Trans Widows Escape Committee 3: Rise of the Trans Widows

[TinselAngel]

Less than two years have passed since the first TWEC thread and now its time for a third.

This is a support area for women who are, or have been, in unhappy relationships with male partners who are transitioning, or exploring their "gender identity"

If you are in that position-

1. You are not alone
2. It is not a situation that you should be expected to tolerate, let alone celebrate.
3. There is always a way out, if you want it. The thread is called Escape Committee for that reason

Remember: women talking to each other is a powerful weapon!

Regulars- do post here to get the thread going.

Lurkers- now would be a great time to de-lurk.

How sad Amanda takes glee in belittling women.

How bizarre that the defiant Amanda (who I think perhaps needs to get out more) doesn't think partners of transitioning people ever feel bad, or ever need support. Fingers in her ears methinks.
Transwidows resources exist primarily because so many women DON'T feel positive about this experience, and are not treated well by their transitioning partners. It may be an uncomfortable truth, and go against the rainbow-joy message, but just blocking everyone doesn't really make us go away or delete our lived experience. Plus I love the fact these people like to delete/block/dismiss, yet 100% expect the world to respect the lived experience/feelings and titles of trans people and their 'allies'... what a contradictory nonsense.
Meanwhile, we can remain focussed on support.

I think she, like others, is in 'survival mode'.

Perhaps like the wife (or husband) who sticks by a cheating partner and then says 'our marriage is better than ever'.

If she really cared about others in the same boat she would be engaging, IMHO.

She cares about herself and this is her way of surviving, IMHO. But then I am not a trans widow, and I may be wrong.

I just know all the parents of trans youth I speak to on the surface are so accepting and positive.

Scratch the surface and they are terrified for their beloved children, did not see this coming and have not encouraged it (despite what the media says about parents of trans youth).

who is amanda ?

She is the wife of a transitionerz. Now she's a Trans Rights Activist and born again "lesbian". Also mother of a trans child.

She's written a book which my life is too short to read.

And very keen to promote herself and her book
Support for people with different experiences, and speaking out about the need for it, is 'hate', apparently...
She seems to be enjoying a lot of self-publicity, and book revenue, from her stance. It would seem important to her therefore to label any differing experience or opinion as 'hate'.
Women seeking support here can rest assured we're not making money or individual profile/following/publicity out of this space.
Hope the rest of you survived/enjoyed Christmas. Let's hope 2020 is better for all of us, particularly those of you in difficult 'stuck' situations, experiencing abusive behaviour, or feeling sad, bereaved, bewildered, scared.

Women seeking support here can rest assured we're not making money or individual profile/following/publicity out of this space.

Let's not rule that out though!

I need to talk about the way that even though I've been divorced from my trans-identified ex for a year, and am almost two years from moving out, I'm still affected by the way that my ex's revelation that he had decided he was "a woman in a man's body" made me reconsider and question past events. And, worse, that it has made me feel uneasy about my ability to make judgements about the present--if I was so very wrong then, how can I be sure I'm not equally wrong now.

I am currently reading Sarah Hall's "The Wolf Border," a very good novel, whose main character becomes pregnant and gives birth. I'm currently in the section that details her life with her newborn, and it is bringing up such feelings and memories, which are all altered and conditioned both by my own post-menopausal state (the end of fertility and the possibility of pregnancy) and by the trans trauma.

One awful and ongoing effect of my ex's trans reveal was that alteration of earlier incidents, the questioning of his motives, the remaking of what I thought I understood. So, for an example, his interest in my breast feeding, his desire to watch and photograph the baby on my breast. I used to think his desire to watch me feed the baby was family bonding, his attempt to be included in what would otherwise be a mother-child experience, and although at the time I longed for time alone to bond with my baby, just the two of us, I considered that it was important to bond as a family and that I facilitate my husband's bonding to our child, so I went along with it.
After the trans reveal, it became clear that of all things female, my ex wanted breasts--he would palpate himself (fondling himself), he wore a bra, including during sex, he took selfies of his "breasts" in a bra, etc etc.
After that, when I saw those photographs, with their focus on the baby's face, latched on to my breast, gazing up, but in which there is nothing of me but the breast, and I think, "Was he projecting himself into this picture? Was he imagining himself as the one with the milk-giving breast? Was he imaging himself as the mother? Was he imagining the face into which our baby was so avidly gazing his own?"

I also think about how he used to undermine my breast-feeding; he would, for example, feed the baby a full bottle before I could return from work, even though he knew I would be home in just a few minutes, and when I complained, my breasts full and aching, he'd attack me, reminding me that he was the one who had to hear the baby cry, and bottle feeding him could comfort the baby.
I know I'm on the road to recovery, but I'm still stumbling over this issue of having my past remade in light of the trans reveal, and worse, I'm still struggling with the feeling that I can't trust my own perceptions of a situation or my own judgement.

I'm sure I'm not the only one of us who has experienced this or something like it.

Walked, I agree that this dilemma is the biggest mind fuck.

My ex, for example, said when we got married that he was really pleased to be doing it this time (his second), with no doubts, unlike his first time.

After we split, he said on social media that he'd stood in the church knowing he shouldn't marry me.

These things cannot both be true.

Is their decision to transition an agonising decision that tears them apart (as they often claim at the time), or were they "born this way", always knew where they were going, and we were just their beards or brood mares?

Due to queer theory and the desire after transition to absolve themselves from blame, they always go with "born this way", had no choice, inevitability.

Which is true? We have no way of ever knowing and it could send you mad. They will never tell us the truth. The only way I can think to deal with it is to try and have faith in the judgements that you made at the time, and understand their motivation for rewriting history.

*Walked, my heart goes out to you. I'm at a similar stage, also about two years out from divorce, and still dealing with the mindfuck of this whole situation. This is the specific cognitive dissonance item that still gets me... my ex said that he couldn't wait even a day later to start transition. Then he later told me that he wanted to transition ten years earlier, but never said or did anything, because we would have divorced and he would likely get only the standard "alternate weekends plus one weeknight" custody of our children. So which one was actually true? A desperate "I can't wait" or "Yes, I can wait ten years until child custody is no longer an issue"?

I'm still resentful. I wanted the future with my husband that I thought I would have. I can intellectually recognize that my life is better now post-divorce in so many ways, but I'm still angry. Especially now that I've learned it was basically for nothing, my ex is not happy, apparently she didn't get the butterfly life she wanted and that I paid so much for. All of this for a fantasy.

I think what you are both describing is actually another facet of this whole thing. And that is their own timelines as they have described them to you. My ex did something like what you describe, too, telling me at one point that he didn't really "know" until three months before telling me (but also saying he first asked himself the question "could I be trans?" three years before telling me), yet also saying he'd first crossdressed at age 8 or 10 (I forget which). I took that for his remaking the narrative of his childhood to make himself trans from the beginning. I wonder about that, too--what did he know and when did he know it, and when did he begin repressing it, lying to me, hiding, etc. So there's that aspect of it

There's also the aspect of looking back on our pasts and seeing them anew through the lens of what we were later told about them. Did my husband know when our child was born that he felt this way? How did he explain his feelings to himself? Was he hiding it? All I knew was what he presented to me, and that was heterosexual male father. And that's the lens through which I interpreted his actions. When I look back now on that period of our life, it feels tainted. Instead of seeing that time and those photos as a time when we were bonding as a new family, I see those photos as an expression of his paraphilia and the whole episode is tainted for me.

And if I couldn't tell then that my now-ex was creeping on me, how can I trust my perceptions now? It's like he knocked my sense of being able to conclude anything with any certainty right off balance. And that is making it hard for me to recover.

Right after my ex disclosed his feeling he was "a woman in a man's body" to me, and I told him that this news had screwed with my past, and my past was a lie, he actually told me that my past was real, that it happened as it happened. Well, the events happened, yes, but if one of the people in that past is misrepresenting themself, then how could the past be "real"? It was only real insofar as I experienced it, but it wasn't real in the sense of honest. If he was lying about who he was, either to himself or to me, or to himself, then how could the past be anything other than dishonest and therefore not "real." I was real; I was honest; I wasn't hiding. But that HE was dishonest and hidinglying about who he was, and I didn't perceive that-that is what is fucking with me now.

@walkedaway

I struggled with this when I left my ex. I knew he liked cross dressing, he'd introduced it into our relationship. He would make me do stuff during sex that I felt awkward about, but he said he liked a bit of kink and I went along with it, because that was what he wanted.

When I found trans porn on the computer after he kicked me out of our shared office space, I realised there was something else going on and I was in shock for a few days. I didn't talk to him about it. The clothing he bought for "me for my birthday" was actually 3 sizes too small and for him, but again, I didn't know that.

I asked my marriage therapist about this, because I just feel like I am incapable of making the right decision when it comes to loving men in my life.

For example: I have an ex that I still love, he's still in my life (best friends), but he's histrionic, traumatised by his past and we never worked out because of poor life choices and timing, he reminds me of my ex, but the good stuff. Intelligent, kind, funny, empathetic, but he's moody, prone to making quick decisions based on emotion and not logic and dismissive about other's issues.

My husband on the other hand, steady, consistent, a great father, but not communicative, not demonstrative, logical, calm. He's the complete opposite to my Ex, and to my best friend. The marriage therapist asked me with the benefit of hindsight, would I have chosen my Ex (the trans mtf) again, if I knew then what I know now. I said no. She didn't ask me about my best friend, but I feel if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have had a relationship with my best friend. My husband on the other hand, I would absolutely choose again. My therapist said to me, if I wouldn't make the same choices again, then there was nothing wrong with my judgement.

I still sometimes struggle with the head games that ex played. He gaslit me so well that sometimes I was unable to distinguish truth from lies. He told me he liked to dress up as a kid, but was told off by his parents (true), he told me he'd been married before but she died in a car accident (not true), told me he'd been injured in the army (still don't know if that's true). The sexual stuff he made me do, I can barely think about without feeling ill.

In the end, for me to heal, I have to focus on now. What is currently real now. You also need to focus on now and not the past. Everything we have been through, we have survived. The next step is to get therapy/counseling if you haven't started already. That is something I didn't do after I left my ex and I am paying the price for now.

Rettstar,
Thank you for that gem from your therapist. It's true also for me that if I'd known from the beginning about his early cross dressing, and that he'd told me lies about himself from the very beginning (one of these liesrevealed as a lie only in the last year of our 35 year marriagewas actually important to me in deciding that he was the type of person I wanted to know better), I would not have become involved with him. That is, if I'd had the truth then, I would have interpreted some of his actions early on differently, and chosen differently. So in that sense my decision making is sound.

I think my worry about knowing I'm capable of making the right choice, of when I can trusting my instincts, my judgment and decisions, comes from being at a crossroads in my own life: I've divorced, my son is grown, and I've just retired. I know I don't want to stay in the location I'm currently living, but don't know where to go. I know I can't retain some of the joint friends and colleagues we shared, because it hurts me that he is still in his closet and those of our friends who do know pretend they don't, and are friends with him still.

I have had some counseling. I am trying to focus on the now, but "the now" is that I am currently caretaking my 93 year old mother, and that is a "now" centered around her needs and not my own. For the moment, I am trying to hang on until the end of the time I said I would do this for my mother.

@WalkedAway

"...I have had some counseling. I am trying to focus on the now, but "the now" is that I am currently caretaking my 93 year old mother, and that is a "now" centered around her needs and not my own. For the moment, I am trying to hang on until the end of the time I said I would do this for my mother..."

I used friend's issues, work and volunteer work to avoid dealing with my own personal issues. Did it really well until it didn't work. I get that you're juggling, just remember though, you must look after yourself FIRST to be able to look after another.

You might find, that once you start looking at your emotional needs first, you will be able to better manage looking after your mum as you're in a better headspace.

Sending you love and hugs.

I did not agree to care for my mother in order to avoid dealing with my own "issues." I agreed to care for my mother because her caregiver left and she was without anyone to help her.

@walkedaway I understand that and I'm not saying you are actually looking after your mum for any other reason than you need to.

Please, all I am saying is that caring for others is a great way of not dealing with your own issues. I didn't understand this until I got into counseling and my therapist literally guessed that's what I do.

I understand our circumstances are different and I mean absolutely no offense.

It's occurred to me that we're probably making too much angst for ourselves by defining things using their terms rather than reality.

Let's reframe it: They always had a delusion that they were a woman. The delusion started small and could be pushed to one side but eventually grew and grew until it became overwhelming and caused them to rewrite their own past as well as their future.

(I'm not writing this deliberately to test talk guidelines. It is our reality, which is just as important as theirs).

The bewilderment is profound and longlasting. I completely relate to not understanding what reality I lived during my quite long marriage. My ex was restless and perpetually dissatisfied, and each fad/thing he tried didn't last and never fully delivered whatever he was looking for. I don't know if he 'knew' on our wedding day, or on the day my children were born, or on the day his latest fad cost us more money, or a major home move to make him at last happy, or the 'several years' before he announced he was a 'woman', which he told friends, or the shorter time he told me. I don't know if he tried on my clothes, or used trans porn, but it seems very likely from the signs, or was jealous of me when he tried to deter me from looking too 'feminine', or when he bizarrely adopted some of my lifestyle and hobbies when he 'transitioned'.
The only freedom - rather like with people whom you can never satisfy, so you need at some point to stop trying - from not knowing the truth or reality you lived, or whom you lived with intimately but apparently never knew, is to accept you will never know. I came to realize that even if I was able to sit down and ask my ex for honest answers about timescale, why he married, when he knew, the secret life he lived, I wouldn't believe him anyway. He became an adept and secretive liar, and took on a whole new identity which necessitated him cutting off from those who knew the 'old' him.
I no longer trust him, which frees me to not ask.
Accepting not knowing is quite liberating.
I don't doubt my own judgement much, as I see him as a very f*ed-up individual, then and now. He is an inadequate parent and spouse, and a poor friend to those who knew him previously. He remains, despite supposedly having arrived at self-actualization, a dysfunctional adult person, and a self-absorbed and sad little man.
So I see the deficiency in him, not me, and regard myself and my children as simply unlucky to have had him in our lives, rather than me as foolish or flawed to have 'not known'.
Men who do this are often by necessity highly secretive and blaming of others. Women are enmeshed often for years while this plays out, their self-confidence and sense of reality eroded.
But you remain who you were before, with all your qualities and potential.
I see it as rather like being with any liar, or con-man, or fake person. My mother now refers to him as 'Walter Mitty' and much of the impact on me has mirrored that of friends whose husbands had other secrets or double lives.
I can't imagine what it's like to have a parent do this; I can somehow separate myself as time goes on, but he is my children's father and that more than blows their minds.
It is an outrage and an offence to relabel and rewrite the lives and identities of others, and many of us resist this here. We are told we must respect the titles and labels and lived experience of our exs, but ours do not matter.
Reclaiming who you were before your toxic and damaging relationship, and separating yourself from that person, is really helpful in moving on and feeling less distressed.
My heart goes out to you Walked and I hope you can find an independent life as just you, and start again. It's tough and takes time but can be done.

Anybody want to take one for the team and try and read this book. I don't think I can face it given the author works for Stonewall.

twitter.com/usborne/status/1215216752709328896?s=21

No one could pay me enough to read that book. I read Jennifer Boylan's "She's Not Here" at my ex's insistence, where the "happy ending" of the memoir is the wife deciding to stay on in a sexless marriage with the trans husband. I don't need to read more memoirs or novels, which is what I'm guessing that book is.

I'd put money in the ending of this book being similar!

My ex tried to get me to read some book about a couple staying together, maybe it was the same one? I declined.

Reading around it, blurb, review, it's a happy tale of acceptance, inclusivity and challenging transphobia. Very predictable. Maybe my unconvinced, estranged and unimpressed kids will write their book one day about their view of their father and his mid-life urgent need to find himself. Predictable, inevitable, not reflective of all experience...

Author retweeting lots of trans women saying it's great. Can't see any trans widows being quoted.

I'm assuming if the author had consulted any of us we would have mentioned it?