Still figuring out who and what I am: bi-gender?

Hi. This whole thing is new to me, so let me tell you my story.

I'm 47, and my 54-year-old husband is MTF transgender. He came out to me in 1998 and is currently living as a male but considering transition, to some degree. He identifies as male at this time, and uses the he pronoun. He announced his intention to take the next step: an orchiectomy and HRT, to see if that's enough to make him happy. While we worked through our relationship regarding this, it pulled a lot of band-aids off of some of my own personal feelings and issues. We've already scheduled doctors appointments to start counseling to deal with this.

Among those included "I feel like" and my response was sometimes, "so do I, so what?" Which brought up a LOT of things, including some dysphoria with my body vs who I am in my mind. The confusing thing was that I have some really, really strong desires to be a femme female, but already had a female body - that happens to be a strange blend of masculine and feminine traits. I also have some strong personality traits that are distinctly male. My husband described me as having a "testosterone war" with a friend of mine who's this huge cop. We were trying to out-male each other, which weirded him out but he couldn't figure out what was going in.

I tend to build friendships with men more easily than women. I enjoy shopping with women, doing sparkly fashion stuff, but for friendships, I look to men. Back in the 1990s I met a couple through a mutual person we both knew and liked them both. I formed a friendship with the husband, and a friendly acquaintance with the wife. Eventually she asked me to back off and stay away, because she couldn't handle her husband having a closer friendship with a woman than she had with him. I had no interest in him sexually and she knew that. He somehow accepted that male side of me as a friend, we shared interests. She was upset because I was becoming her husband's best friend - which was a role she could only accept of a person with a penis.

Since puberty I have gone back and forth constantly between being terrified of embracing my soft feminine side, which I desperately want to express, wearing frilly things and pink and , but there's another side that forced me into generic jeans and t-shirts, choosing masculine bedroom decor, and being terrified of allowing that feminine side to take over. In high school I tried to be a cheerleader, but then took woodshop, autoshop, and later I tried to sign up for the football team, but my mom refused to sign the permission slip for it. Instead I signed up for an unnecessary year of PE to take flag football. It was gratifying, but frustrating that my classmates in that PE class wouldn't accept me as "one of them," just for that hour a day.

After high school I worked as a security guard for a while, then I joined the military. I am incredibly comfortable in uniforms - though I often hate the actual design, LOL. Then after the military I went the other way, rejecting wearing even pants, wearing only frilly girly stuff that never made me happy either. Eventually I withdrew to a moderate feminine look that still includes skirts, but I never could get past the idea that I was using those clothes to "pass." That idea got worse when a job required me to work at a transgender conference for a day, and I saw something there that scared me badly. I thought it was about my husband, but I later realized I saw myself in these people with male bodies dressing in women's clothing - it wasn't me physically, but it was me mentally.

I had two sons, then a daughter, and I went overboard in girlifying my daughter - I was using her as a proxy for the way I wished I could dress. I wished I could be the woman I want to be. There was this other thing holding me back, a side that wasn't comfortable with being female.

Since I'm really tall and athletic/heavy built, I tried to embrace the "warrior princess Amazon" thing, mostly during the Xena era, when I thought maybe I could identify with the big badass woman who could be feminine and have a really strong side, but that didn't sit right. It didn't feel like me.

I've fantasized about being a man, and fantasized about being a petite little woman, and occasionally in my fantasies I'm both simultaneously during sex. But I've never been attracted to a woman in real life, no romantic interest at all. Apparently my mind is somehow bisexual, but my body is straight in responses to actual people.

Regarding my body, I have never seen it as all female. It has female sexual parts - complete with annoying oversize boobs - but I also have the straight hips (I had three caesarians because I couldn't give birth naturally) and a barely defined waist. As a kid/teen I was a four-sport athlete, I would bulk-up like a guy and get big arms, legs and thigh muscles with little effort. Eventually I began to avoid working toward fitness because it further stripped me of my desperately clinging to physical femininity

So, back to my conversations with my husband.

While we talked all this out, we discovered there are many incidents through my life, personality traits that fit both stereotype male (I mansplain, tend to be aggressively alpha in a masculine way, etc) that he has observed, and that I told him about, things I never really thought about before. With my first doctor's appointment just over a week away, we did the idiotic "Dr Google" thing. At first we both focused on the mental mismatch between my uber-feminine identity and my big, solid body. Just as he did tons of research for his transgender issues, we began to research my issues, to find questions we could bring to the doctor. We found about for possible things, but none of them seemed to fit. One required me to be constantly trying to change something obsession with changing a body part) or to see something about my body in a way that it wasn't, like someone with anorexia). Another required me to feel an actual disconnect with my body. It led to a lot of questions to ask the doc, but none of them seemed close enough to fit.

This morning at 4:30 a.m. I woke up in the middle of the night with my brain screaming at me. It told me that this girly personality was there, but there was also a male personality. And that male side just kind of stood up and said "Um, yeah, I've been here all along. Are you blind? Why do you think your girlyness can't just take over?"

All if the turmoil in my head for the pat week, since we dredged up my issues, suddenly quieted. Once my husband went off to work I started googling about having dual genders, and when the description of non-binary gender disorder popped up, and I read it, it was like my world snapped into place.

The forums my husband frequents and where he referred me to their "significant others forums" for education and support, all insist that transgender is a binary thing. The say, "You're either MTF or FTM, and if you're somewhere in the middle you're just lying to yourself and eventually you're going to end up transitioning all the way, so you might as well accept it and do it now." And the message for the spouse is "either get on board or get out of the way/divorce." Which really didn't help matters either. I ended up in huge arguments with them, my gut screaming at me that "They're wrong!" But I had no idea why I was saying this. Their message just seemed so incomplete, and insulting.

Now I think I know why. My upset wasn't about my husband (though that part didn't help since we're trying to find a way to make our marriage work). It was about me.

So, here I am, exploring something that I don't know what do do about.

The names Kasia and Kaiden are from two stories I wrote, high fantasy fiction. I knew that Kasia, the character in my book, represented the inner me, a female shapeshifter. In human form she's a petite, pretty little thing who has a badass attitude but is all girl. She is supposed to be able to shift between human and wolf, but has been trapped in the wolf's body her whole life. Only a man who could accept her as she is - both sides of her - could free her from her prison. Kaiden is the protagonist from the first and only story I have written almost entirely from the male POV. I didn't question why it felt so natural writing from his point of view. This morning I realized Kaiden is the other inner me, the big aggressive warrior with identity issues. Inside of me they're so intertwined, I'm not sure how to separate them. For now I'm using those names for these two sides of me to try to sort this out.

 

It's not quite 36 hours since my epiphany, and holy shit it it amazing. I feel a million times better, and I actually fell asleep last night without my mind screaming incoherently at me that something was not right. I haven't felt this free and easy minded since my childhood. It's a joy to finally acknowledge the part of me I have denied for so long. It's always been there, not trying to hide. I just refused to grant it recognition and wanted it to go away.

As for my husband and I, we are trying to make it work and right now the way my mind works, if he fully transitions I don't know if we could stay together. I am straight to the point that I don't even like to be around other women, I don't touch other women. It's - yucky, like touching a spider. It's not a panic thing, just a dislike/distaste.

At this point we're both committing to some kind of compromise. Our marriage has been based on compromise for 27 years, and we have an amazing marriage and relationship. Neither of us can imagine life without the other. He has told me that, *at this point* keeping me as his wife and intimate partner is more important to him than full transition. Both of us know that may change in the future. Similarly, he's not sure what would happen if I explore each of my dualities and go too far. I have promised to keep it within HIS comfort zone. I've done this for 35 years, I can keep doing it for as long as he needs me to.

Both of us have said we would be just as unhappy without each other as we would be if we don't get everything we need to address our gender issues. Might as well be partly unhappy together over being partly unhappy apart.

I feel this incredible need to shout it to the world, to announce it to family and friends and people who don't give a shit. But we're waiting to even tell our children about either of us until we both get a formal diagnosis and schedule the start of counseling. After that, any announcements we make to friends/co-workers/non-close family will depend on our individual readiness. I will probably be ready before he is. We're planning to do both individual and couples counseling, whatever we need to make this work.

If I lost him, I would probably spend the rest of my life in some dinky apartment staring at the walls. I'm too terrified of death to ever consider suicide, so I'd just bury myself in a mental funk and check out mentally.

 

Right now I'm still feeling out what means what. Comfort/discomfort around men/women may have some relationship, it may not. I'm still exploring, and trying to not ignore anything that may be relevant.