CrossdressedUK Article
I was asked to write an article for CrossdressedUK.. Anna and Harriet gave it an edit and here is is.. https://crossdressed.co.uk/crossdressing-and-marriage-book-for-my-wife/#content
I Wrote a Book for My Wife About My Crossdressing — But I Haven’t Given It to Her Yet
Twenty years ago, I accidentally revealed my crossdressing to my wife before I really understood it myself. In January this year, one unexpected conversation made me realise I finally had the words I wish I’d had then. Three days later, I had written her a book.
I wrote a book for my wife.
More than a hundred pages about me, about Davina, about our marriage and about something I have spent most of my life trying to understand.
There is just one problem.
I haven’t given it to her yet.
My wife and I have been together for more than 30 years and married for 25.
She has known about my crossdressing for around 20 of those years.
It wasn’t a carefully planned revelation.
There was no perfectly prepared conversation.
No sensible explanation.
No moment where I sat her down after years of soul-searching and said,
“There is something important I need to tell you.”
Quite the opposite.
She discovered it accidentally.
And the truth is, at the time, I didn’t understand my own crossdressing well enough to explain it properly anyway.
Twenty years later, I think I finally do.
That is really why the book exists.
It Started With One Conversation
At the beginning of 2026, my wife and I were out together having a drink.
We were sitting in our favourite people-watching window seat. The place was noisy enough that we could talk without worrying about anyone around us listening.
Davina came up in conversation.
Then my wife said something I wasn’t expecting.
She said that "Perhaps she’d been thinking about it in the wrong way.
Maybe, instead of thinking about Davina as her husband in a dress, she could think of her more like a female friend".
That sentence gave me a strange little rush of elation.
After all these years, it felt significant.
I went away from that conversation wanting to write about it.
Just a blog post.
That was the plan.
I started tapping away on my phone with both thumbs, reflecting on what she’d said and thinking about the journey that had brought us there.
Then one memory led to another.
And another.
I started thinking about the first time she discovered my crossdressing.
The letter I wrote afterwards.
The questions she asked.
The years that followed.
How Davina evolved.
How my own understanding of crossdressing had changed.
How my wife’s feelings had changed.
The mistakes we’d made.
The compromises we’d found.
The funny moments.
The awkward ones.
And all the things I’d never managed to put into one complete explanation.
Three days later, I hadn’t written a blog post.
I’d written a book.
Twenty Years Ago, I Didn’t Have the Answers
The strange thing about accidentally coming out as a crossdresser is that you’re suddenly expected to explain something you might never have properly explained to yourself.
That was certainly true for me.
By the time my wife discovered my crossdressing, it had been part of my life in one form or another since childhood.
But that didn’t mean I’d sat down and analysed it.
I hadn’t.
At that stage, crossdressing mainly meant trying things on.
I wasn’t presenting fully as a woman.
There wasn’t a polished Davina.
There wasn’t the makeup, hair, complete outfits and female persona that would come later.
I wasn’t sitting around asking myself:
“Hmm. Why do I crossdress?”
It was simply something I had done privately for years.
So when my wife suddenly found out, my explanation was clumsy because my understanding was clumsy.
Looking back, I think that’s something we sometimes forget when we talk about “coming out” to a partner.
The person revealing the secret isn’t necessarily arriving at that conversation with all the answers.
Sometimes they’re only just beginning to ask the questions themselves.
Davina Started Long Before She Had a Name
My fascination with clothing goes right back to childhood.
Batman and Superman wore tights.
As a child, I wanted the tights because I wanted to look like the characters properly.
From there came an innocent fascination with fabrics, hosiery and women’s clothing.
As I got older, I tried things on whenever I had the opportunity.
It was private.
Occasional.
And for a long time, it didn’t have a name.
Then other parts of life took over.
Sport.
Education.
Work.
Relationships.
I met the woman who would eventually become my wife.
And interestingly, when I was young and falling in love with her, crossdressing almost disappeared from my life.
I think that’s important to my story.
It tells me something about what my crossdressing wasn’t.
It wasn’t a replacement for a relationship.
It wasn’t because something was missing between us.
And it wasn’t evidence that I secretly wanted to leave my male life behind and become a woman.
We were building a life together.
We bought a house.
Went on holidays.
Planned our future.
Started a family.
Crossdressing was simply somewhere in the background.
Then my wife accidentally gave Davina a face.
The Night My Wife Dressed Me as a Woman
One evening, my wife suggested dressing me as a woman.
For a laugh.
She didn’t know I was a crossdresser.
I thought she did.
There’s the misunderstanding that changed everything.
She put makeup on me.
I found a dress, stockings, heels, a bra and knickers and came back into the room.
I looked in the mirror.
There I was.
Not quite Davina yet.
But certainly the beginning of her.
My wife’s reaction was essentially:
“Wow. You look like a woman.”
Then I tried to kiss her.
Her response was rather less enthusiastic.
“Ew. No!”
I can laugh about that now.
At the time, though, I’d just inadvertently revealed one of the biggest secrets of my life.
I asked how she’d known I was a crossdresser.
She hadn’t.
She’d had absolutely no idea.
She’d simply wondered whether her masculine husband would let her dress him up for a laugh.
Oops.
Now I had some explaining to do.
The Letter I Wrote Afterwards
The next day, I wrote her a letter.
It was honest.
But looking back, it wasn’t particularly good.
Not because I was hiding something.
I simply didn’t understand myself well enough to explain it.
I’d never seriously analysed where my crossdressing came from or what role it might eventually play in my life.
At times there had undoubtedly been a sexual element to it.
But I didn’t know whether that was all it was.
I didn’t know that one day I’d learn makeup.
Wear wigs.
Develop a female name.
Present fully as a woman.
Or discover that crossdressing could become something completely different from the private experimentation of my younger years.
Understandably, my wife had the questions many partners have.
Was I gay?
No.
Did I want to become a woman?
No.
Was this because of her?
No.
Those answers were true, but I know now that what crossdressing does (and doesn’t) mean can be much more complicated than three simple answers.
I could tell her what crossdressing wasn’t.
I wasn’t very good at explaining what it was.
Acceptance Didn’t Happen Overnight
There wasn’t one single conversation after which everything was fine.
It took years.
There were periods of negotiation.
Periods of avoidance.
Periods where putting our heads in the sand probably felt easier than dealing with the subject directly.
By my rough calculation, it took around eight years before we reached something resembling greater understanding and acceptance.
That doesn’t mean every question disappeared.
It doesn’t mean my wife suddenly wanted to participate in every aspect of my crossdressing.
And it certainly doesn’t mean we’ve always communicated perfectly about it.
Acceptance within a relationship doesn’t necessarily look like enthusiastic participation.
Sometimes it’s much quieter than that.
It can mean knowing.
Understanding enough.
Finding boundaries.
Compromising.
Living your life.
And gradually discovering what works for the two people actually in the relationship.
So Who Is Davina Now?
Twenty years after that accidental reveal, I understand her much better.
I’m a husband.
A dad.
A coach.
A career-driven bloke.
I’ve spent much of my life around sport, responsibility and work.
I’ve always been comfortable being male.
I’ve never wanted to become a woman.
Davina doesn’t replace that.
She exists alongside it.
For me, becoming Davina allows me temporarily to step away from some of the pressures I associate with everyday male me.
The bloke who leads.
Fixes things.
Solves problems.
Makes decisions.
Takes responsibility.
Feels expected to be strong.
Davina is very different.
Hair.
Makeup.
Perfume.
Matching lingerie.
Hosiery.
High heels.
A dress.
I sometimes describe crossdressing as a reset button.
A way to access softness, creativity, femininity and calm alongside a life where I’ve often been rewarded for being strong, decisive and masculine.
But it isn’t simply an escape.
I genuinely enjoy women’s fashion.
I enjoy makeup.
I enjoy putting a look together.
And I enjoy how I look and feel when I’m crossdressed.
Davina isn’t about rejecting masculinity.
For me, she’s about allowing femininity to exist beside it.
That explanation took me decades to reach.
It’s certainly not one I could have given my wife the morning after she accidentally discovered I wore women’s clothes.
The Letter I Wish I’d Been Able to Write
That is what the book eventually became.
The explanation I wish I’d been capable of giving my wife 20 years ago.
Not because she’d demanded another explanation.
And not because the conversation in January had gone badly.
Quite the opposite.
That conversation had gone so well that it made me want to look back at our entire journey.
I wanted to put everything in one place.
The childhood curiosity.
The years when crossdressing almost disappeared.
The accidental reveal.
The first letter.
The questions.
The periods of uncertainty.
The boundaries.
Learning makeup.
Trying wigs.
Developing Davina’s appearance.
Hotel rooms where dressing became an escape from the pressures of an increasingly stressful career.
The conversations.
The difficult moments.
The funny moments.
And, importantly, my wife.
Because this isn’t only the story of my crossdressing.
It is also the story of what my wife has experienced alongside me.
There Are Things I’ve Never Properly Thanked Her For
My wife didn’t marry Davina.
She didn’t know this would become part of our marriage.
Yet over the years she has done things I sometimes think I’ve never properly acknowledged.
She has dressed me.
Done my makeup.
Helped me choose wigs.
Seen me working from home as Davina.
She once walked out into the world with me in London — a story in itself.
She has laughed at me.
She has laughed with me.
And once, when she decided my legs looked better than hers, she called me a bitch.
That still makes me laugh.
None of those things mean she has always loved crossdressing.
They don’t mean every stage was easy.
They don’t erase the years when we struggled with it.
But they are part of our story.
Writing the book made me appreciate that more.
It isn’t merely an explanation of why I crossdress.
In places, it’s also a thank-you.
And Yet I Still Haven’t Given It to Her
Here’s the ridiculous part.
I wrote a hundred-plus-page book for my wife in three days.
Months later, I still haven’t handed it over.
At first, that wasn’t because communication had broken down.
I’d written it following one of the most encouraging conversations we’d had about Davina.
But life carries on.
Family life carries on.
We have two children — one a teenager and one now 20 — and although we do plenty together as a family, getting genuinely private time as a couple isn’t always easy.
And somewhere along the way, the conversation about Davina has become quiet again.
That’s where the overthinking starts.
If the subject hasn’t come up, do I really want to disturb the peace?
Has she simply put Davina to the back of her mind?
If she has, am I rocking the boat by bringing her forward again?
What will she think when I tell her I’ve written an entire book?
More than a hundred pages sounds rather dramatic when you say it out loud.
What If She Thinks It’s Too Much?
The strange thing is that most of what’s in the book isn’t actually new.
She already knows the vast majority of my story.
But knowing things in fragments is different from reading them as one continuous account.
It has also been more than six years since she last saw me as Davina, and my appearance has changed, so I’ve included more recent photographs in an appendix.
Then come the inevitable questions.
What if the sheer size of the book makes crossdressing seem more important than she realised?
What if something in there makes her uncomfortable?
What if she thinks I’ve written it because I want more?
More dressing.
More involvement.
More Davina in our marriage.
That isn’t what I’m asking for.
But I can’t control how somebody else will initially interpret it.
Perhaps at some point I simply have to trust the relationship we’ve spent more than 30 years building and talk to her.
Acceptance Doesn’t Mean She Has to Participate
One thing I understand much better now is that my wife does not have to embrace every part of Davina for me to feel accepted.
She doesn’t have to dress me.
She doesn’t have to want to go out with Davina.
She doesn’t need to become fascinated by gender or crossdressing.
She doesn’t have to ask questions every week.
And she certainly doesn’t have to feel exactly the way I do about it.
Her boundaries matter too.
What I would like is for Davina to remain something we can talk about.
Without days of worrying about how to raise the subject.
Without either of us feeling awkward.
Without me wondering whether silence means everything is fine or whether it means the subject has become uncomfortable again.
Perhaps the book might help with that now.
But that’s different from why I wrote it.
I didn’t sit down in January thinking:
“Our communication is broken. I’d better write a book.”
I wrote it because a good conversation made me realise just how much had happened since that terrible little letter I’d written 20 years earlier.
And how much better I could explain myself now.
That balance between the crossdresser’s needs and the feelings of partners of crossdressers is something every couple has to find for themselves.
Maybe I Just Need to Pick the Moment
Perhaps I’ve made giving her the book more complicated in my own head than it needs to be.
I don’t need a grand ceremony.
I don’t need to place a printed manuscript dramatically on the kitchen table.
I simply need some private time with my wife.
Time when we’re husband and wife rather than parents dealing with the normal chaos of family life.
Then I can tell her I’ve written something for her.
That most of it she already knows.
That it isn’t a request.
That there’s no test at the end.
And that she can read it whenever — or however — she wants.
I’ve thought about giving it to her as a PDF so she can read it privately, perhaps even listen using a read-aloud function with earphones if that’s more comfortable.
Then I need to let go.
She gets to decide what she thinks.
And she gets to tell me things I may not have considered.
Could the Book Become Something Bigger?
There’s another question I’ve started wondering about.
Could other people benefit from reading it?
I’ve shared it with two crossdressing couples, and both felt there was something in it beyond my own personal story.
That doesn’t mean I believe I’ve written the explanation for crossdressing.
Far from it.
There is no single explanation.
No universal journey.
No magic formula for making a partner understand or accept it.
This is one man’s story.
My experience.
My mistakes.
My wife’s reactions.
Our compromises.
Our laughter.
Our awkwardness.
Our relationship.
But perhaps personal stories have value precisely because they don’t claim to represent everybody.
My book touches on masculinity.
Femininity.
Stress.
Identity.
Sexuality.
Mental wellbeing.
Acceptance.
Boundaries.
Communication.
Enjoyment.
Escape.
And the strange ways couples sometimes learn to accommodate parts of one another that neither expected when they first fell in love.
I Want Crossdressing to Be Better Understood
Part of why I continue writing publicly is because there are still so many assumptions attached to crossdressing.
That it must be sexual.
That it must be perverted.
That it automatically tells you somebody’s sexuality.
That it means a man secretly wants to become a woman.
My story doesn’t fit neatly into those assumptions.
Neither do many others.
I don’t expect everybody to understand crossdressing.
I certainly don’t expect everybody to like it.
But I’d like society to become a little better at recognising that men who crossdress are human beings with relationships, families, jobs, responsibilities and complicated individual stories.
Normalising that understanding feels like an uphill task sometimes.
But perhaps telling our stories is part of how we get there.
This Is My Story, Not Everybody’s
The longer I’ve written about crossdressing, the more convinced I’ve become that we should be wary of universal answers.
I can explain what Davina means to me.
I can’t tell another crossdresser why they dress.
I can’t tell another wife how she should react.
And I can’t tell another couple what boundaries will work within their relationship.
Those are things people have to discover for themselves.
What I can say is that understanding my own crossdressing better has made me far more capable of explaining it than I was 20 years ago.
Perhaps that’s the biggest difference between the letter and the book.
The letter came from somebody suddenly scrambling for answers.
The book comes from somebody who has lived those answers.
Maybe It’s Time to Give Her the Book
I’ve already written it.
Perhaps now I need to stop worrying about every possible reaction and do the harder part.
Talk to my wife.
Tell her the book exists.
Explain why I wrote it.
And let her decide whether she wants to read it.
Not as a demand.
Not as a test.
Not because I need her to become more involved with Davina.
And certainly not because everything we’ve built together somehow depends upon her reaction.
It’s the explanation I wasn’t capable of giving her 20 years ago.
It’s the story of a journey we’ve both lived through.
And, in many ways, it’s a thank-you.
Maybe she’ll read every page.
Maybe she’ll skip bits.
Maybe she’ll laugh.
Maybe she’ll say:
“I knew all this already.”
Maybe she’ll tell me I’ve misunderstood something completely.
Maybe it will lead to another conversation about Davina.
I hope it does.
Because beneath the wigs, makeup, lingerie, dresses, stockings, heels, hotel rooms and more than a hundred pages of me trying to understand myself, the story is actually fairly simple.
There is a husband who loves his wife.
There is a wife who discovered something unexpected about the man she’d married and has spent years finding her own way of living alongside it.
And there is Davina.
Not replacing either of us.
Not competing with either of us.
Just another part of me.
Perhaps a calmer part.
Perhaps a softer part.
Certainly a part I understand much better today than I did when my wife first accidentally brought her into the room 20 years ago.
The book isn’t a justification.
It isn’t an argument.
It isn’t a demand.
It’s the explanation I wish I could have given her all those years ago.
A record of how far we’ve travelled since.
A thank-you.
And perhaps, when I finally give it to her, an invitation to keep talking.
About Davina
Davina has crossdressed in some form for much of her life and has presented fully as Davina for many years. She writes from personal experience about crossdressing, marriage, identity and acceptance, with the aim of encouraging greater understanding and challenging some of the stereotypes that still surround men who crossdress.
X: @Davinalegs25
If Davina’s story resonates with you
Crossdressing can raise very different questions for the person who dresses and the person who loves them. Crossdressed UK has support for both sides of that conversation:
For Crossdressers — support, understanding and practical guidance
For Partners of Crossdressers — understanding, relationships and reassurance
Intimacy, Relationships & Crossdressing — our guide to communication, trust and boundaries
I think they've done a great job telling my story and i need to talk to my wife and give her the book
Davina
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