Dear Amy,
Thank you for writing back, and for trusting the thread with the next layer. You named the thing underneath the thing — "I keep thinking that I am attracted to the male body and not the female body."
I want to push back on that sentence a little, gently, because I think it's telling you something that isn't quite true, and the not-quite-true part is making this much harder than it needs to be.
You're not attracted to "the male body." You've been attracted to Cynthia, for nine years.
Read that back slowly. If your attraction were really to "the male body" as a category, you'd be attracted to every man you pass on the street, and you're not. You're attracted to your spouse. Her body has been a part of how she shows up — a real part, I won't pretend otherwise — but a smaller part than the worry is telling you. The voice. The laugh. The way she looks at you. The hands. The particular gravity of her presence when she walks into a room. Nine years of inside jokes and how she touches your shoulder when she passes behind your chair. That's what you're attracted to. The body has been one of the ways Cynthia arrives. It was never the engine.
What's happening in your head right now is that you're abstracting. You're not thinking about Cynthia — you're thinking about a category, "the female body," and asking whether you're attracted to the category. Of course the answer feels like no. You weren't attracted to "the male body" as a category either. You were attracted to one specific person, who is now becoming the woman she's always been underneath, and the through-line — the thing that was actually doing the work the whole time — is her.
Now I want to show you something, because I think it'll help more than anything else I can say.
I'm going to attach a picture. It's me in my twenties, with four of my coworkers. I'm on the far left.
Here's what's happening in this picture. We had just raised a sunken towboat called The Thrifty Nickel off the bottom of the Cumberland River at Cumberland City, Tennessee. The boat in the picture is covered in mud and algae, and if you look closely you can see the water still pumping out of it behind our feet and legs — that's the boat draining, not the river. Five of us spent that day bringing it up. I was one of two salvage divers working to do so that day. It was a win that belonged to all of us. At the end of the day somebody wanted a photo, and the five of us dutifully lined up on the deck.
I'll tell you something honest. I don't remember much of me from back then. I can tell you what we did that day, I can tell you whose hands were on what, I can tell you the smell of the algae and the sound of the pumps. But the person I was inside that body — what she was thinking, what she was feeling, what she was carrying — most of that has gone soft on me. It faded the way everything fades over thirty-some years. The girl in that picture is mostly a stranger to me now. I love her, and I'm grateful to her, and she got me here. But I don't live inside her anymore, and most of who she was day to day has slipped past the edge of what I can reach.
And yet — look at her on the left. The belt is cinched tighter than anyone else's in the frame. The posture is more contained. The face turns just slightly different from the rest. The body in the picture didn't know yet why it was holding itself the way it was. The day wasn't about her. Nobody was looking at her. And the frame underneath was still her — still me — still the Susan you're reading right now. I didn't become someone new. I became visible. The me underneath was always there, waiting for the outside to catch up. The belt in that picture knew before I did.
I want to tell you one more thing about that photo, because it'll help with the next part.
Ten or fifteen years after it was taken, somebody finally gave me a copy. I hadn't seen it in all that time. I sat down and looked at it — the five of us lined up on the deck, the boat draining behind us, the dust and grime of the day — and I went through the faces. I recognized the other four men. I didn't recognize the person on the far left.
I kept the picture. I looked at it now and then over the months that followed. I knew I'd been at that job. I knew I'd been on that boat that day. I could even remember the smell of the algae and the sound of the pumps. But when I looked at the photo, my eye passed right over the person on the left without ever catching on her. She was just one of the strangers in the frame.
Six months went by like that. Half a year of looking at a picture of myself and not even recognizing that I was in it.
Then one day it landed. I was looking at the photo and something clicked — oh. That's me. The one with the cinched belt. I'd been standing in that line all along.
Sit with that for a minute, Amy, because it tells you something about how this works that I couldn't have made up if I tried. Someone I'd been — recently enough that I remembered the day in detail — was so far from who I'd become that my own eye couldn't find her in a photograph. Not because I was running from her. Not because I'd done anything to push her away. Just because the present had kept arriving for a decade, and there'd only been so much room, and the version of me in that picture had softened so completely that she'd stopped being someone I recognized as myself.
The fade isn't a thing that takes a lifetime. It happens while you're living. The present moves forward and the old shape goes soft on its own, whether you want it to or not — sometimes more thoroughly than you'd believe.
And I want to be clear about something, because the way I just told that story could be misread. I'm not ashamed of the person on that boat. I'm not ashamed of who I was then, and I'm certainly not ashamed of who I am now. The not-recognizing wasn't rejection. It was just distance — the natural distance you grow from any earlier version of yourself when enough years pass. I love her. She got me here. She did the best she could with what she had.
If you want to see how I hold both of those truths at the same time, look at the top of my Facebook page. I have that workboat photo as the header, with a picture of who I am today layered over the top of it. Both of us, on the same page, every day, where anyone can see. The old me and the now me, side by side. Not one erasing the other. Not one ashamed of the other. Just both, holding hands across the years.
That's the thing I want you to keep in your back pocket for the long road, Amy. Cynthia doesn't have to disappear from your marriage story. The man you married was real. He was Cynthia in the shape she had then, doing his best with what he had access to, loving you the whole time. You don't have to bury him to honor her, you can and should carry them both. They were always the same person anyway.
And now I want to show you something else, from the same stretch of years.
Same body. Same year, near enough. Same person. The only difference is that in these two, I'd finally let her come up to the surface for a minute. Look at the waist. Look at the set of the shoulders. Look at the gaze. It's the same frame from the work photo — the same belt cinched tight, the same containment, the same face turning just slightly different from how anyone else's would. The girl on the deck of the towboat and the woman on the deck of the riverboat are the same person. One of them just knew it. The other was figuring it out.
This is what was always under there, Amy. Not a costume she put on. Not a transformation she invented. A person who was already her, in the same body she'd been in all along, the same body that had cinched its belt at salvage site without knowing why. The outside had to catch up. The inside was already done.
I want to tell you one more thing about those photos, because if I don't, the post will accidentally lie to you.
The woman in those pictures didn't start there. I knew about her long before that riverboat. I knew somewhere between the ages of three and five — before I had real language for anything, before I could read, before the world had handed me a single tool to understand what I was feeling. I just knew. The way the smallest kids know things they don't yet have words for. There was something true about me that the body and the name and the life around me weren't matching, and I knew it the way I knew my own hand.
Then at seven, I found the word. Transsexual. I learned that there were other people like me and that there was a path. And the moment I understood what I was, I also understood that I would transition fully someday. Not as a hope. As a fact. A seven-year-old looking at her own future and treating it as already decided.
So by the time I posed for those photos in my twenties, I'd been carrying her inside me consciously for nearly two decades, and pre-consciously for longer. And then it took another twenty-five years after those pictures before I was able to be fully her, every day, in the world. Add it up. From the first knowing to actually living as myself was nearly half a century. Decades of holding my breath while she waited.
I'm telling you this because I want you to hear something underneath it, gently. Cynthia almost certainly has a version of this story too. Three months ago is when she said it out loud to you. But the knowing — the underneath-it-all knowing — probably goes back to childhood. Before she had words. Before she had a framework. Before there was a marriage to keep a secret from, before there was even an Amy in her life yet. The knowing is old. The saying-it-out-loud is new.
That isn't a betrayal of you. That isn't a thing she hid from you. It's that there was nothing to hide with — no language, no permission, no path — for most of the years she's been carrying it. The man you married was Cynthia, wearing the only shape she had access to at the time. That's not deception. That's survival. And the fact that she's telling you now means the survival is finally giving way to the living, and you are the person she's choosing to do the living with.
One more thing the long timeline tells us. If it took me twenty-five years after those photos to grow into the woman in them — and a lifetime before them just to find a glimpse — Cynthia is going to need her time too. Not on a three-month timeline. Not on a one-year timeline. The growing-into is slow and uneven, and the version of her on the other side of this stretch isn't a person she's going to step into next month or next year. You don't have to keep up with anyone. There's no race. You and she have decades to walk this together, and the walking itself is the thing.
Cynthia is going to grow into who she's becoming, and the old shape is going to soften and fade — for both of you. Not because you force it to, not because you "work past" anything, but because the new presence gradually becomes the real presence, and the old one recedes the way the past recedes for everyone. You and Cynthia have each lived about fifty years already. How much of your own twelve-year-old self do you carry around with you on a Tuesday afternoon? Almost none of it. Not because you don't love who you were — just because that's what fifty years does. The vividness fades. The face in old photos starts to look like a stranger you used to know. The present keeps arriving, and there's only so much room.
What stays — and this is the only promise worth making — is the love. The love doesn't fade with the body, because the love was never primarily about the body. The love is the through-line that runs underneath all the changing surfaces of two people who chose each other and kept choosing. In ten years, what Cynthia used to look like will be a soft memory. What will be sharp and present is the wife next to you on the couch.
And honestly, Amy — you're going to look back at this stretch and laugh. Not in a dismissive way. The good kind of laughter. The way couples laugh about the fight they had in year three over something neither of them can remember by year twenty. You're going to be on a porch somewhere, ten or fifteen years from now, with Cynthia next to you, and you're going to remember the woman who wrote this post — worried, three months in, certain she was about to lose something — and you're going to feel so much tenderness for her, because she didn't yet know that the thing she was afraid of losing was already safe. The love was already the thing. It was always the thing. The body was just the room it was living in, and you were both about to remodel the room.
You don't have to believe me right now. You just have to keep showing up. The years will do the rest of the work.
One thing you can tell Cynthia, when you're ready: "I've been worried I was attracted to a body type and not to you. I don't think that's actually true. I think I was attracted to you the whole time. You've been you the whole time, and I've been seeing you the whole time. I'm still figuring out what that means for us, but I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere."
That sentence will mean more to her than almost anything else you could say right now.
One last thing I want to show you, Amy. This is the full arc of me, laid out left to right.
Look across the row. The man on the far left and the woman on the far right are the same person. The bone structure is the same. The shoulders are the same. The way I hold myself is the same.
Now look at the eyes. Really look. The man on the left has dead eyes. There's nobody home behind them.
I wanted to die, and I would have if I hadn't took the very same step Cynthia did to you.
That's not a man who didn't have a soul — that's a woman holding her breath so completely that she'd turned the lights off to survive it. The Susan inside that body was still there. She just couldn't afford to be seen, so she dimmed herself down to almost nothing and waited.
Now move your eye across the panels. Watch what happens. By the second panel, the lights are starting to come back on. By the third, you can see a person looking out. By the time you reach the rightmost panel, the eyes are fully alive — and that's the Susan who's been writing to you all night. The frame was always the same. What was changing across those panels was how much of me I was allowed to let into my own face.
That's what's happening with Cynthia right now. The man you married has been alive behind a face that probably had some of those same dimmed-down qualities, whether you ever consciously noticed or not. Over the next year, as she lets herself come up to the surface, you're going to watch her eyes change. Not because she's becoming someone new. Because she's finally able to look at you with her whole self in the look. The person you fell in love with has been there the whole time. She's just about to stop holding her breath. And when she does, the love you've been giving her — which she has been receiving from underwater for nine years — is going to land in a face that can finally fully receive it.
That's not loss, Amy. That's your wife coming home.
With love, your friend
— Susan 💜
@KristaFairchild — I read what you wrote, and I want to acknowledge it before I close, because what you're sitting in is hard and I don't want to step past it.
The line about scratching days on the wall of a marital prison cell while your body wants to sing and dance is going to stay with me. You did a brave thing telling your wife the whole truth, and the response you got is one of the hardest possible responses to sit with. Your body wanting to sing and dance is not the enemy of your marriage — it's information about you that you spent a long time not having access to, and you're allowed to have it. How you and your wife reconcile what each of you needs is going to take time, and probably help, and the answer isn't predetermined in either direction.
What I said to Amy about the frame underneath, and the long timelines, and the love being what lasts — I want you to know that's not just for the cisgender spouse. It's for both partners. Your wife is at the start of her own version of that road too, and she doesn't know yet what she'll know in a few years. Give her the same grace you're trying to give yourself. Both of you are early in this.
And happy belated birthday. The clothes and jewelry were a real gesture, and I'm holding that alongside the harder conversation. Both things are true at once.
I'm glad you're both here. Keep posting.
— Susan 💜
