 remarkable and honest
This is an honest and intense account of what it is like to be married to a crossdresser. Helen Boyd's acceptance and openness, while at the same time acknowledging her own feelings of trepidation concerning some aspects of this new life, is remarkable and admirable. There are no cross-dressers in my life, (that I am aware of) and I still found this book to be very worthwhile for the honest approach and thorough investigation of the subject.
A very candid account-helpful and revealing
As a crossdresser for nearly 3 decades and someone who is married, this book gave me tremendous insights into the challenges that are faced by my spouse. Helen Boyd does a very thorough analysis of identifying the choices and tensions inherent in being a CD as well as the struggles a spouse must face. What I found especially enlightening was the description of the continuum of dressing and the various types of relationships crossdressers have with their significant others. I highly recommend the section that deals with the real questions that should be discussed in a relationship. There is an enormous struggle that goes on in these kinds of relationships and most don't last. The book offers one useful roadmap.
 The author looks insightfully at her own feelings
Author Helen Boyd, herself the wife of a crossdresser, looks insightfully at her own feelings in relation to her partner's transvestism in her book My Husband Betty. While offering support of her husband's "differently-gendered" perspective, she extensively researched the subject, with the purpose of determining how other couples coped with similar situations. While looking at the mechanism of gender identity dysphoria through a crossdressers' eyes may prove useful, one of the values of Boyd's work is that seeing it from a partners' perspective provides a counterbalanced, completely different and perhaps more objective point of view. Boyd writes about one particular key factor that appears to be prevalent in transgendered marital relationships, appearing to be related to shame-an element of "deceit" that frequently extends itself back before the marriage began. Crossdressing husbands may see a way out of their dilemma by purging themselves from their generally oppressive, unwelcome, and perhaps titillating fantasy. The husband-to-be, apparently smitten by his feelings of love and the prospect of a relationship that will, he hopes, extract him from his unwanted gender dilemma, may unwittingly delude both himself and his partner by incorporating the defense mechanisms of rationalization, denial, dissociation and/or repression. Here, the perspective bridegroom may engage in the activity of purging-which generally results in the discarding of his female attire, makeup and other accoutrements. He most likely may also evoke a temporary cessation of his life-long desires, fantasies, and dreams, all of which will sooner or later come flooding back with a vengeance. The author finds, through her research and reading, that for many men, there is a sexual component related to crossdressing. Sexual gratification may not be the main reason they do what they do, but Boyd feels that many crossdressers experience a convergence of their sexuality and their crossdressing. She writes that many women suspect their husbands are turned on by crossdressing, but they frequently doubt their own intuition because their husbands, possibly because of their own shame, and with the support of some of the organizations they join, often deny it. According to Boyd's findings, almost one-third of the crossdressers surveyed continued to keep secrets from their partners, even after finally revealing their crossdressing proclivities, lying most often about their sexuality-particularly their commonly-held curiosity about having sex with men while dressed en femme, or another common deceit being the true extent of the transgendered feelings. Boyd states that one of the main fears that wives have about their transvestic partners is that somewhere along the line the may want to go all the way and transition to become women. Perhaps many such men are in denial-not even aware of the extent of their feelings, or perhaps they are flat-out lying. In this type of deceit though, an element of transphobic shame is evident with homophobia as a possible component. Boyd contends that most men who keep these secrets do so because they are either too ashamed of their thoughts and fantasies to be honest about them and/or they think their partners can't handle the truth. She states that it appears unlikely that a crossdresser is going to be open with his wife if he is both ashamed of what he is doing or thinking and also afraid that she will become very angry when she learns that thoughts of having sex with a man or changing his gender have crossed his mind. There would seem to be a huge potential for marital failure when a crossdresser finally reveals himself to his partner, but continues to weave a web of deceit by denying, probably because of shame, that he does not crossdress for sexual pleasure, when that may just not be the case. It would seem to follow that any other form of deceit related to shame or internalized transphobia would be detrimental and self-perpetuating of the non-acceptance of crossdressing behavior by society. Boyd points out that in the 1960s, the popular image of crossdressers was that they were either gay or perverted or both. In order to gain respect and public acceptance, crossdressers actively started "cleaning up" their image. In Virginia Prince's The Transvestite and His Wife, she states that it is very clear that by the late 1960s crossdressers started emphasizing two things: 1) their heterosexuality, and 2) the concept that crossdressing is about getting in touch with their inner female, and not about sex or arousal or fetishism. Their bid for acceptance was understandable and their emphasis on heterosexuality was valid, since most of them are straight. Their disclaimer that their crossdressing wasn't about sex, though, did not ring true. That their primary motivation was to get in touch with an inner female self-the "second self" as Prince's Tri-Ess organization would have it-was only partially true. Many crossdressers do indeed access a more feminine part of themselves when they dress. But not only was there an emphasis on denying that it was entirely about sex, there was also an insistence that it wasn't about sex at all. Crossdressers reassured themselves that they weren't perverts, and reassured their wives their crossdressing wasn't sexual, and everyone got to feel "normal." Boyd postulates that, "wives will never understand any of this if crossdressers don't start being honest about their own sexuality." Perhaps this is also true of society in general, and there is something to be said about the confluence of sexuality and shame as a component in gender identity dysphoria.
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