mannerisms, deep voice and broad shoulders — the features I’d grown to know and love about her former appearance — but the transformation hasn’t been a hurdle for me,” she wrote. “When her skin softened, I found myself stroking her face with more delicate attention. When breasts burst from her chest, we shopped for shirts that accentuated her new figure. And now that the hair atop her head has grown longer, I find myself playing with it every time she kisses me.”
A writer named Jess deCourcy Hinds had the opposite experience of many of the trans widows I talked to. She wrote in Insider that her now-wife not only seems so much happier, luxuriating in her silk and cashmere vestments, but is more sensitive to a mother’s plight. Her wife even “offered to push the toddler’s stroller so I could shop unencumbered.” (One hopes that offer stood before the transition.) She takes the kids to the gym and trampoline park more than she did when she was their dad. Their family life, Hinds avows, has in fact improved.
It’s wonderful to be accepting and flexible and for love to conquer all, and to discover that your sexuality is more fluid than you thought. Alas, judging by the number of transwidow stories versus “I’m so happy my former husband is now my wife” stories, Rowello’s and Hinds’ experiences do not seem to be the norm, though the more common story is rarely told in the media—perhaps because the women who object to their husband’s transitions are so brutally judged by a public that demands their acceptance and submission.