My Situation

Hi all,

I wanted to go into a little more detail on my own situation than I did in my intro post in hopes of getting a little advice or encouragement as I process all of this.

I'm a trans woman and a lesbian. I've known all my life, at least a little I guess, but I only really came to accept it a month or so ago. I am a pastor and I've spent the last year or so trying to make up for the negative ways the church as a whole as treated this community. In doing so I tried to reconcile what I had been taught by the church with what I was hearing from this community. That was a very long process, but long story short when I realized that gender being a spectrum, and something different than biology, made more sense than anything else I'd heard on the subject, I started to wonder just where on that spectrum I would be. This is the end result.

Anyways, no one in my life knows. I live in another country from the one I grew up in, a thousand miles away from my parents and the rest of my family. I'm married, have been for almost 6 years now, to a cis woman. Her family lives within a half mile of our place. This is the South and they are rather conservative not to mention nosy as hell. I wear my hair long and I almost always wear it up in a bun or with a claw clip. (I love getting it blown out, too! The salon is just about my favorite place on earth.) Last summer I had it braided (looked amazing!) and her family thought I was gay and tried to split us up over it.

That's the environment I'd be coming out to. One of my wife's cousins is trans ftm and the family never speaks highly of him. As far as my wife is concerned, she doesn't care about trans issues as long as they don't affect her directly. She used to take offense at people calling me a woman because of how I look but she doesn't so much anymore. Even if she would accept me I'm not sure her family could, and that probably means she wouldn't, either. (Last summer when her family attacked me she said she was neutral and just wanted to stay out of it.)

If I come out even just to my wife and it goes badly I have nowhere to go down here. I could go back to my parents easy enough, move back up there, but my passport is expired. I'm reasonably confident I could get back there with my birth certificate and Green card but that's a one way trip. It would take weeks to get my passport renewed. There wouldn't be any temporary separation for my wife and I if it came to that, you know? If I did go back there and then return here eventually it would mean looking for a job all over again, and jobs are hard to come by right now. Plus we just got our own place, and I'm not sure she could pay for it on her own or how I'd send money to her or even if I would.

So yeah. I want to live openly as who I really am. Someday I'd like to have HRT as well. Not sure about the surgery yet, if I'd want to go that far or could even afford it. And yet this situation seems so complicated I don't know what to do.

I do have small victories, if I can call them that. My hair is long and I'm growing it longer. It's permed and colored the way I like it (got dark purple and blue in it the last time). I wear it as feminine as I like and no one fusses much anymore. I have one ear pierced and I'm planning on getting the second one done soon (this week coming, I hope).

Thing is, I want more than that. I hate playing a role that doesn't fit who I am.

 

Thanks!