Trans Widows' Escape Committee 4 - A New Hope

It should have been funny really... An 'ally' and others noted how 'hot' he looked when he looked completely ridiculous, middle aged and very very male .. but I was in mood to laugh

And yes southern my ex agreed with our solicitors to wait a year before changing his appearance around the kids... In fact he started immediately with no warning or preparation. He memorably changed his Instagram profile pic to him in a party frock... I found my daughter crying over it and was so angry. Perhaps the worst part of all of it is the lying and breaking of agreements which is just basic respect. When that went I was kind of done..

soon and XYZ he key thing is your decision to leave, start again, and focus on your own lives. Soon my marriage was the same length as yours and it's a slow and lengthy process grieving for what you lose, and your imagined future with him. But however turbulent and distressing, realising you are being mistreated, or that the lines you've drawn won't be respected, seems to have been a catalyst for you both to walk away. It's a brave and overwhelming decision. I look back and don't know how I survived it, but I more than did, and life is way better without that person, their drama, their selfishness and their lying. You will be free to breathe one day in the future.

Right now the strongest feeling I have for him is pity. He's pathetic.

This is what I think killed my marriage. Not his selfishness, not even that. But seeing his middle-aged rugby player frame in a stupid tulle skirt while he tried to act and stand girly. Bending his knobby knees. Ugh.

I'm 28, had been with my husband for 10 years, where we were married for 9 months (we're still legally married, I left him slightly over a month ago). He was 33 when we met, and I didn't care about the age gap as I was fleeing my abusive parent's homes, and it was pretty cool to be getting attention from an adult like that.

He has always been abusive and controlling. Never cleaned and blamed it on me (I can't do the dishes without your help, you like doing laundry so I don't want to spoil your fun, you are the one that dirties the shower so you clean it, you wanted the pets so you have to clean up after them, ect).

He always told me about his castration fetish. Whatever, nbd, it's basically like getting a vasectomy right? 6 years in to our relationship he LEARNS about trans people. He at first just flat out refused to accept the idea. A year later he's pushing me to take testosterone because he thought it would be hot if my clit got bigger and I grew a beard. Being abused and manipulated my whole life by parents, Peers, partners, I am very easy to Gaslight and manipulate. I get on to hormones easy peasy because in the US all you have to do is ask a Dr for them, they get informed consent from you, and wham bam thank you ma'am you can mess up your body for life. It destroyed my wonderful singing voice. Luckily I wasn't on them for long because I'm a baby about needles, so I took 1 dose for every 10 I should have been taking, and I hated the changes my body was going through. He had magic mushrooms once and had decided that I was his gender and he was mine. He started making me wear his clothes and stole mine.

I put my foot down and stopped my hormones and took back my clothing. He told me I was delusional and that something was wrong with me, and took me to my Dr. He spoke for me, and she got me on antipsychotics, which were awful and basically made me a shell and question reality. I secretly stopped taking them. When he found out he tried to kill himself while I was away at work overnight baking. He said he definitely took enough pills to kill himself, but in the nick of time he realized he was a woman and puked it into the toilet. "Miraculously" he didn't have any liver, kidney, or stomach damage, which you would know by doing any kind of suicide research just doesn't happen if you take the proper stuff. In fact, taking things orally 99% of the time won't kill you, but you will be in and out of the hospital with comas, dialysis, liver transplants, ect.

8 years into our relationship he tells me that he's been on illegal hormones, as if I didn't notice the pills hanging around. He found all the resources from Facebook forums, what doses to take, where to buy them, how to buy them. I start calling him "she". We had planned on having our wedding that year, but he decided to postpone it so that he could "walk down the aisle as the blushing bride he always wanted to be". Whatever, the wedding was going to be in our backyard so it's not like we had lost any money. Pissed me off that he refused to look for a wedding dress. I had purchased mine from an etsy shop and he loved it so much (luckily he will never be able to fit in it) that he told me it was my job to find him one. But he wanted one that was more expensive, around $3,000. Mind you, our budget for the wedding was $2,000, and I had saved up and bought my dress at $250 so we could spend more on food and drink and music. We ended up getting legally married in the court because she told me that she would get a free name change and she needed it ASAP. Well, turns out you only get a free last name change.

9 years in and he's becoming me and distancing himself from me (and blaming me). He had been sleeping on the couch because he "doesn't feel close enough to me to sleep next to me", so I suggest we get him a bed and he can sleep in my sewing room. Which obviously means that it's ME not wanting to sleep next to him,despite every night me crying and begging him to come to bed. Nope, just got sick of it and became resigned, and was sick of him taking up the whole downstairs as his private bedroom that I wasn't allowed to. leave the upstairs till he was ready (the upstairs is literally just a master bedroom, no bathroom or anything).

He starts taking over everything that was mine, if he saw my friends give me attention for it. My pets that I take care of became his, the plants, my makeup subscriptions, my taxidermy hobby, my goth/high femme/vintage fashion pieces, even my stories of childhood magically were stories of his! He decided that he wanted to have a polyamorous relationship so he could "experience dating as a lesbian", whatever I had wanted that from the start. Plus maybe he'd find someone else and leave me. He was hesitant to let me date others. He would scream at me when I would go on dates about how unfair it was that he wasn't getting any dates and I would have more prospects than he did. Which, he only wants to date women, and they have to be OK with him having a penis. Whereas I'm a woman with a vagina, and I'm bi. My dating pool is just bigger, and it was mostly men.

I would wear dresses, he'd be jealous and steal them and whine because"I don't have any girl clothes and you have so many, it's not like you even wear this". I stopped wearing my feminine clothes and started wearing clothes that I joked as country lesbian comfy chic, which got me some attention from ladies at the breweries, so she took them because she's the real lesbian or whatever. She would get sooooo mad when women at the bar wouldn't give her the same attention that I got in the same outfit. Somehow she still had a huge ego and would leer at women and say that thwy totally wanted to have sex with her and would explain in detail about how she could tell that they "wanted her girl dick down their mouths", and would ask me if I thought she should go over and ask them to go to the bathroom with her to have sex. Because that's totally what lesbians do while they're hanging out with friends on the brewery patio.

I got a boyfriend. He slept over one day, and I started crying about how I hated my life. He offered me a place to stay, as a friend helping a friend first and foremost. At 4am I packed a small bag and we fled. I've been back at the house a few times, and he's been sorting through my clothes and choosing what he wants to keep. I've been bled dry of over $100,000 because of him and building our home. Furniture, electronics, cooking ware, decorations, rugs. He promised that once we got married we'd build a family. Now he's telling me that I'm not allowed in my own home without him being there, which lol nope not going to listen to that. I took 1 cat out of 3 and 2 plants out of 30, and he's throwing a fit telling me how unfair and unreasonable I'm being. Wait till my mom and me get the uhaul and I take his precious kitchen table that he refuses to give up (a family heirloom of mine, my great great grandfather made it by hand).

I am so sorry, soon2B. It's exactly right. Life feels so broken. I feel broken.

Do your kids know why you are divorcing? Will you be able to continue to homeschool?

SouthernTW I feel like we are in such similar places! My husband told me about 1.5 years ago he thought he was trans. It's been a flood of tears, fights and therapy since then. I set limits as we live in a fairly conservative place, homeschool, live in a smallish town, etc. He finally told me a couple of months ago that he can't abide by my boundaries of what it's OK for him to do/not do. He also said he couldn't work on our marriage because he needed to spend all of his time figuring himself out.

I'm working on getting a divorce, studying for the CFP exam and finding a job... a big change since I've been home with the kids for more than a decade. As soon as the divorce is final, I hope to find a home in a neighborhood near friends.. something I've dreamed about for a long time.

I know I will be so much happier without him, but I'm having a sad moment tonight. 16 years of marriage is a long time. It's rough on the kids... they are 13, 11 and 8. We told them we were getting divorced, but my oldest told me later she had to explain what divorce is to the youngest - apparently he wasn't sure what the word meant. Life feels so broken right now.

I'm assuming he will be all over the map. Right now he says he doesn't even know if he wants to have hormones. Yeah, I give that a few weeks after he moves out. Once he gets to be on his own full time and be constantly pushed by his cheerleader therapist and all his online trans friends, I know all bets are off. I just want him gone at this point, so my kids and I can start to rebuild a life.

For those who have kids, what all do you tell them? Daddy has lost his mind? I am a firm believer in science and sex is an immutable biological trait, I'm not planning to go along with some wishy-washy "Daddy is now a woman trapped in his body" or whatever nonsense he intends to tell them.

@southernTW, I hope you're holding up okay in this. I saw your comment about your spouse's timeline. Just please be ready for that to change with zero notice. My ex said he would come out to the world in ten months, that turned into "no, I'm doing this in three days" with no warning.

What TooManyTears wrote is so true! In my counseling session today, my counselor really hit home when she got me to realize that I am not grieving the loss of my marriage. That's been over for a rather long time because of spouse's action and repeated rejections. What I am grieving is the loss of what could have been.

Hollywood- that detaching phase is so important. So very difficult, but necessary.

@HollywoodTease, many hugs as you're dealing with this grief. The only thing I can say is that it gets better with time... the best analogy I've heard is ocean waves in a storm, eventually the waves of grief get smaller. And dealing with the cognitive dissonance is hard, too... I still miss my husband but also want nothing to do with the person he is now.

I realise this sounds harsh but the man you want back doesn't exist and never did Hollywood. He has had this other side that he has kept hidden from you and that is who he is.

My DH has worked incredibly hard on himself. He understands fully now what he was doing and why. I don't think he'll do it again but it's too late for us. At the start I believed if he could stop we could eventually put it behind us and build on the 20 odd years we've been together to raise the dc and grow old together but he's taken something from me that I can't quite put my finger on. I honestly don't think that there's anything he could do to repair this relationship now and yet it's still something I would ideally like to happen but I've gone past that now and accepted it won't.

It is incredibly painful to grieve for what you thought you had together. Things will be difficult but you sound like you have a good understanding of the situation and can get out. I wish you the very best.

Yes I get that. I feel like I'm detaching right now. Building a bit of a protective bubble around myself.

I was going to say you have no idea how much getting this out helps, but of course you do. You all do.

I can read it back and start to look at it objectively. Small steps but still moving.

I'm not really stuck. I'm not a high earner but I've always earned more than him.

I could buy him out if I needed to, it would mean a lifestyle change t a degree but it's possible. It would also solve his current lack of income, at least in the short term.

It's not what I really want though. I want my husband back, the man I have laughed and cried with, supported and been supported by, for nearly 30 years.

Right now the strongest feeling I have for him is pity. He's pathetic. I think part of the thrill for him is the secrecy. Since I started to find stuff, he's not sorry or ashamed, he's embarrassed. When I try to talk to him he blushes and looks at the floor like a naughty child. He's over 60 fgs.

The anger I feel is because of the lies, as much as the fetish. I was buying him viagra and he was taking fucking androgen blockers, the stupid prick.

I'd like to think we can muddle through this, move past it, still grow old together. But I'm not stupid, I've seen how it plays out for others. I don't think he'll stop even if he wants to and I know that if he follows this path to its logical conclusion I have to get out for the sake of my own sanity.

My ducks are lining up. Your move DH.

Name change fail

Not sure if you're HollywoodTease Yambabe, assume so...
Sounds like he could find somewhere to go if you sold up and yes, found yourself somewhere affordable. And absolutely not your problem. You aren't in fact sure you're living with a mentally ill person, or a person experiencing gender dysphoria, so arguments about his vulnerability wouldn't wash.
It sounds as if you do in fact see splitting up as the only option; maybe you could still be friends if you weren't having to live alongside an all-consuming fetish, or be part of it.
Sadness and anger are well-recognized on this thread; many of us were and remain bewildered that partners would prioritize fetishes, dressing up as women, or pursuing transition above children, partners etc. You need to accept those feelings, and the contradictory ones about still loving them/guilt/shame, and maybe make some practical plans and decisions.
I always suggest finding out the facts about money, benefits, homes etc. so that you know what you would be dealing with if you decide to split.