Hey BlindCourage, I like your forum name.
My wife had some early difficulties, but ultimately she's seen that expressing my gender variance makes me more pleasant to be around. Many transgender people look at all of the options involved in medical intervention, and after some consideration, elect for none of it or just a little.
Early on... I had no idea what I was getting into. I tried crossdressing and treated it like a fetish. She tried to play along but it'd always end in tears. And as a fetish, it was kind of a flop. Despite the pain and low payout, I still wanted to dress feminine. Well, at the time, wanted to "dress as a woman" which I've come to view very differently than dressing feminine. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
One fateful day, she was upset about my crossdressing and asked me if I wanted to be a woman. I hadn't really considered it, and all I could say was "would you love me if I was?" Her reply was much like yours -- anger, feelings of betrayal; she said that she could never be attracted to a woman, that she was straight, and so on. Actually, pretty understandable given the gravity of the situation. It hurt me to the core, but it opened my eyes to the notion that I might actually be transgender.
The pain caused by her response was enough to put me back in the closet for a few months. I didn't think I was transender, but I still found myself experiencing this weird body shame that I would come to identify as dysphoria. I'd see a woman in a nice outfit, and wish it could ever fit me. Whenever I'd share these thoughts and feeling with my wife, she'd panic about it all and yell at me, and I'd do my best to hide it again.
What she failed to realize at the time is that I was very slowly exploring the space between genders. I would tell her about my feelings on a given day, and she'd interpret that as a promise for the future. I didn't think I was trangender at first, and she took that as a promise. I'd learn something new about myself, and my story would change. She'd accuse me of lying to her, of betraying her... but in truth, I just hadn't really worked through everything and I couldn't tell her the absolute truth because I didn't know it. Also, what I didn't know at the time is that I'm a person whose gender drifts around from day to day, and that was part of the reason that I kept changing my tune.
When we both started seeing gender-specialized therapists, our lives started to turn around. My therapist helped me examine my feelings and desires... and taught me how to better talk about what I was going through. Her therapist helped her talk through her anxieties and concerns, and taught her how to better listen to what I was saying about what I was going through.
I stopped trying to force my gender to fit the binary. I tried "woman" on, and it didn't fit me any better than "man." That lesson was hard to learn, but I eventually got there. My wife has always been fairly open-mined in the bedroom, and she eventually came around on some female features. She doesn't want me to lose that one male feature, but that's fine by me. I'm on hormone therapy, and my life is way better as a result -- I'm experiencing a lot less dysphoria and I lost a life-long hair-trigger testosterone rage response. My wife has come to enjoy some of the physical changes, too.
There's hope for your future. It can take a lot of work, but it can get better. My wife and I were in our very darkest hour about a year ago. But we put the work in. Today, we're closer than we've ever been. We share a tenderness that I never could have expressed as a man -- not because men can't, but because I'd been bottling so many emotions for so long that I just couldn't open up. We've been through hell together, and made it through to the other side.
