The real lead — boundlessly selfish man betrays wife and children, chooses irreversible mutilation instead of family

Posted on April 14, 2007

In March 2004, Steve told Donna he realized they’d grown apart and he was sorry. He said he was working on something that would make things better.

“I thought maybe he was planning a second honeymoon or a cruise, some kind of romantic getaway,” Donna says. “I was getting pretty excited to find out how he was going to improve our marriage.”

One night while Travis, then 10, was at a friend’s house, Donna made a candlelight dinner. Steve poured wine. He handed her an eight-page typed letter.

It started out tracing the history of their relationship, their love. Then he got to the part where he said he had been seeing a therapist. “I need to become the person that I really am,” Steve wrote to his wife. “And that person is a woman.”

Donna read that page five times. The words were blurry through her tears. Her head hurt. Her stomach was in knots. “I kept thinking: I gotta get out of here,” she says. “I gotta grab Travis and run.”

“What about this,” she asked Steve, “is going to make our marriage better?”

He said he didn’t want a divorce. He just wanted to be who he was supposed to be. Sure, they’d have to adjust their relationship. But he still wanted to be Travis’ parent and her partner. He’d just be Susan.

He knew he was asking a lot, but hoped somehow she would understand.

- - -

For two days, Donna stayed in bed crying.

If Steve could take a pill to suppress testosterone, couldn’t he take one to add it? If his body and his brain didn’t match, wouldn’t it be easier to fix his mind than mess with his body? If he had lived with this for more than 40 years, why couldn’t he live with it the rest of his life?

“I can’t keep myself split,” Steve remembers telling her. All his life, he had “put who I am aside for my parents, my career, society, my family.” He says he felt like the alien in a Star Trek episode who could take on the form of whatever creature it was around. But the alien got sick and couldn’t keep up the illusion. “I’m too tired,” Steve said. “I can’t do it anymore.”

He told Donna he had come to understand how people could commit suicide. At times he thought it would be easier to die than put everyone through the humiliation they would suffer when he became a woman.

He had agonized about Travis. He had asked himself whether he could wait until his son was older before making the change. He had decided he couldn’t. It would kill him. It had come down to this, he told Donna: Would it be better for Travis to have a dead dad? Or a dad who wanted to be a woman?

Steve gave Donna books and articles to read, Web sites to study and chat rooms for partners of transgender people.

“I had nothing in common with them,” Donna says. “All those people were planning to stay with their partners, even after the transition. I couldn’t do that.”

She went to see Farrell, who told her many families work through this. Another therapist told her not to make any life decisions while the hurt was so raw.

Donna took off her wedding ring. She and Steve made a two-year plan:

Steve would start electrolysis and hormone therapy. Donna would go back to school to become a medical technician. They’d continue living as a family while he embarked on his new life. When Steve was ready to be Susan, he would move out.

They wouldn’t tell Travis - or anyone - until 2007.

Every time I see a story like this, the overwrought sympathy for shameless narcissists like this makes me nauseous. It would “kill him” to keep his committment as a husband and father? Puh-lease. He “agonized” about their son? Not enough, not enough. If he actually loved his child as much as he loved himself, there would be no decision to make here. The better to have a “dude looks like a lady” dad than a “dead dad” manipulation is classic.

From Jim “Gay American” McGreevey with his poor wife standing beside him at that disgusting press conference, to self-centered villians like this guy…does anyone outside the media really think that it’s really heroic to betray your family so completely? Please save the “he needs to be true to himself and who he is” pap. What about being true to the children whose lives these people have chosen to destroy?

» Filed Under ACLU, Homosexual Agenda, News

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Comments

3 Responses to “The real lead — boundlessly selfish man betrays wife and children, chooses irreversible mutilation instead of family”

gary l. day on April 18th, 2007 12:37 pm

We wouldn’t have stories like this if people like you didn’t constantly
put pressure on people to hide away their true natures, constantly
urging them to conform to a norm that doesn’t fit them, making them
think that marriage was a ticket to a heterosexual lifestyle. If
these people refrained from entering into marriages based on lies
to begin with, we wouldn’t have these tragedies. But no, you insist
on self-abnegation, a life in miserable self-denial. And when the
burden is too much for the person to bear, you tag him as a selfish
villain, blithely dismissing how much conservative judgmentalism
contributes to the scenario.
Glib Fortuna on April 18th, 2007 2:02 pm

Oh please Gary.

This guy (and he will never be anything but a guy), if he thought he was “Susan” all along, should never have married and never brought an innocent child into the world just to destroy his life.

That you sympathize with him over the INNOCENT parties in this story shows YOUR judgmentalism. You have made a judgment that it’s A-OK to devastate others’ lives to “fulfill” one’s own twisted vision of themselves.

Enough with the tired pap about “miserable self-denial” — no one forced him to do anything. He made a choice and now he is making another choice, one that has destroyed a child’s life.
gary l. day on April 23rd, 2007 2:35 pm

I consider everyone involved to be a tragic victom of an intolerant
society that won’t even (as you don’t) acknowledge the power and the
pressure of societal scorn and disapproval on certain vulnerable
people.