By @peak_up (YouTube)

A Continuation of How I Ended Up With a Transgender Spouse

Partners of people who try to change sex carry the burden of loving those who do not love themselves as they are. This is nearly impossible to do well. To some of us, it means we are failing at showing them they are lovable in their natural forms, and like there’s something we could be doing better. It may tell us that our partners have been focused on some inward fantasy or delusion, or like their attention is primarily on themselves, which results in a poor quality of love from them, even when we are doing and giving all we can. If our partners know we love them as they naturally are, it may mean facing the fact that they are more concerned with the appearance of their bodies, and what others think of them, than the reality that we love them unchanged. Partners who try to change sex ask that their lovers reconsider or reinvent our love, curb or change our desires, our words of endearment, our attraction cues, our real emotions, and act as though all of that shouldn’t matter or affect the love.

Loving those who don’t love themselves as they are means doing more than giving the usual reassurance that our partners are attractive and cared for. It means trying to make them see beyond the negative images they have of themselves to the beautiful images we have of them. Further, it means trying to accomplish that feat without treading on the delicate ground of bringing any attention to their original sexed bodies. If we love them, we love them regardless of something as trivial as “gender”, but they only love the forms they’ve chosen to present, so we must always try to express our love for their chosen characteristics, even if the opposite is true. This leads us to the eventual questions: Is love expressed by telling lies to affirm and support our lover’s choices regardless of how they affect us? Is love expressed by putting our own truths and self-knowledge aside to make way for our lover’s wishes? Or is love being completely honest about our feelings, and caring enough to stop our lover from harming his or her healthy body?     

The other day, I listened to a wonderful interview Derrick Jensen did with Clark Strand and Perdita Finn about their book The Way of the Rose. From what I gathered, it’s a book about love, roses, and the Goddess traditions. I can’t wait to read the book, because this talk resonated with me deeply and was just what I needed to hear. 

“To love is to be able to bear incredible pain,” one of the authors, Perdita, said, pulling me in. It’s so true. Love takes immense courage, and makes us vulnerable to unforeseeable kinds of hurt. The weak can’t go near love, but it’s typically thought that falling in love is a weakness, and that it takes strength not to. Fear is what keeps us from loving; the fear of what we will feel when we lose what we love. 

A little further into the interview, Perdita explained that, “‘What do you want?’ is a really radical question.” I agree that it’s a deep and important one, and I don’t ask it of myself often enough. My answers came flooding in, “safety, family, closeness… and…I want to be able to talk about how I feel!” It hit me that I am suffering from some long-term effects of not being permitted to speak openly in my relationship. 

Every year at winter solstice, I set intentions for the coming year. Last year, I set my intention to get my husband to stop taking cross-sex hormones. I went to him and explained that if the relationship was going to be saved, he would have to take steps toward addressing my concerns about them. He actually understood, and agreed to quit taking estrogen, which I considered a huge victory. He continues to take spironolactone, the one he refers to as a “testosterone blocker.” This year, I set my intention to never let myself be silenced. I had grown so tired of my outer reality reflecting something other than it would if I were fully expressing myself. When Perdita posed the question, “What do you want?” I rededicated myself to that intention immediately. I have thought about it often since I made it, I had been active about it, but not active enough. The realization that I had pent-up emotion around unexpressed thoughts alerted me that I needed to start taking the issue of open communication with my partner much more seriously. 

I turned my attention back to the podcast, and Perdita continued, “When we know what we want, when we really know what gives us joy, we suddenly become able to resist the culture in a completely different way.” I thought back to when I had first set my intention to never let myself be silenced, and realized that was when I stopped calling my husband “she” for good. I had been dabbling in calling him “he,” but setting that intention formally had bonded me to it. It was surprisingly hard, yet empowering, not only to retrain my patterns of speech toward him, but to do the action of speaking my truth against the silencing order. 

The other author, Clark, added to the point Perdita was making, “If we don’t know what our hearts’ desires are, the culture will tell us what to desire.” It was beginning to amaze me how everything they were saying related so directly to my situation. Not being clear enough about what I wanted had allowed the culture to speak through me in words that I knew weren’t true, and to accept something I found unacceptable as my reality. Speaking and living my truth was something I had to coach myself into doing again without apprehension, and taking that action immediately started shifting and fixing things that were amiss. 

As a writer, accurate wording is important to me. I define integrity as saying what you mean and doing what you say. Language has power, and words can change worlds. Requiring me to change accurate words was an assault on my integrity. Once I recognized the impacts on my life of changing my language, and then changing it back again to reflect the truth, I wondered how I could ever have made such a grave mistake. I wondered how much I had contributed to my husband’s delusions, and my family’s acceptance of them, by relinquishing my exactitude this way.

As I stuck with the practice of referring to him as “him”, my outer reality started to better suit me. It became easier to talk. It’s hard to explain, especially to those who haven’t been tricked into participating in the kind of gaslighting the gender ideologues insist on. Things just started going into place where they had been incongruous before. When I would speak to people over the phone, for instance, I gave myself permission to say, “my husband,” instead of being politely dishonest by saying, “my wife.” Then if he got on the line, and they heard his male voice, it made sense and didn’t need explanation. When a man would ask me to go on a date with him, I could simply mention “my husband” and end his solicitation, instead of enduring the typical reactions when I would say I had a wife. Taking part in these deceptions had made me look dishonest, and I hated that. When people met him, or heard his male voice, it often seemed like they thought I’d tried to fool them by referring to him as female. I never thought they would be fooled, I was just doing what the culture had taught me to do, which was to affirm his “gender identity” at all times. When I reclaimed my power to speak the truth, my whole life adjusted onto a corrected course. It got less complicated and felt genuine; the way it was supposed to feel.  

              It may be easy to refer to people by their real pronouns when we don’t know them, but when we love someone dearly who hates being called those pronouns, it adds difficulty. To me, loving someone means protecting and defending him or her, so naturally, I learned to “be nice” about it. I didn’t want to hurt my husband, and I didn’t want him to feel like I wasn’t on his team, so I settled for the lie that my support was to be shown by holding back my true words and feelings. I confused protecting and defending him with protecting and defending his delusions. It wasn’t until I was educated about the history and meaning of gender that I realized supporting him meant showing love for who he really was, not who he was dressing up to look like.  

              My husband is an intelligent person, and I stayed with him through the changes because I was confident that I could make him understand the problem of gender if only I could get him to hear me out. I tried to explain what I was learning as I was learning it, but feelings kept surfacing and preventing both of us from carrying on the conversation. This communication is finally happening, and although I have been successful in showing him how gender ideology is harmful, he is unwilling to desist from it. 

Shortly after I listened to that beautiful podcast, my husband was talking to me about something completely unrelated, and I bursted into tears responding to it. My emotions somehow led me straight from what he was talking about into the pressing matters I’ve been steering around for so long. The silence had become more daunting than the fear of conflict, so I plunged forth. I told him that I need to be able to talk about my views and my feelings, even if they’re difficult to hear and understand; that I am suffering silently and it’s not fair. He agreed, acknowledged how upset I was, and I continued.

I told him that people can’t change sex, which is something I’ve said before, but this time he nodded his agreement. The time before, he defended giving hormones to children because he believed that if the change was started early enough, it could be accomplished successfully. He has since accepted that it cannot, which was a relief. He agreed that men competing as women in sports was terribly unfair, and it was clear that he had reached some mild peaking points. Since that was established, I told him that I don’t understand why stating a true fact is offensive, like referring to him as “he,” for instance. He responded that he thought he was “agender” (meaning without a gender), because he knew he was not a woman, but he also doesn’t feel like a man. He had also said this in the past, but at that time, he would still get upset about being referred to as a man. I responded that woman and man are physical realities, not feelings. I told him that I don’t have a gender either. I explained that just because he is a man, that doesn’t mean he has to fit the stereotypes. In fact, the reason I was attracted to him in the first place was because he didn’t.  

It felt amazing to say those things out loud to him. To speak and be heard was so enlivening, and to be updated on his advancements was encouraging. On another podcast, I heard that same interviewer, Derrick, say that it takes ten years to change your mind; that change happens by slow metabolization of new information. I think that is how many people who believe in gender eventually reach understanding about its harms. We don’t usually get anywhere while we are arguing, but when arguments make sense, after a time of contemplation, the correct answers will take the places of the faulty ones. 

Since it was clear that my husband understood the issue, and our differences, I drew the line I should have drawn years ago, and meant it this time. Interestingly, it eventuated in the same important question that catalyzed this whole recent shift. We were talking playfully the morning following that emotional conversation, and he said to me, “You don’t know what you want.” I replied that I did, and he asked me that most relevant of all questions, “What do you want?”

“I want you to stop taking those pills,” I said to his wide, beautiful eyes. He shook his head in refusal, and I knew without a doubt that I had no reason to stay in this relationship any longer. It is too painful to continue watching the one I love acting out this hatred of his body, even if there is a chance he will come around someday to see it the way I do. I have already suffered too long, and even though I am scared and hurt to think of living without him, I can’t live with this anymore. Either way, I lose what I consider to be precious and essential. It’s either the one I love, or the way I love. I can’t have both. 

I am completely at peace with my choice, as terrifying as it is to leave the longest and sweetest love of my life. I know that I’ve been a great partner and done all I could to love and support him by my standards, in the way I interpret and perceive love. To separate is the only way for both of us to have what we need and want without giving up who we really feel that we are. In addition to all the great memories, I am grateful to this relationship for bringing me to radical feminism. Without loving someone like him, I don’t know that I would have ever encountered or understood feminist consciousness. My personal experience, in light of all the right information, has led me to the realization that radical feminism is the only logical analysis of the experience of womanhood. That is not only true for me, or for women like me, but for all women everywhere.  

As they keep updating their narratives, gender identity advocates, including my husband, seem to be coming around to understanding gender the way we feminists do. One thing both sides always say is that sex and gender are not the same thing. What is unclear is why gender identity activists seem to think that they should be. These activists have never all agreed with each other about the condition of gender dysphoria, but as a movement, they have to get behind spokespeople who supposedly represent them as a group. At first, these spokespeople strongly claimed that a person’s feeling about his gender absolutely had to align with his physical body, and that changing his body was the proper treatment for dysphoria. Now they’ve come around to saying that the body doesn’t have to align with a gender identity, and that no physical changes are necessary. They still insist, however, that a person literally is whatever sex he says he is, and whatever “gender” (meaning “sex”) he feels like, regardless of his sexed body. This is getting to be an incredibly difficult position to defend (not to mention a pointless and futile one), particularly after the massive push they previously made for their “rights” to affirming procedures at taxpayer expense. How can they assert that gender is real and necessary, and use it to mean sex, and at the same time say that it’s not fixed, not provable, and not the same as sex? This ideology can’t make up its mind and doesn’t make sense, and it is a matter of time before the general public takes notice of that. 

 It is glorious how much attention this whole movement has brought to the original, generations-old feminist analysis of gender. Gender theorists have blown their own theory out of the water and highlighted to any studious person how accurate feminism has been all along in its denunciation of these sex-based stereotypes. I suppose that’s what made me stay in the relationship so long: knowing that at some point, every intelligent person peaks, and once you peak, you can’t go back. The whole idea of “gender identity” collapses on its own senselessness with enough examination, and the truth becomes clear that people are born in the right bodies. People are starting to notice how objectionable gender itself is through this issue, and the more people who notice, the more momentum radical feminist theory will gain. Perhaps gender identity ideology has inadvertently set off the movement that will finally reveal how much sense radical feminism makes for everyone, and how revolutionary an idea it is to abolish the dishonorable hierarchy of gender everywhere in the world.  

@peak_up was born and raised in Humboldt County, California, and now resides in southern Oregon where she teaches Yoga, volunteers for a nutrition organization, hosts a feminist consciousness-raising group, and homeschools her teenage daughter. She is forty years old and has been married for five years. She was politicized by radical feminism after her husband tried to become a woman, and speaks out to help others affected by the harms of transgender activism.