Sun, my GIDTGH has been dressing since a young age, has progressed from panties, lingere & the usual, to full blown wigs/make u p/silicone body parts and yes, I do believe that the are almost encouraged as you say, by societies acceptance, Kaitlyn & perhaps even by their very nature of translating a spouses "pass" as encouragement & opprtunity to go that little bit further every time. If you've ever been on THEIR forums you will witness how they educate each other on how to get more freedom from their spouses. Once they enter that Pink Fog area, you've lost them. They will never turn back or dial it down. And yes, it is a sexual turn on for them, no matter how much they deny at first. They become so bloody CONSUMED with their girly crap (way more than any real woman I've ever met!!) and yes, rather narssistic in that they are the only thing that matters. I went out a few times with my spouse to events & it was like I wasn't even there, so bloody enamored with himself, prancing around, showing off his latest outfit/wig/costume, basking in all the compliments from fellow girlfriends/tg. It was like being raped by fucking tacky trailer trash meets veronica's closet. Yes, I'm fucking bitter. This goddamn fetish has robbed me of a happy, loving marriage & a life of confidence. Everyone thinks he'she is such an awesome guy in & out of the closet, but he's a selfish lying manipulator as a man & a selfish woman as TG. 

FTR, I hear all the time women talking about how they never knew before they got married so it's extra hurtful & insulting. Well I knew ahead of marriage & it doesn't mean squat. I'm still gutted on a regular basis.. CD's will ALWAYS progress to more More MORE female persuasion if given any freedom. My husband who swore numerous times he wasn't ever going to transition, is now talking on his TG forum about taking hormones one day. "NEVER No Way am I gay!!", has been surfing gay sites, said there was no sexual side to his fetish, now says I never heard him right that yes, it is very sexual. 

Bottom Line, don't fucking trust a CD husband, no matter how much he says he's telling you the truth, & this is all there is to it. If you "respect his honesty & support his "little stress-reducing fetish", you are destined to a whole lot of crushing heartache. I'm now looking down the barrel of a dark, empty marriage, in the process of trying to figure out how to escape, after 2 decades of putting up with his shit. And let me tell you, there is certainly not anything sexual about it for the spouse. When u see your once manly husband, donning a wig, full make-up, tits, hips, ass, corset, nylons, all giddy because he gets to have a fun night out, you want to vomit, but you have been conditioned & broken down so much you tell them "You look good hon, have fun tonight" Then u sit at home, alone for the hundredth time, while you wonder what the fuck he's really doing out there. No good will ever come out of a TG/Str8 relationship. The str8 does ALL the compromising & bending while the TG lets you believe YOU'RE the lucky one.Besides, they're so far up their own asses they can't see/don't care how much it's hurting you or the family.

Just get the fuck out. Before it plows thru too much of your life.

Sorry, extra bitter/scared/hurt/lost/trapped/petrified tonight 

Sun, Bless you for that reassurance, I really needed that. It's been a seriously crappy week. Lots of crying, feeling like I'm actually going insane, so overloaded with stress, questions, discoveries that I am parilized with it all instead of plowing thru my lists. Evrywhere I look I see "what could have been"s. I have been depressed for a few years (anti depressants not working), but this? This is shear HELL! One minute I want to throw every legal avenue at him & hurt him twice what he has done to me, the next hr I wish he would claim sincere sorrow & pledge to make it up to me & the kids & change. But he can't even say "Sorry". If there is such a thing as Karma, I wonder what the hell nasty i did in a former life to come down for such never ending pain. 

This site has been a life line to me. I seriously don't know where i'd be if i didn't have you all to give me hope.Sharing, from your heart & your head of reason & experience, is such a blessing!!

Nel,
   Thank you so much for your post!  I share your determination that what I know to be true based on my experience can not be allowed to be "erased" by the dominant TG narrative, which does indeed demand that we "sacrifice [our] own identity and sexuality to live in someone else's lie."  I, too, am horrified to discover that after a lifetime as a feminist--which includes time as a director of a women's studies program--I am dismissed as a TERF (trans-exculsionary radical feminist) and labeled "transphobic," all because I am trans critical (a position, by the way, shared by some trans-women), a position that I have arrived at after living through the experience of a husband who decided at age 58 that he was transgender, and whose behavior and attitudes since are textbook examples of the outlines of AGP.  By the way, even the FAQ on Transgender on this site supports that narrative of a "woman in a man's body," although no one ever seems to be able to say how it is that a male with a male body who has lived an entire life as a man with accompanying male socialization and benefitting from men's position in society can have any idea what it is that a woman feels!  What they can feel is that they would like to be a woman, or that somehow they are in the wrong body--and they can feminize themselves by surgery and clothes, but they will remain biological males.  Transwomen, but not women.  (Yes, I reject the pressure to refer to myself as a cis-woman, as if trans and cis were simply versions of woman, to be placed in the same overall category; a trans woman and a woman are two different categories, and while we might have reason to ally ourselves on certain issues, on others we may have to disagree.) 
   My husband himself accepts that he is AGP, but insists that unlike some other sexual paraphilias, AGP is "harmless" because it takes advantage of no one.  Well, I'm here to tell you that it's not harmless, to the partner or to the AGP himself.  It's not harmless to me, because what was a marriage between two people has taken on the attributes of a threesome, with my husband accounting for two of the three of us, and dividing his attention between the two women in his life--the one he's married to and the one he's fantasizing that he is.  It's not harmless to him, either, because the more he manifests his desire to feminize himself the more he's driven to want it.  It's an obsessive compulsion, and highly addictive, with higher doses needed to achieve the desired high.  In addition, the more the AGP acts on his desire, the more he's driven by the AGP to believe in the "woman" he's dressing up as.  
   In the 19 months I've been living with him since he told me he was transgender, I've seen just how much his ideas of "woman" are convention heterosexual male stereotypes--mostly sexual in nature.  He wants to wear lace and satin lingerie and swishy dresses or to dress in 1950s slips while engaging in domestic chores (and fantasizes about cooking with me while wearing a Donna Reed-like apron); to act seductively and be coy; to be penetrated (the defining and quintessential female experience, according to him); to pretend that he's a lesbian with me in bed.  His sexual fantasies are so laughably conventional, so much like conventional heterosexual porn for men: a feminine and coy woman in lingerie, just waiting to be "taken," or two lesbians together.
  Nel, I have not sought psychological counseling yet, and for precisely the reasons you cite: I do not want to be lectured by a psychologist I seek out for my own health about my failure to "understand" my husband's trans-ness, or counseled from the perspective of "get with the program or get out of the way," a formulation that casts me as the obstruction in his "self-actualization."  If I arrive at "get out of the way" it'll be because I have decided that because our sexualities are so fundamentally mismatched, I can't live the rest of my life satisfied by a sex life that denies me full satisfaction while helping to fully satisfy his.  I have a lot of sympathy for him, because I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a body you disliked, and to reject your biological sex (I fully understand wanting to reject your gender conditioning, however).  I also didn't want to seek psychological counseling in lieu of telling others in my day to day life what was happening in my life, because I needed someone there for me as I went through my days to know me; talking to a psychologist only seemed to me too confining, too much like a little confessional window in my husband's closet, through which I might talk to a counselor, but essentially remain in his closet.  I told a longtime friend immediately (unfortunately she lives in a thousand miles away), and recently I told another, here where I live; I also found this forum, after 18 months, and it's been a godsend. 
  And I'm determined not to be silenced.  

Sun,
 I realized that I never answered your question.  What do I think my husband is fantasizing about when he's cross dressed and/or engaged in acting out his fantasy of being a woman?  He's told me.  He is imagining himself as the woman he would like to bring into being through his acts, the one he fantasizes about being.  Note: This is different than "the woman he knows he is inside."  My husband has never said he "is" a woman; what he's said is that he has a vision of the woman he would like to be if he were a woman, and by acting out and dressing up, he is "bringing her into being."  He feels sexy when dressed in a chemise, and vamps, because acting that way makes him feel closer to his ideal (because that's what he thinks makes him more like a sexy woman).  
  Sorry for this next, which is maybe too graphic, but it answers your question:  He also fantasizes during sex that he has a female body, and is feeling the sexual response a female does, and experiencing sex the way women do. He has told me he imagines the glans of his penis is a clitoris; he imagines his "breasts" are a woman's; he thinks being penetrated is giving him a woman's experience of "being taken" and "giving herself up."  
  I don't think, by the way, that he's perverted.  I think that for whatever reason--a physical condition in the brain, maybe caused in the womb during development--this is natural to him, his natural sexual orientation.  My objection to it is not that it is disgusting or shameful; my objection to it is that it has opened a rift between his sexuality and mine.  I am not prepared to think of him as a woman or to treat him as if he were one.  I am not opposed even to participating in his fantasies in bed, but I am increasingly dissatisfied that he cannot act as a male/man to me in bed.  His sexuality and mine overlap, but they don't match.  Every straight spouse, whether married to a GID or a TG, knows what it feels like to suddenly know that one's mate, one's intimate partner, has a sexuality unlike your own, and unlike that you always believed your partner had.  I'm all for gender bending, would have no objection to any of the acts--what I object to is that he genders them, rather than ungenders them!  AGPs aren't in any sense "exploding the gender binary"; they're embracing it from the other side.  
  Ok.  My two cents worth at the end of a long work day.