This article will not apply to all trans people, nor to all spouses and family of trans people. This is an accounting of my own experiences, and the experiences that I have followed on the spouse support lists. I will write of trans people as MTFs, as that is my experience.

Transition is a huge challenge, and the spouses of trans people are equally challenged. But it's not just the spouses, although it affects the spouses the most - it's also the children, parents, siblings, friends, relatives, and co-workers of the trans person. All the people in a trans person's life must go through a transition of their own. We spouses didn't sign on for our husbands to become women. We signed on for a husband and a "normal" married life. We had dreams for our futures. Parents and children - same thing. They had a son - or a father - or a brother. And with those roles come expectations. Now, what can they expect? How must they change their view and their expectations of this transitioning person? Tough questions, tough challenges.

When our men become women, the first thing that happens is that we grieve a loss. Oh, I don't want to hear "you didn't lose anything - you gained a much better person." One psychologist explained it to me this way: "Of course you are in mourning. You did suffer a loss. You lost your husband. You gained a partner, friend, whatever, but you did lose a husband. And you should expect to grieve that loss." There are stages of mourning: denial and isolation (pretend it's not there), anger (helplessness and vulnerability producing a lashing out - how could you do this to me?), bargaining (trying to regain control over your life), depression (worrying about the practical implications), and acceptance (finding an internal peace, and letting go). These do not necessarily occur in the above order, and it is possible to be in more than one stage at the same time. I went through every single one of those steps of mourning. When I looked back on what I had gone through, I realized I had covered the full grieving procedure. Now, it's hard enough to grieve a loss when a person has died. Just imagine grieving a loss when the person is still there to remind you, every single day for the rest of your life, of what you "signed on for," and what you have lost. Looking at the ghost of the person for whom you are trying to have closure on the grief. That's really hard.

Within the grieving, there is one detail that often presents a huge stumbling block in the list of challenges to the wife, and that is the loss of trust. I am assuming that the wife did not know about her husband's issues when they married, and therefore spent years in a marriage based on trust, or so she thought. And when her husband comes out, it becomes apparent that even the most basic detail of marriage (man and woman) turned out to be untrue. So she has lost the ability to trust the person she trusted most in life. And without trust, there is no marriage. There is a huge hole there. Trust is a very difficult thing to rebuild. The wife finds that she now doubts everything that her spouse says, even if her spouse promises to never-never keep any secrets or tell lies ever again. Trust takes years to rebuild, and once rebuilt, there's always that tiny niggling doubt in the back of her mind. So, she's grieving, she's terrified, and there is nobody she can trust. She's afraid to tell her family and friends, because she fears that she can't trust them to be supportive. So who can she trust? The isolation and helplessness of losing trust is extremely difficult to deal with. Her husband's closet has become hers.

So much for the first step - the grieving process. The next step (usually taken in concert with the first steps of the grieving process) is the decision. Do I stay, or do I run screaming for the hills?? Do I shut out my husband, my son, my father, my brother - or do I stay and try to cope with the changes? I'm only going to address, obviously, the thought processes of the person who chooses to NOT shut out their trans person. OK, the decision.

The trans person, in many cases (especially the late-onset trans) has had to make an awful decision for a very long period of their life. They chose, for many different reasons, to have the world think they are somebody other than who they truly are. So when they finally throw off that yoke of hiding, they do it with joy. They do it with joy, and with fear, too, as they worry terribly about how this will affect the people around them, and of course, they fear the unknown. But basically, they are joyful. For the wife, parent, child - making this decision to stay and support is done unwillingly and with great regret and a lot of pain. The trans person can face their fears willingly because they have a goal which will bring them joy and peace. The supporter has no goal but survival.

The next step - facing the fears. A friend once quoted from one of her spiritual books "When you step out into the unknown, you will either be given a solid rock to stand on, or you will be taught to fly." That quote has been my mainstay and has kept me going.

What do we wives have to fear? Everything. Everything about our lives has changed. Our entire life has become "the unknown." We're not sure if we have parents any more who will talk to us, or children, or brothers or sisters, or friends. We fear violence. We fear rocks being thrown through our windows. Or murder. And we fear little things like how to fill out the "spouse" space in the doctor's office. We fear that our spouse will lose their job. We fear that our health insurance company will no longer cover us.

We especially fear ourselves, as we have no idea how we are going to be able to make it through all the steps of transition - watching our husbands fade away slowly. Hormones. Breasts. Soft skin. No erections. New name and pronouns. Electrolysis. Wigs. Makeup. Feminine underwear. Feminine outerwear. Plastic surgery to the face. SRS. Fading, fading, fading away slowly. We don't know if we will be able to deal with all this - and remember, we are dealing with it reluctantly - all the while the trans person is ecstatic over the breasts, soft skin, no beard, pretty hair, makeup, pretty clothes, pretty new look, pretty new name. How do we face the fears? With a lot of help from a spouse who is willing to take all the steps slowly enough so we can cope. Because that's what it is - coping. And we find that each one of the fears gets addressed when it's time. But each step is terribly scary, and you never know if you'll be landing on a rock, or if you'll have to somehow fly.

And at the same time - the biggest step. Re-thinking who she is. When a person transitions, it requires that the spouse re-think who SHE is - and remember, she's having to do this unwillingly. I had an especially hard time with this, so I am going to pass along what one of my friends wrote at that time. She explained that so much of who we are depends upon interaction, feedback, and validation from others, especially those we love. In many relationships, a wife's very "self" is threatened by who her spouse is becoming. Changes to the one she loves and depends on also change her perception of who she is and her position in society. It is so sad but, being perceived as a lesbian will often challenge the very bedrock of a wife's self-identity. There is no logic about this; she will feel a deep sense of personal inadequacy and failure as a woman at her husband's transgenderism. Society, through socialization and cultural conditioning, puts the responsibility for the success of a marriage relationship on the shoulders of the wife. Even in a situation like this, where she clearly has no responsibility for what happened, she will feel it and others will imply it. "If she had been a real woman he never would have done this." It's unfair and a terrible burden. Often, family and friends are not been particularly helpful. Even if they do support staying together it seems to be based on the wrong reasons and places the wife in a victim's role, staying as a duty to a "husband" and children, rather than within a re-defined relationship based upon unconditional love. More likely they tell her to just get out. These are basic and deep-rooted beliefs and issues that have permeated throughout our culture for many thousands of years, and they all hit a wife squarely whenever she sees her husband as a woman, talks to a friend, looks at another's marriage, watches TV, sees a movie and thinks about her husband, their future, or herself.

So, it's a constant barrage - every couple she sees in church or walking down the street, in the movies, on TV, could cause her to break down over her loss. I remember crying in church one Mother's Day when the priest (yes, I'm still Catholic) called a couple celebrating their fiftieth to come to the front of the church, and everybody applauded. It was lovely, and it made me cry because I knew that this could never happen to me. I thought of all the little and big things that were taken from me. All my dreams and my images of the future. Dashed.

But back to the subject of the wife's self-image. Does the trans person realize that the trauma she has spent her whole life living, she just passed on to her wife? The trans person has had to live all those years presenting to the world as someone she isn't - a man. The world could not know her true self. Now that the husband has transitioned, the wife must now spend the rest of her life presenting to the world as someone she isn't - a lesbian. Personally, I've got nothing against lesbians; but I don't happen to be one. Now, society doesn't mind men, so as a man, she didn't suffer from who she was, except internally. But a good part of society does have trouble with a lesbian - so not only is the wife presenting as somebody she isn't, she's presenting as someone who could end up in harm's way for appearing to be a lesbian. And she is having to make this presentation to the world, not because of who she is herself or something she did, but because her husband transitioned.

How does a wife do all this? How does she manage to deal with all her spouse's changes, and come out accepting? It's very difficult because we have two people here who are both in desperately self-defensive positions. Sometimes people see this as being totally selfish. The wife sees that her spouse has become totally selfish - but the trans person must be that way, because transitioning is too huge a job to be able to do it in an unselfish manner. But the trans spouse will see her wife as being totally selfish, too, because she wants everything "her way," the old way. She will say she's just trying to survive. She feels like there's an elephant in her living room. It's a huge issue that you can't avoid, and which shadows every moment of every day. This elephant has caused every family member to defend him/herself from the impending doom of possibly being crushed under its huge feet. So a wife has to take care of herself. Oftentimes, the trans spouse, once "out," goes into fast-forward. What the wife has to do at this point is to tame the elephant. The elephant is not going to go away, so she has to tame it, so she can deal with it. To change metaphors, she has to convince her trans spouse to switch from a speedboat to a rowboat. She has to insist on her spouse slowing it down, so they can ride together in the boat, and not leave her behind, hanging on for dear life in the wake of that boat. Some transitioning spouses don't understand why it takes their wives so long to accept their "true selves." The question here is - how long did it take you to come to terms with who you are? Unless you are in your teens or twenties, trans people, it took you years. Sometimes 50 years or more, to come to terms with who you are. So how can you, trans people, expect your wives, parents, siblings, children, to come to terms with this in a few days or weeks, or even months? Time is the key. And time is exactly what most trans people are not willing to give, because they are in a huge hurry to be "themselves," right now. But that elephant has to be tamed, and the family (wife) has to be willing to become an elephant-tamer and make the effort - and many wives are not willing to do that. Here's what I did, to gain myself the time I needed. My trans spouse used to say to me "I'll never get to transition if I go at your pace." My response was "If you transition at your pace, you'll get to transition sooner, and you'll do it alone. If you transition at my pace, you'll still get to transition. But you won't be alone. And I promise to keep taking small steps forward."

Can others be expected to understand? Not really. This whole scene is not understandable unless you are going through it. I will never really understand transexualism. Not completely understand. I may have done all the research; I may understand in my head. But I know I will never truly understand. All I can do is accept. The concept is so alien to anybody who isn't trans, that it's not really possible to wrap your head around it. Trans people should not worry about people who don't understand. Worry about people who are judgmental and refuse to accept.

Now, let's look at the dreams and the images of the future.

The dreams of the 50+ year-old transperson (severely simplified): "I'm finally going to be able to be my true self. I'm going to be a woman and spend the rest of my life being really me. Oh, joy!! My wife and I will travel the world like two girlfriends and we'll have such fun!!"

The 50+ year-old wife (before the bomb dropped) (severely simplified): "I'm so looking forward to retirement. Relaxing and walking along the beach into the sunset hand in hand with my husband. Maybe we should look into Viagra - things could be better there. Traveling the world. Being Grandma and Grandpa and going to our grandbabies' christening, birthday parties, high school graduation, all that."

The 50+ year-old wife (after the bomb dropped): @##$$%%^^&&*&**()(**&&^^%%$$## !!!!! If we walk along the beach hand in hand, they'll throw rocks at us. Our families will forbid us from coming into their homes. Our neighbors will shun us. We'll never get to retirement because he'll lose his job. Forget the Viagra - forget the sex at all (except for the wives who choose to continue intimacy in "experimental" methods). If we share a room when we travel (and who can afford separate hotel rooms?), people will look at us and laugh. So much for grandchildren - our kids won't even let us see them. All dreams shattered.

So, why do we stay? I'm not sure it's unconditional love. I think it's a lot of history - at least it is for us. We have shared a lot. It's a very deep and abiding friendship. A real partnership. And a lot of hope. A lot of hope that nobody will throw rocks, and that the neighbors will say "so what?," and that he won't lose his job, and that we can be happy in a celibate relationship, and that if people look at us strangely we won't let it bother us, and that our kids will figure out a way to explain the grandparents to the children and the children's friends. So far, our hopes have mostly borne fruit. Nobody has thrown a rock. In all our close and extended families, there is only one person who is refusing to accept her. Two out of three immediate neighbors said "so what?" (the third still waves hello, but doesn't stop for a chat any more. Oh well.) She did not lose her job. We're managing in a celibate relationship. Nobody has looked strangely at us. Our daughter (no grandbabies yet) introduces us proudly as "my parents - my mom 'Sue' and my father 'Jane'." (made-up names) Her friends think her parents are "cool," but then her friends are all theatre people so they are very accepting of gender oddities.

Do I wish I would wake up and it would all go away? Of course I do. I wish I still had a normal marriage, a man, and a future out there with fewer "challenges." Does our daughter wish it would all go away? You betcha. Would our siblings and friends like "Mike" back? Yup. But we're muddling through, and we're all making it.

And here's a funny "aside" on self-perception. We know a few gay couples and lesbian couples who are suddenly becoming hetero couples. Are they happy? NO!! Are they going through all the same things I talked about above? You bet. A lesbian who suddenly has lost all her friends (lesbians circle the wagons, big-time), the only society she knows and is comfortable in - the lesbian society has shunned them. The lesbians and gays have to re-think their whole relationship, and their whole self-perception, when they suddenly are going to be presenting as hetero, something they are not.

Nobody ever said life is easy. We all face challenges, some big, some small. This is a big one. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of time. We all envision our lives as a straight path, but in reality, the path has many twists and turns. For some, it's not worth it. I thought, at the beginning, that I could never be happy again; my spouse's happiness seemed to come at the cost of mine. But that did not turn out to be true, at the end of the journey, and the future does have a brightness to it again. I know that the journey is not over, and never will be. But I am no longer afraid to face the future with my chin up, because now, it is certain that I will step on a rock, or I will fly.

Copyright Beaumont Society 2006

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