Sharing this section of my life with you has cost my many tears, and I expect there are more still to come, but I offer it to you in the hope that it will continue to help you understand my experience as a transgender woman.
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In university my life continued the pattern of my teen
years. I lived as a male because I knew no other way to live, but my primary
relationships continued to be with women. In the college years this becomes a
bit more involved, as male-female relationships, at least at the Christian
university I attended, always have the tension of where the relationship is
going to go. I enjoyed hanging out with my female friends and went on a number
of dates, though in retrospect I’m not sure how many of them were really dates
to me as much as opportunities to spend time with my female friends (I want to
say girlfriends, but in the male-female dynamic that term tends to carry loaded
meaning.)
Beyond the relationships expressions of my inner identity
were fairly limited at the time. When I was at home as a child I had access to
mom’s wardrobe. As an independent college student I did not have such access,
nor did I have the privacy or funds to seek opportunities for self-expression.
I do recall though talking with one friend about borrowing a skirt and wearing
it around campus to see how people would react, but I lacked the courage to
ever actually follow through with it (though she was willing to let me borrow
one!)
In time I met a woman with whom I felt a deeper connection
than with any of the other female friends I had had, such that calling her a
girlfriend would be accurate. We began dating and eventually married. I loved
her deeply and do not think that in marrying her I was trying to cover my own
inner struggles – though maybe I was. It may seem strange that someone who is
transgender would choose to marry someone while living in the role of their
non-internal gender. From what I have read and learned from other transgender
people, this is not really that unusual at all. Because we cannot (certainly
not at the time I got married) live in harmony with our inner identity, we
strive to succeed at living in the role that society has forced on us, even if
we don’t realize at the time that we are just living a role. I was pretty good
at the male role, though interestingly I was never really very masculine. Even
my future (at the time) wife recognized this about me and nicknamed me her
“unguy.” Little did she, or I, realize at the time how accurate that title was.
She and I went on to have a family: two wonderful, amazing
children whom we both love with all our hearts. We moved more times than either
of us would have imagined when we first married. We were not a perfect couple.
(I really doubt they exist). We struggled in various ways, one of which related
to my persistent inclination to form friendships with women. Not surprisingly,
and maybe not unreasonably, she had a hard time with this. I could never offer
her a satisfactory explanation as to why I always connected better with other
women. In retrospect it makes perfect sense, but for most of our married life
it just created tension between us. I don’t blame her for this, as it was a
natural reaction for a woman who thinks she has a cisgendered husband who can’t
seem to stop building friendships with other women when he should be focused on
her. I should have done better and I regret that I did not, though I understand
better now that I wasn’t looking for love outside of the marriage. I was just building friendships as I am a
very relational person.
In my next sections of my story I will share about the later
years of our marriage and how I came to finally recognize who I am and why I
had behaved as I did all my life. But before I close this entry I want to
emphasize as strongly as I possibly can that my now former wife bares no blame
or responsibility for my transition. I’ve already established that one doesn’t
“become” transgender, yet some people will insist on blaming it on some
inadequacy or failure on the part of the spouse. That could not be farther from
the truth. I’m not going to say she was perfect. I certainly wasn’t. But
nothing she did or didn’t do made me the way I am. I look back on our years
together with a lot of joy, as we shared many great adventures together and
passed through a lot of challenges together.
My greatest regret is that when I finally began to really examine myself
and figure out who I was, I didn’t let her in on that journey. I’ll talk more
about this later, but she really is one amazing woman and being her partner for
so many years is not something I regret.
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