Belgian discovers his wife was a man

A Belgian man is seeking to have his marriage annulled after discovering that his Indonesian wife of 19 years was born a man, writes the Daily Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfield. The man, named only as Jan, married Monica, his family’s former au pair in a previous marriage, in 1993 despite legal difficulties raised by the immigration authorities. But in recent weeks he discovered that his wife had undergone a sex change. “I feel I’ve been assaulted," he told Het Nieuwsblad. “I brought her to Belgium. The Belgian courts had serious doubts about the authenticity of her birth and her identity papers, but eventually they accepted it. I thought she was an attractive woman; she had no male traits.” Jan, 64, said 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. “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 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, with her abdomen completely exposed.” Rumours 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. Jan, who is undergoing psychiatric treatment, has started legal proceedings to have the marriage annulled but the courts have refused to allow him to turn her out of the family home.