Tag: Transition

My Husband’s Transition – A Partner’s Perspective (Part 2 – Social Transition)

The story began in Part 1 – Exploration.

Coming out

We started Jake’s coming out process with some preparation and planning, as usual. We made a list of the people he wanted to tell first starting with who would be easiest to tell and would likely be the most accepting. Telling them would hopefully give Jake the confidence and support he needed to tell the ones who’s acceptance would have a bigger impact and therefore, would be a lot more stressful to come out to.

I helped Jake write an email that he sent to the first few people on the list. When that went well, he continued down the list at his own pace. We revamped that letter a number of times throughout the coming out process depending on who we were telling and what type of information they would respond to best.

Gender Gymnastics

I had my own sort of coming out process at the same time. For a long time I had been trying to refer to Jake using male pronouns and name in my own head and at home (which we discovered is hard to do because when it’s just the two of us we never use our proper names or third person pronouns). But until Jake was ready to come out I still had to refer to ‘my wife’ when I wanted to share personal stories with co-workers. This is something I had done a lot of in the past in an effort to be a visible example of a queer couple. Plus, I’m a talkative sort of person, what can I say. This became very uncomfortable, to the point where I began avoiding pronouns or using neutral pronouns when talking about Jake, and shortened his birth name to a gender neutral nickname. However, neither of those would fly around his family so I had to continue with the female pronouns and name with them.

Adjusting to someone’s new pronouns and name is extremely difficult for a lot of people but here I was switching back and forth between three sets of pronouns and names with minimal errors for about four months. We quickly realized this must be my super power. Even so, it took a lot of mental energy, caused a baseline level of burnout that would continue to escalate over the next two years, and caused me to develop a speech pattern that has random pauses in it from when I had to reorder the words in a sentence to avoid a pronoun midway through.

Telling My Co-workers

Around the time Jake started coming out to his friends and family, he gave me permission to ‘come out’ for him with my co-workers (whom he had minimal to no contact with). Finally, I would be able to use male pronouns and refer to my husband Jake. This happened to coincide with November 20th – Trans day of Remembrance. I work in health care in a department that is broken into smaller teams so I decided to make a short presentation at a the next team meeting.

I highlighted how difficult navigating the health care system can be for trans people and the disastrous consequences of that ignorance and transphobia can have, especially when it comes from a professional or happens at a time when the trans person is already in a vulnerable position. I explained that this issue is particularly important to me because my husband is transitioning. My voice only wavered a little bit at this point but I was extremely grateful that I could hide my shaking hands behind the lectern and lean on it for support when my legs went to jelly. I quickly followed this with an educational introduction video done by Jazz Jennings listing the 10 most important things to know about trans people. At the end of the meeting I received hugs from a couple of my closer friends on the team and someone even thanked me for helping them understand what a younger member of their family was also going through and how to support them better.

In my experience, there was plenty of gossip about co-worker’s private lives relating to other topics (deaths in the family, health issues, reasons for absences, personality conflicts, etc). I thought this would be a novelty item for gossip and would spread quickly through the department. Well, I was wrong. Either my partner transitioning is too far removed to be of interest (rather than me transitioning), or people didn’t know how to talk about it or were too uncomfortable to talk about it to want to gossip about it. Or they recognized that talking about it would constitute outing someone which is generally not acceptable, though in this case it would have been useful.

So this began about a year-long, slow coming out process with many repetitions of – blah blah my husband blah blah, oh yes, still the same person, yes, my wife is now my husband, no I haven’t gotten divorced and re-married in the span of a few months, my husband is transitioning, yes I’m ok with it, yes, I’m still gay, his name is Jake, no, it’s not actually polite to ask what his name was before, no, that’s alright, yes, I’m happy to explain it all to you sometime, just not right now in this room full of people, anyway, what I was saying was…. Each time my heart would pound, my palms would sweat, and I’d be glad I was sitting down or would find a chair quickly. This reaction lessened with each repetition but often the mini coming out sessions would take me by surprise because I was never sure who would have found out some other way or who I had told already (I am notorious for forgetting who I told what to).

Occasionally I would have longer more in-depth conversations with some of the co-workers I knew a bit better or some that were particularly curious. I say curious rather than nosy because for the most part their questions didn’t come from a place of wanting to know juicy details about my personal life or my husband’s. They were more curious about what the internal and external process was like in a general sense or in a health care related sense and what my reactions were to it. So even when their questions were targeted to me or Jake I would keep my answers broad such as ‘well often the trans person…’ or if I was ok being more specific or personal (which often I was) I would say ‘well I can’t speak for other people but for us…’ I had many conversations with Jake about what aspects of his transition he was comfortable with me sharing with people and lucky for me he usually said whatever I wanted to share was fine. This is partly because I was talking to people who he had little to no interaction with and partly because I work in health care and we want to educate as many health care workers about trans issues as possible.

Over time (via trial and error and educating myself via online resources) I learned what questions were appropriate for people to be asking and which ones they didn’t really need to know in order to expand their understanding of the trans experience. One example is when people would ask what his name used to be. They would remember that I had a wife but couldn’t remember my wife’s name so when I said I had a husband named Jake and yes, he was the same person as before, they wanted to fill in the missing information. In these instances I learned to tell people that this isn’t actually a question you should ask and provide an explanation why so they didn’t think it was just because I was uncomfortable answering and then go on to ask the same thing of the next trans person they met. For the above example I would explain that knowing his previous name wouldn’t help them understand his experience or who he was, it would likely only get in the way of them changing the image of him in their heads by giving them a female name to latch onto. Maybe at some point in the future I will be brave enough to challenge them by asking why they are curious about this in the first place and make them reflect on where that question is coming from.

Telling My Family

When Jake was ready to come out to my family we discussed who he needed to come out to directly and who I could act as a go-between for. I helped him rephrase his letter (again) and provided backup for the follow up questions. I had discussions with my immediate family about what this meant for me and how I was dealing with it all. By this time I had had plenty of practice with explaining this to people so though the conversation was slightly more intense because it was more personal, I managed it fine.

Since my family lives across the country from us they had to police themselves in order to reinforce correct name and pronouns. So we gave my immediate family some time to get used to the idea and more comfortable with the correct name and pronouns before telling my extended family. I hand wrote a personal letter and mailed it to my grandmother, hoping that the evident effort in writing it would show how important it was to me. I got a brief response from her that said she received it and that she loved us and she used male pronouns and ‘Jake’ throughout which was all we needed. We shortened this letter to just the necessary basics and sent it as an email to my extended family all at once. I got many responses of support, all of which I forwarded on to Jake so he would see them too. Overall, it went fairly smoothly.

Helping With His Family

Around Jake’s family I reinforced his name and pronouns just by using them. Since he never uses them for himself and they wouldn’t use them when talking to him it was only when I was also there that they would hear someone using them and we could see whether they were doing the same. This meant I had to get out of the habit of avoiding pronouns and start using them as much as possible – again, thankful for my super power. But their slow reaction time and constant misgendering of him took its toll on me. We discussed a number of times whether it was ok for me to correct them or not – was Jake not correcting them because he didn’t want to rush their acceptance process and he was trying to be respectful or because he didn’t have the energy but really wished I would? Jake preferred to correct them when he saw fit so when I felt my blood pressure rising I would bow out of a conversation or avoid social engagements with them for little while.

The turning point came when Jake’s step-brother got married. Jake hadn’t planned on telling his extended family yet but he knew he didn’t want to be introduced as the groom’s sister or be asked to wear a dress *shudder*. So about a month before the wedding Jake sent them an email (as per usual) and got a supportive reply suggesting they get together the next week when they were in town. We had a lovely open conversation with them and discussed how to handle this at the wedding. Jake decided he was going to jump in with both feet and correct people as needed but he would be ‘Jake’ and ‘he’, the groom’s brother from now on.

The majority of the guests at the wedding had never met Jake before, though a few would have known that the groom had a number of sisters but no brother. I assume some of that correction happened in the background on the groom’s part but for our part Jake and I made brief explanations and corrections for the people who actually knew him and his mom helped with that a bit too (yay!). Throughout the weekend everyone around us was referring to Jake as male like it was a non-issue. It was fantastic. More than that, it showed Jake’s immediate family that using Jake and he/him was ok, people wouldn’t treat him as a freak, and he was so much more relaxed. Because everyone else was calling him Jake and ‘he’, they looked weird when they didn’t. So his immediate family had a weekend of name and pronoun immersion which is just what they needed.

Coming out at work – more anxieties

We had been planning for Jake to come out at work for a while. He had contacted HR to make sure he had backup if he needed it, he had done bathroom reconnaissance to find a gender neutral bathroom in case the males were not supportive enough to feel safe using the men’s bathroom, and he had drafted a letter to his team lead and her boss. But after that weekend at the wedding where he got to be Jake for an entire weekend it was extremely difficult to go back to being a woman at work. So he bit the bullet and sent the emails and had the meetings.

When Jake was preparing to come out at work I had a resurgence of the anxieties about whether he’d be going to an antagonistic work environment that was unsafe but I knew that it would still be better than the constant overwhelming dysphoria. How would he deal with people that weren’t accepting? The first day when he was telling people was super stressful but in the end it went fairly well. They are still (more than a year later) messing up his pronouns on a daily basis which is taking a toll but overall everyone was supportive.

The next step was to start changing his ID. Not to mention that he was still waiting for the initial psychiatrist appointment who would refer him for hormones and surgery. This is where the real frustrations began.

The story concludes in Part 3: Medical and Legal Transition.

Differences in AFAB and AMAB Cross-Gender Exploration and Transition

Note: Since writing this post I have learned that the use of AMAB and AFAB to categorize people, especially nonbinary people, is exclusionary, reductive, and often not helpful in describing experiences in an accessible way. I am working to stop using these terms. I have chosen to leave this post up for now. If you feel strongly about what is written here please leave a comment or send me an email. I appreciate your input.

Historically in society the default has generally been masculine. This is slowly changing but is still true in a lot of ways. One of the main ways this is brought to my attention on a regular basis is that it is deemed appropriate for women to present in a more masculine way but it is not ok for men to present in a feminine way. The ‘androgynous ideal’ is often seen as someone with short hair and a flat chest both of which are typically masculine aspects of appearance.

AFAB people 

exploring your masculinity or trying to decrease your femininity

Pros

  • You can explore your gender and presentation without having to justify it as much.
  • Cis women who prefer an androgynous or masculine presentation are fairly easily accepted by society.

Cons

  • Your efforts to express a more masculine or less feminine gender will be seen as changes to your presentation only and will not necessarily be seen as a reflection of your gender. Therefore, people will not necessarily adjust the language they apply to you or your gender category until you explicitly come out.
  • You may have to over-masculinize to feel like it is having an impact on how people see and interact with you.

As an AFAB person exploring my mostly neutral but somewhat fluctuating gender and trying to present more masculine at times to reflect that, this has definitely been my experience.

AMAB people

exploring your femininity or trying to decrease your masculinity

Pros

  • Once you are ready to come out it will only take a few minor changes in your presentation for society to start questioning your gender and applying new language to you.
  • You will not need to overly-feminize (unless you want to) in order for society to take notice.

Cons

  • It is very difficult for you to explore your gender without society noticing and potentially putting yourself in a dangerous situation
  • Cis men who want to explore or express their femininity have difficulty doing so without having their gender identity questioned.

This leads to AFAB people having difficulty gaining male privilege because they are still deemed female no matter how masculine they present and AMAB people losing male privilege very easily as soon as they present slightly feminine.

For those people who are interested in undergoing medical transition there are distinct differences in experience with certain aspects of transition due to society’s specifications of how they identify someone as female or male at a glance.

AFAB people

attempting to be read by society as male

Pros

  • Male puberty overrides female puberty so taking Testosterone results in slow but effective changes to allow you to ‘pass’ as male fairly easily (voice lowering, growing facial hair, building muscle, body fat redistribution).

Cons

  • Producing the appearance of a flat chest is very difficult either by wearing a binder which is uncomfortable at best and injuring at worst, or surgery which has a difficult recovery and leaves obvious scars.
  • Surgery to relieve dysphoria associated with genitalia or provide a sense of physical euphoria or completeness has a high rate of complication and may require an extensive skin graft again resulting in visible scarring while providing minimal benefit for sexual function.
AMAB People

attempting to be read by society as female

Pros

  • Producing the appearance of breasts is fairly easy, either with breast forms and a bra or through a well refined surgery for breast augmentation if hormones do not produce the desired effect.
  • Surgery to relieve dysphoria associated with genitalia or provide a sense of physical euphoria or completeness, while still having a fairly high risk of complication, also is highly effective.

Cons

  • Because male puberty trumps female puberty, starting Estrogen after completing male puberty does not reverse the effects (facial and body hair continues to grow, voice remains lower) and though some breast tissue may develop, it is not always enough to provide the appearance of a typically female chest.

Caveat: The pros/cons related to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) will differ if you’re on hormone blockers prior to the start of puberty.

This all results in trans men ‘passing’ more easily but potentially having ongoing physical dysphoria or visible scarring as a result of surgery and trans women having difficulty ‘passing’ but having effective surgical options if desired.

These are my own observations during my husband’s transition from female to male, my experiences as an AFAB genderqueer person, and listening to other trans people’s experiences. If your experiences match or differ from these observations please leave a comment below!

My Husband’s Transition – A Partner’s Perspective (Part 1 – Exploration)

initial reaction

We were driving in the car together (the place a lot of our more intense conversations happen) and my husband turned to me and said something like “I’ve been wondering lately if my social anxiety and awkwardness might be gender related…”. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that and tried to clarify. The conversation progressed something like this:

Jake: “What if this means I’m trans? What if I won’t be happy unless I transition?”

Me: “Wondering if your anxiety is gender related is nowhere near deciding you’re trans. Lets just take it one step at a time. And so what if that’s where it leads? We’ll figure it out.”

Jake: “You wouldn’t leave me? You’re gay! What if I end up being a guy? That’s not what you signed up for. You mean more to me than figuring this out. I wouldn’t do any of it if you weren’t going to be ok with it.”

Me: “Yah, I’m gay. So what? I love you. Let’s take it one step at a time. I can’t guarantee that there won’t be stuff that I’ll struggle with. But we’ll figure it out. You have to figure out how to be happy, figure out who you are. There’s no way I’d be ok holding you back from that.”

I don’t know if those are the exact words but you get the gist. I’ve heard from other people – either trans people or their partners – that this is a fairly common pattern. I understand why Jake would say that he wouldn’t transition if it meant I would leave him but what kind of person would I be if I said yah, I’ll stay so long as you never live authentically? Not the kind of person I wanted to be, that’s for sure.

This revelation didn’t particularly take me by surprise but I know it does for a lot of people. Jake had been living as authentically as possible and was quite a masculine woman to begin with which, I recognize, is a benefit of being AFAB that is not afforded to AMAB people who want to present more feminine (more about my thoughts on this topic here). I also had my own gender questioning experience and had been involved in the queer community for a number of years which gave me an understanding of what he might be feeling and the language to conceptualize and express it (more about my personal history here).

Exploration and Experimentation

So, we took it one step at a time, starting with a deep dive of the internet. We quickly learned terms like dysphoria, FTM and MTF, learned about binders and packers and STPs (stand-to-pee devices), and started looking for community support.

For the first few months we were exploring and talking about his gender confusion pretty much in secret. I was must happier being his confidant and helping him sort through it than I would have been finding out later that he had struggled through this part on his own while I was out/at work.

We learned pretty quickly that Jake’s experience of his gender and dysphoria didn’t match the typical trans experience of ‘feeling like you were born into the wrong body’ and ‘telling your parents that you were meant to be a [insert non-assigned gender here]’ or ‘suddenly feeling like your body was betraying you when you started puberty’. It took a while before we could explain what his experience actually WAS but now we know that, at least at the beginning, he primarily was experiencing social dysphoria (as opposed to the physical dysphoria described in the stereotypical examples). He felt fairly neutral towards his body but felt uncomfortable in female spaces, being treated as a woman, and referred to as female.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible for general society to perceive you as male unless you physically appear as male so even though he was not uncomfortable in his body, a lot of the exploration required altering his presentation and body appearance (trying binding, packing, haircut, wardrobe changes, etc). This progressed at Jake’s pace which was significantly slower than I wanted things to move. I was all – yah! you can do it! Let’s figure this shit out! But sometimes people need time and space and the supporters need to give them that.

We also wanted to explore the social aspects of being male (pronouns, name, interaction) but that is impossible to test without first telling other people who you are exploring your gender and could they please use male pronouns and a different name for you. At the time we did not have a group of friends that we felt comfortable doing that with as a trial period so we tried it as best we could just between us.

My role and experience as a partner

Through all this my role was helping him see the bigger picture about how far he’d come, help him to not get discouraged or frustrated, provide support and feedback, provide options when the first thing didn’t work or feel good, provide positive distractions and outlets, and help him find confidence in his new image. Pretty much just give him a positive, safe space to explore himself in. I would often ask him how something had felt and he would struggle to put it into words so we would start with did it feel good, or bad? We used the things that felt good as a compass for what direction he was going with his gender.

I often pushed him to take the next step before he felt ready. This is partly because I didn’t want fear to stop him from figuring out who he is but also because the longer it took him to figure himself out the longer I was in limbo. How do you start the process of acceptance when you don’t know what the new status quo is going to be? I had a constant feeling of unsteadiness which worsened when I was away from Jake and improved when we spent time together. I think this is because when we were apart my mind would fixate on all the new things, all the changes, and all the unanswered questions. When we were together it was obvious that he was still the same person, we had the same inside jokes, enjoyed doing the same things, and had the same interactions as always. Together time was the major antidote to both of our mental and emotional stress during the entire transition and we learned early on to prioritize it as much as possible.

Changing my mental image of Jake

I knew a big part of accepting whatever the end result was going to be was that I had to change my mental image of Jake to match his mental image of himself. I was able to do this bit by bit rather than all at once. As he explored his gender we communicated regularly which allowed me to understand his sense of his own gender as he discovered it. This was very beneficial to me and allowed me to adjust the pronouns and name I used for him much more easily when he was ready to experiment with those.

Changing your mental image of someone who has told you they don’t identify as the gender they were assigned at birth is hugely important. In order to be truly supportive I couldn’t continue to see him as a woman – I wouldn’t be able to discuss his dysphoria or experiences of gender euphoria in ways that felt authentic to him. Yes, this took some personal work, a lot of mental corrections anytime I thought of him, and a lot of quality time talking about his perception of himself as it was changing during his experiments so I could give my mental image the best chance of keeping up. And once he was ready to change his name and pronouns it allowed me to consistently use male pronouns because my mental image of him was of a male person, regardless of what his physical appearance was. One of the things that helped the most with this was changing his name in my phone so that every time he texted me or called me I would see his preferred name. This was a huge step forward when I figured that out. We ended up recommending it to other people as he was coming out to them in an effort to help them adjust as well.

My Own Fears

I had many fears and questions that came up throughout this process. I didn’t want to talk to Jake about them all the time because I didn’t want my struggles to increase his already exponential fear and confusion. Luckily, we had a couple of friends that Jake felt comfortable telling early on in the process so that I would have someone to talk to about this stuff. Having that outlet was very important.

Some of my fears were: How would I respond to people’s questions about my identity changing? What if I wasn’t as attracted to him once he started appearing more male? What if I wasn’t interested in being married to a man? What if he changed as a person as he transitioned? Many of these questions couldn’t be solved just with introspection or discussion. Some required time and patience, some required trial and error, something I’m not as comfortable with. I had to see how I felt about him in ‘boy mode’.

So, on a vacation to an area where we wouldn’t likely run into people we knew, we planned for him to be my husband for the whole trip. We used male pronouns and tried out a couple different names that had made the short list. As we went along we realized you don’t introduce yourselves to many people when you’re on vacation, or at least not when you’re both introverted and you’re going on a driving and camping trip and the general goal is to stay away from civilization as much as possible. So it wasn’t the best test but it still gave us one more piece of evidence.

The Tipping Point

At some point we sat down and made a list of the stuff he had already tried and the stuff he wanted to try next and we realized that even if he didn’t go any further with exploration or transition he would still be more comfortable living as a man than either a non-binary person or a woman. Finally, I could let my mental image of him solidify.

At the same time, he all of a sudden had an exponential increase in physical dysphoria. He had identified that he was a man and suddenly his body was no longer what he wanted it to be or what other people would expect. This took us both by surprise. I have since learned that this is a very common experience from talking to other trans/NB people. This was extremely difficult for him to deal with and all I could do was support him, distract him, and interact with him in ways that validated his identity and avoided triggering more dysphoria.

The next step was to start telling people. This was a big relief for me because I no longer had to be alone in this. I would be able to share what was happening – take the lid off the boiling pot so to speak. But the thought of him coming out as trans increased my anxiety and fear in new ways – how people would react, would Jake be put in any danger, how he would respond to people who weren’t accepting, whether he would stand up for himself or absorb and internalize the antagonism.

There was nothing for it but to make a plan as best we could and push on.

The story continues in Part 2: Social Transition.

The story concludes in Part 3: Medical and Legal Transition.