In Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On, Christine Benvenuto confronts the question that most people never imagine asking: What happens when the other woman is your husband? This searing, darkly humorous, and emotionally raw memoir invites us into the inner sanctum of a marriage disrupted not by infidelity, but by transformation,when Benvenuto’s husband of over two decades comes out as a transgender woman.
One night, as they lay in bed in their New England home, the father of her three children says, “I’m thinking constantly about my gender.” From that moment, the landscape of Christine’s life shifts irreversibly. What follows is not just the dissolution of a marriage, but the dismantling of identity, family roles, social expectations, and deeply rooted assumptions about love, gender, and the self.
Unlike many transgender memoirs that chart the joy and struggle of transitioning, Sex Changes is told from the other side of the mirror. Benvenuto writes as the cisgender spouse, blindsided, heartbroken, and profoundly confused. She offers no sanitized narrative of easy acceptance, nor does she demonize her former partner. Instead, she chronicles a process of grief and reassembly.
