I’m re-reading "My Husband Betty" to see if time has tempered my enthusiasm for this book or lessened my quibbles. As I read the introduction and Preface, I’m struck as I was the first time, by the simple use of the term transgender. I noted in an opinion piece in last month’s newsletter, that the use of transgender as noun bothers me. I prefer to be specific and talk about transgendered behavior and transgendered identity. These are two separable concepts, and someone doing the one may not possess the other, and vise versa. What does one make of Betty, Helen’s husband saying "Sometimes I just like pretty shoes and pretty blouses, but because I have a penis we have to use big words to describe it", or make of Helen quoting Betty as saying this? Then consider another concept from the introduction - that women can sympathize with not liking to be told what one can and cannot do because of one’s sex. These remarks frame things in terms of an unfulfilled aesthetic desire or imposed impracticality. But alas, as we all know it’s mostly not that simple.

Helen opens with a comparison of scenarios that aims for that simplicity. We have, it is true, a double standard for men and women, and that causes us to think differently about a woman putting on a man’s shirt from a man putting on a woman’s slip. Unfortunately, this comparison is somewhat lame. It’s not just that women are viewed as erotic, but that everything associated with them is eroticized in our culture. Only a few male garments would merit such associations. If one substituted a man’s y-front pair of underpants, or jock-strap, the wife’s behavior would more likely be viewed as suspect. Helen’s point that it is an unfair comparison, a double standard applied to males and females is well taken, but it also must be understood that behind the prejudice of the double standards lie truths and blind spots.

The truth of the matter is that the public is often but not always correct in viewing the man’s behavior as unfamiliar sexuality.... in technical terms a paraphilia, the substitution of an object for a person. What the public ignores is that a man becoming aroused by pictures in Playboy is just as paraphilic... the picture is not the woman, but a substitute, just as is the fetishist’s leather or rubber. We’ve accepted one kind of paraphilia as normal male behavior, while frowning on the other. On the other hand, the assumption that a woman’s behavior is not paraphilic under those circumstances is more likely due to our cultural inability to think of women having any sexuality at all, much less having paraphilic sexuality. Women are the objects of desire, they are not allowed to have it, even though they do. The little child is quoted as saying "Daddy maybe, Mommy, never". It’s not that in general the woman wearing her husband’s shirt is enacting a paraphilia, so much as we have a blind spot that keeps us from considering the possibility.

And this business of blind spots and generally accepted truths is where I think Ms. Boyd’s book stumbles a bit... because there is a tendency to want to accept the cover stories that have been popularized for the various kinds of transgendered behavior and identity. This despite her acknowledgment that she was sometimes handed "cheerleading that was unfair, untrue and harmful". Where Ms. Boyd’s book succeeds, and succeed it does, is where it abandons the rationales and simply talks about what is observed, what is felt, what is done and how love and kindness matter above all.

The first success of this book comes from confronting the difference between having fun clubbing, being a man-in-a-dress playing with other-men-in-dresses, and simply being Betty. What elated Betty terrified Helen. Up till that point, Helen had found the whole scene fun. An outgoing Betty in a club was a kick, a subdued demur Betty in an ordinary restaurant was depressing. Did he really want to be a woman? And from this crisis came a new idea...that putting Betty back in the closet caused suffering...that in Betty’s case there was something more there.

From this zephyr of reality, follows the typhoon of realization- secrecy, facing her own expectations and limitations, and every disaster scenario that has ever befallen the crossdresser whose closet door is opened. Looking for support, Helen joined on-line support groups, only to get hit with another set of taboos and another kind of epiphany. Just as there are party lines and favored mythologies about transgender and about crossdressing, there are the politically correct ways of women consoling each other about their husband’s crossdressing. Helen, after getting kicked out of a number of spouse’s forums for speaking her mind, for being more supporting, more accepting than the norm, starts her own.

You might sense a pattern here. I did the second time around on this book. Helen tends to be torn between the problems that crossdressing can bring, including her own fears about Betty being out, and her political and social ideals and her own desires, her own finding Betty a bit of a turn on. Thus the writing moves rapidly back and forth between the problems and her ideals. Women have a lot of legitimate concerns about crossdressing spouses, but Helen cannot figure out "why so many of them are upset by a change of clothes", even when she can describe herself as being upset. I saw one review that I think cited this as a weakness in the book. I see it as a strength and a reality of many women’s lives, and of how many women view the world. For them it isn’t a matter of distilling things down to some forced consistency. Both sides or all five sides can co-exist, and are an unavoidable part of existence. Men would do well to respect this ability, or at least not view it as some kind of failure of intellect on a woman’s part.

From the Introduction (and first chapter), "My Husband Betty" proceeds in chapters focusing on particular aspects. In the second chapter, she looks at crossdressers and covers what to us must be considered the familiar ground of stories about who we are, why we do it (somewhat limited range of possibilities), and why we supposedly can’t stop. Ms. Boyd finds appealing Eddie Izzard’s distinction between the "executive transvestite" and the weirdo transvestites who inhabit both popular tabloids and the popular imagination. But, then she goes on to list categories of crossdresser’s behavior, and not too many of them would fit "executive transvestite".

The third chapter deals with the women in crossdresser’s lives, and the issues pile up. When a man chooses to present himself as a woman, a woman must question the whole notion of what it is to be a woman. Ms. Boyd lays out the personal, political, sexual and cultural dimensions of that question, and the difficulty in finding answers. The chapter continues the ambivalent analysis of how she and other women feel. The good, the bad and the ugly. In one striking passage Helen admits to a degree of envy of the wives of non-passing CDs...her domain would be secure if she didn’t think her husband made a better looking woman than she did. Trust as an issue is covered, and in more candor and depth than many places. The usual level of discussion stops at "why didn’t he tell me?" and "is there something more?". Ms. Boyd points out that there is active misinformation spread about sexuality that further contributes to the problem. In particular she points to the mythology promulgated by TriEss that heterosexual crossdressing is never about sexuality and always about a second self. She says that women often observe that this isn’t true, and that these women aren’t stupid. In other words, the problem of trust isn’t only a problem between spouses. Because of the words and actions of some crossdressing institutions, the issue of trust becomes deeper and more pervasive.

I think reading about the details of Helen’s and Kathy’s experience with on-line support groups is a must for women exploring that resource. I’m also glad that the following quote from Lisa appears: "When my spouse and I were having problems I coined a new "mantra" for myself and for conversations with my spouse: The crossdressing is functional, the manner in which it is handled can be dysfunctional". This very much affirms my own belief that we have no say in what our desires are, but have responsibility for how we deal with them.

Chapter Four is devoted to relationships. Ms. Boyd makes a very interesting use of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of facing death: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Helen demonstrates easily how Denial and Anger happen. What is fascinating is her discussion of bargaining, or setting boundaries. She points out how wives setting limits can be counter-productive, institutionalizing passive-aggressive behavior or co-dependency. Husbands are adults, and Helen demands they take responsibility for their own behavior. Women do have an obligation to respect a husband’s need to crossdress, but it’s up to him to make the expression of that need respectable, not her. In dealing with how couples work things out (or don’t) she presents extended interviews with six couples with widely varying backgrounds and experiences. Ms. Boyd is also a generous and respectful author in allowing them to speak with their own voices. Would that Amy Bloom have allowed as much and as varied self-representation in her book!

Chapter Five is devoted to what is many a wife’s worst fear - that her husband will decide he’s a woman and want to follow the transsexual path of hormones and surgery. The reality, as we all know but often refuse to acknowledge, is that for some, crossdressing is the first toe in the cold water of rebuilding a life. Ms. Boyd is sympathetic to both sides and considers it a problem of reality intruding on people’s lives. What she doesn’t cover is the possibility that there are transsexuals, and then there are people who get carried away.

Chapter Six covers the big taboo, sexuality. When Amy Bloom writes that crossdresser’s wives have unhappy sex lives, she does so in the form of a bomb dropped in the closing of her essay. Helen Boyd doesn’t do that. She’s talked to wives across the board and she has her own experience. After describing in great detail what she has pieced together about the varieties of sexuality experienced by crossdressers, and consequently their wives she explores why the variant sexuality of crossdressers leads to marital problems. It comes down to two ideas: First, that when push comes to shove ordinary vanilla sexual relations are unfulfilling to many crossdressers. Fantasy and erotica are where their libido resides. Second, the wife may not be able to accommodate any of the husband’s variant libido, leaving them always facing failure in the bedroom...neither of them able to fulfill the other’s desire.

One remark that I wish would get remembered is that "the fetishist is as capable of falling in love with another person as he is turned on by high heeled shoes. The crossdresser likewise". I could probably write a whole essay on this point alone. I’d want to explore how the love of another person is not inevitably linked with having sex with him or her. I’d also want to examine how we tend to use the existence of a variation to make one-dimensional things that are complex. We tend to regard any single variance from our idea of what is "normal" to draw into question the entire validity of a person. It’s not only sexual kinks. The Steelers fan in a Brown’s town. The dog lover among cat owners. The gay or lesbian among straights... or reverse that. It’s a form of intellectual and moral laziness that I’m as guilty of as any one, and one that we should all strive to overcome.

Helen goes on to explore the extent of bisexuality and homosexuality among crossdressers. She seems to agree with my observation that the vanilla heterosexuality that seems to be the watchword and cover for organizations like TriEss isn’t anywhere near as common as claimed.

Chapter Seven is devoted to the social lives of crossdressers and spouses, from clubs and the demimonde to the apparent respectability of a TriEss meeting.

Chapter Eight turns to something I found more interesting, Gender Politics. Here are some of the provocative statements Helen makes:

• Crossdressers can’t freely wear what they want to because they haven’t earned it.
• Most Crossdressers, like most other men, have these weird stereotypical views of what being a woman really is, something derived from Playboy and fashion ads, and having little to do with what women’s lives or bodies are about.
• The crossdressing community doesn’t celebrate powerful, self-assured women... although those are the kinds of women most likely to accept them.
• The percentage of "sensitive" guys isn’t any higher in the crossdressing world than outside it.
• Wives need to be reminded that their husbands know that they’re more than what they look like.

This review has gone on for a while. That’s what happens when you read the New Yorker and come to believe that a review can be darn near as long as a book and that’s ok. Sometime, a while back, the notion of a 500 word book report being an overwhelming task has turned around for me... now it’s overwhelming because it’s too short, not because it’s too long. But I gave the capsule review a few months ago. This is a landmark book. Both husbands and wives should buy it, read it, and put what they learn from it to use. g