Chapter Three:
No Support for Partners
Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself—and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to—letting a person be what he really is.
—Jim Morrison
From the Accidentally Gay Blog: Silent Partner
Posted on November 29, 2013
First, before I get into my post, I want to make clear that my husband, Wolsey, is supportive of me. He is sometimes overwhelmed with his own situation with school, health and his transition. I understand that. Sometimes he is distracted by his own fight, and this post has nothing to do with him. This post is about everyone else.
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I have noticed since my husband came out as a transgender man, that the spouses of transitioning people seem to become a silent partner. I have done a lot of research, and support groups for the non-transitioning spouse are either sporadic or non-existent. I see very little written about, or for, people like me whose spouses needed to transition. When I do find things, most of them are long out of date, and from the point of a wife being supportive of her transitioning partner. Very few of these articles dealt with the support the spouse was able to get for themselves, and I don’t think these spouses were able to find the support they needed.
I found this in my personal life as well. My husband has an incredibly supportive group of people for his transition. Our friends and my family are incredibly accepting of his gender identity. All of them continually inquire if they can help him, or if there is something he needs. This makes me incredibly happy for him. He is undergoing a tremendous amount of stress, with nothing but positive energy coming back, even from schoolmates. This is something we didn’t expect.
Here is where I feel like an asshole. Once Wolsey came out, there were a ton of questions to me about him. People asked how me how he was he feeling, or if he needed anything. Of course, I replied appropriately to whatever questions I was asked. However, I felt like I was hidden in a weird shadow, as if I only existed as an extension of him. One friend did ask if I was going to stay with him, and, of course, I answered yes. Once I said yes, then the questions went back to being about Wolsey. I am happy they assume my love is so strong for Wolsey that I had absolutely no problem with the transition, but I felt hurt.
I couldn’t figure out why I was hurt until my family asked me how I was doing, and I thought about the transition. They wanted to see if they could do anything for me to make it easier during this time. They seemed to understand it was going to take a lot on my part to change. While Wolsey is going through the physical/emotional/societal changes of becoming a man, I was going to have to undergo the changes in my 21-year marriage and in my own sexuality as well.
To my family, I had been fully heterosexual when I married my “wife,” and now, 21 years into my marriage, I was going to be married to a guy. My dad mentioned he was glad gay marriage had been legalized in my state last year. Wolsey says I am “just gay enough.” Although I could fall in love with a guy, I am more orientated as a bisexual towards women, and never really considered myself anything but straight until now.
My parents were right. I was struggling a lot with the loss of my wife, the gaining of a husband, and the fact that I was now in a de-facto gay marriage. I had an even more unusual situation of being married to a transitioning husband. I was saddened that my family recognized that, but not my friends. I felt alone a lot. I know I could go to a friend and they would listen, but it was the fact that I wasn’t taken into consideration that hurt.
I realize as a person I am generally closed off. I don’t talk a lot about my feelings in general. In fact, I haven’t even cried since I was 16. I usually shove my feelings into a deep dark hole inside myself. That is what makes this blog sometimes hard to write. I feel like I am a bad person for feeling hurt or frustrated, and I don’t want to seem like I am taking any of Wolsey’s support, because he needs all he could get.
My feelings are battling each other right now. Part of me is sad and a bit disappointed with the situation above, and the other part of me is disgusted with myself for being sad by it. The disgusted part of me feels like I am betraying Wolsey, or trying to take away the focus away from him. I feel like I should shut up.
Part of me wants to delete this blog post. I am embarrassed that I even feel this way by something so little. I am a little worried that by putting frustrations out there like this, I will seem like the jealous asshole husband. The few blogs I have seen out there are almost 100% support blogs for the transitioning partner with no posts about their own frustration. It makes me worried that I am being unreasonable.
My idea originally with this blog was to present both sides. Surely I am not the only one who felt this way, even if it is unwarranted. I figured “in for a penny, in for a pound” meant I would put this out anyways. Maybe it will help reassure others that they aren’t alone in the thoughts/frustrations that come with having a transitioning spouse.
Lucky’s Perspective Now
When Wolsey initially came out, and we started the process of his transition, my only thought was for him. How was he going to handle things? Did he need special support? Who did he need to talk to? How would he progress after he transitioned physically?
This occupied me for several weeks, and by the end of those weeks I found myself exhausted. Mentally, physically and the largest surprise was how emotionally exhausted I was. I felt drained of everything, and it was only a few weeks into the transition. If I was this burned out, how was I going to last decades?
That is when I realized I had no support in my life for me. I had somehow disappeared to all my family and friends during Wolsey’s transition. Don’t misunderstand me, I understood why he was preoccupied. He was undergoing physical and mental changes, along with his changing status in society. However, I felt his absence pretty hard. I looked up one day, and I realized I had been alone.
The bigger realization was that no one else had even inquired about how I was doing. They were concentrating so hard on their friend who was transitioning that no one really considered if I was doing OK. A big part of this was my fault. I am not normally a person who seeks support because it’s part of the hyper-masculine culture I grew up in. For some reason, I push that even further than most people.
During those weeks, my friends, acquaintances and strangers would ask about Wolsey. They would inquire on everything under the sun that was both appropriate and inappropriate. They would ask if he was feeling good physically, if he had changed a lot, if he was on testosterone yet, if “the change had occurred.” They were very concerned about the stress he might encounter, and if he was being accepted.
In addition, Wolsey was able to find many support sites, boards and groups for transgender people online. I went with him to many of these, but I was always a supportive figure for him. It was always about his experiences and needs. I completely understood it, but I still felt like I no longer existed except to support him.
I am sure this is when he realized I didn’t have any other support as well, because he always included me in his search for support, looking for something that would help me. I hadn’t noticed this yet at the time, but now, looking back, I can see he probably noticed my lack of support before I did.
The first time I truly realized this was when I went up to visit my parents, two hours North in Bellingham. It had been the first time in weeks, since I had been to see them. Wolsey’s transition required a lot of focus in the beginning, plus I was a bit nervous about seeing my parents after Wolsey was officially out. Wolsey was a little overwhelmed with everything, so I went up to visit my family without him.
I arrived at their apartment and sat down. We joked around a little bit. I was starting to get uncomfortable because my father kept just watching me. He had a concerned look on his face. The day went by and my mom kept fluttering around me.
She generally did this when she was worried about something as well.
The conversation came around to Wolsey and myself. I prepared for the normal conversation I had been having with people, telling them how Wolsey was doing, what his plans were and how he was feeling. I was more comfortable talking to my parents about my husband. They had known him as my wife for 21 years, as my best friend for five years before that. In fact, my parents were the ones that had told me when I was 18 that I should date him. With Wolsey being so masculine, my dad treated him like the son he never had.
That is when they surprised me. My parents asked me how I was doing. I initially started talking about how Wolsey was doing. It was down by rote at this point, and I didn’t even realize they were asking about me. My parents both laughed, and told me that was great, but they wanted to know how I was doing.
They were concerned for me. They loved Wolsey, but they knew I had signed up for a heterosexual marriage, and everything in my life was changing. They were incredibly supportive, and made sure to never, at any point, say anything negative about my marriage. They just wanted to make sure their son was OK. They hugged me, and chatted about normal things as well. Interspersed with the small talk were more reassurances and support.
That was the first time I truly realized I didn’t have a support network of my own. We had lots of friends, but the focus was rightfully still on Wolsey. I am sure none of my friends meant anything by it. Wolsey and I had been together for 21 years, and I believe they just assumed things would stay the same, and it wouldn’t have an effect on me.
When I got home, both Wolsey and I decided to do some web surfing and find any online support I could for myself. We could only find a couple of websites for the spouses of transgender people, and no in-person groups locally for those spouses.
What made it even harder was the fact that the online groups/websites I did find were exclusively for women spouses to stay with their newly transitioning wives. I emailed a couple of those people listed in the groups/websites and they got back to me a bit surprised. None of them had ever been contacted by a husband asking about his newly transitioning husband. For them it was always the other way around. One lady told me that they had one woman in a lesbian relationship that had contacted them when her wife was transitioning into her husband, but they had never had a cisgender husband even consider staying with his spouse who was transitioning from being designated as female at birth to a man.
She was nice, and apologized that she couldn’t help directly. They had no experience with this, and didn’t know of any specific resources. She did refer me to a couple of other groups that helped women stay with their spouses. She was hoping maybe one of those groups would help.
The other group was surprised that I would even stay at all. Some of the members bought into the idea that a man wouldn’t stay, and that there was something “off” about him if he did. This is when I realized there was a stereotypical outlook of what a man would do, or accept, in a partner.
Other women from those groups emailed or messaged me, but seemed to distrust my staying with Wolsey. I was told by several that I needed to be sure what I wanted, and that it would only hurt Wolsey if I wasn’t. Looking back now, I realize they were just trying to protect Wolsey. Perhaps they were playing out some of their own fears, but at the time it really upset me. It was even worse when one woman specifically went into detail about how women were naturally flexible in marriage but men weren’t, and the sooner I figured that out and left, the sooner Wolsey could heal. This was so confusing because at no time did I not love Wolsey, and I never even considered leaving him.
There was an unfortunate side effect to all of this though. I noticed every time after this point when someone would ask about my husband, I wouldn’t say anything because Wolsey was transitioning and he needed all the support. But it hurt that no one really seemed to notice I was going through a lot of changes, and my life had been thrown upside down as well. I had never wanted to cry so much as I did at that time, but I felt I couldn’t distract myself from Wolsey’s transition.
I then became angry at myself, as I turned that hurt and feeling inward. I was angry that I would even feel bad. It was an awkward time when I would feel bad, and then get mad at myself for feeling bad.
It was at about this point that Wolsey had found an in-town support group for transgender and genderfluid people that talked about including transgender men. Before this, most support groups were aimed at transgender women, which is great, but didn’t help our situation much. We were both really excited by the prospect of joining this group. There were people we could talk to in real life, maybe they would be a support network we could fall back on. We could then, in turn, help let others fall back on us for support. If nothing else, maybe they could point us in the right direction.
We arrived at the meeting and were greeted at the door. The group was a little different then I had anticipated. It was organized more like an AA support group meeting. People sat around in a circle, minutes were taken and people talked about their lives. I hadn’t ever been to a support group meeting other than an AA group for children of alcoholics, so this was a surprise.
The group was comprised of people both older and younger than us, but nobody in our direct age range. They were open and talkative with Wolsey, and they didn’t object to my being there. However, they were a bit distant and hawkishly watched over me.
They listened to our story, and to my surprise they didn’t seem to accept it very easily. Many of the people seemed to distrust my reasoning for staying with my husband. They were still incredibly supportive to Wolsey, and they were polite to me, but they obviously did not believe I would stay.
The oldest lady there was much like a mother bear with Wolsey. She asked me several pointed questions, and outright asked me about my sexual identity when we went to the pizza place for food after the meeting.
All of this was a surprise, and I think I was a little hurt by it. However, this was their safe space, and they didn’t owe me anything. I didn’t blame them for their reaction, and I didn’t expect them to do anything specific. I was frustrated by the cold shoulder at the time, as I had hoped it would be this magic place where I would feel accepted. Even with all of that, they let me in, were polite, and I do appreciate they let me stay.
There is one bit of “support” I sometimes did get from complete strangers. I noticed after the trans support group experience that cisgender strangers would say the “how brave of you” line. I would occasionally get someone telling me that I was a brave man to stay with my husband, as if he was diseased and lucky to have me. This was extremely upsetting to me because I had never thought Wolsey was broken. It was the same tone of voice they used when Wolsey had gotten sick and almost died. The whispered “you are so brave for staying.”
This would usually be some older person who would lean over and pat my hand and whisper how lucky Wolsey was to have me. They obviously thought that they were being nice and supportive, but it only angered me that they were so clueless that they thought something was wrong with Wolsey, and that I was some sort of martyr for putting up with it. I really tried to avoid those people, but even to this day I get that response sometimes.
It was after all this that I decided to start my own blog full-time. I didn’t realize there would be so many supportive people, and I assumed I would just be writing my experiences. My goal for the blog then was purely to support the people who would come after me with my experiences and insights. Maybe I could help them when they started this journey.
Sadly, to this day there aren’t a lot of support sites that help with a husband and his transitioning spouse. It does seem like most men leave, and because of this vacuum there is very little out there. I am fortunate. I now have a lot of new friends I have met through my blog and a lot of great support that comes from it. The community of transgender people and their spouses were great and supportive, and people have contacted me. The blog that I am writing itself became a great resou
rce for me, and I am grateful for that.
Wolsey’s Perspective Now
It had been several months since I came out, and I kicked up my search for resources for both my husband and myself. This would prove a bit hit or miss, with mostly misses. Despite the acceptance of marriage for same sex couples, transgender acceptance wasn’t really a thing. This was before Ms. Jenner, and Orange is the New Black, so there wasn’t a huge amount of publicly available resources.
For myself, I found a lot of transgender men of all ages online that were willing to talk to me about what I wanted to do. Between Tumblr, Reddit and some state-based female to male transgender Facebook groups, I could find men like me. Overwhelmingly, these men were more than happy to tell me what I might need to know and answer any questions I had.
I could not find any supportive groups online for partners, and it didn’t take long to figure out why. Very few spouses stayed, period. While I talked to other transgender people, I heard from the majority of them that their partners didn’t stick around.
In fact, women were more likely to stay with their spouse then men were. I’ve only anecdotal evidence of this, but each anecdote I collected reflected a transgender person’s heartbreak. I think the older the person is, the more likely they are to leave. Younger folks seem to accept it easier.
When I did find a group for a spouse or significant other, it was usually long dead. I felt like I was sifting through empty houses. I’d find blogs with a half a dozen entries, abandoned forums, and aging websites filled with broken links.
In person, that was a bit of a different story. The available gender groups I could find locally mostly worked with transgender women. These groups were often very much about security and safety for the women that attended, and sometimes required vetting. This is understandable when you consider the sheer amount of violence transgender people face, and that violence runs towards transfeminine folks, and hits women of color disproportionately.
Acidentally Gay Page 4
