Does he have everything? He seems miserable. He complains we don't have enough sex and he has 'given up'. He complains that I used to be ok with it all and now I am not. He is unhappy most of the time because he can't dress enough, which I feel the complete opposite, he dresses all the time. I can't touch him without feeling straps under his shirts or knowing he is wearing panties and miserable deep down because he would rather be in a dress.

I honestly am starting to think if he would just admit he wants to live full time as a woman we could both just put this behind us and move on and be happier. Then I feel guilty for having the thought. I do not actually want to divorce my husband, when he is being a man I love him. But when he is only being a man once and awhile, its not enough anymore.

I feel that I need to wait for the children to be independent before I can make such a decision but it is a long time to wait and live in a sexless marriage where you walk around on eggshells avoiding the topic.

otherwoman,
   I so know what you're going through, having gone though something similar myself.  It's a terrible blow at the most basic of levels to have your male husband rejecting his maleness, and then to have him pouting and angry that you aren't "accepting" him.  It really hits you at the most basic level when your male husband, the one you fell in love with, begins to disavow his very maleness.  When it comes to sex, this is particularly painful--in fact, it's traumatic, and the more you engage with that trauma, the deeper the wound from which you will have to recover.
  One thing you will see in virtually all the stories on this site by women whose husbands go down this route is that their activity ramps up over time, and often accelerates, that they push the boundaries you have set or agreed on, and become ever more self-centered.  You are seeing this right now: he wants to spend more and more time in women's clothes and is less and less able to imagine what this is like for you.  Listen to yourself: for you, "when he is a man once and awhile, it's not enough."  This tells you everything you really need to know.  
     While it is infuriating, unfair, and painful for us to have to be the ones to legally end the marriage when they, by their disavowal of the male man we fell in love with and married, are the ones to have already broken it, it's important that you get out in front of this feminizing fever of his, and act.  For one thing, all the money spent on clothes and other accoutrements, hormones, and surgery is money that will be drained from your joint assets, and is not recoverable. 
     He is not ever going back to the husband you married and loved, and the deeper he gets into this feminizing behavior, the more disordered his thinking will become. 
   As for your children, there's a saying "You don't stay for the children, you LEAVE for the children."  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (April 22, 2019 7:53 pm)

Thank you. Its been awhile since I have been validated. OutOfHisCloset - when you said, 'and then to have him pouting and angry that you aren't "accepting" him' This was something I have experienced, when I don't get excited or thrilled when he figures out how to present more like a woman he pouts and becomes angry. That behavior is disappointing.

Otherwoman,
   It's not your job to teach your trans identified partner how to be a woman.  In fact, if you think about it, he could have been learning by watching you for all the years you were together.  My ex, to whom I was married 32 years at the time of the trans bomb drop, had had ample time and example to watch me, intimately.  He was also 58 years old, and has lived and worked with women his entire life.  If here had been interested or paying attention or listening, or integrating any what he learned from the books he read, he would have had a clue about the way actual women live.  Instead, the persona he adopted was a complete stereotype of femininity in terms of dress, behavior, and gesture, his idea of the socialization of girls and women a one-sided fantasy of giggling girls at sleepovers playing with unicorns and decorating themselves with glitter, and he idealized both domestic chores like vacuuming (but only if he could do it in a 1950s white slip like Donna Reed en deshabiller) and porn doll sexual behavior ("do with me what you will"; "I need you to fuck me"; "sometimes the strap just slips down").  
    He was in the grip of the pink fog high of feminizing, and not rational enough to engage in any "negotiation"  carried out between two parties who each understand the other is an equally legitimate party with equally legitimate rights.  With him, it was ultimatum and pronouncement, proceeding from a place of  self-righteous entitlement.  When that's their mode, we are always, as Leah says, reacting, rather than acting.