Ute Heggen thinks of herself as a widow – and in one sense, she is correct. The man she married as a college student is dead.
He is now living as a woman, so Ute is, properly speaking, a ‘trans widow’, a woman whose tumultuous life experiences have presaged the culture wars gripping America today.
It is more than twenty years since she discovered a secret diary Neddy (not his real name) kept, detailing his secret life of cross-dressing and visiting New York bars hoping to ‘pass’ as a woman. She was profoundly shocked.
But there was, to her, worse to come: when Neddy finally decided to medically transition, Ute said, he seemed to use her – his wife, by then, of many years – as his template of womanhood.
He grew his hair into the same style as Ute’s and dyed it the same shade of strawberry blonde. They wore the same shades of make-up.
‘He began copying my mannerisms to try and look more convincing as a woman,’ she says (she refuses to use female pronouns for her ex, so as the Daily Mail shares her story we will not either).
‘I saw the way he moved his hands when he talked. I often put my palms together and bump them off my chest when I’m making a point. He began copying my mannerisms to try and look more convincing as a woman.’
It was all terribly unnerving, especially as he also started copying the way she walked. ‘He’d stop and straighten up, then try to move his arms and shoulders loosely,’ she says. Without a doubt, she says, it was an ‘imitative gesture.’
Ute Heggen thinks of herself as a widow – and in a sense, she is correct. The man she married as a college student is dead. He is now living as a woman, so Ute is, properly speaking, a ‘trans widow’, a woman whose tumultuous life experiences have presaged today’s culture wars.
When Neddy finally decided to medically transition, Ute said, he seemed to use her as his template of womanhood. He grew his hair into the same style as Ute’s and dyed it the same shade of strawberry blonde. They wore the same shades of make-up.
These days, the 68-year-old author can laugh about it. ‘A good friend said it was as if he was trying to be an ugly version of me,’ she says, still struck by the absurdity of the situation. ‘You could certainly argue that he lacked imagination.’
But sometimes she can’t sleep or has nightmares and mourns the loss of the wife she once was.
She talks about her ordeal in the documentary, ‘Behind The Looking Glass,‘ released last year after the director, Vaishnavi Sundar, interviewed more than 40 trans widows.
Sundar tells the Daily Mail that their lives were universally derailed when their husband became an autogynephilic — a man who is sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as female.
She says that our politically correct society expects their wives to ‘go along with it’ and, instead of being recognized and offered support, if they don’t they are slammed as bigots or transphobes.
‘When a wife or partner speaks out,’ Sundar explains, ‘She’s accused of transphobia, kink-shaming, being a prude or attention seeking.
‘It’s a rock-and-crazy-place situation for women either way.’
As for Ute, she has learned that men who transition often try to bury their past along with their former identity – sometimes literally, burying an old item of clothing, such as shoes or a business suit.
But at the same time, she says, they ‘erase the history’ of the spouse they leave behind. And that, over the years, she has found very hard to take.
‘I’m not even supposed to display wedding photos,’ she adds, noting that some trans widows are forced to dispose of them entirely.
In a quiet act of rebellion, she keeps a collection of pictures of her 1978 wedding ceremony – in which she’s wearing a traditional, off-white dress – in her home in the Hudson Valley of New York.
The Daily Mail has agreed to use her pen name and not publish her precise location because, due to speaking up about the damage her husband’s transition did to her family, she has received threats from transactivists.
She could not have imagined being in this position when, aged 18, she met Neddy, then 20, when they were both undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin in Ute’s native city of Madison. They shared a love of dancing and met through joining a Balkans dance group.
Ute (pictured) could not have imagined being in this position when, aged 18, she met Neddy, then 20, when they were both undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin in Ute’s native city of Madison. They shared a love of dancing and met through joining a Balkans dance group.
‘It’s a combination of Bulgarian line dances and Hungarian couple dances,’ Ute says. ‘Neddy had a wiry masculinity, and I was attracted to him. He wasn’t a big guy but, at nearly 6ft tall, he was four inches taller than me.’
The romance flourished. They got married soon after graduation. Neddy became a database manager for a series of high-profile art museums after getting a master’s in library science from an Ivy League.
Ute went on to become a professional dancer and later a teacher, specializing in early childhood education.
The couple settled in Brooklyn, New York, and discussed starting a family. ‘I turned to Neddy and said, “You know, I think it’s time for us to have kids,”‘ Ute says. ‘”You have a good job so we should figure this out.”‘
She says the pair had a healthy sex life. ‘When we decided on having kids, I was almost disappointed how quickly I got pregnant,’ she recalls.
Their sons were born in 1987 and 1991. Ute embraced her role as an at home mom while Neddy worked for a non-profit organization in New York City.
But even though their youngest child was barely one and Heggen coped with the baby and toddler on her own, Neddy was keen to go on business trips across the US.
Looking back, Ute says there were telltale signs that he was leading a secret life. Neddy gave her jewelry such as bracelets and necklaces that didn’t come in a box.
‘I bought it in a flea market,’ Neddy told her. With hindsight, she believes they were items Neddy had been wearing himself.
Another time, she was presented with a pink sweater with a rose on the front. ‘It wasn’t my taste at all,’ she says.
In August 1993, Neddy returned from a business trip to San Francisco. They were reunited at Neddy’s parents’ home in Chicago where Ute had been staying with the kids, then one and four,
‘He was wearing shorts and a T- shirt,’ Ute says. ‘I was shocked because he had shaved off his entire body hair.’
Next, as she says, she ‘opened Pandora’s box.’ Neddy had told her his suitcase was full and there was no need to repack for their on-going journey.
But, suspicions raised, Ute found three journals inside the luggage. The handwriting was so neat, it looked like calligraphy.
‘They were cross-dressing diaries,’ she tells me. ‘He wrote things like, “Should my name be Diana, or Donna or Dorothy?”‘
Neddy also wrote about going to bars in women’s clothing, hoping men would buy him a glass of wine. ‘He wanted to pass as a female and see what he could get away with,’ Ute says.
She checked the dates in the journals. ‘I could tell that he must have been doing this behind my back when I was pregnant with our second child, if not before.’
Ute felt physically sick and unsteady on her feet.
‘I saw a vision of myself falling out of a window from that high rise apartment,’ she says. ‘Everything I’d thought about Neddy, and I seemed inauthentic.’
Ute confronted her husband. He was mostly rattled that I’d read his personal journals,’ she says. ‘I asked if I was safe because I didn’t want a sexually transmitted disease. He didn’t spare a thought for me or the kids.’
Neddy assured her that her health wasn’t in danger. Then, as Ute puts it, ‘he played the suicide card.’
‘It was the emotional blackmail narrative,’ she says. ‘But I wasn’t going to risk my children finding him on the floor with a knife in a pool of blood.’
She packed up the kids and called Neddy from Newark Airport before flying to Madison, where her parents still lived. ‘If you truly feel suicidal, go to the closest emergency room or call 911,’ Ute told Neddy. ‘They will take care of you, but that’s not something that I can help you with because I’m not trained and need to protect the children.’
Neddy said he had consulted a therapist — whom Ute is quick to point out was not certified — and been given the diagnosis of ‘transsexual.’
A month passed before Neddy appealed to Ute’s father by mail. ‘It was a misdiagnosis,’ the letter said.
Ute says Neddy, who had somewhat performatively grown a beard, coerced her into coming back to Brooklyn three months later, blaming a mid-life crisis. Ute says she felt pressured to keep their young family intact.
She describes the next two and a half years as ‘purgatory’, forfeiting her own happiness to concentrate on being a good mother. ‘At that point, I felt lonely, neglected as a woman and stuck in a cold marriage.’
There was barely any intimacy between them due to her knowing what she did and him withdrawing from her.
‘I felt that my husband didn’t love me, but my focus was always the kids.’
The couple had sex less than three times a year. The ‘business trips’ become more frequent. Neddy showed a penchant for wearing pink-colored shirts and turtlenecks.
Ute (pictured) grew suspicious of her husband, and decided to check his suitcase from a recent business trip. Ute found three journals inside the luggage. The handwriting was so neat, it looked like calligraphy. ‘They were cross-dressing diaries,’ she tells me.
Then, after a while, Neddy ditched the beard and, according to Ute, started taking estrogen.
Ute, who knew nothing about the medication at the time and was appalled when she saw Neddy without a shirt one day and saw his developing breasts. ‘They were little buds on his chest, just like me around the age of 12,’ she says.
Neddy admitted to receiving hormone treatment and spoke about plans for gender reassignment surgery. But he didn’t want this to be the end of their marriage. Instead, he asked Ute to come with him to see a therapist who, Neddy said, had much success persuading wives not to leave.
The consultation in March 1995, Ute says, was a joke.
To her horror, the therapist talked about the ‘kinky delights’ of lesbian sex, suggesting that Neddy’s transition might re-ignite the couple’s love life in a mutually satisfying way.
‘She insulted heterosexual sex, asking me, “Aren’t you getting kind of bored with it?”‘ Ute says. ‘Then she insinuated she could get me prescriptions that would calm me down and help Neddy through his second adolescence.
‘She peddled the assumption that, if you’re in a marriage with a man who starts wearing make-up and dresses and identifies as a female, you will embody his desires in your intimate physical relationship.’
Ute did not agree: ‘It’s damaging to your psyche to be coerced or cajoled into engaging in scenarios which your husband has derived from watching porn.’
Disgusted, she told the therapist that she had zero interest in saving her marriage.
She accused Neddy of ‘an unforgiveable betrayal’ and filed for divorce ahead of her ex’s operation at Stanford Medical Center in 1996. Neddy spent five weeks recovering from the surgery in California before returning to Brooklyn.
Neddy told their sons, ‘I’m a woman,’ and that ‘Daddy was now called ‘Dee Dee.’
Ute, who fought Neddy in a bitter court battle over child support payments, says the emotional upheaval was huge.
Ute talks about her ordeal in the documentary, ‘Behind The Looking Glass, ‘ released last year after the director, Vaishnavi Sundar, interviewed more than 40 trans widows.
Kids at her sons’ school would say things like, ‘Oh you have two moms, now.’ when Neddy picked them up. ‘No, that’s just another relative,’ her 11-year-old would reply. His younger brother cottoned on to men Ute knew and ask if they would become his father, she claims.
Around the same time, Ute says, she discovered that Neddy had not only started to mimic her, but he had also co-opted her experiences of childbirth.
‘I’d had two natural deliveries when the first labor lasted 12 hours and the second was five hours,’ she says. ‘
As part of his alternative personality, Neddy was dropping little observations to people about how the doctors and midwives had been happy with his progress during his labors.
‘I was appalled and felt more erased than ever.’
Ute says her sons, now 37 and 34, eventually came to terms with Neddy’s gender reassignment. Sadly, they’ve been estranged from their mother for several years because of differences in opinion about transgenderism.
‘They’re both very progressive, and my younger son will call me by my first name instead of Mom,’ Ute says. ‘I’ve told him that I won’t answer him unless he addresses me correctly.’
The children have failed to back Ute’s activism in the trans widow movement.
As well as appearing in ‘Behind The Looking Glass,’ she is a regular contributor to Trans Widows Voices, an on-line organization that offers advice and support to women like her.
‘We wives got put into the closet behind the closet our husbands decided to come out of,’ Ute says. ‘Woke society wants us to stay hidden, but it’s time for us to be seen.’
When approached by the Daily Mail Ute’s ex-husband declined to comment.
