Woman Seeks Advice After Husband Cheats With Younger Trans Model

by Brandon Voss

16h ago

What’s a cis straight lady to do when her husband cheats on her with a much younger trans woman?

This week Slate sex advice column “How to Do It” fielded a letter from a woman who recently learned her husband of 25 years had a two-year affair.

“First, I found out she was 23 when he met her (and he was 58),” she wrote. “That was hard to digest. Then I found text messages between them that revealed modeling pictures of her. She is beautiful and a model! That was blow No. 2! How could a 55-year-old gray-haired mom whose body had three kids compete with that!?”

“Three months into trying to recover from all this with the help of a therapist and figure out how or if to rebuild our marriage—he emphatically wants to, but I am still hurt to the core—I still felt that I wasn’t getting the full story,” she continued. “Finally this week, starting our fourth month on this, he told me his young model is trans.”

“He admitted to getting turned on by trans porn for the past five years, and one day when I was out of town, he went to a trans party at a gay bar to make it real. He landed his model on the first try, or so he says. Now, miraculously, he says he’s over the trans attraction and says it can’t fulfill him. He says I make him complete. (We’ve been having daily sex for about a month now.) I don’t believe him. I believe he is scared to explore his sexuality in fear that it will upend his lifestyle. Is trans attraction ’baked in’? Can you ever be ’over it’?”

“How to Do It” author Rich Juzwiak had some thoughts, particularly about this scorned wife being so hung up on the gender identity of her husband’s mistress.

“I don’t believe him, either, about being ’over the trans attraction,’ but here’s where we differ: I don’t think it makes much of a difference. His interest in others doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with you,” Juzwiak told her.

“Taste and desires don’t evaporate when people commit to a monogamous partner; they just learn how to manage them,” he added. “I don’t think he’s telling the whole truth about his outside desires, but maybe he feels that to do so would be to further jeopardize the repair of your union, especially in its current, brittle state.”

“There are plenty of people who identify as bisexual or omnisexual but have a single monogamous partner. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily left unfulfilled because of all the sex with people of other genders they could be having,” Juzwiak clarified. “Many committed people masturbate to porn featuring idealized body types that their partners do not possess.”

“I sense your objective here is to ferret out whether, in revealing his capacity to be attracted to a woman who is trans, your husband has revealed an immutable and defining feature of his sexuality. You may now be wondering if he is only attracted to trans women and thus is unable to be attracted to a woman who is cisgender, such as yourself. This is not necessarily so. Many men have completely internalized that trans women are women, and thus make no such distinctions. But even if he enjoys certain features trans women may have that cis women don’t, he may also have a broad palate. Liking one thing doesn’t cancel out other things, and the idea that it would is quite retrograde.”

“I think you should stop dwelling on this particular aspect of your husband’s infidelity,” he concluded, “and start thinking about whether you can trust him again as a partner.”

Good advice?