otherwoman,
   You hit me where I live today.  My ex, who declared to me that he was "a woman in a man's body" but then decided that because when dressed he looked 'like a man in a dress" (his quotes) he'd stay in the closet, does exactly what yours does.  He dresses at home, but stays upstairs most times because he's afraid that someone will come to the door.  He dresses in women's clothes in the mornings "because people are less likely to come around then" but keeps a man's robe draped over the dining room chair in case anyone comes.
What I mean to say is that Every Single Act He Takes is Determined by His Crossdressing.  
   He decided to stay in the closet because whenever he looks at himself in women's clothes he sees "a man in a dress," and he is too proud to to live his truth as an ugly woman.  (As if women have this choice, to decide whether or not every morning we will present ourselves for scrutiny and judgement.)  Nor does he want to give up the male privilege he enjoys at work where people simply give him their attention because he is male, and assume that because he is male that he knows what he is talking about.  He says it's shame that keeps him in the closet, but I know better.  It's pride and privilege.
   I left him and got a divorce, and began, finally, to come out of his closet, and tell my friends at work about what had been actually going on for the three years I withdrew from committee work and refused to meet their eyes.  But I work in the same university, and I got threatened with disciplinary action for telling the truth of what I'd been through, because hey, he's a protected class, and so fragile that HE has to be protected from ME, the woman he subjected to what he put me through. 
    That did it for me; I refuse to work in a place that devalues me, and adds its institutional weight to his attempts to shut me up.  I won't have my reality invalidated.  It took me three long years before I my self respect rose up and reused to take it any more, and I told him I wanted a divorce (after 35 years of marriage!).  I decided to take early retirement because I cannot live in his closet, will not countenance my workplace's slamming me back into it, and cannot stand to watch him deceive others.  He's nothing but a hologram, a projection of a fake front.   
  Now that I am retiring and therefore not threatened with disciplinary action for telling the truth about my experience, I am planning to meet with the college administrators to tell them why they lost me, a popular and valuable faculty member,  two to three years before I planned to retire, and to tell them exactly what is wrong with their implementation and interpretation of Title IX.  And if I have to provide all the sordid details ("I need you to fuck me"; "Sometimes the strap just slips down"; "I'm a masochist; I want to be punished.  I want to act the part of a woman; I want to be penetrated.") I will do so. 
   No more fucking closet for me. Nor more lying by omission. No more silence by coercion.  And no more taking a pass on well-meaning but false understandings that invalidate my experience--and that of the other women who've posted on this forum--which allows that false narrative of "a woman in a man's body," when the reality is far more sordid, to prevail without a challenge by someone who's lived it.
  OtherWoman, if you value honesty and truth over secrey and hiding, your course is clear, and I think you know what it is.  And because you are who you are and value what you do, you have what it takes to do it and remake your life to thrive--in the open.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (April 26, 2019 9:13 pm)

   One of the realizations I had that helped me make up my mind to tell him we were through: he was willing to keep me in his closet for the rest of my life.  He loved his closet more than me.  I don't know whether he knew how his decision to live a double life was affecting me, because he himself had such ironclad (or watertight) compartments, but I knew that if he did know, he didn't care--or didn't care enough, anyway.  His closet was far more important to him than I or my health were.  He expected me to shoulder that burden. 
   And yes, when you realize that you are the only one bearing the consequences, because you have to go off to work every day to encounter what women daily do at work, and then you have to come home and have him impose himself on you by subjecting you, and only you, to his feminizing activities, and you realize that he's demanding 100% acceptance from you but his decision to "live his truth" only in secret means he hasn't accepted himself--because otherwise he wouldn't feel he needed to hide in the closet--well...that's clarifying.  My ex liked to rationalize it all as a reasoned response to both transphobia (although he's a tenured professor in no danger of losing his job on a campus that on its website trumpets its welcoming stance to trans students) and autogynephilia, which when he was rationalizing he'd say was primarily a sexual orientiation to the self--and so he didn't need to go public--but at other times he'd make it clear that he believed that although he might be autogynephilic, sexual orientation is identity as well as sexual behavior, and he was as trans as any out transwoman successfully passing.  The logic was incoherent. 
    I finally decided his decision to live in a closet wasn't either a rational response to anything or a result of shame (he had not been too ashamed to discuss his ideas of himself with a former student for months before he told me), it was pride and privilege.  Too proud to be an ugly woman (although our office coordinator is a grossly obese woman who must have to put on her own psychological armor every morning before she leaves her house, because she doesn't have the luxury of decising whether she'll go out into the world in a body that calls down upon her a virulent social opprobrium).  Too wedded to his own male privilege and too aware of what he'd lose--being listened to and having his ideas respected, his authority in front of the classroom assumed--to give it up. 
  I have a friend, the only one who knew from the beginning (my oldest friend from grad school, a lesbian, which made my ex think she'd be on his side so he said, when he dropped his trans bomb, that he would not mind if I told her), who said the secrecy, fear of discovery and anticipation of punishment is probably part of the thrill for him.  I do know my ex told me early on that he wanted to be punished, and the psychological literature says masochism is co-morbid with autogynephilia, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if my ex has a need for secrecy because potential discovery and the anticipation of punishment is part of the thrill.  Perhaps that another reason he wants to live in a cloest.
   Good for you for refusing his "tell your daughter, keep the secret from his" idea.  You should not make your daugther complicit; nor should you allow him to make roping her into his crazy part of the requirement he imposes on you to prove your "acceptance." 
     I hope that once you make up your mind (or finally make a determinatin on when) to leave you do tell your daughter.  I still regret knuckling under to my ex's rage when I told him I planned to tell our son the reason for our divorce because I wanted an honest relationship with my son.  I settled for a watered down version of the truth ("It's something to do with your father and you will have to ask him about it, and he knows I'm telling you this. But I already know, beause he told me so, that he's going to tell you 'some things are private' if you ask."), and now I don't know how to open that door back up, even though I think the truth would explain some things about the family dynamic and our marriage that have bothered our son for years, and knowing the truth could help him in his own life. The problem for me is that I'm now locked in a situation in which both deciding to tell and deciding not to tell makes me feel as if I'm deciding for him, acting paternalistically, and he's an adult who should be able to decide what he wants to know. That is, I feel as if I can't tell him just because I think it will be "good for him" (even if I do think this).  He has signaled to me that he doesn't want to know, because he doesn't want to feel as if he has to take sides, and I respect that, even though it hurts me to know that we can't have a fully honest relationship, even if knowing the truth means we would all have to work through the reconfigurations in parental-child relationships.  My ex doesn't want to have to do this; I don't want to have been put in the position of not being able to do this. 
   I hope you won't mind if I say that I also for at least a year said I had some ducks to get in a row before I could leave, but it turned out that it wasn't "ducks" but me, rationalizing, telling myself I would leave, but not being actually ready.  As things transpired, things reached a point inside me that the scale tipped; getting out became more important than any ducks, because I finally felt that my health and sanity were more importance than the financial end of things that I'd said was the reason I was not yet ready to leave. 
   You don't say how long you've known, but it's clear you see the pattern of escalation in the behavior, and the ramping up of the narcissistic entitlement.  That his dressing is more important to him than his step-daughter's visits tells it all.  His self-absorbed feminizing activity is more important to him than real relationships with other people. He expects you to explain it away or keep it quiet, even as he ramps it up and flirts with public revelation...well, no wonder you're sick of duplicity and hiding and secrecy, all of which are corrosive.  I decided to get out before I was eaten away.  Now that I've been out for a year, I can see that the fears holding me back from leaving/declaring were just that: fear.  Not reality.  Life is so much better now, despite the financial hit I've had to pay. I hope you see your way clear soon to getting out.
  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (April 28, 2019 8:26 am)

Delete post.

Last edited by Lynne (April 25, 2020 11:20 am)