It’s no secret that marriage is not as easy as it looks, a lot of times you will have to encounter many problems. They say that a healthy couple has a strong level of trust and honesty and one factor that you cannot afford in your marriage is the tendency to be dishonest or deceptive. Dishonesty will undermine your marriage, even in just a little amount.
But what if your other half has deceived you to conceal the truth about his or her gender?
Just like the shocking story of a 64-year-old Belgian man named Jan, after 19 years of being married to his wife, he recently found out that she was actually born a man.
On 1993 Jan married Monica, who is an Indonesian and despite legal difficulties raised by the Belgian immigration authorities in processing her documents, the court still approved her application.
“I brought her to Belgium. That was not easy. The Belgian courts had serious doubts about the authenticity of her birth and her identity papers, but eventually, they accepted it anyway. I thought she was an attractive woman, all woman. She had no male traits.”
The couple lived in normal life for many years and Monica was like a “big sister” to his children. But it was only in recently that he discovered that his wife had originally been a man and had undergone a gender change.
“I feel I’ve been assaulted,” he told the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper.
According to Jan, his wife and he had decided not to have children because he had two by his previous marriage and Monica fooled him “to conceal the truth” by using sanitary towels as she pretends to menstruate.
“Even during [redacted], I never noticed anything,” he said.
But their marriage started to come under tension when she got a new full-time job. “Monica began to change very much,” he said. “My oldest son saw her sometimes at a nightclub. She began to wear very flashy clothes, those ultra-short skirts or tiny tops, so her abdomen was completely exposed.”
Finally, Jan found “amorous messages” from other men on her computer and rumors began to surface, and after that, he confronted Monica in a violent manner that led to the police being called.
“A friend told me that he had heard that Monica was actually a [redacted]-changed man. I could not believe it. My son heard similar rumors,” Jan said.
“I pushed her against the wall and said: Now I know the truth. Are you a man? She then announced that she was born as a boy and that she had been operated on. She was now a woman, and so she did not need to tell me about her past as a man. My world collapsed. That evening came to blows. The police came.”
Jan, who is undergoing psychiatric treatment after the shocking revelation, has started legal proceedings to have their marriage annulled, but the Belgian courts did not allow him to turn Monica out of the family home.
According to his Lawyer, Liliane Verjauw.
“That person has deliberately deceived him for years, even scammed. Presumably, she has also forged documents used here to get a residence permit. The children, who for years have lived with her, are devastated. “