prudie's response to My Ex Didn't Tell Me She Was Transgender and Now I'm Married to Her Sister: (long-ish)
Posted by
Diva (aka Diva)
Mar 20 '14, 08:41
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So much for sisterly solidarity. Yes this is a tale of bad judgment, but if Rhonda erred by omission, Amy’s sin was one of commission. She collected a dossier on Rhonda and presented it to you, meddling in her adult sister’s private life. You are stuck on the fact that you feel misled by Rhonda, so let’s examine that. There are no hard and fast rules about what one is obligated to tell a potential sexual partner, beyond the necessity of alerting them to one’s communicable disease status. You were slowly getting to know Rhonda, and I think two people looking for a serious, intimate relationship are obligated to divulge facts about themselves in a timely way that a reasonable person would feel deceived not knowing. For example, revealing that one had been married previously, or has children, or can’t have biological children, or has a significant medical condition. I think being transgender falls in this obligation-to-disclose category. I know that what to tell and when is an issue of debate in the LGBT community, so for perspective I spoke to Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of Stuck in the Middle with You, a memoir of her transition from being a father to a mother. She agrees that where intimate relationships are concerned honesty in general is best, but when to reveal that one is transgender is a choice made by that individual. A generation ago, she says, transgender people were told by their doctors to erase their pasts and live a stealth life, which caused a lot of anguish and meant people traded one secret for another. Today, she says, some trans people who have had reassignment surgery assert they simply had a birth defect that was corrected, and therefore their past is nobody’s business. Boylan does point out, however, that in the age of the Internet trying to keep the fact of a gender change hidden can become a terrible, and hopeless, burden.
But above all, Boylan noted the violation committed when Amy decided to out Rhonda, a revelation that was not hers to make. I hope you can understand how Amy’s act cleaved her family and shattered her relationship with her sister. Now that you and Amy are about to have your in-laws’ first grandchild, you’re asking for my help to undermine any chance this family might find some way forward. It’s you, however, who has to examine whether the presence of Rhonda makes you so uncomfortable that you would prefer to demonize your in-laws and sever them from your child’s life. It is you who has become the toxic influence. And as Boylan points out, now that you and Amy are about to become parents, think about how you would react if your own child turned out to be transgender, which might help you better understand all your in-laws. - Prudie
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