Dear KayNorth,

      You feel like you're in a void because you are.  Your partner has just pulled the rug out from under your life and all your expectations for your future, plus you are also now reassessing the past in light of his news.  HIs rejection of his male body, masculinity and his role as husband and heterosexual sex partner throws some of the most basic facts of your life and your being into chaos.  Your ideas about your own sexuality, gender, and identity are going to be circling around out there in the chaos, too.

    My ex revealed much the same to me in March of 2015, after 32 years of marriage.  I left in January 2018, and moved into my own apartment in March 2018.  Our divorce was final in November 2018.  I say this so you know that I have been where you are now, and that I eventually decided that I could not remain married to my trans identified male husband.  (MtF, although biological sex is not alterable.)  Please don't think I'm just too old to be hip; I'm a former women's studies director, and I engaged in some pretty mind-warping sexual behavior when I was attempting to accommodate and accept my ex's desires.  That is, I earned my "trans credentials" the hard way. 

   The pressure to stay and accept is indeed very powerful, and it seems as if "everyone" (or every "good wife") stays.  But they don't.  One argument that is deployed to make you think you should simply adjust is   "she's the same person she always was," which I hope you will consider critically; because if he's "the same person" then why does he have to transition?   Your partner is NOT the same person; your partner wants to disavow the most basic facts that define him: his sex, his body, his sexuality.

     You have every right to decide that you want to live with the man you partnered with, and that living with a trans person is not what you want in life, and you should not feel guilty for that decision.  The fact is that his decisions and actions mean that every aspect of your life is about to change, and you will not be in charge of the changes.  Right now, in fact, you are thinking much more about him, and putting his feelings and future at the forefront of your thoughts, than you are your own.  That is, you are thinking about your life IN RELATION TO him and his choices.   But you have every right and are entitled to decide that what you want for yourself to fulfill your own needs and to work for the future you wish to have is a legitimate choice to make.

     My first piece of advice is that you put the responsibility for his life and choices where it really lies--with him.  Any alteration he makes to himself and in his life is a process he has to undergo himself.  You may want to help him with it, and he may say he wants you to, but this is something that only he can figure out.  If you try to help, you will let yourself in for a world of pain and confusion (ask me how I know). 

   My second piece of advice is to think about yourself and your needs, and to think about them as apart from him.  Otherwise you will find yourself living with someone who is making choices unilaterally, and you will find that your place is simply to go along and adjust. 

     For him to say he loves your life together and doesn't want it to change is simply not believable: he wants it to change in the most far-reaching and basic of ways!  He wants to stop being a man!  What he means is that he wants to have everything he already has, and also wants more, for himself, even though it blasts apart every assumption about your life together, while depriving you of the man you were partnered with.  Think about that: to get what he wants, he demands you deprive yourself of what you want.  He is willing to sacrifice your desires to fulfill his own, and to argue at the same time that he loves your life together.  Where does that leave you in his new scheme for living?  Not as a woman who can expect her partner to put her needs first--ever.  It leaves you in the position of partner whose role is to put her partner's needs first without any expectation of reciprocity on his part.

    You can see this as a glimpse and preview of what life with a trans-identified male is like: always pushing, always moving the goalposts, always demanding more of you, always wanting the next step, pouting or accusing when you ask for some consideration of your own needs, always needing validation, and manipulating you to give it to him, instead of negotiating from the position of two co-equals in a committed relationship.  Here's the awful truth: his PRIMARY relationship is NOT going to be with YOU; his PRIMARY relationship IS to HIMSELF as the woman he imagines himself as wanting to be.  

   Perhaps, then, it's not a case of you not being emotionally strong enough to support him; perhaps it's a case of you being strong enough to know what is acceptable to you and what is not, and, further, knowing this isn't the way you want to live your life.  

   If you are looking for more information, here are some good sources: 

Academic and Professional:
  Michael Bailey, "The Man Who Would Be Queen."  It's available online and downloadable.  Bailey is a research psychologist at Northwestern Univ.
 
 Donna Chapman and Benjamin Caldwell: “Attachment Injury Resolution in Couples  When One Partner is Transgender”
Journal of Systemic Therapies, Vol 31, No. 2, 2012, pp36-53
(full text of article available online)

  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.
 
http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html
 
 
 
Memoirs/Accounts by Wives
 
Those who left:

 Christine Benvenuto: "Sex Changes."     A memoir, available from Amazon.

   “Naeferty”  (a pseudonym)  Naeferty ran a blog about her experiences with her own trans identified male partner.  Read the post "Gas Mark Six" and the comments.  I guarantee you won't feel so alone after you do.
 
A podcast: How my ex-husband’s transition made me feel
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06xvbsc
 
  Transwidow: My Only Path to Power.  Also a blogger.  She, too, was married to an apparently happy man who decided he was trans.  Her original blog posts constituted a real time diary of what she want through, but when she began writing a memoir of her experience, she pulled a number of these posts, so you can't follow her journey as she lived it.  There are still a number of really good posts remaining, however. 

 

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (May 27, 2019 10:17 am)

Kaynorth, I'm so sorry you're going through this.

Please remember, you need a lot of time to grieve your old relationship, and it takes a long time for you to come to understand what you'll be able to handle for the rest of your life.  It's very early for you to be trying to figure out how to make the relationship work -- there's a point in this process where all of us have been, where we were so desperate to be the "supportive spouse" that we were tempted to accept conditions that, in the long term, we'd never ever be able to live with.  I think that's just a natural part of the progression; when I first made my discovery I imagined I'd be able to save the marriage somehow.  I hadn't yet learned all the secrets my husband had been keeping from me -- that took many more months.  

Having a child creates stress in any relationship, and if there's already a fault line in the marriage it can force a far more catastrophic breakup.

In my local SSN support group, every single one of us who has kids (of any age, of any sex) has reported that the kids are in therapy -- and this includes grown adult offspring in their mid-40's.  This is not a healthy way for children to come into  the world.

Thank you so much for these responses, I didn't expect to hear from people so quickly. You don't even know how much of a relief it is, I can even feel my shoulders coming down from being held up tensely. I really thought, especially from google searching, that I was in the 'bad guy' role for feeling so upset and even angry. Also thank you so much for resources!! 

My fiance is a loving caring man, he hasn't switched gender pronouns or anything yet, and I think that makes this even harder because we are also best friends. He said today that he won't transition, that he will try to make it work because he is happier in his life now than to change. 
 But I don't really believe that, because if he is happier as he is now then he wouldn't have come out to me that he wants to be a woman. I think that if I just happily forget this happened and go back to normal that we will have more serious issues in a few months, or a year, or a few years. And like the last poster said, I don't want to bring a child into a relationship that could possibly have such a drastic thing happen. 

I am also devastated because I'm 31 and will be 32 in less than a year. I feel like my baby days are closing and it breaks my heart that it may not happen now. It feels a little like my time was stolen, I know that's not true because it was a good relationship, but if he could have told me 10 years ago it would have been very different.

Thank you guys so much for your responses, it feels so good to get these thoughts out loud (kind of). I'm so sorry that you all had to go through this too. It really is the loss of a partner, even if you decide to stay with your spouse in their new gender, you've lost the person you first built the relationship with. 

I also can't help but feel a loss of trust, is he who I thought he was? If this big of an identity crisis has been happening and I didn't know, are there other things? How can I trust he is being honest with me about his other thoughts?

How do I keep all the sad and confusion and even hope from turning me nuts in the meantime. Because we have to go to work, and talk to family, and act normal so that I don't give away his secret. When I feel like my world is spinning. 

Anyway, long rambling thing again. Thanks so much. 

OutofHisCloset wrote:

     For him to say he loves your life together and doesn't want it to change is simply not believable: he wants it to change in the most far-reaching and basic of ways!  He wants to stop being a man!  What he means is that he wants to have everything he already has, and also wants more, for himself, even though it blasts apart every assumption about your life together, while depriving you of the man you were partnered with.  

 

This really hit me hard! Because it's very true. I told him my feelings,I said I could support changes if he wanted to make them like enjoying more 'typically feminine' hobbies or hygiene routines but that I wouldn't be comfortable with him dressing as a woman in public or having to call him by a female name, and when I asked how that made him feel he said it 'disheartened' him.
It made me feel so sad for making him feel that way, but now I'm thinking, why is it more important that his feelings are hurt. I am 'disheartened' and sad and upset that he would want me to be ok with that huge change. Especially with only one day to have thought about it. 

Also I keep going from ok, to crying. I feel like I'm crazy. Your response was so well-written, thank you for taking the time to do that. 

Just want to add that I had my children at 36 and 37. My husband did not come out of the closet until the older one was off on his own and the younger one was away in college. During the marriage I did find that I assumed many of the traditional male roles and my husband was more motherly with the children. I suspect that when the man considers himself a woman trapped in a man's body you might also find your duties changing to include car maintenance schedules and trapping mice.