A couple of years clear of her traumatic separation, a friend has found herself in a good place. So, in the quiet corner of a city wine bar, she tells me about the man she married. A man that sometimes wears dresses and heels, indulging in what he calls his ‘little hobby’.
When did you meet *Tim? I’m intrigued to know how someone begins dating a man with such a hobby. “I’ve known him since school,” she says. “I got to know him better when he was dating a friend, and one night he just said ‘I’ve got to tell you something’.”
Just like that? “He just randomly just dropped it in,” she assures me. “I was just like… what? Are you having me on?” Tim had then sent her a photo. “He looked like a grandma,” she laughs, “with a cardigan on.” Another one soon appeared with him sporting a mini-skirt and knee-high boots. That’s more like it, I think.
In his female attire, Tim would head out on the town, frequenting gay and ‘tranny’ bars, or for a spot of shopping. How did he look? I ask, “Quite feminine,” my friend says. “He’s got very sharp features and is slender in the face, and he doesn’t have much facial hair, so he pulled it off.”
And what about makeup? “He was kind of shit at it actually,” she remembers. “I helped him out sometimes. It just became normal to say ‘hey I’ll do your makeup’ once we were together.” And together they were – Tim and my friend grew very close, shacked up, and soon got engaged. I ask if she hesitated before taking the plunge. “As a friend I’d accepted it,” she says of Tim’s cross-dressing. “So as a girlfriend I thought, why should that change?”
She did, however, do her research. Tim sent her to relevant websites and forums. She even read his online profile on transgender social network site urnotalone.com. “It said he’s a bloke 95% of the time – he loves sport and has a girlfriend, but there’s this part of him that likes being this other thing,” she tells me.
Despite Tim’s assurances, my friend was understandably suspicious that he might be bisexual or gay. “A little part of me still thinks it might be a sexual thing,” she says. “But I was really accepting of it. At the time I had the vested interest of being with him.”
Without any prompting my friend then answers the niggling question at the back of mind. “I have to say though”, she continues… “sex with him was a bit boring.” So he never got intimate while dressed as a woman? She tells me no, quite the opposite. The times that he did don the dress were pretty ordinary. “Like just hanging out at home, watching a DVD,” she says, making it all sound so harmless… but surely it bothered her?
“It did because his mannerisms changed,” she admits. “He was a bit more feminine in the way he would stand or move his hands.And he would pout in the mirror when he looked at himself. It was weird, and I wasn’t attracted to him. We’d just hang out as friends.”
Why do you think he did it? My friend had of course asked Tim ‘when did it all start?’ He had said it was around the time that his mother and father divorced, when he remembers putting on one of his mum’s dresses. I nod in understanding, familiar with the deep-set affects of a broken home. But later in life, without access to mother’s closet, did he ever wear your clothes?
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A colleague of mine was married for quite some time and had three kids to her husband. He 'came out' as a cross dresser at some stage and ultimately left her and the kids and is now a transvestite. Not sure if he has had gender reassignment surgery yet. He does not see her or the children, who are now grown. I believe that some time down the track he also 'came out' as gay. She developed severe anxiety and her children don't wish to see their father any more. The positive is that (with his permission) she wrote a book about the journey for her and her family. While this example is pretty extreme, it shows the wide impact these sort of events have on everyone around you.
When people become more open-minded, it's then you find out things like this are actually fairly common.