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Her Husband

Narratives like this one are always so hard to read. It’s all so familiar, and brings me back to a time when I hadn’t made any peace (yet) with my partner’s transition, and I knew so much more going into the marriage, had not yet been married 20+ years, but to “Diana” – you’re not alone. There are a lot of us out here.

This paragraph, in particular:

Can I walk away? No. Can I stay? Today I don’t think I can, but my answer changes all the time. I don’t just love this man, I adore him. After all these years, he still makes my toes curl when he kisses me. Every day he makes me laugh. He holds me when I cry. We have always been there for each other. To this day, my favorite thing is falling asleep on his shoulder in front of the TV at night. I believe him when he tells me hurting me like this is heartbreaking for him. This man whom I have admired for so many years is also fighting depression and has confided in me he’s thought about taking his own life. He’s also hurting and struggling with the turmoil he’s brought into our lives. He isn’t a deceitful monster. Like me, he’s stuck between what he wants and what he can have.

I really need to get the next book written. I really, really do.

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Five Questions With… Tasha

Another interview with a partner whose narrative is in Transgress Press’ Love, Always.

1. What didn’t you write about in your narrative but wish you had?

I wish I had known at the beginning that they were going to discard the conceit that it was a “letter to our partners”; I submitted early, before they abandoned that title and theme and opened it up to all sorts of contributions. (I actually love the new approach and think it was brilliant, so I’m not complaining about the change!) It seemed weird to me to write to my wife about things that she was there for, so I omitted a lot of discussion about, for example, the times when the year she spent in transition was tough in ways I never anticipated. I knew the “big stuff” would be a tremendous deal, but I didn’t expect to find myself crying every time I looked at her newly pierced ears, or that sometimes her gender issues would overshadow everything to the point where I’d be desperate for a conversation about something banal like who forgot to pick up cat litter. I didn’t realize that the process of transition wasn’t going to be about huge milestones so much as a million little things, all of them nibbling away at the life I knew and replacing it with the unknown. There were indeed some huge milestones, but when they came, I tended to have had a lot of warning and to cope very well.

I also didn’t want to make her feel guilty, and composing a letter ostensibly to her of “ways you made me suffer” seemed likely to do so. Particularly when, at this late date, we’ve both hashed this stuff out often enough that it would seem like re-opening wounds that have (genuinely) healed. But I think that sort of thing is important to tell because it shows that happy ever afters are possible… and that like most things in marriage, it takes work and determination and sometimes tears.

Oh, right, and lest I look like a saint, I kind of wish there’d been a way to shoehorn in the anecdote about the time I screamed “How can you be fine with growing breasts but afraid to buy a bra?!!” at the top of my lungs and then fled weeping into the bedroom and slammed the door. It’s easy to tell a story with smoothed edges and narrative flow after the fact, but the reality was messy and complicated and sometimes involved me completely losing the plot.
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How Marriage Changed

I did this talk back in November for Lawrence. It’s a basic overview of the changes in marriage, focusing specifically on same sex marriage and how, and why, things seemed to change so quickly.

So this is what I do these days.

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Five Questions With… Loree Cook Daniels

Another interview with one of the partners whose narrative is in Transgress Press’ Love, Always. Loree Cook Daniel’s is the “partner’s partner” and has been working on SOFFA support and inclusion in the trans community for 20 years. She works primarily with FORGE, the awesome trans advocacy group out of Milwaukee.

1. What didn’t you write about in your narrative but wish you had?
I’ve been partnered with a trans person for a total of 32 years now; there is a LOT that wasn’t covered!

2.  What is the biggest misunderstanding you confront as a partner to a trans person?
The thing that most irritates me is when someone tells me that because “I’m cis” I don’t get it.  First of all, I don’t identify as cis. But secondly, I’ve been working on trans issues for more than 20 years, and from the beginning I have had a really strong commitment to understanding and representing the tremendous diversity there is in the trans community. It ticks me off when someone who came out last year or the year before that says that because of their experience, they know more about being trans than I do. Kinda like the heart patient who says she knows more about heart attacks than her heart surgeon: if you had a heart problem, which one would you rather get advice from? I’ve had people who said they didn’t want me to train them because they wanted to hear from a “real” trans person.

3. Where do you get your support?
When my first partner first transitioned, I was active on a lot of the partner’s listservs. But those didn’t always feel supportive to me, because Marcelle and I were not comfortable with a lot of the group norms, some of which involved being a “good (silent, nonequal) partner.”  So it seemed like I was either involved in a conflict or just giving advice from what I’d gathered in working with so many people; I didn’t get support for myself. I think this is still true.  I still have trouble finding/feeling support for me and my issues. Except, of course, that both of my partners have been *extremely* supportive of me. I just don’t feel much support from “out there.”

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Five Questions With… Dan

In honor of the publication of Transgress Press’ Love, Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge, & Resistance, I’ve done a few interviews with partners whose words appear in this book.

The first of these is with Dan, whose wife transitioned to male.

 

1.What didn’t you write about in your narrative but wish you had?

I didn’t write about sex. Make that S-E-X sex. It is a hard subject for me and for most people, I suppose. I have learned that, despite the widely held view that transgender people are, by and large, some sort of sex pervert, it seems that transitioning and post-transition folks are often asexual. It is understandable in that for many trans people, their sex organs–and in the case of trans men, their breasts–are hated reminders of their lifelong “wrong body” predicament. Still, I was not at all prepared for my partner to tell me, shortly after beginning transition, that he had lost interest in sex.

I am 69 years old as of this writing and Rob is 13 years behind me. We’ve been together, sexually, for about 35 years. We had always had a very satisfying love life, and the loss-of-interest announcement came so closely on the heels of transition that I naturally think of the two incidents as being related. Rob had been peri-menopausal for a few years before starting on “T,” and that immediately cut off the supply of estrogen and brought on full-scale menopause. It is not unusual for women to find their sex drive diminishing with menopause, but this was an abrupt and dramatic change.

For the first few years I struggled hard with this. We didn’t talk much about it, partly because I didn’t want him to feel guilty or pressured or any such thing, but I am a sexual guy. I thought about raising the possibility of opening our relationship, but discarded that idea quickly. Early in our marriage we had some experiences with sharing a third-party lover, but we gave that up as something that was simply not our style. Of course, I considered the possibility of an affair, but we have a trust-based, monogamous relationship and I would never jeopardize that, nor do I think for a moment that Rob would ever tolerate that. Neither could I, for that matter.

A couple years ago, Rob indicated that he was interested in re-establishing our sex life, but by that time we also found that he had developed one of those other post-menopausal bugbears: dryness and some pretty serious pain with intercourse. At the same time, whatever prowess I might once of had was mostly in my memories. I had hip replacement surgery when I was 60 and again three years later. The pain and mobility problems leading up to and recovering from those certainly reduced my skills and stamina for being a very energetic lover. These days I think Robin is more ready and willing to get it on than I am, not because I don’t want to or don’t find him attractive, but largely because we’re just way out of practice and, truth be told, we’re just not as young as we were when this all started.

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