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[quote=Anonymous]My spouse and I had been married for over ten years when he came out as trans. Assigned female at birth, now identifies exclusively as male. Before I get to my thoughts, if you're local to DC, MCC NOVA has a trans significant others group. I used to go, but stopped with COVID, so I don't know if it's virtually or what these days but I found it VERY helpful. The information is here (https://www.transunity.net/support-groups/) under SO Circle. A lot of the people there are people in exactly your shoes, women with assigned male spouses that are non-binary or at least somehow "mixed" in gender presentation. It's a really helpful group. A lot of what I'm going to tell you comes from sharing experience there. I'll also say it's a place with a lot more older folks; most trans support groups are 20 year olds. There's also a trans SO reddit group (https://www.reddit.com/r/mypartneristrans/) which I read a lot when this started. It helped.

Not every marriage where one partner transitions fails, but many do. It's not automatic to go to a divorce lawyer unless you see no way for this to work at all. Our first stop was to a couple's therapist, but eventually we stopped going together and I saw the couple therapist individually. We saw someone through Keith Miller & Associates, who specialize in gay couples therapy but also had people with experience with trans people. The person we saw there was great (Samuel Allen) but he's in Chicago now and maybe only available through Zoom?

You'll also hear a lot of your sense of a lack of progress echoed if you talk to other women in relationships like this. Figuring out a new identity is scary; it's a life changing thing and a lot of people stand at the threshold for a long time before deciding if they want to come in. My husband tried to make it a thing he only did when I wasn't around for a few months, convinced that he'd rather die than tell me (and we took a couple of trips to the psych ward that year because he was suicidal). It's hard. It's frustrating not to know where it's going, but it's not really a process that can be rushed. Set whatever boundaries you need, but his identity is his deal and only he can figure it out.

Sex is almost always the biggest problem. I'm a very conventional straight dude, so yeah, I'm not especially attracted to him as a guy. He also has no interest in men as a man (he identified as bi before), so we don't sleep together anymore. He dates outside our marriage pretty often, I don't, because I'm not as interested, but opening up and having a platonic relationship is what worked for us. Sex was a pretty important part of our relationship before, and now it isn't, and we're doing really well. He's still the love of my life, we have all kinds of non-sexual physical intimacy (cuddling, hugging, etc.), we're a family with kid, just like before. This might not work for everyone, although I know at least a couple other open relationship from the support group, but that's the option we chose.

Anyway, I hope that's helpful a bit. It's hard. There's no roadmap and few people have this experience. For me, the marriage was worth adapting to the change, but it's still a challenge sometimes.[/quote]

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