Nadine,

I totally understand your shock, pain, hurt, betrayal etc.

I want you to know you are not alone.  I have been there and done that. You can read my story and postings.  It’s been over a year since my ex ambushed me with a phone call about his trans revelations.

Some days will be better than other but stick to your convictions and values and don’t waiver. Any doubt trying to make it work when you know in your core that’s not who you are will only prolong your hurt and suffering.

I am glad you have support as you will need to lean on true friends and family. Take care of yourself and your children.

Hugs to you! PM me if you want to chat.

Nadine, I"m so sorry you find yourself in this predicament.  Your husband's remarks about you being transphobic are just attempts to deflect blame -- I hope you realize this.  The same goes for his claim that he's the same person and his gender shouldn't matter to you.  The logic can be turned back on him: if his gender doesn't matter, why is he changing it?  Why insist it matters for him, but not for you?

Nadine, here's what worked for me, but of course everyone's situation is different.

My daughter was 22 when it all came crashing down.  If you read my story in "Our Stories", I get into more detail about how this had affected her, so I won't repeat the whole miserable story here.  It was necessary for her to be told, because she needed to make sense out of things that involved her -- and as it turned out, she'd seen things she didn't understand and had been afraid to talk to me.  

I was also very concerned that if I didn't control the time, place and message ... she'd find out purely by accident in the most shocking and devastating way, at the worst possible time.

I gave my husband the choice, but with a deadline.  I said she had to be told, and that it was better coming from him but if he didn't step up to the plate I would do it myself.  I said it had to be after her graduation, but within about a two-week window.  When time came for me to move her out of her college apartment, we got everything into the car and on the drive up to her next place, I asked her if Daddy had said anything to her about his situation.  She didn't know a thing, so I told her as gently as possible.  She had a LOT of questions, which kept coming for months after that conversation.  Her first reaction was that she was terrified he would do something drastic, and she called him and told him that she loved him.

Next, she went for a year not speaking to him.  Go figure.

I think that I'd reached a point where all the lying was too much and everyone had to know the full truth.  I couldn't imagine how she'd feel if I covered for him and she ended up finding out by accident.

Nadine, we are in the same boat😢30 years in, and now I’m expected to be attracted to a man that wants to be a woman...I am struggling. He is my best friend, we have adult children, he was SO manly, but is was not genuine. There’s so much to lose at this stage of life😩we’ve built an amazing one and I’m afraid to change my circumstance, but I DESIRE a man😭 honesty, this seems like a no win situation, and I’m at the angry stage right now. I’ve done the role playing, yada yada domimatrix thing to satisfy him, but I don’t like it. It’s not authentic for me....where’re  are you at?

Nadine and Dobie,
    I was 61 when my then husband, who was 58, dropped his trans bomb.  We'd been married 32 years.  I stayed for three years, until the escalating demands, manipulation, and anger on his part when I expressed any sort of discomfort with his gender expression and behavior became too much for me.  
  At first I had hoped that now that he could be his "authentic" self, he would finally become the partner he had never been.  (Need I say this didn't happen...).  I participated fully in his sexual acting out of his woman persona--and like you, Dobie, that sex was tinged by sado-masochism.  I wonder if you have found, as I did, that the whole "I want to be a woman" was essentially sexual.  When my ex first told me about his trans identity, he outlined his expectations for sex before anything else!  And in outlining them, his "masochism" was first on the list, even before "being penetrated" in order to "play the part of a woman"!  At the time I was so shocked by the revelation itself that I was in no frame of mind to ask myself why it was that his entire idea of woman revolved around sexual expression.  Even the clothes he wanted to wear were women's lingerie: bras, stockings, camis, etc.   Later I discovered the work of Michael Bailey ("The Man Who Would Be Queen" which is available for downloading online as a pdf), Ray Blanchard (psychologist/sexologist), and the transwoman and MD Anne Lawrence, all of whom outlined the sexual paraphilia autogynephilia, which motivates most of the late-transitioning males.  (Anne Lawrence also maintains an online presence.) 

It is a terrible thing for us in our 60s to have this trans bomb dropped in our laps.  As you say, it leaves one feeling cheated, out of the past and the future we had worked for for decades of married lives.

 I divorced my now ex when I was 64.  I was able to do so because I had a professional job and a pension of my own, and have since retired.  My retirement is secure enough, but of course it's not what it should have been, and would have been.  I will say this, though: my life out of that crazy is infinitely better than it was before when I lived with his volatility, his snits, his moods, his anger, his manipulation, his envy of my femaleness, his appropriation of my femininity, and his objectionably sexist portrayal of woman.   I am still dealing with the trauma that is the result of those three years I lived with him between his bomb drop and my leaving, but I am in a much healthier frame of mind now.