• I’m AMAB (29) and do not want to be a man, but am also attached to certain aspects of manhood. I also have really severe OCD and mentally have always avoided feeling and processing anything that is challenging or hard (this is going to be relevant later).
• I haven’t changed my pronouns. She/her is just incorrect. They/them makes me feel panicky. I’ve been called he/him my entire life.
• I like the sound of all the effects of estrogen except for breast growth(the thought of having breasts also makes me feel panicky) so I have no plans for HRT. I think this is related to some body dysmorphia issues I have with my weight.
• I can’t tell if I prefer a beard because I like having a beard or because my face gives me dysphoria, but I generally keep a short beard.
• I hate getting called “sir”. I hate when a strange man walks up to me and acts friendly in the guy way where he wants to do the handshake and call me “man” or “dude” or “bro” after every sentence. I hate when I can tell someone is treating me differently because they perceive me as a man, even when the treatment is better.
• I also really enjoy wearing my yoga pants and above the knee socks, but I tried wearing a skirt one time and it made me freak out. I didn’t like how I looked.

I think about this sort of the thing all the time to the point where it’s really worn me out. I’m tired of staring at myself in the mirror. I’m tired of trying to figure out what parts of my body I like and don’t like. I’m tired of just dissociating or shutting down because I’m depressed about who I am and about my body.

I’ve loved being around trans inclusive spaces and just getting to know various trans people online. I love reading about trans experiences and learning about the process of transition and how it looks so different for so many different people.

With regard to the people pleasing, whenever someone else expresses a need or desire, I almost always process that as a demand. I also process most people’s negative feelings as criticism, especially people I’m close with. There’s a lot of toxic shame going on there.

• She’s cis (31). She’s straight (like a 1 on the Kinsey) and on the asexual spectrum and experiences extreme sex repulsion. I’m the only person who she’s ever enjoyed having a sexual relationship with.
• She has a lot of sexual l, emotional, and mental trauma from past relationships which includes having sex under false pretenses among other things (but the sex repulsion was pervasive before the trauma occurred, so she’s positive they aren’t related).
• She has also experienced a lot of discord between her relationship with her gender and the experiences of women. For example (sharing with her permission), she has always been EXTREMELY disturbed and disgusted by getting a period. She has always described herself as “being bad at being a girl.” She’s said in previous discussions we’ve had that she’s always felt like she wasn’t a woman like everyone else, but she is mostly okay with paving her path own path to womanhood without worrying about anyone else.

• We’ve been together for 12 years in July of 2024. When we first got together I struggled with commitment and broke up with her and cheated on her a few times, but we’ve been solidly strong together for at least 8 of those years. However, I have had SOME sort of issue with commitment or trust every two or three years since we got together, including seeking other women to talk to (ie online chatting for sexual stuff), asking one of my friends to have a threesome with us without asking her permission first, and emotionally cheating on her and kissing the girl I was trying to date before my wife and I got together.
• We both come from rather toxic family dynamics. Hers was very in your face so she’s had time to process the trauma of that and know how it impacts her.
• We just bought our first home two years ago and have three children together.

This really starts about three years ago. I made friends on Hexbear with a person who we’ll refer to as Lily. She was coming to me and a group of our friends on Discord to vent and talk about her issues with her wife, who we’ll call Calliope. At this time, admittedly, I didn’t act as my best self, and I participated in bashing Calliope for her reactions and struggles with the transition from Lily being Calliope’s husband to being Calliope’s wife. I laughed at Calliope’s pain along with my friends and told Lily that Calliope was a bad person and partner and that Lily should just leave her because she’s not worth it. All the while, my wife told me that wasn’t fair to Lily or Calliope. My wife repeatedly told me that she would have very similar feelings to Calliope and that she understood where Calliope was coming from and felt bad for her. I convinced myself and told her repeatedly that she would never be like that and that she would never have to worry about it anyway because I would never put her through that. She kept telling me that she really would feel like that and would act the same way, and I believed that (because of her trauma) she was just being self deprecating, which isn’t always an uncommon thing for her when she’s struggling.

Fast forward a few months. I’d had another friend transition (MTF), I’d been talking to my trans friends more. I finally felt like I might have the supports I needed to explore my gender. I told my wife I thought I was trans for the first time. She freaked out (which in hindsight, she said she would), and it quickly escalated into us fighting really bad. She was having panic attacks relentlessly, and I struggle to know my own feelings, so after about two days of us fighting while she asked questions, I decided I was wrong and that the whole thing was an OCD spiral because I’d been reading so much about transitioning and spending time in trans spaces. So, I went back to being cis. Then, a year later, repeat the same process.

Throughout both of these events, she was very clear that she couldn’t be with me if I was trans. She was clear that she knew her needs and her limits and that me being trans wasn’t something she could do. She said her sexuality and her trauma made me being trans a hard boundary for her. She also said, based on my behavior and my friends’ behavior towards Calliope, that she was a transphobic piece of shit for that and she wasn’t allowed to feel that way and that there were expectations for her behavior that she couldn’t follow. No matter how much I told her she wasn’t and those things weren’t true, she refused to accept or or couldn’t.

Finally, in March of this year, I told her I was trans again. I wasn’t really sure what I was. I just knew I wasn’t a cis man. I was having a full on gender panic. I still felt man-adjacent. But over the previous year, I’d grown out my hair, was wearing a mix of men’s and women’s clothes to find things I liked, and was just generally getting in touch with a lot of things I was uncomfortable with about being a man.

When I told my wife, she didn’t react great. A lot of the Lily/Calliope anxieties resurfaced, and we fought relentlessly. I had a lot of different labels that I used. I started with trans, then moved to NB, then moved to demo-man, but none of them really lasted for more than a few weeks, and this really distressed my wife. Every time we discussed labels and gender identity, she would get distressed and upset with me for changing, and I always felt like she didn’t really understand exactly what I was saying (this will be a continual issue).

This was ten months ago, and we’ve had MANY long conversations about my gender, her sexuality, our relationship, our connection, what we want and feel. Approximately 5 months ago, we figured out that her panicky and distressed reactions to my gender changes were related to her sexual and relationship trauma. She expressed that, even though she knew it wasn’t the same thing, she was triggered by the thought of me being a gender other than the one I thought I was when we got together. She’s expressed that she’s triggered by constantly having inconsistency and instability, because she’s experienced denial of consistency and safety as a punishment in her past abusive relationships. She’s expressed that she has been pretty triggered by mine and my friends’ reactions to Lily/Calliope’s experiences and how she’s going to be treated (and that whole experience really has resulted in her feeling like she’s transphobic for knowing her limits).

There’s also the aspect of her being straight and ace with extreme sex repulsion. Ours is the only sexual relationship she’s ever enjoyed and if it turned out my presentation or identity was too feminine, we’d both be losing that. However, during this discussion that was meant to be productive where she was finally able to articulate the cross section between her complex sexuality and her trauma, I got angry and reactive, and I told her she was transphobic (one of her biggest fears, which I’d told her repeatedly over the last three years that it wasn’t a reality) and she wasn’t allowed to have sexual trauma relating to trans people because a trans person didn’t rape her. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I basically threw her trauma in her face and told her she was a bad person for knowing who she is and what she can do, after being the only person in her life that has ever REALLY made her feel safe and truly loved. And it broke me when I’d realized what I’d done, but I’ve been trying to earn back that trust, and it’s been going pretty well, but the anxiety is always re-triggered for her when we talk about my gender and/or her feelings.

So, we have spent ten months fighting a lot. On one hand, she wanted wanted to be supportive and was validating to me when she was calm and collected and not triggered. On the other, even a mention of me being trans, being a woman, or even non-binary could made her panicky. I didn’t have a good label for what I was, and since the generic label was triggering, we started using a Kinsey-like scale where I rated my gender from 1-7, where 1 is completely aligned with my AGAB (cis man) and 7 is completely unaligned (binary trans woman). I considered myself a 2 or a 3 out of 7. She said her boundary was 3. She couldn’t do a 3 or higher. After this, we started using the scale we’d created to discuss where to could fall on the scale with certain labels and where she could fall in terms of her sexuality, because the goal was for us to be able to stay together but for us to be able to both feel safe with where I ended up and for us both to feel validated. She felt that I needed to do this for me, but she also felt like she should be able to be a part of the process if she was impacted by it as well. Specifically, she asked for flexibility on the label I ended up using, so we could find one that made me feel validated and safe and made her feel like she wasn’t forcing herself into a sexuality that she knows she isn’t and doesn’t want. I agreed that this wasn’t too much to ask for. So, we each individually made a list of all of the gendered labels that felt true and safe and that we thought and felt like they could work. We both had a lot of common labels on each of our lists, but when we would talk and try to solidify one, there just seemed so much discord between us and we both repeatedly left conversations feeling like the other person didn’t understand.

We would have short sprints with relentless fighting (like 1 day to two weeks), where we would be distant and didn’t know if we could be affectionate or if we’d get through it. Then that would be followed up with long bouts where we were so much like our old selves, and we acted like we have for the last 11.5 years. But, she felt the whole time that she had to make any conversations about us and our issues happen, because I just fell into the tendency to ignore the problem, which is typical for me.

In the past month, things have gotten worse. I’ve become more anxious about our interactions and relationship. And after many lengthy discussions, we’ve realized that I have kind of resorted to living within an alternate reality in my head where I perceive her in a way that isn’t true. For example, I was convinced every time we talked about my gender that she understood I wasn’t a man at all. However, in the back of my head, I knew that her cut off was “if there isn’t any man involved at all, I can’t do this, but I can try if you’re a man of some kind.” So, even though I knew that, I convinced myself she understood, when if she’d understood, she would have told me she was done. And I’ve realized I’ve done that for our whole relationship. I’ve done that with every aspect of our relationship, and I’ve never actually let her into see the real me or any of my feelings. I broke down twice yesterday, and she cried because it was the first time she has ever really seen me really feel. But, she’s really struggling because I broke the fantasy for both of us: I admitted that I’ve been in denial and that I don’t know what parts of me were real and will remain when I’m better, or if I’ll ever get better, and I’m not a man at all.

For the first time, I’m being honest even when it’s terrifying, but she’s struggling to believe me, even though she is very open about understanding these are real, despite feeling like they are lies. But now she doesn’t know if she wants to leave or stay. I don’t know if I want to leave or stay. We love each other… we love each other so fucking much. We are closer to divorce than we ever imagined we could be. We’ve discussed what a separation would seriously look like and we’re both devastated.