How To Tell If Your Man is Really a Woman

“How to Tell if Your Man is Really a Woman!” Sounds like great blub for the cover of Cosmo, situated right beneath Zooey Deschanel’s armpit. I love her by the way. I can’t say if this has ever been an article or not for as you all know, most of these posts are hastily written, and even more hastily researched. I’m doing a PowerPoint presentation, replying to an email, and listening to someone tell me something I clearly don’t find important even as I write this. If it really was an article in Cosmo, Marie Clare, or even 17, it should not have been. Whoever wrote it doesn’t know a thing.

That doesn’t change the fact that it is something every heterosexual cisgender woman would really like to know. I don’t blame them one bit either. There are a lot of really good reasons for that. In terms of base animal attraction, there are a whole lot more late night fantasies playing about Channing Tatum than Cpl Klinger from M.A.S.H. I’m not saying it never happens, but come on. In the hetero female world shirtless Diet Coke guy always beats guy in a dress. That obviously excludes shirtless Diet Coke guy wrestling himself into a pair of Spanx after hitting the Old Country Buffet. Hetero women, cis or trans, tend to gravitate toward more masculine men. Even Sheldon Cooper comes in way above a trans woman, even when she was originally perceived to be a gentle yet commanding powerhouse of a dude.

Finding out you married a trans woman also comes off as a great big ‘fuck you’ to a whole lot of life planning. This is especially true in marriage. Everyone gets married with the expectation that this is it, no more having to worry about dating, ‘the scene’, and attempting to penetrate the confounding intricacies or lack thereof of yet another male brain. The thought itself is exhausting. Marrying, and especially having kids with, a trans woman is essentially the presentation of a huge complex problem for any woman, no matter what she decides to do with it. Suddenly she’s got to share the mirror, get constantly asked if her partner looks OK, go to countless family and friends and declare “well he, I mean she, sure got me!”, and all the other fun stuff. Plus the once big strong man who used to be able to carry in all the groceries in one trip now has to call some guy just to move a set of shelves.

Honestly, it goes on from there. I could probably spend all day on this. The point is that my razor sharp perception is that the vast majority of women sure would love way to see this kind of thing coming well before diving in too deep. As far as I can tell, however, there isn’t. At least not unless the trans woman in question is right on the hairy edge of being self realized and doing something about it. “But why Michelle? I mean all you do is go on and on about all the fricking signs that you were trans from the time you were like 4. Were these not big whooping red warning signs?” Yeah… now they look like that, but at the time they were sunk a mile beneath the earth in an abandoned mine shaft, cemented over, with rabid baboons posted miles away from the entrance.

I know I’ve said it before, but it can’t hurt to drag out again. If I didn’t know, you sure weren’t going to figure it out. Unlike the legendary gaydar, we can’t spot each other either. There was a trans woman sitting 20 feet away from my office just as I was starting to figure myself out. No facial hair, long beautiful hair, breasts, and I even thought she was a girl until I saw her male name, and failed spectacularly in putting the facts together. My chance of telling if someone is trans is as good as yours. Having the body of, plus being raised and cultured as, the wrong gender is the world’s greatest camouflage. Jack Byrnes, the living lie detector, would have passed me with flying colors.

“Bullshit Michelle, your stories are rife with clues! Share much?” Um, no. I sure didn’t. I should have, but even now looking back, there was no chance of that happening. I don’t know if it’s a form of super OCD, or something else all together, but I would have happily submitted myself to endless water boarding rather than ever breath a word of it. Exceptionally terrible things would have happened. Like the worst thing ever plus infinity. I don’t know why I thought that, but it was the stuff of nightmares, frequent ones, for well over 35 years. Even so, we minimize it all to the most trivial of unimportance. “Me dress female? Well, maybe once or twice, but only as a lark. Just a fun little diversion to take my mind off the Bills crap ass season.” Never mind the four cubic yards of clothes crammed in every hiding spot.

Getting back to the main point, there will never be an accurate article with this title because there simply can’t be. Even the most powerful psychiatric tools available are wholly and completely dependent on the person being ready to acknowledge the truth and answer honestly and openly about it. To even the trained and highly experienced professional, it’s a grueling process. So sorry my cis sisters, if I could tell you I would in a heartbeat, but in truth you are just playing the odds. At least they are heavily in your favor.