Washington Post: Transgender Man’s Wife Is His ‘Best Friend’

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The Washington Post uncritically celebrated the claims by a 30-year-old divinity graduate to have changed his sex — while downplaying the betrayal of his wife, who is now facing the imposed choice of being a divorcee or the lesbian handmaid in his life.

“It took a huge [coronavirus] disruption in the outside world to force Kyle to look inward and examine who they really are,” author Lisa Bonos said:

Kyle says their [anonymous] wife has been “deeply supportive,” and they both describe each other as their best friend. Still, Kyle acknowledges that separating is the next right step, filled with grief and possibility. “We’re living in the grief, but still giving each other a hug and a kiss good morning and good night.”

The Post’s July 2 headline declares Kyle is a truth-teller: “Kyle is transgender. It took 30 years and a pandemic for them to realize it.”

“Nobody ever cares about what the wife or girlfriend is going through when one of these guys decides to transition,” responded Natasha Chart, a feminist who rejects the transgender claim that people can have an opposite-sex “gender identity.” People are free to dress as they wish or to work in surprising careers, but they cannot change their sex, she said, adding:

I see no sympathy for the wives or girlfriends or children [in these articles because] caring about women is just not cool enough anymore. The left has moved on to their next leading edge critical rights fight. They got bored. They have a new sidepiece.

Chart, a feminist and a lesbian, has led opposition to the transgender demands. “A man can never be a woman,” Natasha Chart told a 2019 demonstration outside the Supreme Court. “A lesbian can never be male … I will not be forced to lie, I will not submit,” she said.

Chart said the Washington Post article is all about the man’s feelings and about how Kyle’s new identity is a liberation from sin:

Kyle has felt “very outside the norm” since they were a teenager. Back then, they would see an attractive woman and ask themself: “Am I attracted to her, or do I want to be her?” recalls Kyle.

For years, Kyle understood their fascination with transgender fiction, and with trying on women’s clothes, not as gender dysphoria but as a sinful addiction.

So Kyle is learning to navigate his new identity by appropriating symbols of his wife’s identity, said Chart:

As Kyle reimagines how they want to present themself to the world, the default has been to look to the woman they’ve been living with for the past seven years: their wife. They’ll occasionally go to Target separately and discover they’ve bought the same dress.

The couple have had to figure out what their boundaries are when it comes to clothes. She hasn’t seen Kyle in a wig, for example. And it was a bit unnerving to find out her spouse had tried on most of the clothes in her closet, including her lingerie. Hearing that Kyle knows which of her bras fit them best was “a little bit too much of a violation of personal space.”

“How could that not be just a complete shock?” responded Chart. “You don’t have to be religious to find it very upsetting when you discover a man in your family has been trying on your clothes. It’s the kind of thing that pervy guys do … [It appropriates the wife’s identity] that’s why it’s upsetting.”

The Post article coyly obscured the couple’s romantic life before and after the transgender bomb, Chart said. “It’s good to read a site like the trans widows website [transwidowsvoices.org] to understand what these men often do to their wives,” Chart said, adding:

They start forcing them to participate in disturbing fantasies, they’ll start trying to copy and sort of inhabit [and appropriate] their wives’ lives. The wife understands that this is a sexual fantasy, she knows this is a sexual roleplay, and then he’ll make her take him out with her friends, forcing her to do something that she knows is sexual roleplay for him in public with her female friends. It’s very psychologically coercive and cruel.

You can certainly find women who are willing to be redefined as lesbians when their husbands go through these kinds of social transitions … But I think for a lot of women, it’s something very upsetting because that’s just not how they see themselves, that’s not how they ever wanted to see themselves. They may be talking about a man who is the father of their children and then all of a sudden he’s telling her she’s in a lesbian relationship and she’s really a lesbian and she’s really always been a lesbian.

It is definitely humiliating. How could it not be humiliating to have someone forcing you to lie about who you are and who they are, and force you to participate with them in their sexual fantasies in public, when that was never something that you wanted or asked for or signed up for?

Establishment media outlets do not want to explore the motivations of their fashionable new class of victims, said Chart:

One of the reasons why people don’t know about the different ideas, the different states of mind that lead to an identification as the opposite sex, was because the [trans]gender activists have so demonized and vilified what was the state of the art of research on these conditions. Ray Blanchard and J. Michael Bailey have both been utterly monstered for describing the particular nature of the sexual fantasy that this is for straight men — that [men can] begin to fall in love with the idea of themselves as a woman, and this becomes their erotic target. Instead of another person, they fall in love with this idealized vision of themselves as a woman, and it begins to distort their reality.

Instead, the Post downgrades the wife’s marital shock to “a lot of upheaval and uncertainty for one couple to bear,” saying:

They’ve been together since they were teenagers; it’s the only romantic relationship they’ve ever known. But starting in July, the pair is separating in an attempt to figure out who they each are on their own, and whether their marriage still fits. “When I envision myself married with kids, I envision it with a man,” says Kyle’s wife, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the couple’s privacy. She’s torn, however, when Kyle asks her, “Well, do you envision it with me?”

“He’s still the same person,” she says, “and in some ways, more themselves, but not the person I married. … I’m open to it, but I don’t know.”

The Post‘s dismissal of the wife’s concerns is not surprising, Chart said.

Journalists feel the pressure to go with the transgender movement, Chart said. “They can see where the wind is blowing … They know they will get utterly destroyed if they go out against this [so] they have to be their best cheerleaders.” But, she added, it is also “utterly humiliating for the reporters [and editors] to have to go along with this.”  The forced deceptions empower the transgender activists, she said:

That’s the point of it. [If] you get people to lie like this, in public, then you get under their skin … It’s actually a really powerful recruiting tool, because they know they’ve been forced to lie, and they don’t want to deal with the full humiliation of that by having it acknowledged.

In the meantime, Kyle and his new female identity are feeling around for a new church, the supportive Washington Post reporter wrote. The man’s “wife is a pastor, and Kyle wants to respect their separation by not showing up in [her] pews. ‘I want to go back to a church that loves me for who I am,’ Kyle says, ‘as I’m figuring out who that is.'”

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