‘OUR SON WAS SIX MONTHS OLD WHEN MY HUSBAND STARTED TO TRANSITION’
After her son’s birth, Alexandra Heminsley felt her then partner withdrawing from her. The truth ended their marriage but also set the author free to rebuild herself and her family with honesty and love
Challenging times made this family stronger
There is a bench on the Brighton seafront, facing the iconic green railings, where I sat for hours, waiting for my contractions to start. Six months later, I sat there again with my baby and sobbed into the hood of his coat. That evening, I went home to have the conversation that had been looming almost since the moment he was born: my then-husband was going to transition.
For months leading up to that moment in 2017, I’d known something was very wrong between us, but it was a battle to understand what. We were still close, there was no shortage of love, and we adored the baby we’d both wanted. But the love was changing shape like a phantom I couldn’t grasp. Each time I reached out, it slipped away. Eye contact was avoided, then physical contact was evaded, yet kindness remained. We should have been so happy, but I seemed to be sharing a home with someone consumed by sadness. It felt like living in a hall of mirrors; nothing was real but nothing was quite a lie.
What had made it particularly hard for me to understand these strange currents disrupting my marriage was a series of events that had taken place in the months preceding our son’s birth.
When I was a few weeks pregnant, we had decided I should take a Harmony prenatal test. The NHS did not have space for us to have the usual 12-week scan until I would be nearly 15 weeks pregnant. And after a couple of gruelling rounds of IVF, I was desperate to know our baby was safe from any chromosomal disorders, which the test would look for. But a few days after taking the test, results came back saying I shared no DNA with the foetus. As it was an IVF pregnancy, this raised the possibility that I was not carrying my own child; something that has indeed happened in cases abroad. It took several weeks, a trip to Harley Street specialists, and an invasive and painful CVS test (which also looks for genetic disorders) to establish that it had all merely been a lab mistake.
Then, a month before I was due, I was sexually assaulted on my train home. Grabbed by a drunk football fan, then trapped in a carriage by his friends, it was a further destabilising experience in an already difficult pregnancy. When the case went to court, a magistrate decided that, as I was pregnant, I would have been highly emotional, and thus might have made a mistake in remembering what had happened. The man was found
not guilty, despite an independent witness coming forward to say that she had seen the entire episode take place.
QUESTIONING REALITY
Consequently, there were several months during our son’s early life when I felt unsure of what my actual reality was. After all, by this point I had been told I might not be pregnant with my own baby, and that a man who had grabbed me, hadn’t. Meanwhile, all the baby books, the blogs and the endless Insta-mum posts said the same thing: early motherhood can be disorientating, lack of sleep can knock your judgement, and becoming a parent requires a little recalibration around who you are and what your place in the world is now.
So maybe I was overreacting to the distance I felt between me and my husband? After all, we had always been so close in the six years we had been together, and agreed on so much, not least on how to parent. But now it felt as if a sheet of Perspex had been dropped between us; things looked almost the same, but less clear than before.
In hindsight, I am proud that by the time our son was just a few months old, we had reached a point where we could have the conversation. There had been no malice, no desertion, no affair. To my frustration there was never that Tv-drama ‘moment’, no big reveal before the credits rolled. There was just the creeping, all-pervasive sense that what might be a joke on a hen night could actually be happening to me, to us. And that I knew nothing about how to handle it or who to talk to about it.
When the moment came, when the person closest to me in the world was able to finally articulate the need to transition, it felt like a sort of terrible freedom. I was facing losing someone, but I was also finally gaining a sense of solid ground beneath my feet.
GRIEF AND ACCEPTANCE
Once the worst of the conversations had taken place, it turned out that we did not lose each other. Sure, we are no longer a couple. Our marriage was unsustainable and we both accepted that. There were equal measures of grief and acceptance on both sides. I could not demand that my then-husband not be trans, any more than she could demand I become lesbian. Friends and family were desperately worried about me, unsure of how to comfort someone dealing with this sort of loss, this degree of change, and so fast. But what took me a long time to articulate was how much easier it was to deal with the finality of knowing, than the surreal months that had preceded it.
Until I knew the truth, I felt that so many choices about my life, my body, and my sense of myself as a woman had been taken away. IVF had left me passive for such a huge life stage: reaching to be a mother, to achieve what society still so often wants from a ‘proper’ woman. I’d had to sit back and see my body discussed as a hypothetical, an interesting debate, a puzzle to solve, both in doctors’ offices and magistrates’ courts. I had been rendered repeatedly mute as debate swirled around me, the voices often belonging to men.
So when I realised that the problem in my own home had never been me, it wasn’t that I hadn’t breastfed well enough, or lost weight fast enough, or been feeling ‘myself’ ebulliently enough (all things I had tormented myself with), there was just as much
Love was changing shape like a phantom I couldn’t grasp
relief as there was rage. Yes, there was a lot of rage, at myself for not having asked more questions, sooner; at my ex for not having told me more, sooner; and at society in general for making such conversations so painful, the relentless punchline to so many jokes, the twist in so many second-rate crime novels.
But a lot of that passed. Once I was dealing with reality, everything became easier. Seeing my ex have the courage to be true to herself gave me the freedom to get my own voice back. Because, while choice after choice, including the end of my marriage, had felt snatched from me, I still had a card to play: how I responded. And I decided my response would be my story. I could see a very clear line from the historic treatment of trans people in this country to the fact that my ex had felt it necessary to push any truths about who she was to the furthest part of her mind for so long.
And I had a son to care for, who was now part of an LGBTQ+ family and would be for the rest of his life. Meanwhile,
I was very conscious that people beyond my immediate circle were realising I was single. I did not want silence to calcify into a lie, suggesting that either of my son’s parents had actively wanted to leave the marriage. I did not want to be part of attributing blame and
I refuse to be ashamed of our family.
On his first birthday, after several months of mulling to myself, I wrote an Instagram post to my 10,000 followers describing my new family set-up. Being honest about us was the first step to living an open life, to reaching towards freedom. And that was the only sort of
I had to learn to cherish my own body again
life I could imagine that would not ultimately harm my son. He needs to know, every day, that we are proud of who he is and who we are, and of the marriage we once had. We are!
But there was more to it than that. In order to be truly accepting of my ex, I had to take a look at what I thought a woman’s body is, and could be. I had to think about how casually I had talked about what a ‘normal’ woman was in my previous books, Running Like A Girl and Leap In, and examine how little I had ever stopped to think about race or disability. And amid that, I had to learn to cherish my own body again. I went back to the gym, regaining strength I feared I had lost in the maternity ward. I went to Norway and climbed mountains, reminding myself of how I was capable of things I had never even considered. And
I began working with the amazing Brighton-based women’s charity Rise, helping to fundraise for people who have been affected by domestic abuse.
Yes, I have been through pain I had never realised possible and had certainly never imagined for myself. But I have also learned how much good there is in my life and how much I have left to give. By being open, by paying testament to the fact that my ex remains a wonderful person and an exceptional parent, and a woman, I sincerely hope that I am part of creating a society where fewer people feel compelled to hide their truths for so long. And I hope, in turn, that will mean fewer women will find themselves in the murky loneliness where I once felt so stuck.
A HAPPIER FUTURE
Our son will start school this year and sometimes I reel at how much his early years will have held. At times I have felt utterly unmoored by what life has thrown at us, but at others I know it has been the making of me. I went back to that bench last week, three years since I sat on it, weeping. This time, my son was trying to climb the railings, waving at seagulls, as happy as I could ever have dreamed. We have made it.
• Some Body To Love: A Family Story by Alexandra Heminsley (Chatto & Windus), is out now