Christine Benvenuto

This is one woman's story of a section of her life during which her husband of 20 years decided to live as a woman. It also includes her ensuing affair with another man.

What struck me most about Christine Benvenuto's experience were two things she repeatedly emphasized: the complete character change that accompanied her husband Tracey's gender bending, and the seemingly unanimous unconditional support the community offered to Tracey.

Tracey didn't only decide he felt like a woman and wanted to make the outside match the inside (his terms); he also became selfish, manipulative, controlling, and bullying. He essentially discounted the past 20 years of what seemed like a happy marriage and demanded Christine to admit that none of it was real. He neglected his responsibilities to their three children and tried to create inappropriate peer-type bonds with the two girls.

This makes the second point even harder to swallow, the fact that in the name of political correctness, the neighbors and friends and fellow Jewish congregants basically told Christine that whatever Tracey was doing was okay because it was what he needed to do. By refusing to allow for the possibility that the way Tracey was moving forward in a new gender was selfish and destructive, the community failed to support Christine.

But. Benvenuto is not faultless in this memoir, though she writes it as though she was. The love she finds after the dissolution of her marriage is a primarily sexual relationship (at least initially) with a married man. In what feels like weak justification, she describes his marriage as one of convenience; but she never delves into the question of whether she is doing to this man's wife the same thing Tracey did to her: destroying her happy life.

I'm interested in the question of how spouses are affected by gender changes. Benvenuto highlights what I would think are common issues that arise for the spouse being left behind. But I want her to have written this memoir maybe ten years down the road, when she's gained a little more hindsight and doesn't feel the need to prove her worth as a woman (which is what it seemed like she was trying to do) by describing her later hyper-sexual encounters with a decidedly non-effeminate man. Although she has plenty of legitimate whine fodder, the often whiny tone chips away at the empathy the reader naturally wants to feel for her.… (altro)

No rating on this one; it's too far outside of my realm of relate-ability to put a score on it. I reminded myself repeatedly throughout reading this that this is not the story of her husband's transition. It is instead the story of her experience as her husband transitions. And as she is a devout Jew for whom unnecessary body modifications are discouraged (possibly sinful), from a time when gender was black and white and has no same sex leanings, her husbands sudden choice, after 20 years of marriage and 3 children, was devastating and something she couldn't accept.

Looking at some of the other reviews, I think this distinction between her husband's transition and her experience as something separate has been lost on a lot of readers. In fact, this is one of the author's main points, that everyone expected her to be willing and able to drop her own identity as a devoutly Jewish, heterosexual, sexual (as her husband wished their marriage to continue as platonic) wife and woman and accept her husband's status as female. She was widely condemned for not doing so and felt very hurt by this. While much of the book I struggled with, this struck a cord with me, the idea that she was suddenly expected to happily become a lesbian overnight. That, in the same breath, people would denounce her for not accepting Tracey's chosen identity while denying her the right to maintain he own chosen one. It's a quandary for sure.

Having said that, not being religious, growing up in a time when gender wasn't so codified and the culmination of my own life experiences, I do not come from a place where I can truly understand her complete inability to accept Tracey's change. Her anger over unexpectedly having what she saw as a stable and loving marriage implode over something she had no control over, couldn't stop or accept, sure I get that. And certainly her husband, as described, feels like a raging, narcissistic A-hole. But most of that was outside the transition. He just seemed selfish and self-absorbed. But I'm left wondering to what degree can you take a description written by an injured second party at face value.

I found this hard to read, again, because I really couldn't relate to her unbending position and a lot of her narrative goes against the current dogma of acceptance of differences and encouragement of self-identification. She refuses, for example to use the feminine pronoun when discussing her husband, even post transition and that felt disrespectful and spiteful. Often Benvenuto comes across as less than angelic too, especially at these times. Her anger leaks through. But I'm not willing to dismiss the importance of her experiences. Unfortunately, it's a fact that a spouse is sometimes left behind by transition and it's a painful experience for them and as Benvenuto says, the family is often forgotten as people rush to congratulate the transgendered individual on finding themselves. For better or worse, these experiences are hers and I'm not going to pass judgement on them. The book was an interesting 'other side of the coin' read for me.… (altro)

When you see a car wreck or a dead animal on the highway, you don't always want to look, but sometimes you can't help yourself. If you want to see a real bloody wreck of a marriage, feel free to pick up this book and look. What you should not do is expect to learn much about transexuals, or even get any general idea about how transitioning might affect those around a transexual person.

Benvenuto describes her train wreck of a marriage, including three young children, which, after 20 years of what she thought was happiness, began to unravel when her husband declared himself to be a woman and began the process of sex change. Although the story sells itself as the experience of a marriage ended by a man's decision to become a woman, that interesting fact gives this whole miserable story a false significance.

In reality, like many survivors of difficult divorces, the author has much to be angry about. The dividing of friends, the indignities of divorce negotiations, the loss of economic security and friendships, the rejection she experienced from her several Jewish communities as they seemed to take his side, all ache. Beyond all that the rage just boils and flows, stemming ultimately we gather from the feeling of falseness that accompanied her 20 years of intimacy with her husband before he declared that he was not who she deeply believed him to be - a man.

But is this about transgenderism or transexuals? Would it be any worse if her husband had discovered that he was a Christian Evangelist? A neo-Nazi? Or, l'havdil, gay? Would it be any different if her seemingly heterosexual male Jewish husband realized that this outward identity was fundamentally at odds with who he really was in any of a hundred fundamental ways and then resolved to change it? It seems blindingly obvious to the reader that her husband changed, discovered himself to be something that he had never really known himself to be (or never accepted himself as being), and decided to act on it. People change, and sometimes when we are invested in them being one way the change makes it impossible for a relationship to continue. One person's liberation becomes other people's profound loss. Transexual-ness has almost nothing to do with the underlying marital dynamics of this situation, except to add some colorful 21st century details.

This is a book about a miserable, aching, angry divorce. Many times I wanted to scream - "get over it, move on." Oh don't get me wrong, her husband seems like a narcissistic piece of work too, although we have only her testimony to go on. But her subsequent affair seems to suggest a fair degree of unreflective narcissism on the author's part too, and she just seems unwilling and unable to let go of, or even get any perspective on, her own sense of anger and betrayal.

Even at the end, after Benvunuto builds new relationship with a married man who apparently then divorced his spouse to marry her, she still clings to the beauty of her relationship with her first husband as it, and as he, once was. We can easily sympathize. Those must be painful memories of her children and husband all together as a family. But surely there is a limit. We can all hope that the writing of this book enabled the author to move on - it's hard to believe that she had done so by the time she wrote the last chapter.

It's a train wreck. An ugly, angry divorce, with a dash of modern je ne sais quoi created by the husband who needed to become a woman. We sure do live in modern times. This cry of raw pain from divorce court is eminently readable, and not without both documentary and prurient interest to be sure, but still and all, deeply confused.

As other reviewers noted, ten years of distance and a good tight edit might improve things considerably. Or perhaps ten years would yield only indifference and boredom with her old drama without yielding any philosophical or psychological insight, and perhaps the most this author can offer us is her cry of narcissitic outrage and her unreflective sense of injury in the immediate aftermath of the wreck. This is what it feels to step out of the wreck, bleeding and half alive, not what it feels like to have recovered and lived.

The book would better be titled "A memoir of Divorce, Sex, and the Complete Inability to Move On".
… (altro)