The elephant in MY room is starting to make some noise

[Sara Jessica]

Wow! We need to talk. I may not have answers, but I'm a good listener and of course always a friend.

Yes, we will soon. Let's connect on some options in early November.

By the way...Raquel, your post is wonderful and unique in it's perspective. I will try to address it within the next day or two.

OK, maybe I should have said within the next week or two.

Nods... that you'll have to address too. Would your wife accept being part of a Lesbian relationship.

Thanks for the reminder Veronica. And once this is done I'll have to get back to the rest of your comments within the next day...I mean week or two!!!

This is your best friend? The guy who keeps noticing more and more things and making little comments?

You've gotta watch out. You've gotta really think about what your boundaries are. I know it sounds silly, but this could turn into a situation that totally blindsides you.

Guys get a little weird when their friends turn out to be gay or trans. If you're not in the let's-drink-a-beer-and-whistle-at-chicks zone, you're in a place that has some sexual tension. Some guys can deal with that and even make jokes about it. Some guys can't.

If you're not their 100% hetero dude buddy, you become a sex object to some degree. It doesn't mean they're going to be offensive or try to rape you. But one day they might have too many drinks and tell you you're un-f*ckable. Or maybe they'll tell you that you are. Either way, it's a weird situation.

Maybe you've thought of this and you're prepared to stand up for yourself. But is being out new to you? Are you prepared for your own feelings?

And in a way, it can be flattering just to be seen in any kind of feminine terms. A part of you will say, "This person sees the woman in me, and that's all I want," and no matter how gross a guy is, it's good to feel beautiful and desired. You've gotta plan ahead and make up your mind that if you hear that voice in your head you're going to tell the b*tch to shut up.

Sorry for the tangent, but I just thought if you hadn't really experienced what it's like to come out to your guy friends that it might be helpful.

This is a very interesting tangent Raquel. Yes, he is one of my best friends. I have known him for at least 25 years. The motivation for disclosure is important for discussion no matter how the individual identifies. There are way too many tales in these pages about those who become obsessive about their TG nature and the next thing you know, they're blabbing it to others, seemingly without forethought about the fact you cannot put the genie back in the bottle once she is out. In these cases I often wonder about the motivation. Is it an effort to get that elephant off their chest, to be able to share with someone, with anyone, this part of them which they deem so important to continue harboring such a crushing secret? My motivation to (potentially) share comes from an entirely different place. Let's keep it in context with this particular friend. I've kept mine hidden for this entire time. I have no real desire to get this off my chest for the sake of hanging out with him while presenting as a female. Fact of the matter is that he is getting closer to that proverbial bullseye and I have expressed a desire to be honest should he actually hit it. Might I say he doesn't have the balls to come right out and ask the question? He may be saying the exact same thing about me, that I am being evasive in the face of his little jabs. But at the end of the day, I think your perspective is certainly one to keep in mind for anyone disclosing to their guy friends but part of it comes across as a little bit Freudian in that it implies some sort of sexual tension being inherent, being perhaps inevitable. Interesting point but I'm not so sure I agree with it's applicability to my situation but again, I do think it was an important tangent to bring up.

Less authentic? You're not posting about frilly panties. You're posting about changes you're making to your everyday life to make you more feminine. You say you identify as female. Sounds pretty authentically TS to me.

Thank you Raquel. You see it just as my transitioning/transitioned friends IRL see it. And that I do appreciate.

Not that I'm necessarily right, I really think most people who try to stay in the middle are torturing themselves and they would be better off (as far as their sanity) to go a little further to the one side of the path that they know they want to be on. Let's be honest, you're pushing pretty hard towards one side, aren't ya?

But, if you love the woman, if you love the relationship as it is, your sacrifice may be improving your sanity, not just appeasing her.

Yep, I'm pushing pretty hard. I've said before that my goal is to get as close to that "line" as possible without going over. The problem is that I have in fact crossed it, hence the existence of my elephant.

Interesting point about sanity and I think you really hit the essence of where I'm coming from. There was a comment made elsewhere that said something along the lines that sacrificing one's true being by trying to stay on a middle path is a profoundly masculine thing to do. Of course I took great exception to this notion that striving to stay on a middle path is somehow akin to laying one's body on a live land mine to save the other troops from destruction. This is where an important facet of a middle path comes into play, that at the root of it there is love.

Why is it less authentic to choose love over transition? These things do not have to be mutually exclusive but in my case they most certainly are (more below on that).

Sometime in the next several weeks I am going to write of a friend who should have stayed on a middle path. She gambled that love would somehow find the way and apparently didn't fully understand that the odds were against this notion on so many levels. While being witness to what she went through gave me a mysterious resolve to go further down the transition path, eschewing the middle path I had already committed to. Yet at the same exact time she helps me to understand how the love in my own life is in fact good for my sanity which supports staying put on a middle path, the precise point you are making.

OK, here's another tangent of mine. Because I never hear anybody else talk seriously about the sexual-orientation-transition you force on yourself as a married M2F.

You kinda blame things on your wife not being comfortable with your inner female. But look at the big picture. Even if your wife is totally supportive and accepting, it's pretty weird to transition from living as a straight guy to living as a lesbian.

Seriously. I transitioned, and within a couple months I was totally comfortable being full-time and felt that I passed just fine. Not that I'm particularly attractive, but nobody looked at me funny. But when you throw a wife/girlfriend into the mix, that's when things get hard. Because gay people making public displays of affection attract attention.

And I'm not talking about inappropriate displays. I'm talking about subtle things. It attracts attention. It makes you self-conscious. You act more awkward. People look at you. In the end it adds up to you outing yourself as trans as soon as you out yourself as a lesbian. And you don't want to attract attention. So you show less affection towards your wife. And that puts a big strain on your relationship.

For me, it came out of nowhere. I realized, "Wow. I guess I really don't know the appropriate way for a lesbian couple to act in public."

And it made me realize that I had put all my energy into coming to terms with being trans but neglected to really think about what it was to be a lesbian. You're married to a straight woman. Unless she's capable of being publicly gay, and privately getting what she wants from a relationship with another woman, it's just not gonna work out.

This one is easy. And not to lessen the validity of what you are talking about (after all, it's a major theme in the mhB books) but this doesn't apply to my situation in any way. My wife has made it crystal clear, transition = divorce.

And even if you take her out of the equation, you need to take a long look on whether or not you can handle being a lesbian with a lesbian. Because if you don't really cope with what it is to be a woman who loves women, you're going to end up being with unstable women. I went through that for awhile. Women were intrigued by me! I'm the weird guy who's going to get a sex change! But the women I dated weren't lesbians. They were unstable women who saw me as a novelty.

I'm just saying, being a lesbian is a huge part of the "big picture" that people tend to ignore completely when they wish they could transition. It might be a good reason to stop pushing towards the female side of the "middle path" and be happy with the relationship you have.

This is certainly something to consider as part of a transition plan, digging deep to know exactly where one is coming from in terms of their own sexuality. At this point, it's not something that I'm overly concerned with other than remembering what my friend mentioned above said to me, that she felt she needed to keep an open mind when it came to her own sexuality because she didn't want to be alone.

Ugh! That's how I felt for so long! I didn't accept myself. I basically idealized womanhood and thought I wasn't good enough to see myself as a "real woman." It really screwed up my perspective more than I realized. It was a depressing place to be at.

Veronica does a good job keeping me in check when it comes to the woman thing. Fact of the matter is that I accept myself to a great degree and what resides in my heart and soul is not trans, she is a woman. For better or worse, I am still seen by most, if not all people as being trans which in all likelihood would remain the case even should I ever transition (short of pure stealth). When it comes to this thing of ours, it is what it is. I guess my goal is for those who know me to think of me as their friend, perhaps their woman friend and less so their trans friend.

Ouch.

She might not actually hate every one of those things. She just hates that you're trying to kill off the man she married, and she hates that you're trying to invade her space in the role as the woman.

My ex was awesome at first. She accepted me as a woman more than I accepted myself. She'd even dated a few girls. She knew how to treat a woman. She loved to go shopping with me. She gave me my estrogen injections.

But in the end she wanted a more normal life for her and her daughters, and it was just too much for her feeling like she was losing her place as the woman.

The bottom line is that if you're a lesbian you have to be with a woman who's OK with being a lesbian. Otherwise it's going to all hit the fan sooner or later.

Mine hates the things these changes represent which is in fact the killing off of the guy she married.

Of all the heartfelt advice I have received, the one thing which I intend to do is to share with her emphatically what the endgame is, that I desire to remain on this middle path with her, that transition is not an inevitable conclusion to this whole thing. Despite our efforts though, we just haven't been able to make the time to actually talk at length about this. The good news is that we're getting along which is not only a testament to her ability to compartmentalize things but also that my elephant is safely back in her cage right now.