Dear All,
   I've officially registered, after finding this network about two weeks ago, and posting a few replies in which I gave some of the details.  Eighteen months ago my husband of 34 years revealed out of the blue that for over a year he had been exploring whether he might be transgendered.  He told me he'd been fishing my discarded bras and panties out of the trash and trying them on, visiting trans and cross dressing websites, watching trans tv (Transparent) or shows with lesbians (Orange is the New Black), and reading lesbian romance novels.   He had decided he wanted to "transition."  He wanted to use me to talk over his desires and his plans, but after a particularly painful revelation about his sexual fantasies (what he wanted me to do to him), I told him I didn't want to hear any more and he needed to go to a therapist.  He did, a FtoM trans person, but only for a couple of visits, as the therapist was relocating out of state. We were starting to make the arrangements to split; I was starting to see a life on my own as something I could do (I have savings of my own and a good job, our son is in his mid-20s and out of the house) when one day I walked in the bedroom where my husband lay on the bed, clutching a pillow and crying over how afraid he was over the future, how hard it would be to be a transwoman given that he would never pass and knew that he would put himself in danger at work of losing the respect of those he worked with (or becoming an object of derision, curiosity, or worse).  He asked me to hold him, and I did.  
  I can see now that this was a huge mistake on my part.  I had been feeling shut out, traumatized, reeling as if someone had hit me over the head, and I responded to being wanted, valued, needed.  
  That act of comfort was followed by several more, and then sex.  
  After that, exploration, in and out of bed, which I not only allowed but aided and abetted, and even enjoyed.  
 Over time, however, I came back to my senses, and began to read and to analyze, and to realize that although I was heterosexual, he was seeing himself while we were having sex as a woman making love to a woman.  I discovered that the dominant trans narrative of "a woman in a man's body" is not the only one, and read about autogynephilia, a description both he and I decided fits him.  He is sexually excited by the thought of himself as a woman, and by dressing in women's clothes and acting in ways that are available only to women--that is, in feminine clothes and in feminine ways.  He decided he could satisfy his need by acting as a woman at home and a man in public, and that meant I've been in his closet for a year and a half, unable to talk to anyone.  I know you all know what this is like, how isolating, how miserable, how narrowing to one's perspective.  
   I've been asking myself if we couldn't have a future together, if the CD/TG autogynephilia is an insurmountable hurdle, responding to him saying how much he loves me, what a gift I've given him in allowing him to give outer shape to his inner longings.  Of course there were the first stirrings of my rejection: how his idea of what a woman dresses and acts was a girly caricature, how his saying he needed to shave because women are smooth and hairless made me, a woman with facial hair I remove, feel like I wasn't a woman.  
  Finally this summer when I was away from home for a family event, I had a realization: if I were to tell my mother or my sister about this situation, they would say, without hesitation, "Get out.  What are you waiting for."  It was a perspective outside of the insularity at home, and it was freeing.  Then I found this forum, and I began reading the posts, and seeing in them, whether about homosexual spouses or those who crossdress or proclaim they are transgender, parallels and lessons to heed.
   I want to thank you all tremendously for being here, for being honest, and for seeing clearly.  
   I am here writing because I believe registering and writing a bit of my story constitutes my first step to toward getting out of my marriage, and I need to make that step.