Trans Widows' Escape Committee 4 - A New Hope

*rejection can be tied. Not tired as I obviously am.

That is part of what floors me I think. The shock that accepting them as “she” also means partner can’t just “choose” to change their sexual orientation. The “well you tried some stuff before”...and didn’t happen to enjoy it...have zero cares who else enjoys what between consenting adults but personally got nothing and felt like my presence wasn’t required anyways.

Some people don’t like tomatoes but giving them a try once doesn’t mean they now must obviously love tomatoes because well they tried it.

I’m tired of feeling the pressure is all on me. Though still saying if there was some effort even approaching bare minimum with housework and spending time with the child I’d be more inclined to pretzel myself. The self absorption combined with this pandemic isolation is just gnawing are me. But why would they go, zero responsibility and everything provided free of charge. Special protected status to boot as now any rejection can be tired to being “not accepting”.

"I don't want to be married to a woman, I married a man" should be enough

It should; in fact "I don't want to be married to this person" should be enough.

But personally I'd be inclined to play silly buggers and say "I'm heterosexual, so being married to a woman doesn't work for me," at least to the husband if not to the lawyer.

Well, if I may interject, wrt the issue of mixed sexuality marriages being leveraged to troll transwidows.
It seems to me that the attitude TRAs have towards women with husbands who identify as trans is very similar to the attitude of the conservative Christians who believe that a lesbian marrying a man is a method of cure of her 'fault', and that submission in this manner is a supreme example of love.
In each case, the woman is being asked to subsume her own self and sexuality in the service of both a man's individual desire and a higher ideology.

Yet again, trans ideology is co-opting the language of LGB oppressions, and the methods of those who oppress LGB people.

As others have mentioned, when a man comes out, he is not asking his wife to stay with him and be a prop to his identity. In fact, a gay man coming out to his wife is actually reversing the process - she is no longer being asked to help him pretend to be something else. His coming out is essentially freeing of her of that role. This is the polar opposite of what transwidows face from everything I have read from them over time.

1. Go social worker! that's brilliantly put. I feel an urge to share parts / all of it.
2. Just spoken to a solicitor (go me) who said unreasonable behaviour could be a grounds, but I don't have to mention the trans thing, I can go off other stuff, and would need to have 5 or so examples of "unreasonable behaviour". On reflection, "I don't want to be married to a woman, I married a man" should be enough.

If they were born that way, they knew they were gay or trans from a young age and stood at the altar misrepresenting themselves before their God, if they have one, and entering into a false marriage contract. That alone is enough reason to divorce. It's a huge betrayal.

Interesting question for us, why this is different from a spouse coming out as gay.
Similar, as I'm guessing theses for 'gay widows' are betrayal, lives lived as a lie, wasted years, great personal pain and feelings of rejection, questioning of one's own sexuality/attractiveness/sexual role in the relationship. Both may involve pre-disclosure secret lives unknown to the partner. Plus both involve very intimate parts of our lives, and the majority of relationships break up in order to not continue living a lie. Post-coming-out I imagine those women feel shame and embarrassment that they didn't know/realize, and self-consciousness over the judgements of others on their private relationship.
However

1. a newly-out gay usually man does not want to continue the relationship as he is not attracted to his partner; the deal may be staying together for show/children/stability but him pursuing his sexual life elsewhere;

• in ours partners often want to stay, even if we are no longer attracted to them and in fact positively repulsed. They want us to sleep with them, and often to collude in their fetish/fantasy, sissification etc.

2. in those situations, it is not hard to believe that someone is gay. It is a self-declared orientation.

• in ours, we may not believe our partner is actually gender-dysphoric, and certainly may not believe any evidence that they are actually 'a woman'.

3. in those situations, men don't tend to spend lots of money on their new lifestyle to the detriment of their households and children.

• late transitioners make quite a meal of transition. I'm comparing this my teen's friend - a young woman deciding she's male, and continuing to have short hair and wear jeans. Late transitioners relentlessly and repetitively seem to go the whole drag-like hog: nails, hair, clothes,shoes, lingerie, porn, accessories, hair-removal. It's a time-consuming and self-absorbing hobby of playing 'woman'.

3. Sexual orientation is just part of someone's identity; it isn't hard to retain the person even if this happens. Late transitioners appear to change profoundly and wholly, however much TAs shout 'they're still the same person'. Our experience is of wholesale rejection of previous interests, behaviours and relationships, and the crafting of an entire new person. Gay men don't change their name, have their genitals cut off, take hormones, have voice-coaching etc etc etc
4. Deciding you're gay seems to be based on evidence, behaviour, responses to others. Deciding your trans seems to be all about feelz, and your stereotype of what it means to be a woman and what bits of that experience you want to try on for size. Doesn't look quite as evidence-based to me.
5. Lumping these experiences together when it comes to berating women for being 'bigots' is very blinkered. Nobody accuses a woman of being homophobic if they end a relationship with a newly-gay man. Nobody accuses women of being homophobic if they don't want to sleep with a gay man... actually the more I write this the more I realize how ridiculous their position is. Thoughts welcome, All.

I'm thinking it's a fundamental change in the balance of power, too.

The balance of power in heterosexual relationships is skewed in men's favour anyway (because, well, patriarchy). They get to be intractable and unreasonable and we have to do all the running around trying to find "compromises" that are anything but.

Invoking trans puts a massive extra weight into an already-imbalanced system. It gives them an advantage way above and beyond that afforded by their maleness, in terms of interpersonal relations.

"Being trans" - by which I simply mean declaring themselves to be so - makes them far more powerful; and power in a pair-bond is a see-saw. Their gain is our loss.

Why should we accept this powerlessness?

Yes I don’t see why not wanting to continue the marriage/relationship is conflated with “invalidating” “not accepting” “phobic”. Frustrating! It is a fundamental change in compatibility. If some are just as happy with the new comparability ok fine but not being ok with it is not an attack on the person who has changed.

I think that's true across the board, regardless of whether they're AGP or HSTS or something else that we haven't identified and analyses yet.

Ultimately it comes down to sexual incompatibility.

But the people saying "you're being homophobic for not accepting your wife's transness; you need to be kinder" can fuck right off, because they're telling us to be kind to our abusers because the poor dears just can't help being abusive.

Which is misogynistic as hell.

We're up against a juggernaut of refusal to accept facts on this one though - one of the twitter posts you shared upthread shows that clearly.

They think this is about us rejecting T as an identity?

No.

A major component of this - the component that can be justifiably compared to having a secretly-gay husband - is about us rejecting AGP as a sexuality that's incompatible with ours.

No bold fail so far as I can see; it worked as you meant it to.

I know we're supposed to hold abusers entirely responsible for their own actions; but this is a clear example of the fact that society also bears some responsibility, for facilitating males' abuses of women.

I don't blame individuals for the fact that society encourages them; I blame them for uncritically going along with it and grabbing the opportunity with both hands.

It's so bloody inconsistent too, this charge of homophobia - they're trying to have their cake and eat it, to my mind.

If they're truly women (as they claim to believe) then we're well within our rights to leave on the grounds of incompatible sexual orientations; and it's homophobic to expect us to try to change our orientations to accommodate them.

If they're truly men (as we believe) then we're well within our rights to leave on the grounds of their being abusive misogynistic arseholes, and also on the grounds of no longer being remotely attracted to them.

I actually think it's really disingenuous of them to lump T with LGB in this context.

I don't think women leave their freshly-decloseted gay husbands because they have a problem with gay people. There's no homophobia in it; it's just a) incompatible sexualities and b) the fact of having been lied to.

When they come out as trans, both a) and b) apply, but there's also c) the fact that the progressives of our society hold trans to be the sacred caste, who can do no wrong and must be centred and championed at all costs. This gives them licence to abuse us, and those who accuse us of homophobia for not accepting this treatment are compounding the abuse.

Gay husbands aren't excused from minimum standards of civilised behaviour on account of being gay. The same cannot be said for trans-identified husbands.

As for why they're calling it "homophobia" I think there are two important drivers there: it confuses and obscures the issue; and they've realised that 'transphobia' isn't going to wash as a mechanism to shame us into submission.

As I said, they're the homophobes; and so are their supporters who've swallowed Stonewall's homophobic redefinition of the concept of orientation.

Actually, let me correct that.

The T identity becomes a vector for both emotional and economic abuse and also sexual coercion.

we should try and be kind because the poor things can't help it

The trouble with that is, it's not their being trans that turns out to be the major problem. It's their abuse of that status. The T identity becomes a vector for emotional and economic abuse.

So really what's being said is that the poor things can't help being abusive.

If you treat it all the same (relationships breaking down because one partner is either LGB or T)

This is the crux of it, and this is where it gets political.

T is an identity, not an orientation; and it is not benign. It's rooted in misogyny.

When your husband comes out as trans, he's coming out as a raging misogynist. Why the hell should we accept that?

Right, yeah, my answer to that is pretty simple, but it's going to get political.

We're not the homophobes here. A spouse who's secretly gay doesn't use that status as a mechanism of coercive control. A spouse who's AGP and forcing his wife (with societal backing) to accept him as a lesbian, does; the commonalities of our stories are testament to that.

Are women who don't want to stay with gay husbands considered homophobic for not wanting to subsume their needs and wants in order to play emotional nursemaid? Or is it accepted that they're not sexually compatible and the relationship breaking down is to be expected?

The AGP spouse who declares himself to be a lesbian, and castigates his wife for not playing along, is himself a homophobe. Specifically, it's lesbophobia.

The idea is that we should reimagine ourselves as lesbians in order to validate their identities. This presupposes that lesbianity is a choice that women freely make.

Speaking for myself, AGP was the final nail in the coffin that made me realise I find male sexuality repellent. Understanding AGP as an extension of male heterosexuality was most illuminating in that respect.

When I get round to telling him this, if his response were to declare himself a lesbian, this would be a homophobic act that denied my own sexual orientation. (This isn't likely to happen though; I chatted to him briefly about it and he looked quite perplexed and said basically what others have said here - people change and become incompatible and that's fine.)

Anyway, the short version is: we don't leave them because they're trans; we leave because they use transness as a weapon against us.

I wouldn't worry about goady accounts who are trolling you, they aren't making sound arguments.
Women who speak out on an issue that affects them aren't concern trolling. We're often left managing without child support payments as the money is spent elsewhere; thats economic abuse.