Petunia,
I'm catching up on the site after some weeks away, and your thread is one I wanted to read all the way through before saying anything. I'm glad I did.
First, congratulations on the hair. The hairdresser siding with you was exactly the right call, and you just bought yourself six to eight weeks of growth without a confrontation. That's a real win, and it sounds like you knew it the moment it happened.
Reading through everything from April 14 to today, what strikes me most is how much good advice you've already gotten and how well you've been received here. Danielle has been her usual encouraging self. Krista's incremental progression — panties to studs to clear polish to shaved legs to foundation, each step terrifying and then becoming the new baseline — is one of the most useful things anyone could have given you, because it's the actual shape of how this happens for a lot of us. Charlotte's medical-grade antiperspirant tip is the kind of practical wisdom you only get from someone who's lived it. Lori Dee's response to your "you deserve someone better than me" moment was exactly right — wearing lipstick doesn't make you inferior, and your wife's reaction was a shock response, not a verdict. Stottie has been steady and warm throughout, including the British "sorry for everything" exchange that made me smile. Krista's later post about "we aren't pretending when we wear our feminine things, we are pretending when we aren't" is the line I wish I'd had thirty years ago.
You're in good hands here. I want you to know that.
What I'll add, because I haven't seen it said yet in this thread:
On your wife — I don't know her, and a 34-year marriage holds far more than any of us can see from the outside. What I'll say is that her listing assets and threatening divorce over a blouse, and the lipstick incident at the hotel, sound less like verdicts and more like fear talking loud. Fear often doesn't mean what it's saying. The fact that she also bought your blouse, didn't comment on the leggings on your walk, asked about your hair before going to the hairdresser, and is meeting you partway in dozens of small ways tells me there's a part of her trying. Both things are true at once. They usually are. The hardest thing for spouses in her position isn't the clothing — it's the fear that the person they married is becoming someone they don't recognize. That fear deserves compassion. It also isn't a reason for you to disappear back into a version of yourself that was making you ill.
When the time is right, a couples therapist who has real experience with trans and CD spouses can be enormously valuable — not to convince your wife of anything, but to give her a place to put her fear that isn't onto you. A lot of marriages on this path struggle because the spouse has nowhere else to put what they're feeling.
The other thing I'll gently raise — your psychologist's suggestion that the head injury caused your feminine feelings to return. The injury part is plausible as a mechanism. But I'd offer a small reframe: the head injury didn't put feminine feelings *into* you. It dismantled what was holding them down. The difference matters, because the framing "this came from the accident" can lead both you and your wife to hope it'll go away if you try hard enough. From everything you've written — the lifelong undercurrent, the way it surfaced before in your life, the peace you feel when you let it out — this isn't post-accident in origin. The accident just took the lid off.
You're moving at the right pace. The pace that's right is the one where you don't lose yourself and you don't lose the people you love any faster than you have to. Sometimes that pace still costs you things, and that's the part none of us can solve for you. But you're not doing it wrong. You're doing it the way it has to be done by the person actually living the life.
Keep posting. The thread becoming a blog isn't a problem — that's exactly what this place is for, and you've gathered the right people around you.
With much love and support!
— Susan💜
