MJM017: you are right that I should not stay out of fear. I'm totally scared of the future now. I've always tried to outlive my problems but this situation will probably teach me to decide and act.

walkbymyself: I feel the same about divorce. I understand that the marriage we used to have is gone. But is there anything else between us? Time will show.

Ellexoh_nz wrote:

Why? Why do you need to know that (edited) who he becomes?
 

Good question, Elle. Everything is too new, too fresh for me at this moment. I need a clearer view of the future to decide where to go next.
I don't need to see him completely transformed or anything like that. He has lots of ideas at the moment, but didn't act on it yet. It's just talking about it so far. So I'm not sure what will really happen and don't want to act prematurely.
 

Marianne,
(I have revised the final section of my original comment, to read as it currently does in the final two paragraphs, below.) 

   As your husband moves from "lots of ideas" to putting them into practice, you may find that he backs up when faced with the reality of what it will be like for him.  I say this not to give you some kind of hope that he will change his mind, only to give you a head's up.   My ex did this.  He was gung ho about transitioning and living as a woman, drawing me into his excited discussions about this life, expecting me to help him, but when I told him he needed to see a therapist rather than seeking to enlist me as one, and the therapist suggested he attend group therapy with transitioning individuals, he backed right up.  When he started to contemplate the consequences he would experience as a mannish looking transwoman, it brought him down out of his fantasy land high. 
     
   At that point, he wanted to limit his cross dressing and activities to the home; this was a win-win for him, but a lose-lose for me.  He expected to go out every morning and live his professional and public life as the man he is, but to come home and immediately change into women's clothing and act out his fantasy of being a woman.  His life would change only as he wished it to, and for the better for him. I, meanwhile, had to go out every morning bearing the secret of my husband's activities, stay in his closet by not speaking of the reality of my life to anyone, and then come home to his role playing, complete with a role for me, and act the enthusiastic, supportive "lesbian" wife.  My life changed not as I determined it, but as his decisions about his did.  When I look back on it, I realize what a horror it was.  
 
   It was an untenable situation, and became more so over time, because he wanted to keep pushing the envelope at home, and broke through the boundaries that he himself had set, acted to feminize himself behind my back, and attempted to manipulate me into more than I had agreed to. 

   Boundary breaking, deception, and manipulation are some things to watch out for, because from what a number of other women here and on other boards can attest, they are common behaviors of the trans-identified spouse, espeically when in the grip of the excitement they feel about feminizing.  Also common is escalating, addict-like enthusiasm and behavior.  Every degree of change is accompanied by the need for the next buzz, the next escalation.  And if your husband is an autogynephile, you may discover, as I did, that he wants the extreme versions of femininity because that's what gives him the buzz.  If you read Michael Bailey's "The Man Who Would be Queen," you will learn that the paraphilia of autogynephilia is often accompanied by other sexual paraphilias like pedophilia or masochism (and others).  If that's the case with your spouse, whatever that paraphilia is will manifest in the "woman" he becomes.  (Every seen grown men wearing little girl dresses?  It's a thing. Look up "Stefonknee.")

  I know very well where you are right now, in terms of "I'm not ready to give up and make a decision until I see where he's going," because I once felt the same way.  Subsequently, I realized that because my then-husband kept changing his mind, constantly raising the stakes, and told me outright that he could not say what acts of feminizing (cross-sex hormones, an orchiectromy) he might wish to engage in in the future, and would not promise anything was off limits, that as long as I stayed with him I would be living in a contingent situation in which I was always waiting for another shoe to drop.  I also saw that in the time I spent with him he had moved the goal posts repeatedly, and those changes were normalized for me--I was groomed to accept each new change, and each new change moved me farther along a line I didn't wish to travel, and which, traveling it, did damage to me psychologically. 

  Luckily, I have inside me a self-protective core, which didn't desert me, even though I was often working against my own self interests (telling myself I needed to be "accepting," etc). The longer I lived in this untenable situation, the more difficult he made it by the escalation of behavior and rhetoric (including the bizarre idea he got from trans communities on the internet that trans people represented an evolutionary advance that benefitted the species, which made them superior to others).  I finally realized that when I said I couldn't leave until I knew where he was going to end up I was rationalizing my inability to leave because I was not only reluctant to give up the life I had but also afraid of a future alone. I may have been speaking in a very rational voice, but it was all still psychological rationalizing born of fear.  And that, too, is a common response of people in our situation.  You might want to take that possibility up with your therapist, too. 

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (November 23, 2021 8:34 am)

Elle:
What you say about untangling the couple, resonates deeply with me. It is already happening but it is a slow process.

OutofHisCloset:
Yes, I already see the backing up you mentioned. He is aware that all of his effort can make him (at best) only a very ugly woman.
I also experience the boundary-breaking, but not deception or manipulation. Nothing is off-limits, just as you say. Maybe I could adapt if I knew what I was adapting to... but this uncertainty is the worst.
I'm reading "The man who would be queen" at the moment, haven't finished it yet. Strangely enough, my husband does not show any symptoms of autogynephilia. 

walkbymyself:
Exactly! I don't plan to become a lesbian. I couldn't even if I wanted to!

walkbymyself:
"...when the decisionmaking is ALL on one side of the relationship, and the other person is only offered the option to take it or leave it, that's a real imbalance in the power within that relationship.  It's not healthy."

 I agree, and if not for the combination of shock, disbelief, and damage control, I normally would never have done what I did.  Tht, and the fact that he'd known for years and I was playing catchup.