Why "come out'?

[sandra-leigh]

I'm not sure why some of us object so strongly to the term "ruined her life" that I have used.

I can tell from what you write after that point that you are writing from a USA perspective. Society is different in different places.

An affair ensues, and suddenly he's in love with her and feels the need to tell his wife to placate his own conscience. She is appalled and shattered, takes the kids and goes home to mother. Has he ruined her life? Yes - he's a bum and that's what the judge will tell him when she sues for divorce - maybe not in so many words, but through the settlement she will get.

In Canada, divorce is a civil procedure, not a criminal matter it once was, and not the "Requires a Bill to be passed by Parliament" that it was before that. The exception is that it is still legally possible to proceed through the criminal code to sue for divorce in the cases of abuse, incest, or adultery -- but proceeding in that manner for adultery is heavily discouraged unless the matter is very complicated and there are literally tens of millions of dollars at stake. The courts have made it clear that in ordinary cases of passion, that "the courts have no place in the bedrooms of the nation", so ordinary adultery divorce cases will be thrown out of court, leaving only cases where (for example) it can be demonstrated that the marriage was fraudulent in order to get access to someone's substantial wealth.

In cases of ordinary adultery, people are expected to go through the provincial or territorial civil divorce proceedings. I do not know the situation in all provinces, but in at least the majority of provinces, the civil procedure is "no fault divorce": you separate for a year, you file a financial and custodial settlement proposal with the courts, and if there aren't fundamental disagreements over custody or finances, then the judge simply reviews the settlement in his or her chambers to be sure it meets the legal standards, and then rubber-stamps it. And the no-fault divorce rules have no provisions for directly or indirectly punishing an adulterer financially: the property division rules are set down in law. About the greatest extent to which the adultery might be acknowledged is possibly in requiring the adulterer to pay a higher portion of the cost of therapy for then children (children tend to blame themselves for the divorce, no matter what the circumstances.)

And so it is in Canada with respect to divorce due to cross-dressing or due to transsexual surgery or the like: the situation is considered the same as if the divorce was because the husband watched too much sports on TV -- or, for that matter, if the divorce was because the husband was a good and loving man forced by circumstances to work two full-time jobs to pay the food bills and the rent, and the wife got sick of being lonely and functionally left to deal with the kids by herself.


Your analogy comparing an affair to cross-dressing has, in my opinion, fundamental flaws; unfortunately I have already spent enough time on this message that I must now rush to get to work on time.