My Husband Wants to Be a Woman

Nails on the chalkboard of my soul

“My Husband Wants to Be a Woman.” We have read and heard this endlessly in the media. It makes a great headline for media desperate to exploit the circus created, currently, around being transgender.

I don’t know about you but I can’t adequately convey to you how much I despise that phrase. It literally causes pain to hear. It feels like nails on the chalkboard of my soul. My entire being winces at the sound of each word. It conveys ignorance. It conveys judgment. It conveys condemnation. It conveys rejection.

“My Husband Wants to Be a Woman,” says to the listener that such a thing is an impossibility, that the thought is absurd.

And they are right.

If medical and psychological science, relying on clinical facts, are right, as opposed to current antiquate social perceptions and bigoted religious beliefs, as a trans woman, I am not a man that wants to be a woman, I am a woman that was forced to be a man.

If you rely on the biological argument that there are only two sexes, that assumes the gender and sex are synonymous, which they are not. So, let’s take a moment to get the facts right:

SEX: Biological attributes of humans and animals, including physical features, genitalia and chromosomes.

GENDER: Socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender-diverse people.

One additional important fact is human biological sex is not purely male and purely female. It’s not that black and white. Nature has created a whole series of human beings that fall in the gray area in between.

The one area ignorantly relied on by binary purists is the XX and XY chromosomal difference. They believe that all people are simply divided into either female (XX) or male (XY). It’s an easy argument and one that would appeal to someone looking for the easy way out of the sex versus gender argument.

But they don’t get off so easy.

According to geneticists, people can have XXY, XYY, X, XXX, or other combinations of chromosomes so that binary argument gets shot down in flames by indisputable scientific fact.

So, let’s forget the notion that Nature has created a pure binary system of sex. Nature has a sense of humor and has clearly blurred the binary lines for our amusement.

Now throw in the human element. There are numerous studies that have found that drug pharmaceuticals can impact gender, for example, DES (diethylstilbesterol) on pre-natal gender development. Many mothers, between 1938 and 1971, were given DES, an extremely powerful synthetic estrogen, that was administered to pregnant women to help maintain a healthy pregnancy. It is believed that the prenatal exposure to DES has had an impact on gender association. Exposed male fetuses appear to be feminized, and exposed female fetuses were masculinized.

There are theories that pollution can also be a hormone gender disruptor. Research has shown that polluted ponds could turn male frogs into females. Research is developing that humans may be vulnerable to hormone disruptors in ways that resemble the effects on frogs inhabiting polluted wetlands.

OK, enough scientific facts and theories. The bottom line is that there is no pure binary system of either sex or gender, so back to my original point …

Let’s kill the “My Husband Wants to Be a Woman” headline forever. It’s just stupid.

Your husband does not want to be a woman, she is one. She is a woman trying to be a man because the world forced her to in order to survive. The world has finally given her a way out of the jail cell. She never knew there was even a door.

She needs to finally be herself. Don’t judge her if she is not the man you want her to be, accept her as the person that she is.

You may actually like her. After all she is already your best friend.

Emma Holiday

Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.

Thank you for reading my work.

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