New to all of this, and so very, very confused...

[Tuatha]

My apologies in advance if this ends up getting long-winded or anything...

A little backstory.

My SO and I have been together a little over a year. We met online completely out of nowhere, neither of us was looking for someone to be with, that sort of thing. Either way, him and I started talking, started to fall for each other, and met in person for the first time a few months later. I'll add in here that we're separated by about 2,000 miles and a border, so we've been in a long distance relationship from the beginning which is complicated in itself but I digress.

We've made several trips to see each other, and on my most recent trip down, about three weeks ago, my SO came out to me as transgender (mtf). It was a bit of a shock at first but it made sense to me, he'd always been kinda girly and wasn't shy about it, which I was completely cool with. Anyway.

I'm a very open-minded cool as a cucumber type of girl, and always have been, so for the first couple of weeks I thought I'd adjusted to the idea that he was a woman in a man's body quite easily. I'm still cool with the idea, just recently over the past few days I think it's really started to settle in my head and start to really sink in.

The past few days I've been flip-flopping in my head going from being 100% okay with it (as I should be) to freaking out, worried as hell mainly about him, things such as what if he transitions and doesn't pass? I know his family won't accept him as female, and I know his relationship with them is already on rocky ground for several reasons that I won't go into. I worry about his state of mind and how he's doing, and then I wonder what it'll mean to our relationship. He's the first person I've really clicked with on a level I don't even really have words to explain, and I don't want to lose that. I'm not attracted to women (I'm straight), yet his looks weren't what attracted me to him in the first place, since it was several months before I even really saw pictures of him, and a month or so after that that we first "met" over webcam. When he transitions, what does that make me, exactly? I'd be with a woman, but I'm not bisexual or lesbian, is there even a term for that?

I realise that in theory I fell in love with a woman, but all of this is so new to me that it's very confusing. I've known for as long as I can really recall that there were such a thing as transgendered people, but I really never understood it (and only am just starting to understand), and while I knew that transgender people existed, I'd never met one (to my knowledge).

I don't even know if any of this is making any sense, really. My head is such a mess. I want to be there for my SO. I don't want to leave him (her? I don't really even know what the proper gender definition is at this point since he's pre-anything). I love him with all my heart and I want to be there for him every step of the way, though I suppose the fact that we're long-distance doesn't really make any of this any easier. (I'll add here that when I was down last we discussed me moving down, so hopefully by next summer we won't be long distance anymore if we can get this visa thing sorted out.) I'm just so confused and I thought maybe getting this all out there would help sort my thoughts out some, though I'm not sure if it's really working.

I had a discussion about this with my best friend earlier today (with my SO's blessing, I didn't feel it was my story to tell but he gave me the go-ahead) and that helped me a lot having someone back home to talk to and unload on, and I think she'll help a lot in the coming weeks as I try to adjust to this.

I guess what I'm really asking is, for the SO's of transgendered people, how did you wrap your head around it? I'm trying to be as understanding and supportive as I possibly can be, and as difficult as the past couple of days have been on me, I can't even begin to imagine what he's been going through his whole life, knowing that the body he was born with wasn't what it was meant to be. I guess I just really need help sorting out all these confusing thoughts, I've given out so much love and support in the past three weeks that I almost feel like I have nothing left for myself and I almost feel like I'm drowning. I could go on for pages and pages and not get all of these thoughts out of my head, so I'll just stop here for now.

For anyone that took the time to read this and reply, thanks in advance, I'll appreciate any advice I can get.

[Cindy]

Hi'

I'll post the standard first and we can talk after

Hi, and welcome to Susan's! We have people come to visit us from all over the world, expressing different points of view, and you are likely to find someone to help you along your way   

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I'm a transgendered MtF. I'm female and identify as female. I'm in a strange position as my wife of 29 yrs knew I was TG when we started dating. We have had a glorious marriage. We have no children as I'm infertile. She is now very ill and our time together is running out.

I'm the opposite of you. I worried long and hard about marrying a cis-woman when we both knew about my life. I was totally intending to have SRS and then met this wonderful woman who accepted me and I love to pieces.

I dressed as me whenever I could, I gave her a promise I would not transition while we were married but it was damn difficult to keep. We often went out as two women, we shopped together and went on holidays as two women. My wife is totally heterosexual she has no lesbian fantasies. Our sex life was dismal for her. I realised quite quickly that I'm not a lesbian.  We have never broken our marriage vows, but it has been at a loss of sexual activity for both of us. It is not an easy call by any means. If you look through the site there are plenty of 'men' who married and had family and cannot keep going.

You cannot turn off gender dysmorphia. There is no cure. No matter how hard we try. I'm a woman, I knew I was a girl when I was five yrs old and dressed as one, much to my parents horror..

Your friend will not change. She will fight like hell to be  'normal' we all do. We all hope. We all fail in one way or another.

Think about what YOU want out of the relationship. You will. hopefully, have a very loving partner who may look male but is female.

Sorry

Cindy

[Tuatha]

I fully understand there's no cure or switch to turn it on or off. In no way do I want to change anything about my SO, I want to be there for support. I'm doing a lot better with all of this this morning when I woke up, so perhaps word vomiting on a forum helped a bit, I don't know. Thanks for sharing your story I'm doing my best here. I was talking with my SO earlier and she told me to chill out because this isn't something that's going to happen overnight, it's going to take some getting used to. We're going to talk later today hopefully and get my head sorted the rest of the way out, and I'm sure that'll help.

[tekla]

I'd go with the confusion myself.  It's appropriate.  It is confusing.  Even the people who 'are' still don't often 'know' in any sort of way they can really explain to anyone else.  Give it time, it is a huge deal, and there are lots and lots and lots of ways one can choose to go, and that choosing will continue throughout their life.  So don't rush to 'understand it all and then put it behind you.'  That might not happen real quick.

And for sure there are issues of how much you would put up with, what level you feel comfortable with, what your hopes, dreams, and aspirations are.  There is no one size fits all and most of us are making all this up as we go, so no matter how confident it sounds, or how boldly it was stated, it's all just one person's opinion, and that's an opinion that is always changing.

[Tuatha]

Just thought I'd post a little update. Been sick as a dog for the past couple days and had nothing but time on my hands, really, so I've been doing a lot of researching. So, I'm happy to say that I'm starting to level out about this whole thing since I made this post. I'm not just going to pass it off as a bit of a freakout, but I suppose that's really what it all boils down to in the end. Reading some of the posts on this forum and such has really helped a lot. So while I'm not quite at the point I'd like to be *yet* with coming to terms with this, I've made a lot of headway in the past couple of days. So thanks everyone.

[madwoman_in_the_attic]

Short version: It's totally understandable to wonder, "what does all this mean FOR ME?" I'm glad you've found this supportive community. Let's take some deep breaths together while you and I swap notes.

[My first post at Susan's. Thank you Susan and friends!]

Long version: In May, I found out the woman I was interested in was MtF; she has been living as a woman for four years. From the beginning I thought she was cute/hot, but LOVE came in when I fell in love with her brain. She has ALWAYS had a women's brain [=Gender Identity Disorder], and now she's working to get her body to match.

You asked,

>> how did you wrap your head around it?

Some of the stages I've gone through since she came out to me:

(1) "Does this mean I'm not a 'real lesbian' any more?"
(2) No to #1, I'm still a woman in love with a woman because gender is in the brain.
(3) Through ignorance, I said various hurtful/annoying things.
(4) She gently let me know (she coaches for a living so she had a good sense of how fast to go with the reframings).
(5) Plus I did my own research and didn't try to make her do ALL the work of educating me.
(6) I discovered I was totally ignorant of about 30 years of progress in gender studies. (And some of it seemed hopelessly theoretical and annoying.)
(7) I'd basically swept my OWN problems with gender under the rug. But her problems are so LIFE threatening, she doesn't have that luxury. "Gender is like underwear; if it fits, you don't think about it, but if it doesn't fit, you have problems thinking about anything else." [Not sure where she heard this; maybe on this site, years ago now.]
[8] She had a stable and amazing life (especially amazing when I discovered how much extra effort is involved, which I as a cis-female don't have to do) and was trying not to think about how far away surgery was ($$ and time off work).
(9) But now we've decided that 2012 is SRS surgery year. We're finding the money and setting aside the time.
(10) All the prep for that is kicking her dysphoria back into high gear because she has to think about "stuff" pretty much every day. Right now we avoid her thinking about (let alone looking at) her genitals OR mine because those thoughts / sights trigger her dysphoria.
(11) After thinking I was going to be able to be all tough about everything, I have found an in person support group for SOs of people in transition and it can't meet often enough!
(13) And the kind of sex we CAN have, which helps us work around her dysphoria, is kicking up my own gender issues big time. (Some of what I do might be "genderqueer" and maybe that's one of many reasons why the psychic space of our relationship feels so good BUT I have been resisting the term.)
(14) So every DAY is a new adventure. This is the place from which I'm writing, as a comparatively new (but already wrasslin'-with-it) SO of another MtF person.

My thoughts for you, dear Tuatha, are:

- This is a serious condition and the best thing for your partner's health is to pursue whatever changes feel good to your partner. As Cindy says, there's no way to make this "go away"; she has to go THROUGH it. (I'm jumping in and using the female pronoun.)
- What with the family, social, and medical stuff, etc., there's going to be LOTS of work. She will need all the support she can get.
- It's good you're not hung up on your partner's looks; those may change A LOT.
- If your partner hasn't transitioned YET, it's not certain that your partner will still be attracted to women, afterwards. So you might just end up as friends. You can be supportive as a friend OR as a girlfriend.
- I'm not sure what culture you grew up in, but mine passed on lots of bad messages about being a lesbian. And I internalized them and even married a man for awhile - nope, didn't work. So if you decide to stay with her through her transition you will be grappling with whatever your own feelings about being bisexual, etc., may be. (On top of everything else, if she stays interested in you, does that make HER a lesbian? I think so but that's because I've made it a good word for myself now.) Or since you're cool as a cucumber maybe you'd like to be genderqueer (rejecting binary options) with me - I need a role model there, for sure.

You wrote:

>>I've given out so much love and support in the past three weeks that I almost feel like I have nothing left for myself and I almost feel like I'm drowning

By now it sounds like you've figured out that we "partners" have to take care of OURselves or we won't be able to be there when our support is needed. You might choose to turn this into a friendship. Or you could embark on the adventure with the person whose AMAZING BRAIN you fell for - like I'm doing.

Thank you for sharing and for providing the opportunity for me to share back.

- Maddie

Once I post here enough to get a .sig, mine will probably be:
If more people knew how awesome MtF queer people can be as partners, EVERYONE WOULD WANT ONE.

[JoanneB]

Just thought I'd post a little update. Been sick as a dog for the past couple days and had nothing but time on my hands, really, so I've been doing a lot of researching. So, I'm happy to say that I'm starting to level out about this whole thing since I made this post. I'm not just going to pass it off as a bit of a freakout, but I suppose that's really what it all boils down to in the end. Reading some of the posts on this forum and such has really helped a lot. So while I'm not quite at the point I'd like to be *yet* with coming to terms with this, I've made a lot of headway in the past couple of days. So thanks everyone.

Gaining more knowledge and keeping the communication lines open between you and your spouse will help tons. As she said, nothing is going to happen overnight. Neither of you cannot say what the future will hold for you in 1 month, 1 year, or 5 years from now.

There is a lot for you to take in, understand, and eventually digest what it all means to you. Even for the most knowledgeable of wives, this takes time to grok. Even for my wife who knew of my gender issues from day one, AND who is a post-op MTF, has swings in her feelings about us. At times it seems that I am looking more and more at needing to make some sort of transition. In effect the original "contract" between us changed. To put it bluntly, she married a guy. I believed I could always pull off pretending to be a guy. She was OK with my occasional need to be me. We had a good 3 decade run at it.

With her having first hand experience on many of feelings I am wrestling with you'd think things would be relatively smooth. This past year has been an emotional roller coaster, especially for her. Each of us having our freakouts. Yet through it all our understanding and love for each other has grown even stronger.

[Ellie Ryan]

Tuatha~~
I'm in a similar position as you: MtF SO who is not out to her family yet and pre-hormone and surgery, but NOT pre-therapy. I think that last bit is the part that has helped us both a lot. We found a good gender therapist who is the ex-wife of a MtF person herself (she decided she couldn't sustain a relationship with a woman). This therapist is also a couples counselor, so she helped me with some of my confusion. Mine mostly stems from the opposite problem of most SOs of TG folk (as I wrote about at length in a thread I started in this forum about a month or so ago). I am VERY in favor of her transition and coming out, so much so that I find it hard to always be on guard for using the "wrong" pronoun that might out her to someone in appropriately. But I'm on the same page with you about worrying for her life. Here in Colorado, I've heard of many TG folk who have been attacked and even murdered.

Aside from going to therapy, the best advice I can give is to find support where you can (here or with your in-person support system), keep a journal to give yourself a 100% safe place to express your feelings, and always act out of Love instead of Fear. A small, practical step to take is to ask your SO what pronouns are preferred. My wife prefers female pronouns in private and uses the male ones in public only out of necessity. But honoring her preference seems to go a long way towards helping her refrain from total despair.

Best to you on your journey!

~~E