Trans widow and feel so much pain for her

[Hotandbithered]

I know this is not actually my grief but DH has a good friend who we have known throughout our marriage, let’s call him Steve.

Steve was married to Jess and had two children.

We spent a lot of time with them over the years. Camping trips, dinners, bbqs, birthdays. Steve was your classic sort of male really. He was quite attractive, funny, polite, well educated and both he and Jess very successful, had a beautiful home.

Anyway getting to the point. Almost out of the blue (to us at least), a few years ago Steve began transitioning. He is not short of money and has had facial surgery multiple times, paid for himself. He is extremely supportive of the trans community and recognises he is lucky he can access this sort of treatment.

Jess stayed with him through this, went to the appointments, talked to their kids about what this meant (primary age) and tried to stick in the marriage. It’s now broken down and they are doing their best to be great co parents to their children.

Jess’ grief is immeasurable. This couple always seemed so in love, so respectful of one another. She says she feels like her husband has died yet she has to experience this new person in his place, like he’s been stolen from her. I too have felt this obviously to a much lesser degree, but its truly life changing to even be affected by it even a little bit.

I should add that I have no strong views on what or who people choose to be but I suppose I am shocked that a person can live a lie for so long and especially put their children through it? DH has tried to be supportive but I think struggles more with Steve’s new interests more than anything, as in they don’t have much to talk about anymore as Steve is consumed by this (I suppose understandably) and his focus on what makes him a woman rather than anything else.

I don’t know what I am asking really. Just feel grief for Jess and for DH and wonder if others have been through similar how they navigated it.

So someone who has AGP has been lied to, when in fact the "science" says that they are females trapped in male bodies...

40 years ago homosexual male-to-female transsexuals wanted nothing to do with the AGP (transvestites, crossdressers etc). Since the umbrella term of transgender came in it muddied the waters. It was always well known that there were men who were aroused by seeing themselves as woman.

It angers me that these heterosexual men can claim to be part of the LGBT community, when they experience no same-sex attraction. No homophobia can be levelled at Steve because he is a heterosexual man.

Speaking as a widow myself the term Transwidow is not at all offensive to me - I understand perfectly that it means he is not actually physically dead!

As pp had pointed out trans people use the term "deadname" and everyone understands no actual death has occurred.

Seems to me that some people want others to fall in with every demand they make for no logical reason - just the need, compulsion, to control all the narrative.

No. Shan't. Tough.

I am constantly shocked that we ended up here.

We were on a good path in the early 00s when it was becoming more and more accepted that there was no right way to be male or female and that children should be encouraged to express themselves however they liked.

Yet somehow that all got derailed in favour of the deeply regressive and sexist trans ideology.

As I've said innumerable times on MN, why would humans have evolved as the only sexually dimorphic species that can't reliably identify the sex of other humans?

Easy. One exists as material reality and one is made up based on lazy and regressive sex-based stereotypes.

We had the lovely Lego advert encouraging girls to play with a toy that could have been seen as just for boys.

No, we had Lego adverts that advertised toys for children. They weren’t ‘encouraging girls to play with a toy that could have been seen as just for boys’. They were just toys and seen as for all children.

You are wrong. Definition of gender it is original form is EXTREMELY binary, it is a construct of society aimed as defining roles of man and women and basically dictates what either sex have to behave like, dress like/ think like. Examples: women have to be soft, gentle, wear make up, dress, look after children. This the expectation of their gender. Nowadays gender is "fluid" because there are less boundaries, society generally allows crossing over of gender roles and attitudes.

Sex is something you are born with and something that is determined by your genetic build up. In healthy people there are only two sexes. Sex determines what part you play in reproductive process and its can't be altered.

Someone asked on here why men would like "pretend" to be females as females are more oppressed in the society - the answer is, this is part of the fetish. Being treated as a woman, even in a negative key, is what these man are after so it makes no difference if its being discriminated or valued.

Everyone knows what a dick looks like, and what its for. So it was always very simple - dickless "no-tail" people are females, people with dicks are men.

Anyone who tries to deny it was always thus is an idiot or a troll.

I am not a TRA, actually gave me a laugh.

Also, surely the point with the whole issue is that words, in fact, do have meanings and they do matter.

As I previously said I understand the issues and the trans widow terminology and don’t have a problem with it.

However, it’s quite a shock to see a thread full of women trying to support women in one situation by telling other women who are widows to ‘get a life’ (incredibly crass of a PP by the way).

Narcissistic behaviour and gaslighting is narcissistic behaviour and gaslighting.
Dead is dead.

Not the same thing and people really should not be sweepingly announcing which is worse to support their argument.

Or, of course, you can carry on but for myself I would say Jess and her children are in a situation so difficult it doesn’t need to be compared or held up as worse to prove it.

Women are not ‘dickless’ men. A man who has had his penis removed or blown off by an ied isn’t any less a man and is certainly not a woman.

It is crazy to me that some people are purely fixating on whether a woman is allowed to call herself a widow, on a thread about a husband wanting to be called mummy….

I think there was one further step before that. I once saw a transactivist video which inadvertently clarified the picture for me. They had the meme showing Grace Jones and Annie Lennox in sharp suits with cropped hair, and Boy George and Prince in make-up, flowing hair and blouses. They asked 'how can people who grew up with this be so rigid about gender?' (meaning GC second-wave feminists). But none of those people questioned their sex. At the time, we thought this could be opened up for everybody - boys wearing skirts to school, long hair tied back in the military, toys and jobs being open for all. However this was swiftly stamped out and rigidity enforced just about everywhere but the performing arts. That left the gap for ideology to fill.

People who are gender critical are critical
of gender - it is in the name. They don’t care if women wear sharp suits and cropped hair it doesn’t change the fact they are women. One the other hand TRAs are fixated on gender - it is central to their claim to be the ‘opposite gender’ that women have long hair and wear makeup.

Me, me! I know this! Remember “Give Boy Tonka Toy”? Definitely directed only at boys because they were toy juggernauts and lorrys. I’m still surprised Gillette is allowed to say “the best a man can get”, do we still have Kleenex Man Sized tissues?

Tbf I was embarrassingly old before I realised what ‘man-sized tissues’ was all about and the task they were designed for.

I'm saying that the difference between sexes can be simplified to the having/ not having an appendage. "No-tail" is a reference from the League of Gentlemen. Our genetic make up predisposes the set of genitals we get, so its not simply a case of " I will have a pretend penis and now I'm a man". Having a penis or a vagina is a manifestation of your genetic role in the reproductive process.

Equally, if you lose your dick you are not automatically become a woman (i can't believe I have to type this). Penis had to be there in the first place to be removed/ lost, and even if it is removed its still conspicuous by the signs of it being removed/ missing. I also appreciate there are males who are born without a penis (DSD) but this is rare, not the norm and they are still genetically male. Female born without a uterus is still a female, just, unfortunately, the one with some kind of illness/ genetic defect. If its MEANT to be there and its not there its not a "gotcha" moment - its just an unfortunate situation that happens throughout animal kingdom.

Hopefully, she'll boot him out & he can live his life of fantasy elsewhere, to his heart's content.

Poor Jess & kids.

@Soontobesleeping oh no, I thought it was because they’ve got big hooters 👃

.

The point is it is very misogynistic to consider women as men who are missing something. It goes along with the TRA fancy that ‘all foetuses are female’ because they lack a penis. We are male or female from the moment of conception and follow separate distinct developmental pathways from that moment. Women are not people who are missing something that makes men men.

😂oh yes, in our faces, boom!
I just don’t think I can match this level of insightful communication

It's understandable, I suppose, that men and boys fixate on the presence or absence of the appendage that obsesses so many of them. Meanwhile, they do their utmost to ignore the immensely complex female anatomy that brought every single one of them into existence, along with the other half of humanity. Out of sight, out of mind. Nasty messy stuff anyway. Obviously inferior to the nice simple male form.

I totally agree but I also see what this poster is trying to say - that for hundreds of thousands of years, right back to homo erectus, early hominids and the original chimpanzees we diverged from, individual humans have always known the difference between male and female individuals of their species, that an individual is either a male or a female and that, in 99.999% of case the individuals everbody instinctively knows are males have a penis because of their male sex.

Removing it, losing it in an accident or having a hormonal processing disorder due to a generic mutation which means it didnt develop properly doesnt change the fact that that individual is male.

For some reason, for a brief period in human history, it became fashionable to pretend that humans had sexed souls and so you could end up male by mistake. Clearly bollocks, and cruel to all concerned, as we see on this thread, because instead of encoraging individuals to be happy in themselves, however they present, whatever their sexuality or interests or personality, we now have children being coerced into calling Daddy Mummy, instead of just having a Dad that happens to be gay.