The World Around Us

When we transition everyone around us also transition, sometimes it is too hard on them and sometimes it is not. I think that it is hardest on a spouse when their loved one transition. I know several couple who have stayed together and there is an article in the Huffington Post about a couple that stayed together,

It Turns Out My Partner Is a Woman, So What Does That Make Me?
By Jason Rozek
Posted: 02/28/2014

Eight months ago I pulled a bra out of the washing machine for the first time since breaking up with my college girlfriend and loudly coming out of the closet as a gay man a decade earlier. This bra belonged to someone I would have called my boyfriend a week earlier, before she came out to me as a transgender woman. Bras were just the start of things to which I'd need to adjust.

To the rest of the world, we're a couple of gay guys. Only she and I (and a team of medical professionals) know that that's not the case. While she's not currently out to anyone else and lives her everyday life passing as a man, she's medically transitioning so that her body will match her gender identity. Eventually she'll live her everyday life as a woman.
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When you find out that the person you love is of a different gender than you'd thought, you end up with a lot of questions. Amidst the cacophony of questions I had about her, her experience, her thoughts, the vocabulary, the pronouns, the medical information, the surgical plans and all the other minutiae, the one thing I kept circling back to had nothing to do with her. It was about me:

I'm a self-identified gay man whose partner is a woman, so what does that make me?

That is a question many spouses and partners ask themselves when a partner transitions, in this case he is wondering if he is still gay. I know spouses who had to adjust to the fact that society now saw them as a lesbian couple, no long could they walk down the street holding hands without stares. Another couple that I know she used to enjoy sleeping on her husband’s shoulder on a train and now when she does it people talk. A trans-man that I know before he was married he was a lesbian and his partner stayed with him through transition, I believe that they eventually separated because she was losing her lesbians friends who now saw her as straight.

It is hard for everyone when we transition, but it especially hard on spouses and partners.