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Last edited by Duped (August 28, 2019 1:51 pm)

Yes, I think it would be helpful.  Despite the fact that there are similarities in all the gay issues, there are definite differences between gay and trans.  Someone can be trans and gay, or trans and straight.  Plus being trans doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't attracted to their current partner (or at least that's what they all tell their partner in the beginning, anyway).  I think it would be helpful to have a separate category.

Kel

Here are my thoughts:
1)  It would be good to have a way to identify the most relevant threads, along the lines Lyonene suggests.
2) However, I would not like to be isolated in a trans ghetto, because
3) I think others have a lot to learn to about trans issues (Kel, I'm talking to you--you who sometimes wades in where angels fear to tread), and 
4) I learned a lot and there were many similarities between what I was going through and what others with gay or gid spouses were going through. 
 I would not like to atomize things so much that this ability to learn from each other and support each other is lost.  I thought it was a great mistake to ghetto-ize those who were striving to make MOMs work, as if they were hothouse flowers whose positions would never change and whose situations were those from which we could not learn.
 

Kel,
  The issues are confused with the trans situation.  With a gay/lesbian revelation, the situation is clear: your spouse wants someone of the same sex: a males feels desire for a male; a female feels desire for a female.  If you're the straight spouse in such a situation, there's really not much you can do to accommodate that desire and situation.  GID spouses will use the bi ruse to avoid admitting the truth to themselves and others, but as we've seen, it's more often a ruse than the truth--and even when it's the truth, the bi spouse in a monogamous marriage can choose not to act on a same sex attraction just as the straight spouse chooses not to act on opposite sex attractions). 
 With a trans spouse, there is no such clarity.  A husband suddenly announces to his wife that he is or wants to be a woman, and he can say !) I still love and desire you, but as a lesbian, and want to remain in the marriage, but as your wife; 2) I want to be with men because having sex with a man who desires me as a woman will make me feel like a woman; or 3) I want to have the freedom to have sex with both men and women, because I want both of those things.
  Only with the second scenario is the future remotely clear, and it it analogous to a man who comes out to his wife as gay: a man who becomes a transwoman and wants to be with men is not going to be happy staying with his wife.  
   In scenarios 1 and 2, the straight partner encounters the confusion of still being desired by the trans partner, and, when the trans partner is a part time cross dresser, the straight spouse is further confused by seeing what appears to be the partner one has always loved still there--the same body.  It's confusing and comforting and alienating all at the same time.  I've said before that what this felt like to me was that suddenly my husband brought home a new woman and installed her in my marriage, my home, and my marriage bed, said, I love her and you must love her, too.  If your partner just brought home another woman, you'd say, Hell no.  But when that other woman is at the same time your partner, the person to whom you're married?  And your partner after all belongs in your home and your bed?  A mind fuck of a very specific and different order. 
   Add to this the fact that although we use "trans" as an umbrella term, there are two very specific varieties of trans for men.  One is the stereotypically feminine boy who always wanted to be a girl (and is not, as studies indicate many such boys are, going to grow up to be a gay man); the other is a male with autogynephilia, a boy with an unproblematical boyhood, doing boy things, until, typically adolescence, when the condition manifests.  It's not just a case of "I want to be a woman"--what we refer to as "gender identity."  It's a sexual desire: I want to dress like, act like, be, a woman because it makes me sexually excited to dress like, act like, and imagine myself as a woman.  Lots of times this desire manifests at adolescence, and then is repressed, or recedes, or appears periodically, all the while the man is living a life as a man. 
     More than once you have written to someone that their partner "knew" from a young age, and has been lying about a life long sexuality; that's simply not accurate.  What you say aside from that, that once a spouse decides he's trans, he has an obligation to disclose; and once he has disclosed, 1) he should not expect his straight wife to accommodate his desire, and 2) his straight wife has the right to decide whether she wishes to stay in a marriage in which the contract has been unilaterally changed to something she didn't agree to.  
   
  That the straight partner is still recognizably the partner, and still says, "I love you" and "I want you" is, I believe, the reason so many of us spend so much time concerned with what the trans spouse wants or needs--or who the person is!  Each straight partner in a trans situation works out what the bright line is: mine initially was "If you go ahead with transition, I can't stay married to you. I'm unwilling to be the wife of a transwoman."   When my stbx decided he would stay in the closet and simply act out his sexual desire with me, I wanted, as his spouse committed to marriage to him, to accommodate him.  I had no idea of the way autogynephilia would affect him and how his need would escalate and how acting as a woman would push him to believe in this woman he was acting out.