I posted this message below on Reddit and some people have directed me here: 

My past, my present, and my future are in ruins after my (now ex-)husband of 26 years came out to me as trans last year. Let's call him D. I still call him he. He hasn't transitioned yet. 10 years ago he came out to me as bi-sexual after he had had an affair with a man (and because he was confused about that he also cheated on me with a woman after that). We tried to make that work. Went to support groups, talked about it for about thousands of hours. I was so empathic that I forgot about how I myself felt at first. I felt so bad for him that he had hidden that part of himself for so long. I even met up with the guy he had cheated on me with to see if I could figure out how to deal with the two of them seeing each other. It nearly broke me but I couldn't do it. We mutually decided this wouldn't work in our monogamous relationship. After this we had about 5 really good years.

Now our 26 years together weren't easy ones either. We have 2 kids together and another from my previous marriage and we have been through a lot together. My first marriage was to an abusive husband who at one point even kidnapped my daughter to the U.S. ( I am Dutch) and my second husband came from a very dysfunctional family. So by the time we met eachother we had both been through a lot. We found a home with each other that we had both never had before and we were truly soulmates and best friends. During our marriage we had to deal with a lot. My daughter from my first marriage had severe psychiatric problems and his (my ex-husband's) mother was tragically and brutally killed by my brother-in-law who then committed suicide by jumping in front of a train..while holding the hands of his 4 and 6 year old sons.... (yes, they also died). This was 20 years ago and our whole family was of course shaken to its core by this traumatic event and it had a snowball effect on everything and caused my oldest daughter to completely derail. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice and well....there is so much more that happened in our 26 years together but it is just endless. But we stuck together and we made it all work somehow.

So, like I said before, after the cheating and him coming out as bi-sexual we had about 5 really good years together and then I slowly started sensing something was up but couldn't put my finger on it. He started being really weird about stuff like wearing women's perfume or wanting to try make-up. Now, I have never cared about things like that and am very unconventional in my opinions compared to most, so that was what was weird about it, that he started hiding things. He kept receiving packages and ordering things that he sent elsewhere too.

We had hardly any sex and when we did he always lost his erections. So here I am, a middle-aged woman, having just gained a bit of weight.....it made me feel so insecure and of course I thought he was secretly actually longing to have sex with a man. But we didn't talk about it anymore somehow. And meanwhile we were really busy with yet another big thing that came up in our lives. My oldest daughter had become addicted, was hanging out with the wrong crowd and got pregnant. It was a nightmare. Long story short, our grandson was born and we became his foster parents because my daughter couldn't take care of him. So here's a newborn baby added to the mix. (he is four years old now).

When D. told me he was transgender last year he said he wanted to do it right this time and not like last time when he cheated on me. He told me the day he had been put on the waiting list for the transgender clinic. At the moment he told me he said he just needed to look into the transgender thing. He told me he had to figure it out. The first thing I thought when he told me was: I cannot do this again. I cannot lose myself in his search for his identity again, I just can't with everything going on, trying to raise my grandson, working and taking care of my other kids (my youngest was still living at home at that time too). He somehow downplayed everything a bit so even though I really didn't think I could cope with this I still had hope for us. I thought he was just really confused and maybe some of it had to do with his suppressed longings for men. I told him, the bottom line for me was him taking hormones because I am just not attracted to women and I wanted to be able to have an intimate relationship together. We continued living together because we had to present a united front to the outside world because we had to keep proving that we were stable foster parents. It was total hell for me and as the months went by I kept finding out more and more about how long he had been on internet forums and in chat groups and he started going to weekly transgender meetings and he went to the laser clinic to have his facial hair removed. It was so hard for me to deal with. And I kept finding out more. I hadn't had access to our joint business bank account for awhile because I had a new phone and never installed the app and then one day when I looked I saw he had spent thousands of euros on clothing and things and the laser clinic and also there were transactions from this vague business called HappySmiley. I tried to look it up but couldn't find anything. I thought.......what if he has been taking hormones? So I confronted him. My two youngest kids were there at the moment. And he said: you are so paranoid and intrusive and ridiculous and you check my every move and that is just a company where I order this special kind of paint. I felt so embarrased. Even my kids thought I had gone too far and told me. After this he opened up a bank account that I had no access to. I thought that was not okay since we have always thrown our money together and now he just moved my own money away from me. That didn't feel right but he kept saying, well, that's because you are paranoid. About 3 months after that one day (still living together in this hell) he left his phone open while he was bringing our grandchild to bed and I don't know what came over me but I felt I needed to look.

It's the best thing I ever did because he was on his transgender chatgroup app and he was just talking to someone how our doctor wouldn't prescribe hormones for him because she didn't think it was safe without some checkups and he said to someone there that he had been taking hormones for 3 years already. Three years! When he came downstairs I confronted him and asked him if he had been taking hormones and at first he denied it. Then I said I just saw it on your phone. And then of course the conversation was about what a bad person I was for looking at his phone but I somehow got through that and asked him if the hormones he had been taking were illegal hormones from a place called HappySmiley and he admitted to that.

Everything fell into place for me after that. Everything. It explained his low libido. It explained the budding little breasts that I had thought I had noticed but that had never registered enough to me. I don't know how to explain but I feel violated by that. For weeks after that I kept thinking oh my god he made me touch those things. It made me sick. It still does actually. It also made me realize how long he had been going behind my back. At the moment he told me he was transgender, he made it sound like he was at the beginning of a journey while in actual fact he had been actively on this journey for about 5 years, taking hormones for the last 3 years of that. I felt so, so incredibly betrayed. And guess what? He said: That is ridiculous, if wasn't so transphobic and if I only would be willing to be more empathic and understand how hard it had been for him, this gender dysforia, then I would understand that it wasn't a betrayal at all. That was the moment (March of this year) I filed for divorce and asked him to move out of the house. I got my divorce (divorced in July) but he didn't move out until August and all this time he was blaming me for everything. And he still does.

That makes it incredibly hard for me to deal with him, and deal with him I still must. He still has rights to see my grandchild and I see him twice a week and I don't know how to deal with him, especially now that he is starting to look more like a woman. I blame him for not having said anything before, if he had told me 5 years ago, or when he started taking hormones, our poor grandchild wouldn't have been attached to him and wouldn't have had to go through this divorce. This kid already has to deal with parents who cannot take care of him and now this......it is so much.

Anyway, I would soooooo much like to talk to people who have gone through or are going through something similar but I just cannot find them. I have looked for support groups but over here in the Netherlands there are only support groups affiliated with transgender organizations and mostly for partners of transgenders and very much focused on accepting the transgender person. I am not there yet. I am not transphobic. I think everyone has the right to be who they wish to be, that goes without saying. But I want the focus to be on me first, on my hurt, my grief, my anger, my life and the betrayal that has devastated me. I think there MUST be others like me. People who understand just what I am going through. I would like to hear how they dealt with things, how they picked up the pieces and made a life for themselves again.