“Like in a Woody Allen film, I discovered that my husband is crossdressing as a woman”
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Husband and wife, married for 30 years, go to meet the parents of their daughter’s boyfriend. They are an American upper middle class couple. It would seem like the classic family lunch, except that men love to wear women’s clothes. He goes upstairs to go to the bathroom and enters the room of the future in-laws. He can’t hold back. He opens the wardrobe and chooses a dress and puts it on. It’s a scene from the famous movie by Woody Allen: ‘Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask.’ But even in the film ‘The Danish girl’ the protagonist dresses as a woman.
Men who love feminine dresses that don’t exist only in the cinema. Giulia, a real name, my patient, discovers that her husband crosses himself as a woman. It was a bolt from the blue because before then she had never smelled anything. For her, her husband was a serene, balanced man, at peace with his masculine clothes, immune to temptations. When there was talk at home about some scandal that had just happened, he took a drastic, judgmental, guilty, inquisitorial position.
For her husband Giuseppe, a real name, it was unthinkable that a man could wear make-up, dress as a woman or even dress up during intimacy.
It all seemed perfect
Their sex life had always been fairly lukewarm: no big leaps, no big games, no role-playing games or frills of seductive memory. When Giulia asked him for something new, Giuseppe stiffened into a defensive silence. Several times he had asked her husband to consult with her to try to clarify with me, during the consultation, the causes of her rigidity, but Giuseppe had always refused.
“I found out my husband has been cheating on me for 10 years”
by Valeria Randone
Him at home with stockings and heels
It was Saturday and usually my patients never call me during the weekend, unless something dramatically irreparable has happened to them. I fish out my cell phone from my bag after hearing it ring with disturbing insistence to say the least. I find four phone calls, received in a very short space of time. I recognize Giulia’s number, I call her back. She replies with a broken voice that soon turns into an uninterrupted cry alternating with a river of excited words.
He overwhelms me with an impetuous story, with great detail. She tells me that she suddenly came home from work because she had forgotten her iPad in her house and that she discovered her husband disguised as a woman.
“Doctor, he was wearing my stockings, my black pointy shoes, which didn’t even fit, my butter silk nightgown. It was monstrous. And he was made up like a prostitute too. I’m broken, please help me “, He says.
Sex, when it’s true love with the toy boy
by Valeria Randone
Her experience, his motivations
Giulia felt betrayed, offended, humiliated and mortified. She thinks she doesn’t know anything about her marriage and her husband: that man so rigid and austere that he has always worn the politically correct clothes and criticized everything that strayed from his orthodox way of understanding life. She insults him, yells at him, threatens him to leave home to avoid “diverting” – she uses this very term – their children. She tells him that a man dressed as a woman cannot be a good father and even less a good husband and asks him how long this aberrant practice has existed and persisted for her.
The fierce confrontation of the two spouses in front of the therapist
Giuseppe gasps, his legs tremble and his voice trembles. He doesn’t know what to say and how to justify himself. He timidly tries to reassure his wife, but fails in his intent. They both join me in the studio the following week with an emotional urgency that didn’t bode well. They insult each other, attack each other, tear each other apart with words, leaving me no room for a possible interpretation of the events. They threaten to separate.
Giulia tells him that she will ask for exclusive custody of the children because with a man who disguises himself as a woman they cannot grow up in a balanced and psychically intact way. She will see them again next week to try to salvage parenthood and disjoin it from the shipwreck of marriage.
Sex, the quarrel as love doping
by Valeria Randone*
What is transvestism and the suffering it entails
Transvestism is a solitary practice that leads to intense sexual arousal given by contact with the fetish: the clothing of the opposite sex. Transvestism fetishism is a form of transvestism that causes great suffering in those who experience it and in the partner who discovers and suffers it. Very often, those who live in the mesh of the need to dress up feel obliged to do it often, especially in situations of stress or emotional vulnerability. Addiction that delivers him to the grip of a repetitive and lonely prison.
A form of fetishism
Transvestism is a form of fetishism. The women’s garments, silks, laces, heels and make-up that are worn represent the fetish. In reality it is a form of paraphilia, what were once called perversions. In transvestism, it is usually the man who prefers to wear women’s clothing; very rarely do women choose to wear men’s clothing. Cross-dressers are not homosexuals, nor do they feel the need to belong to the opposite sex or the desire to change sex, as happens in cases of transsexualism and gender dysphoria.
Transvestism is practiced for the resulting sexual excitement but also as an anti-anxiety and anti-stress. In fact, it becomes more acute during moments of greater emotional tension.
“Let’s make it strange”, eccentric sexuality between fantasies and disguises
by Valeria Randone
How to deal with it within the couple
Serene coexistence between transvestism and married life is not always easy or feasible. When within the couple relationship there is complicity and empathy, even of a sexual nature, transvestism can represent a sort of erotic game: the couple’s amusement playground. The woman does not compete with the female part of her partner but uses it as an euphoric ingredient.
Usually, however, the opposite happens: the partner who practices transvestism does so in a climate of maximum secrecy, feels ashamed and even a certain embarrassment. In these cases, when the woman discovers it, she is seized by a profound unease as well as by an experience that recalls that of the betrayal suffered.
Shame and guilt
Transvestism is associated with an aura of shame and guilt. For the person who practices it or for the couple who suffers it, facing the discomfort and shaking off that sense of embarrassment and awkwardness represents the way to face it in a serene and balanced way and try where possible to save the couple bond.
The listening space of an individual or couple psycho-sexological counseling becomes the place of non-judgmental clarification, from which to start again to heal the couple crisis or the suffering and solitude of the individual patient.
*Valeria Randone is a psychologist, specialist in clinical sexology, in Catania and Milan www.valeriarandone.it
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