NewFly welcome and sorry that you are here...
My ex and I didn’t work at the same company but our lives were somewhat intertwined at work because several women at work played hockey in the same leagues as my wife( including the wife of an individual that reported to me). I took the ‘less is more’ approach and am glad I did.  I said as little as possible about the reason, most people didn’t ask. (I manage a large department, so I didn’t expect my staff to ask, and peers were professional about it).  This early in the process I would just say ‘we could no longer make it work’. I don’t know your situation but if you say ‘secrets and lies’ you are starting a ‘whose at fault’ discussion that he will have to manage too and you lose control of your own story.  (This is important to maintain , especially if you are dealing with a liar and anything that feels like gaslighting). The truth may ultimately come out later but the less specific  you are now, the more control of the narrative you have later. And you don’t owe anyone your story until you are ready to tell it.

I hope this is helpful.

Last edited by a_dads_straight_journey (May 16, 2019 5:28 am)

So I'm going to respectfully disagree with you, DSJ, about being vague now allowing you to control the narrative later.  Or, at least, I'm going to say, "it depends."  It depends on the situation. 
    I work with my ex.  In fact, we once shared a job, until we were each given full time positions of our own, but in the same academic department (we are both tenured professors).  Although initially, during the first pink fog high of feminizing--and what a high it was!--my ex was hellbent on "transitioning," he ultimately opted to stay in his closet.  I was and remain the ONLY one who ever saw him when he was acting out his feminine fantasy sex life. 
    When I'd decided I'd had enough and said I wanted a divorce (two years of active wrestling with myself reduced to an introductory clause...oh, how much is ellided), he very much wanted, in order to maintain his comfortable position in the closet, for the story we told everyone, including our adult son, to be "we grew apart."  And while I don't trumpet the details to everyone, I do tell a story that I suppose you could say introduces "fault."  I prefer to say it provides and explanation.  Depending on how close they are to me, people get a more or less detailed version.  For colleagues I've worked with for years, but to whom I am not close, I say, "He was keeping a marriage changing secret from me and I couldn't live with it." And that's where I leave it.  I don't provide more details than that. I suspect most of them think he was having an affair.  For those people, colleagues or not, who are my friends, I tell the truth: "After thirty-two years of marriage he came in one day to tell me he hated his maleness and wanted to become a woman. I don't want to be wife of a transwoman."
    Here's why I do that.
    For the three years after his trans reveal that I tried to see if we could make a go of it, his decision to stay in the closet meant that I was the only one bearing any consequence for that decision and his choices, both at home, where I was subjected to his feminizing activities and personae (yes, multiple; he had several women inside him, he said) and expected to accept, accommodate and adjust, and also at work, where only I knew that he was projecting a hologram of the concerned male feminist (while wearing women's panties under his trousers and creeping on committees to do with women, like the judiciary committee that handled rape accusations on campus, while basking in the approval of the women who believed him to be an enlightened male).  I was living a gaslit existence at work, and the constant pressure was taking its toll.
   So it was and is important to me that I not endorse any narrative or act that enabled his continued gaslighting of me and the warping of my life around his closet.  Part of the process of healing is remaking one's own narrative, and telling one's own story: that's a precept we accept from all traumatized people, whether as a group (the TRC in South Africa, for example, which I observed in action) or as individuals (the MeToo movement).  I lived in a situation in which my very day to day existence was conditioned by a lie.  I'm not maintaining it or contributing to it.  
  NewFly, as you move through the process of healing, separating yourself from your marriage, and detaching emotionally, you many find that your idea about what you will say, and what you're happy with people knowing, changes over time as his influence on your life wanes.  During my marriage I was, I realized later, afraid of my ex's anger, and unconsciously acquiesced or preemptively tailored my own actions to fit his needs.  So early on, I agreed to tell our son a bowdlerized, compromised version of "the story of our breakup" that was only a partial truth, and I now very much regret that.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (May 16, 2019 7:26 am)

Thank you OOHC and DSJ different perspectives.

I fear that the more departments that find out the less I will able to control the or any narrative. I changed my name because there was no way I wanted to be reminded of my STBX anymore than I have to and I wanted as much separation from him as possible. I had to have the name on my company CC changed and the person processing the change emailed me to ask me if she could ask me a personal question. I was working off site and didn’t respond. I know there was most likely some discussion or gossip before she asked. Ironically, my STBX’s fear of gossip was one of the reasons he wanted to stay in a MOM. He was willing to keep me in his closet. That and lifestyle - he didn’t want to give up our comfortable life. I’m not afraid of the gossip but I don’t want to fuel it myself.

Last edited by NewFly (May 18, 2019 5:42 am)