I didn't think he had suppressed them I thought he had let them go. Given the strength of my reaction, it may sound strange that I thought I could continue in the relationship – in hindsight, it does to me – but Tom had put aside these feelings. For me, there was no wiggle room: I couldn't engage in an intimate relationship with a man who dressed in women's clothes. This understanding was so disturbing, it literally made me nauseous and dizzy. But this time it hit me that he had at least contemplated cross-dressing. I still thought he was investing gender with a power to resolve his childhood problems. Tom told me a few years later, early in our marriage, that he was struggling with these feelings again. Tom had a difficult upbringing, so for me it was a given that what he meant was that at his lowest moments he had wished to be something he knew he was not.
When he told me once, early on in our relationship, that he hated himself and had sometimes wished he was a girl, I assumed it was psychological – a rejection of self. I can still see his look of stark sexual appreciation when he spotted me walking towards him on a date. His signals were heterosexual and male. He initiated our intimate relationship and responded to me in the ways I expected. The Tom I knew was sharp, funny and irreverent. We got married, had a child, then a second and a third. Tom and I met and fell in love at college. Our marriage, our family and everything that up until that moment had constituted our story was over. "I'm not going to do anything." By which he meant, it went without saying, anything to his appearance. I heard the urgency in his voice and tried to be supportive, as I would often fail to be in the many conversations that would follow.
I know that I stayed surprisingly calm, for me. "I keep feeling like I'm the wrong gender, a lot, all the time, constantly." "I can't stop thinking about it," he said. Sex, among other things, would never be the same. As post-coital murmurs go, this one was a knockout. 'I 'm thinking constantly about my gender." That's what my husband said one June night, seconds after making love.