'For myself, at times it was very hard, but we have pulled through together.' Photo: istock/winterbee.
‘Although I had known the truth from the beginning, I shared their pain.’
My partner lived as a man before we met, but was always open with me about feeling the need to be a woman. That doesn’t mean the transition was always easy
If Friends need to know how being transgender feels and works, I have some practical experience that I can offer, from the perspective of a trans person’s partner.
I met J when we were both volunteers at an educational charity. He was a tall man, rather overweight, very intelligent and masculine, and as time went by I also found him to be deeply thoughtful and humane. We were drawn together, and when we found ourselves on the edge of a relationship J told me immediately of his need to be a woman, showing me a photo of himself dressed thus. Being supremely ignorant of what that really meant I thought ‘that’s interesting’, and put it to the back of my mind.
Then one day J asked me to see him fully ‘en femme’. I agreed, and was taken aback – there was this woman’s face with eyes smiling at me, and I simply could not recognise ‘him’. As time went on J’s drive to be female became increasingly urgent and he/she asked for help and encouragement from me. I am a fully heterosexual woman, and there were many false starts. However, I could occasionally (and surprisingly) recognise the woman in the man, and understand the reality of it.
J has told me about his past. From the age of three or four he was unable to understand why he was not allowed to dress like his mother and sisters. His mother was horrified by even the slightest hint of femininity in her son, which created a feeling of rejection by the very person he saw as his role model. He thinks his father understood that something was not as it ‘should be’, although he was always kindly to his son, and never pressed him to follow ‘manly’ pursuits.
Years later J’s former partner was dying of MS, and he was responsible for her and their daughter. One visiting care worker advised J, in definite terms, to stay dressed as a woman, since ‘she’ looked much better that way than as a man, while another, a very stylish woman, told her that she had good dress sense. These responses, and other supportive ones, encouraged J to consider a change of role.
J’s GP referred him to the local mental health team, and from there to the Gender Identity Clinic at the Charing Cross Hospital in West London, where he learnt a lot, mainly from the other attendees and, occasionally, their wives and partners (sadly he didn’t feel that the consultations with the doctors helped him much at all, as they gave little or no advice or guidance, merely asked questions). Some of the wives had had no idea of their husbands’ situation and only discovered it after years of marriage and raising a family. J’s description of their eyes, their grief and their longing for their husbands to ‘return’ to them was very painful for me too. Although I had known the truth from the beginning, I shared their pain.
After three years of monthly attendance at the clinic J decided against taking hormones and going through the surgery necessary to physically transition, partly because, by now living alone, he didn’t feel able to cope with the enormous difficulties that openly trans people still faced, but also because of a realisation (now widely accepted) that gender and physical sex are two different things, and that it isn’t always necessary to alter your body in order to allow your mind to find its true identity (as he put it, with typical wry humour, ‘I was too old to get pregnant anyway’). A few years later we met. Our journey so far has lasted for seven-and-a-half years. Often J would go back to being a man, knowing how much I would rather that was our way. But then the longing to be herself, as she should always have been, would return, and could not be denied.
The real turning point came last year. J’s weight problem (she weighed nearly eighteen stone at the time) caused her so much pain in her knees that she could barely walk. Weight had to be lost, and typically she set to work. Alcohol had been given up a year or two before; now it was farewell to eating between meals, especially cakes and biscuits. She succeeded. In less than a year she lost over five stone, and is now officially a ‘normal’ weight.
The transformation was astonishing. Now here was a tall, attractive, elegant, modestly dressed woman who could almost have been a former model (I claim some credit for cajoling her into buying a new wig, which has played a major part in the transformation). Increasing confidence in herself, helped by the kindly response of so many other women, has taken the tension out of living publicly.
For myself, at times it was very hard, but we have pulled through together. J says that I am the most important thing in her life, and I know she means it, although I also know that if I had asked her to suppress her true self for me it would probably have destroyed our relationship. She is the most important thing in my life. Her wit, her outrageous running commentaries on TV news programmes, and her loving support in any problems I have, have enriched my life in so many ways. Her gender no longer means anything to me. It is the human being that matters, more than I can say.
I have always ‘lived adventurously’, but I reckon the Friends who chose that advice would not have thought of this particular angle – or I could be wrong! I only know that I am profoundly grateful to J, and to life and the Light.
Name and Meeting withheld for privacy.
Comments
Thank you. Very brave and honest.
By Jedmonds on 18th April 2019 - 17:39
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