Being transgender, coming out as transgender has been rife with so many bizarre or painful double binds. I have had to choose between what my heart tells me is true, at the cost of so many things: my marriage, potential health risks, painful procedures, the risk of violence, giving up my male privilege. However, it is often my momentary awareness of responses in these situations that has helped me clarify who I am and what I must do.
I will give you an example.
I am bi or pan sexual orientation, or something of a more flexible sort, at least in romantic attraction. My wife is not. She is straight. Kind, compassionate, and very very much the epitome of the cisgender straight woman. After I started wearing rings and nail polish she lost all romantic interest in me. We haven’t had sex since that time, several months before I came out... almost a year at the time of writing this.
In our conversation I was complaining that I missed the touch and affection. I was hurt and suffering and felt like it was emotionally neglectful. She looked at me, exasperatedly, sad, angry and said, “I’m not interested in women”.
It should have hurt. I was rejected.
She thought of me as a woman. She really did.
I fought the urge to smile.
This is not to say I am not grieving the loss of my marriage. I am hurting, horribly. I miss her, as I know she misses ‘me’, the me she knew and loved.
Technically, our marriage vows didn’t have he/she/man/wife in the language. Technically, she “shouldn’t” reject me. Technically, I was born with a penis and was labeled a male.
I can’t really stand on technicalities in this.
It is just a big bramble pile of a painful mess; there is no untangling it. Hard choices have to be made, hard losses need to be endured. Parts of me, of my life, will be pruned away to make way.
I think of it as dying and being reborn. He is dead, she is free. To death do us part. She and I, two free women again.
If it were easy, I would have done it years ago.