Transition in the Family: Children Need Protection, Sometimes Even from their Own Fathers
By Una-Jane Winfield
When I was growing up, Stephen, who was the same age as me and the son of a neighbour, became severely schizophrenic. When he fathered a child with a woman he met while in treatment for his mental problems, Social Services stepped in and the baby was put up for adoption. As tragic as it seemed at the time, it was clear that this was best since both parents were in and out of mental institutions. They could not look after themselves, let alone a dependent child. Our neighbour went on to become addicted to heroin and died aged about 40. I never imagined my own children would need similar protection.
When I look back on my marriage to Paul there were signs early on in our children’s lives that he was incapable of attending to their basic needs. From the beginning he was extremely uninterested in forward planning and did not contribute to the household work and family life, the fact of which, I gradually realised, contributed to the break up of his two previous marriages. It was puzzling to me that he had a successful professional career and was respected at work. In retrospect, I didn’t understand the vast dichotomy between his emotional and intellectual development. It fell to me to make all the decisions in our family life, and over time, I grew used to this responsibility.
As the years passed, Paul retreated into the world of his computer. He started to actively push me and all his acquaintances and friends away through his teasing and taunting behaviour. It finally became a sort of psychological torture that lasted over 10 years. I had to struggle to defend myself and protect the children from his negligence. He disagreed about anything and everything, for the sake of disagreeing, like “civil disobedience” within the marriage. When he finally left us after 14 years, I was just as terrified as I had been when he lived with us. At least when we were together I could observe him. I was very worried that he would demand access to our children.
When Paul became “Elizabeth”, I hoped that my now medically transitioned husband might one day wake up and realise the chaos and heartbreak he had caused, or that he might feel remorse for the psychological torture that he had inflicted in the decade before he left. Instead, he demonstrated what I have come to think of as the classic autogynephile’s “narcissistic rage” at any suggestion that he was in the wrong. The thing was: we had two children together.
I couldn’t deny that he was their biological father, but I HAD to refuse him direct contact with our son and daughter who were ten and twelve at the time. He wanted to “recruit” them to his delusion, even trying to persuade them that he was their “sibling” not their father. They loved him innocently and were incapable of recognising the manipulation which he tried to impose on them. After what he had done to me I was absolutely certain that Paul/”Elizabeth” would disrupt their normal development with his self-centred, whining pleas and vapid weakness. Everything was about him not his children. He had no parental feelings of protection for them, which I found very alarming.
It was easier for me, an adult and a responsible parent, to push him away through the divorce, but I worried about our children. Fortunately, now in their late 20s, they merely recall a “ghost”, a man who said and did very little with them and spent all his time in the dining room, which he used as his study. They barely remember him.
“Elizabeth”, as he was by then, Paul admitted to the neighbour of his new house that he was lonely after he left us, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. I found him terrifying. To me, he was a fraudster, a psychopath and very seriously deluded. He had given me absolutely no explanation for his repellent behaviour during the whole of the marriage. Once he had decided to go he left in a cupboard a dress from Dorothy Perkins, a pair of women’s shoes in a size 9 and a set of credit cards from NatWest, one in his normal name and the other for “Elizabeth” – which was my mother’s name. I asked innocently: “Whose are these things?” thinking that he had a lover called “Elizabeth”. He replied: “It’s true. I’m a transsexual”. Nothing more! It was like the air was all sucked out of the room. I was stifled and unable to ask anything. Three months later in July 2006 he physically moved out, still with no explanation apart from that one sentence.
After he left I wrote to ask him “Why?” and he pointed me straight away to the Gender Identity Research & Education Society (GIRES) and “The Beaumont Society”. He knew all the gender-affirming “support groups” and I realised that he had been preparing his departure for a long time. Just like my “boy next door” neighbour Stephen all those years ago, Paul was set on a destructive course and our children needed to be protected from him.
Two decades have gone by since our divorce. In that time our children completed all stages of school and university with excellent academic results and good friendships. They are now 29 and 28, both living and working in the USA. I am glad that they have gone to a new world which they enjoy.
Paul died by suicide in April 2022. It was a tragic life, but one he had chosen.
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