Man shocked to find wife was a man

A Belgian is seeking to divorce his wife of 19 years - after discovering that she was born a man.

The man, only named as Jan, 64, married Monica, 48, his family's former Indonesian au pair from a previous marriage, in 1993.

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 told the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper. "I thought she was an attractive woman, all woman.

"She had no male traits. Even during sex, I never noticed anything," he said.

For many years the couple lived a normal family life until their marriage started to come under strain when Monica 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..."

Finally rumours began to surface and after Jan found "amorous messages" from other men on her computer, he confronted her in a violent row.

"A friend told me that he had heard that Monica was actually a sex-changed man. I could not believe it. My son heard similar rumours," 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."

Jan has started legal proceedings to have the marriage annulled but the courts have so far refused to allow him to turn Monica out of the family home.