Thank you so much RabbitSpectre, ALIce, NYM and all! It is exciting and worth celebrating! I just wish it happened earlier and that I understood what Susansplace was—I tried to get help many times, but few understand my "ness"; that is the essence of my being and that while it is different it is the same; I spent a lot of last night talking to my wife and discovered that she too had a early childhood sexual experience that makes her uneasy (with a female) and that she is mortified of being bisexual, and that even though I do very much excite her en femme, that this also scares and disgusts her because she has a deeply, deeply rooted anxiety about being judged for being LGBTQ so really it's both my wife and I who are in the community; I can am trying to just take it slow so she can face her feelings too—I went over all the things I have done to love her; I was disinherited for her, I "let" her "trick" me into a baby after we married—I'm reality when I decided to love her, I decided if I had children with her, ready or not, they she was the one (O have a deep rooted fear of pregnancy because my mother and father were essentially a tamer version of pretty woman but without a happy ending (she was Denny's waitress and he was a Rob Lowe-looking son of a well-to-do Orthodontist).
She is very very resistant to getting independent therapy, but is finally starting to warm up to it; terrified of judgement and has major cognitive dissonance about me transitioning since her definition of bisexual means sexual attraction to both sexes (assuming mostly cisgender) and actual sex acts with both sexes—if I become a woman then she falls into her definition of bisexual and this is simply unacceptable to her.
I explained to her all the femme things I do all the time and that she really is a bit of a house husband (I work and often handle more traditionally feminine tasks in the home like cooking(cleaning via proxy via a maid) and she is very anxious about appearing non femme because she does not know how to do certain traditionally femme tasks (I of course do not mind, I married her for love, she is just beginning to understand I have never really been a husband more of a husband/wife father/mother—She has never had to work no matter what and never will if she does not want to, even if we are apart; she really has my true love, but is very hung up on losing her "husband"; I love her so much I would be willing to cope until the kids are 18 and come out at that time—I know she needs this sincere offer to investigate her own bisexual feelings and realize they are far, far from "disgusting" and they she is as normal as the rest of humanity).
A little off track, but so many trans-negative experience kept me in the closet and in fear; im laws school a gay professor would regularly clock a transwoman I had a deep friendship (even a desired love connection with, but wow she was dangerous, smoker, spender, always letting things go to the last second)—he would call her "mr" blank despite her very feminine appearance; her name was also a Afghan mans name, but it still never clicked; she beat me over the head with it (we hung out constantly and even held hands a few times, I really wish I knew how to find her to tell her she's beautiful—I'm very taken, but I wish I had known her true self was like me and why we were such fast friends) she's say things like "some guy asked me if I was a (transgender slur) and I was like eff u, her hee her" and "it's so horrible in Iran, they take homosexuals and force them to be women, what do you think about that, isn't it horrible!"—I of course tried to hit in her like a woman would, thus confusing us both and we never became true friends.
My courtship with my wife was similar, I simply talked to her instead of the more aggressive approach many cismen take, and wrote her poetry; she melted; I held her all night even when my arm fell asleep beyond the point of circulation loss I knew possible and I became very much invested in her future early in the relationship; my family couldn't understand why I didn't want a rich girl (her mother was shacking up with a frankly creepy guy who was raised in a religion many find to be a likely cult (he made very innappropriate sexual comments to me in front of my wife and mother in law as a show of power); but I knew she was like me.
Now as I feel our marriage bending and stressing to the point of a near snap, I am discovering she is much more like me than I thought—she wants to be like what we described as a "top female executive" a confident, powerful and beautiful feminine woman who commands respect.
So I say, go to school and become a PsyD or whatever other professional you want (I have the funds to put her through any schooling she wants) and she says; but what if I don't love you after I get my degree and you become a woman? And I say, then you'd be in good company with a lot of other guys who use their wives to get through school—which made us both laugh with realization that this is true. I don't think she'd Leave, but she does have masculine features which I like (but she is petite and this bothers her since she takes after her father mentally, he is a shorter luxury car salesman who is the epitome of such a thing—and a womanizer (she strongly fears my infidelity, but other than sexual abuse, she was my first and only sexual partner and despite any fantasies to the contrary I want to keep it that way unless we both someday become comfortable swinging (I doubt it; probably just an eternal fantasy, my personal Danielle Steele novel I guess)
She also drops some FTM hints that I am 🤔 if are intended to test me to see if I would be open to it, or if it's just talk; she says "I never could be a man", and you should just leave me and be with a transperson, like a FTM" I am trying to make her feel safe when I respond instead of dismissive; I don't hope she is FTM, but she might be and I need to give her respect and safety so she can figure that out instead of being judge mental.
I guess I just really do have feminine hardware with a male overlay, and that despit my wife's protest, this is likely largely why she fell in love with me on the first place; that and the fact that she loves that I am Caucasian (she is Mexican American, and one of her lighter skinned grandmothers alway used to make fun of her skin color calling her a "dark witch" which caused her great stress and inferiority feelings).
And so if I go from a green eyed, white cismale appearing, professional heir to a white professional transwoman—even though I have other status symbols she associates with being Caucasian, this process also brings up her anxiety about society deeming her a "dark witch".
I hope we are getting somewhere, I don't want her to leave or for me to have to leave, but I have to make sure we don't fight in front of our son (she instigated mess a power play often im this way I'm the car; so so told her next time it happens I am going to pull over and get out and take an Uber home; it's just not acceptable parenting...I not an angel either, I have temper issues especially around money which I have had to work on over the years, but I am pretty sure being en femme (at least in stealth) and therapy will help this.
I guess we have a more modern love story than either of us realized, so just how it has a happy ending!