Hello!
This is my first post here, I have a lot of stuff going through my head so this is probably going to become a mix of venting, questions, and advice seeking. I will try and keep things as coherent as possible!
So a month ago I came out to my wife, the month or so that has followed has been hard, and this week has been a nightmare. I guess first a little bit of background. I am 35 AMAB, my wife is 33 and a trans woman. She had the good fortune to transition 10 years ago, the problem is that this has given her very...narrow view of what it is to be trans or how to transition.
This translates into her having a very hard time being supportive. Things have gotten a tad better and we have a rough idea of where I want to start, but it feels like tenuous footing right now. She has a lot of concerns, which is natural, I have a lot of concerns too. But she also portrays this as being a process that will 100% be miserable and life ruining. I have been trying to stay positive about it, and I allow for the fact that yes, sometimes bad stuff is going to happen. But it seems that thinking that every step is going to be a failure before I take it is just a tad too self-defeating.
It also causes her to say some truly awful things when she is in the throes of worry. She recognizes that it doesn't help and that they are terrible things that she says sometimes, we are both going to therapy right now to deal with all of this.
Her constant questioning is making me doubt myself though. I think that she is trying to pick through any detail she can find to convince me that I am not trans because she has said that the best thing for her would be if I didn't transition because it's easier. I have had these feelings on and off since I was 14, I can remember getting online and finding chat rooms where rich guys tried to find stupid kids like me to live with them with promises of helping them transition. I remember going to bed at night wishing to be a girl when I woke up.
I don't remember exactly what caused me to bottle it up and repress it, but I did and moved on with life until my mid 20's. This time the internet had gotten more robust and I found message boards and the like and talked with people, I even made an appointment with a therapist. But in the end I felt that I couldn't do it and that I was being ridiculous, it was never going to work I thought, so why bother trying? I canceled the appointment and bottled it all up and buried it deep down.
I am sure you can see where this is going, the decade-long cycle returned, except now I am newly married and have someone that I care deeply about. I have explained all of this to her, but she keeps insisting that she never saw any signs that I was trans. She pointed to at one point while I still had a beard that I was trying to take better care of it with fancy men's grooming products. I was sort of surprised that this was her big case, this is the kind of things that unsupporting parents try to say to their children when they come out. Of course I didn't show any signs, I thought about it but I didn't do anything because I never wanted her to find out.
So with all of this said, even though I think that what I feel is real and valid, her constant suspicion of it is now starting to make me doubt my own feelings. Is she right, am I just confused about what I want? I try to visualize what and why this is something I want, and it usually just sort of comes down to "because it feels right/better" The idea of having breasts make me happy, the idea of not having them makes me unhappy. This part of it is all new to me because before it seemed like this wasn't an option, but now that it is I have to try and square that with my feelings. I would think that the fact that this keeps popping up in my life makes it a real and valid thing, that's not a thing that happens to cis people, right?
Her negativity has also made me doubt the fact that I can actually pull it off. As I said earlier I am 35, I am still somewhat young, but definitely not at the prime age for HRT. I know HRT can definitely do great things at my age, but I also know it's a complete crapshoot and you don't know how it's going to work until you do it. She worries that I would never pass, and admittedly that's something I worry about too. I know that passing is not the end all and be all for transitioning, but I do think its rational to fear that I wouldn't be able to.
I don't know, this ended up being a lot longer than I had intended. I feel like there were so many other points that I wanted to make, but I can't keep track of all of them in my head right now. For the moment, I think this is a good starting point though.
