19 September 2010 by kathleen.

What I’m writing today might almost be Part 2A instead of Part 3.   In Part 2, I wrote about sexual fantasies and expectations.  That horse is not dead yet: I shall kick it some more.

Regarding lingerie at bedtime, there is a myth:  If my wife was really supportive, she’d let me wear frilly nighties to bed.   That myth seems to be believed by many married MtF.  Silky, slippery lingerie may be a turn-on for you; it may or may not be a turn-on for your wife.   It might be a turn off for her if the person wearing the lingerie is you, the husband she married.   She may support you well and thoroughly, but still not want you to wear nighties to bed.

If your primary satisfaction from wearing women’s clothes is sexual stimulation, that’s OK with me.   Just don’t expect your wife to participate; see Part 2.

Revealing your trangendered nature to your wife does not relieve you of your marital obligations.   One of those obligations involves the marriage bed, touch, and sex.   How you express sexual affection for each other is your private business.   I will only say that how ever you were doing it, you should still be doing it to the extent your body enables it.

If you begin taking hormones, your  capacity to engage in copulation will diminish, as I mentioned in my article about estrogen.   You may be able to replace intercourse with increased non-genital affection.   That was what I had to do when I lost erectile function after prostate cancer.

How far and how fast you move toward transition and surgery is where you and your wife have to come to some understanding.   It is entirely reasonable to negotiate the nature and extent of your use of cosmetics, clothing and hormones, remembering that you negotiate on the priorities in you life; see Part 1.

Posted in Being/staying married, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »

30 August 2010 by kathleen.

This is a follow-up to Part 1, in which I wrote about identifying priorities.  Today I am thinking about expectations; specifically, what you might expect a supportive wife to do for you.  You know, one of those “If you loved me you would….” traps.

From talking to people (and from reading some of the stories on the internet), it appears that there are some MtF who expect the wife to do their makeup, buy their clothes, style their hair, manicure their nails, etc.  In other words, they expect their wife to be a ladies’ maid.  This might work once or twice, especially if as a couple they use it as prelude to marital sex.

There are rumored to be women who actually do enjoy feminizing a man.  It is undetermined, however, whether such women would actually want to feminize their husbands.

There are certainly service providers that will gladly take your money to make your fantasies come true.  Just plug the phrase “school for sissies” into your favorite search engine.  If you’re looking for the realization of your forced-feminization or sissification fantasies, those services are a much better place to satisfy your desires than your marriage bed.

From another point of view, if your wife does all those things for you (shopping, hair, nails, makeup), it demonstrates that you aren’t really a woman and aren’t capable of taking care of yourself.  For some couples that might be a good thing; it might serve to bind the partners in a dependency relationship.

On the other hand, you as a transgendered person cannot grow into realization of your nature while you are dependent on your wife.

Posted in Being/staying married | 1 Comment »

10 August 2010 by kathleen.

I am imagining a series of posts on issues around a MtF staying married to the legal spouse through and after MtF transition and surgery.  Similar issues arise for the FtM, but I am not as familiar with that situation.  In succeeding posts I will mention some things you can do to make the transition harder on your wife, and some that might make it easier.

I want to start with you.  What is the most important thing (item, concept, situation) in your life?

• Is it that you need to express the feminine nature you’ve denied so long?
• Are your kids most important?  your grandkids?
• Is it just the idea of being married?
• Is it a need to experience sex with a male?  with another female?
• Is it that you are just delighted to be married to this cheerful, loving, creative woman?
• Is it the happiness of your birth family (parents, siblings)?

These are not necessarily incompatible priorities — and there are many others possible.  Having one does not necessarily mean giving up all others.  However, when it comes to decision time, what are you going to do?  Which of these will you put first?

Please do not hear judgment in the order in which these choices are listed.  None of the choices is  better, nobler, or worthier than the others.  However, you need to be clear in your own mind what you want the most, so that if choices have to be made, you have some foundation within yourself upon which to base the choice.

You also need to be realistic; even the thought of you having sex as a female with a male is likely to be very threatening to your wife.  Valuing that particular activity highly may be incompatible with staying married.  Saying so is not making a value judgment; it’s an observation.

With all that taken into account, if staying married to this woman is not something you want very badly, staying married will be hard to do.  The choice is not entirely yours; this situation isn’t all about you.  Your half of the decision — just as important as your wife’s half — needs to be based on what you value in your life.

Posted in Being/staying married, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »

25 July 2010 by kathleen.

I wrote a week or so ago about the value of chatting, but I didn’t explain how to chat.

I can start with an example. Back in the ’70’s there was a British series called Fawlty Towers. John Cleese and Prunella Scales played Basil and Sybil Fawlty, owners of a small, seaside hotel in the south of England. In a third of the episodes or more, there was a scene in which Sybil was on the telephone with one girlfriend or another. You only heard one side of the conversation, Sybil’s, which inevitably went like this, “Oh, I know…… Oh, I know….. Oh, I knooooow…….” to unheard remarks.

Men don’t get it; men think it’s funny. The value in Sybil’s repeated phrase is feedback to the other party. It doesn’t much matter how she feeds back, it’s only important that she does so. Her girlfriend knows that she, Sybil, is listening. Sybil is repeatedly giving her friend small, innocuous positive strokes.

There: I’ve the the cat out of the bag. Chat to give your girlfriends positive strokes. Praise them; remark on the colors they’re wearing; empathize with them (”Oh, I know……”); let them know your are listening. That’s how other women will know your are one of them.

Apply this skill especially if you are keeping your marriage together across your transition. Use the technique on your partner, starting today: “Yes…… Uh-huh….. Uh-huh…… Really!…..” as she talks about the kids (or the grandkids), or the house, or the party coming up next week. You are giving her reinforcement that you are present — here, now — and listening to her. Your attention is an assertion that she is a worthy, valuable person. She gets those strokes from her girlfriends; as you manifest the woman within you, make yourself a valuable friend by doing the girlfriend-things she’s used to.

Anyway, that’s how I chat. It’s a learnable skill, doesn’t take much practice, and greases the social wheels so nicely!

Posted in Being/staying married, Sex & Gender Roles, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »

19 July 2010 by kathleen.

When I was a young man, dating, back in high school and college, my (female) date accepted responsibility for keeping the conversation going.  She chatted.

Women chat among themselves — when men are not around — about the little details of daily life, the details that are important to us.  We tend to notice the details, and we take the time to experience them.  We fuss with our hair and makeup; we are attentive to styles, textures, and the subtleties of color, as I wrote about in March.

We chatter incessantly while we’re shopping with our friends. We chat when we go out to dinner. If our dinner companion is not talkative, we take the lead. We entertain if we have to, maybe not publicly, but we keep our date amused — at least, we do if we ever want to go out with him again.

A few years before my transition, my wife and I went on a river cruise. There was an older couple seated near us; just a man and a woman. He rarely said more than a word or two at any meal. She tried to converse; in fact it appeared from the tired look on her face that she’d been trying to converse for decades. Meanwhile, at another table four women were gaily talking back and forth, at every meal. You could easily imagine a look of longing on the lonely wife’s face: if only he would talk!

So, do that: talk. As a transwoman dating an average sort of guy, talk. You will entertain him, whether he appreciates it or not. Whether you like him or not, do your duty and talk. As a transwoman married to an XY woman, your greatest social value is to hold up your end of the conversation.  She will appreciate it, all the more so if your male personality was quiet and somber.

Whether your partner is male or female, you will make your partner very pleased to be with you when you talk.

Posted in Being/staying married, Sex & Gender Roles | 1 Comment »

17 July 2010 by kathleen.

Many of us who now recognize that we are transsexual — many of us just didn’t know. We thought when we married you that we were “just” crossdressers or transvestites. Maybe not even that: maybe we thought we just had a fetish for makeup or shoes or nylons.

And many of us who thought we were crossdressers also thought we would get over it; that if we got married, the urge to crossdress would go away. I mean, we thought it was sex-based anyway, so when we started getting regular, healthy sex in marriage we wouldn’t need to crossdress any more. Yes, I know now there were several misconceptions in that thinking…..

So if you, our partners, feel betrayed, if you feel we lied to you, if you feel we were dishonest: wait. Some of us knew at a very early age that we were really girls not boys. Many others, though — like myself — just didn’t know, thought it would go away, or were in any case sure we could control it.

We did not withhold the information to hurt you. We were ashamed: we knew boys shouldn’t dress like girls, and we tried not to do it, but it was so hard, and we got so depressed when we didn’t dress.

If you are the spouse or parent or sibling, or maybe just the friend, of someone who now says “he” wants to be “she”, it is most likely that he didn’t know that his condition was more than transient.

Please consider a different context: suppose he found out at age 25, or 40, or 55, that he had a congenital heart condition that required him not only to have an expensive — but elective — surgery, but also required him to avoid sex because of the stress it might put on his heart. You might feel afraid for his life, and sad that it might be cut short, but would you feel betrayed?

Posted in Being/staying married, AutoBiog, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »

6 July 2010 by kathleen.

This is yet another post on the topic of telling loved ones about your essence: that you are transgendered, or whatever you are.

Living people change; long-term partners — legally married or not — are likely to change at different rates, or in different ways.  There is no shame, guilt, or deception involved: that people change is a fact, and the people in some relationships simply grow in such different ways that they must part.

As a transgendered person, your own view of yourself may change as your life unfolds.  My view did, and I’ve heard others say the same.

In my late teens and early 20’s I began to discover that

• sexual satisfaction was closely related to women’s clothing and makeup
• I was not the only one experiencing that relationship

What I didn’t realize or recognize — or acknowledge till I was in my late 50’s — was that my nature is transgendered; it is not simply the practice of wearing women’s clothes once in a while.  I denied vehemently that I was or could ever be transsexual — until of course I realized that I am transsexual.  The change I experienced was not a change in my nature or essence; that didn’t change.  Instead, I stopped denying my nature, and accepted it.  The change was in my perception of myself.

I am not the only one for whom that change occurred, either.  As we age and mature and learn more about ourselves, we may have the opportunity to discover that we have been in denial for 10 years, or 20, or 30, or 40.  We didn’t deliberately mislead anyone; we simply didn’t recognize what we were doing to ourselves.

What all this has to do with “telling” (the title of this post) is that you might not have divulged your nature to your partner because you didn’t know yourself just what was going on.  When you do finally realize that you have been in denial, your loved ones need to know.  They need to know for the same reasons I mentioned in Telling, Part 3.

Just as there is no shame or guilt if a married couple drifts apart because the partners grow in different ways, there need be no shame or guilt if you discover that you are not what you thought you were.

The absence of shame or guilt does not mean the absence of responsibility to tell.  Going back to Part 3: if you were to discover that you have a communicable disease, you would owe it to your partner to share that information.  When you discover or perhaps recognize that you are transsexual, even though, all the years you knew your spouse, you thought you were just an occasional crossdresser — yes, that is the time to divulge.

Posted in Being/staying married, General FtM topics, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »

5 July 2010 by kathleen.

I was interested in a blog post about transsexuals and marriage at enGender, Helen Boyd’s web site: what is it like for a couple going through transition?

If I were still the man my wife married, this would be much easier to explain. I did my best to be a sensitive and supportive husband before my transition, but I know there were many, many times when “we” did what “I”, The Husband, wanted.

Our relationship isn’t quite like that any more; I am not empowered to speak for my spouse/partner/friend the way I was empowered to speak for her (or thought I was, anyway when I was The Husband. It is very hard to write this without putting words in her mouth — which is what I try not to do… especially not any longer.

The story of our relationship through transition and SRS is influenced by the prostate cancer I had.My prostate was surgically removed just a few weeks after our 25th wedding anniversary. I was 53 years old at the time, which is somewhat young to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Usual or not, it left me with erectile dysfunction.

The silver lining in that otherwise dark cloud was that both of us were challenged to explore non-genital affection. By the time I started estrogen, I was accustomed to giving and receiving pleasure with parts of my body other than my male organ. Consequently, less changed for us on the physical side when I began taking estrogen; or rather, a change in style of affection occurred long before my transition.

In my opinion, one purpose of love-making between married persons is to affirm that each loves the other. If I don’t want to have sex with you, or you with me, I begin to doubt that you love me, or even like me. Without that confidence in a spouse’s affection, sexual tensions mount and trivial events become monumental emotional storms. Just touching you affirms that I love (or at least like) you.

The other side of heterosexual relations is that, at least in some jurisdictions, the husband has the right to demand that his wife submit to his sexual desires. That right — whether or not it is ever exercised — establishes a barrier between husband and wife, just as there is always a barrier between master and slave, no matter how much affection the master has for the slave. From one couple to the next, the barrier may be higher or lower, but legally it always exists in a man-woman marriage.

The mutual invitation to pleasure between persons in a same-sex couple is conducive to eliminating the barrier that arises from legal possession of the wife by the husband. That is not to say that all same sex couples have healthy, equality-based relationships; that is patently not the case. The legal and cultural basis for inequality, however, is not present.

I believe it was the tipping of that balance, the change from less equality to more equality, that gave me some uncertainty during my year of RLE. No, I was not the sort of husband who regularly said, “Woman, get on your back!” Nonetheless, I am aware that I, the former Husband, for the most part assumed I would have my way; male privilege was assumed. I knew I had to relinquish that privilege, and two and a half years later, I’ve almost let it go. More about male privilege in another post.

To answer the original question, I can say that for me there was some anxiety that the stresses of the transition could drive us apart. I strove — and still strive today — to prevent that from happening by being patient and affectionate. Keeping the marriage together, keeping it vibrant and satisfying: that is not business-as-usual. It requires attention, love, and care.

Posted in Being/staying married, AutoBiog, General MtF topics, Prostate cancer & SRS | 1 Comment »

15 April 2010 by kathleen.

I have mentioned here and there that I have been married since 1976.  That’s a few weeks shy of 34 years as I write this.   I haven’t provided much detail though; I cannot do so without infringing on my partner’s privacy. I think tonight I’ll stick to what I call her.

I have been using partner pretty consistently.  In a comment, Sophie urged the use of consort instead of partner.  Consort, though, has a connotation of less-than-licit sexual liaison; partner, however, while gender-neutral, has a bit of a commercial overtone.  While we are certainly financial partners, owning a house and other things in common, or relationship is also richer than that.

Spouse is a really good word, in my opinion, because it is both gender-neutral and marriage-specific; the word, though, just sounds so formal to me.  My spouse is also my lover, which implies a sexual dimension to the relationship.  Sex is good; sexual dimension is not inaccurate — it is merely incomplete.  For our relationship is a legally-binding one, and is financial in addition to being affectionate.

If I say, she is my wife, then must I be her husband?  I was; to some extent I am, I think, still legally her husband.  Somehow wife does not sound right to me as a tag for her, nor does husband sound right for me; and wife doesn’t sound right to describe me either because I am both more and less than wife.

In short, there is not a word — not a thousand words — to convey the depth, complexity, nuance, and joy of our relationship.  For now, I think I will stick with partner, feeble though that word is.

Posted in Being/staying married, AutoBiog | 2 Comments »

18 March 2010 by kathleen.

Going to a civic league meeting is not like shopping at the mall, or going to the grocery store.  Oh, no.  At the civic league, the first piece of information everyone wants from you is your street and address.  You are not anonymous at a civic league meeting.

They had a speaker tonight, someone addressing a topic of considerable interest; if it hadn’t been for the speaker, I wouldn’t have gone.  In fact, my partner and I have lived in this house for nearly 25 years, and this is only the second meeting I’ve been to.

Er, except, of course, that the last time I went, I was John.

I really didn’t know what kind of reception I would get.  Would anyone connect my street address to the bald old guy that used to live there?  No, actually, no one did — but someone came close, and got an answer she didn’t expect.

They asked newcomers, which sort of included me, to stand up and introduce ourselves.  When I did so, a woman at the next table asked if I was related to “the librarian”?  Well, my wife is the supervising librarian at the city library a few blocks away, and, yes, I said I was related.

“Are you her daughter?”

“No.  I’m her partner.”

“Her what?”

“Her partner.”

I considered mentioning that we’d actually been married in 1976, but thought better of it and stopped.  My neighbor turned away with a quizzical look, but said no more to me.

I was very conscious tonight of not being exactly what I appeared to be, but I was darned close.  I’m glad I went tonight.

Posted in Being/staying married, AutoBiog | 3 Comments »