A Belgian man is seeking to have his marriage annulled after discovering
that his Indonesian wife of 19 years had been born a man. The man, only
named as Jan, married Monica, his family’s former nanny in a previous
marriage, in 1993 despite legal difficulties raised by the Belgian
immigration authorities. But it was only in recent weeks that he
discovered that his wife had originally been a man and had undergone a
sex change.
“I feel I’ve been assaulted,” he said. “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.” Jan, 64, said that he and his wife had decided not to have
children because he had two by his previous marriage and she fooled him
by pretending to menstruate, using sanitary towels, “to conceal the
truth”. “Even during sex, I never noticed anything,” he said.
For many years the couple lived a normal family life and Monica, 48, was like a “big sister” to his children
until their marriage started to come under strain 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 rumors began to surface and after Jan found “amorous messages”
from other men on her computer, he confronted her in a violent row that
led to the police being called. “A friend told me that he had heard that
Monica was actually a s*x-changed man. I could not believe it. My son
heard similar rumors,” he 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 we came to blows. The police came.”
Jan, who is undergoing psychiatric treatment following the discovery,
has started legal proceedings to have the marriage annulled but the
Belgian courts have so far refused to allow him to turn her out of the
family home.
“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,” said his Liliane Verjauw, his lawyer.
