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September 15, 2018 11:40 pm  #1


Edited

Edited

Last edited by Calamity (September 16, 2018 11:37 pm)

 

September 16, 2018 1:10 am  #2


Re: Edited

Welcome Calamity,

First of all, I’m so sorry you’re in this position.  I am new to posting on this board, (was a lurker for 3 years) and know what it’s like to actually post for the first time (I have gotten over that).  I really just want to welcome you and say you are in the right place.

You will find nothing but support on here ( responses may be slow, but you will get them).  Everyone’s exact circumstances are different, but the core of what we have been through is the same.  Kudos to you for reaching out, you are at the start “of a process”.

It has been very helpful to me to read people’s stories and to go through old posts. If you do, you will see similar patterns.  You’re right,  spouses have put up with many things in order to save marriages.  You sound like your mind is set, that you have set a boundary. It also sounds like your husband has made his mind up as well, my personal opinion is that he did you a favor.  So many of us, never got that kind of honesty from our spouses.  Some of us spent years suffering with gaslighting and nothing but lies lies lies.  I left my marriage of 22 years and am still recovering, but on the road to happiness now 3 years later. 

I sacrificed a lot, you may end up paying him spousal support.  Hopefully your also going to be blessed that the actual marriage was only five years long, so maybe that support (if any) will be short term.  Do yourself a favor, start thinking about taking care of you and you alone.  Overwhelmed, is usually an understatement.  Take it one day at a time.

Last edited by 4everdamaged (September 16, 2018 1:34 am)

 

September 16, 2018 2:38 am  #3


Re: Edited

4everdamaged wrote:

 

Great post 4ever   

And welcome Calamity 
 


KIA KAHA                       
 

September 16, 2018 3:24 am  #4


Re: Edited

Sorry you find yourself here Calamity.

I was in a relationship with a man who I discovered crossdressed and acted out. He also wanted to be “the pretty one” or beautiful or whatever. I also found his transexual porn and his adverts for sex with other crossdressers (and twinks) which he insists weren’t adverts for men (roll eyes here).

Your husband shows many of the same manipulations and justifications for what he’s doing, is he stupid enough to think you buy that he bought women’s shoes because they’re slimmer fit? Etc etc (more eyes). And as for pink and unicorns, well where do you start?!?!

I think you are dead right to have got out, he won’t change or come to his senses, at best he will lie and manipulate and maybe retract a little but he will still be doing and thinking this stuff.

Hold on to that part that wants to never see him again, that is the part that will save you.

Keep posting, a few of us here have dealt with similar and will try and help and listen.

 

September 16, 2018 8:54 am  #5


Re: Edited

Calamity,
    I, too, was in a relationship with a man who was/is much as you describe your husband to be: often anxious or depressed but a seemingly wonderful man, not "macho" but definitely male, had trouble "finding himself" (at various times was going to be a woodworker, a musician, a writer), and who got "weirder and weirder," including fixating on women--he had a series of what I refer to as crushes, and would occasionally drop hints that revealed that he had a rich fantasy relationship with them.  
  Once the declaration of transgenderism came, it was full out crazy.  He wanted to wear a 1950s slip like the one his mother had, and which he said she'd once discovered him in and punished him for wearing.  But lingerie was his real passion: he developed an obsession involving having someone else (me) shave his legs for him and then put black stockings on him; he had bra and matching panty sets in several colors, and while we were having sex would have to begin the session (it feels like that to me now, a "session"; and certainly I learned to dissociate just like a good prostitute, so I could give him what he wanted) in one outfit and then change to another, because his sex life revolved around himself, was conducted primarily with himself (with me as prop), and in experiencing himself in these various outfits.  He believed I actually found him fetching in these clothes, and began trying to seduce me, in the most stereotypically feminine (and caricatured) of ways.  I found it surreal, when I wasn't repulsed.  The only way I could participate was to tell myself that this was my male husband, and I was his wife, and it was "just sexual experimentation."  But as time went on, and there was never any other kind of sex, I could no longer sustain that lie.
   And everything ramped up, escalated, just as you are finding.  Clothes, beliefs, the body dysmorphia and his fantasizing that his male body parts were female ones (that he had breasts, that the glans of his penis was a clitoris), extending his need to "feminize" to more and more, and needing affirmation in the form of enthusiastic embrace.  He said he was "multiple, with "many women inside him." 
    From the very beginning, he would not rule anything out.  He started out saying he wanted an orchiectomy (to have his testicles removed) and to take female hormones, and that never changed, even after he'd decided not to go public.  I could not make him understand that I found it very difficult to commit to staying married to him if he wouldn't rule out in the future the thing I told him would be a deal breaker for me.  It was a constant push on his part to get me to accept more and more, which he attempted not through actual conversation and negotiation, but by manipulation and stealth.
    You are right to be weirded out.  He's delusional.  You can't reason with him (the idea that liking pink is an indication he's really female, when as you say many men wear pink).  And that he's being encouraged by society and by "gender specialists" in the psychological community in the delusional belief that a male can become a female or a woman can be born in a man's body is not only mind-boggling but a huge negation of our experiences and our intimate and hard-won knowledge of how delusional and strange they actually are.  
   Here's some reading that might actually support you:
   Michael Bailey, "The Man Who Would Be Queen."  It's available online and downloadable.  Bailey is a research psychologist at Northwestern Univ.
  Anne Lawrence, "Men Trapped in Men's Bodies/Becoming What We Love."  Lawrence is a trans person and an MD, a psychologist who treated (now retired) trans identified males.  Lawrence maintains an online presence and there are articles there.
 Christine Benvenuto: "Sex Changes."  This is a memoir by a woman whose husband became a trans person. You will recognize much of what you see in your own spouse here--the girly feminizing, etc. 
   Naeferty.   A pseudonym.  Naeferty ran a blog about her experiences with her own trans identified male partner.  Read the post "Gas Light Six" and the comments; there are a number of comments from other women in our situation and it will validate you to read them.
  Transwidow: My Only Path to Power.  Also a blogger.  She, too, was married to an apparently happy man who went trans crazy.  Her original blog posts, which constituted a real time diary of what she want through, were extremely useful to me, but as she's now writing a memoir of her experience, she pulled a number of them, so you can't follow her journey as she lived it.  There are still a number of really good posts remaining, however. 
 
  Duped has given you excellent advice: "hold onto that part that wants never to see him again, that is the part that will save you."  He's not going to change and he's never going to give it up, even if it goes dormant for a time or he hides it from you.  And take it from me, who stayed for almost three years after the declaration, the longer you stay, the more the trauma, and the longer it will take you to get over it all.  It's hard to be willing to take the hit to your finances if you have to pay him support for a bit, but in the long run it will be more than worth it--and the sooner you get out the less you'll be on the hook to pay.  Get a good lawyer.  I am currently divorcing my stbx, and I will be voluntarily forgoing tens of thousands of dollars the law says I'm entitled to, just so I can extricate myself without subjecting myself to his rage and to the extra time I would have to spend entangled with him.  I think of it as the price of freedom; I want to get on to living the rest of the life I have left (I'm 65).  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (September 16, 2018 9:14 am)

 

September 16, 2018 10:21 am  #6


Re: Edited

great post oohc - I'd like to suggest it gets pinned for new people.

interesting point about the idea of being a woman trapped in a man's body is a misconception.  thanks.

I also liked calling it 'the price of freedom', that extra bit you give them over what the courts say - that's just what it is, the deal has to be in their favour to be accepted.  It's a pink girly self-entitled unicorn.

good luck Calamity, one step at a time, you sound like a good person to me. 

 

September 17, 2018 2:59 pm  #7


Re: Edited

Sorry to see your post gone Calamity.  I know you were going to an atty today, guessing that might be why.  Still wishing you all the best in your journey.  If you can in the future, please come back and share your story.  It helped me, by triggering some memories of my XH.  It can help others too, good luck with whatever your path ends up.

 

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