Gender change and a family’s undoing: Shutesbury woman’s memoir stirs controversy
Christine Benvenuto in her Shutesbury home Tuesday. Benvenuto, a freelance writer, recently finished a memoir entitled "Sex Changes," chronicling her experiences with an ex-husband who underwent gender reassignment surgery.
JOSH KUCKENS
Purchase photo reprints »Christine Benvenuto in her Shutesbury home Tuesday. Benvenuto, a freelance writer, recently finished a memoir entitled "Sex Changes," chronicling her experiences with an ex-husband who underwent gender reassignment surgery.
JOSH KUCKENS
Purchase photo reprints »Christine Benvenuto in her Shutesbury home Tuesday. Benvenuto, a freelance writer, recently finished a memoir entitled "Sex Changes," chronicling her experiences with an ex-husband who underwent gender reassignment surgery.
JOSH KUCKENS
Purchase photo reprints »
Several years ago, Valley writer Christine Benvenuto and her husband of more than 20 years went through a bitter divorce. Their children were heartbroken, and Benvenuto was devastated. But the sad story had an unusual twist.
The marriage dissolved not because her husband left to be with another woman. He had begun the process to become one, from growing his hair to ingesting female hormones.
“For two years I watched my husband die,” she said.
Benvenuto, who lives in Shutesbury, eventually came to terms with the circumstances. She gradually confided in friends, came to better understand her ex’s situation and met another man. And now, she has detailed the experience in the book “Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On,” recently published by St. Martin’s Press.
The book takes the reader through grief, anger, bewilderment, self-recrimination — as well as some dark humor — as Benvenuto confronts the end of her marriage and the steady disappearance of the man she fell in love with as a college student. She becomes a single mother to three active children and finds herself worn to a frazzle.
While Benvenuto says her story can help families in which a member has gender issues, not everyone agrees. It has sparked a local protest which included Margaret Cerullo, a Hampshire College professor of sociology, who admits she hasn’t read the book, but nevertheless calls it hurtful, containing negative stereotypes about transgender people based on excerpts she read online. “These kind of portrayals are very damaging, especially for young trans people, who are already struggling with self-image ... it seemed unnecessarily cruel,” she said in a phone interview.
Last month Cerullo, a group of Hampshire students and others — including friends of Benvenuto’s ex-husband — showed up at Benvenuto’s reading at Amherst Books to voice their objections, an episode that ended with police being called. Cerullo said the group was attempting to have “a dialogue” with Benvenuto. Benvenuto, however, said the protesters shouted obscenities, even though children were present at the bookstore, and seemed to be seeking “a violent encounter.”
She insists her book is not a statement about or portrayal of transsexuals as a group. “I completely support their rights,” she said. “This book is my story — it’s about my very particular experience.”
A mistake, then hope
Benvenuto and her ex remained together for two years after he told her he felt like an alien as a man and was taking steps to change genders. In retrospect, that was a mistake, Benvenuto says, as it bewildered and then angered her children — then 12, 8 and 2 years old — while creating insurmountable tension between the couple.
Of the night her husband broke the news seven years ago, she wrote: “From that evening on, there would never be another easy moment between us ... ”
Yet today, Benvenuto, who declines to give her age, says she has softened, even though her children’s relationships with their other parent are still evolving. That was part of her impetus in writing her book, she says: “I did end up feeling pretty good about my life, that it didn’t just come to an end, and I wanted to give hope to people. I believe families need to be supported in supporting their kids ... because this is a difficult and painful thing for families. It’s not going to be a good outcome to tell your kids that everything’s going to be fine.”
Benvenuto, a freelance writer and editor who has written fiction and feature articles for various publications over the years, does not identify her ex-husband in her memoir, referring to him by the fictitious name of Tracey. According to past newspaper stories, however, her ex-husband was Jay Ladin, a writer and poet who at one time taught English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Ladin made national and even international news about four years ago when, after teaching literature at Yeshiva University in New York City for a number of years, he returned to campus as a transgendered woman, Joy Ladin. Officials at the Orthodox Jewish school at first put Ladin on administrative leave but then allowed her to teach again.
Joy Ladin published her own memoir this year, “Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders,” in which she details her struggle to live as the “wrong” gender and the steps she took to become a woman. She also offers a frank appraisal of what her transition cost others: “My gender identity crisis had destroyed my marriage, shattered my family, and turned me into an unwelcome stranger in my own home.”
“My children were grief stricken, angry and baffled by the double blow of losing their happy family and the strange transformation of the father they loved,” Ladin adds.
Road to realization
Benvenuto says her ex-husband went from being “a wonderful father” and her closest confidant to a detached, secretive and sometimes belligerent stranger, completely consumed with changing his gender and angry that neither she nor their children seemed to be happy for him. She in turn increasingly saw him as a narcissist who was willing to throw four lives overboard to meet his own needs.
She recalls one conversation in which she asked, “What if you knew if doing this would destroy one or all of the children?” She writes that her ex-husband, “ice cold,” responded, “I would do it anyway.”
Looking back, Benvenuto says she did not understand the depths of her ex-husband’s misery, feeling he was trapped in the wrong gender. There had been some hints in the past — one time, as a much younger man, he had told her he wished he’d been born a girl — but she says she attributed that to his difficult childhood and strained relationship with his father.
“I thought [gender confusion] was a psychological problem,” she said. “I still don’t completely or really understand this issue, but I know that it’s not as if you can get over it with the right therapy. If a person is saying, ‘I have gender issues,’ then they do.”
But at the time, she was overwhelmed with confusion, fear and rejection, and not just because of her ex. Some friends and acquaintances were sympathetic to her, she says, but others in what she sarcastically calls “The Valley of the Politically Correct” seemed more interested in the symbolism of her ex-husband’s change.
“I do think there was a strong element of ‘We have to embrace this, we have to celebrate this, and we can’t stop and say, wow, this is really hard for you, this is really hard for your kids,’ ” Benvenuto said.
“I would be waylaid at grocery stores or on the street or at school events with the most intimate questions,” she added. “Sometimes it was people who maybe wouldn’t have spoken to me before but would say, ‘How exciting this is! Has your husband had surgery yet?’ ”
She was also disturbed by what she calls “an anti-feminist element” among some people, primarily women, whose attitude appeared to be “we’re going to support your husband — you’re the wife and you’ve got to shut up and back him and sacrifice, and if your kids aren’t on board with this, get them on board.”
As one woman said to her, “Look, he’s a transsexual. Whatever he does is what he needs to do.”
Benvenuto would eventually leave the Jewish Community of Amherst synagogue, which she and her family had attended for years, because she felt she wasn’t getting support from some members. “Ultimately it was too hard to be there,” she said.
Her grief was compounded by shyness and reticence. It took her months to tell friends her marriage was on the rocks, and months more to say why it was failing. Her own upbringing, Benvenuto adds, made it painful to see her ex-husband feminizing himself, and she was horrified to discover he was playing dress-up games with her older daughter, then about 9.
As she writes, “It is inescapable: for me there is something slightly creepy and more than slightly sad about a man in women’s clothes.” These “admittedly terrible” feelings, she notes, mark her as “hopelessly retrograde. Hopelessly, viscerally outside the pale of political correctness.”
That said, Benvenuto notes that she has told her ex-husband she wishes she could have been more supportive of his change. “It would have involved letting go of the marriage much more quickly, saying, ‘We’re on separate paths but I can be supportive of you on your path.’ ” she said. But she says her ex refused at first to move out of the house, and for nearly two years the couple tried to keep up the appearance that things were “normal.”
Benvenuto, whose previous book is “Shiksa,” about the experiences of gentile women married to Jewish men, said she’s searching for her next writing project. She added that she hopes her new book is read “more as a story about divorce and mid-life crisis and how a lot of things happen, but you pick yourself up and go on. The specifics of my story are a little unusual, but the theme is more universal.”
“I clung to stasis like a fraying lifeline, kicking and screaming as it slipped through my fingers,” she writes in her book. “But against my will and finally because of it, my life changed, and changed me with it.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.