Chapter 4- Transitioning Into the Spousal Closet

Chapter 4 – Transitioning Into the Spousal Closet

As this was happening, I was becoming more and more uncomfortable about what was happening. I was in a closet myself.  I had read the book, The Other Side of the Closet, which along with my counselor, helped me feel that I wasn’t alone.  At the time, I couldn’t tell anyone because it wasn’t my story to tell.  With my new job, I sure couldn’t tell them what was happening.  During the first two months of that job, I was so busy moving the furniture across country, settling into the house, and getting Mom settled with caretakers that could be trusted, and being in a “closet” that I knew I wasn’t giving what I needed to give to a new job.  Therefore, I was relieved when the position turned into a part-time one I could work on from home.  I was teaching computers to online students from across the country.  This allowed me time to work through issues with Mom, and deal with my closet in the privacy of home.  The closet was becoming more tricky as time went on.

I found out that my spouse was taking female hormones trying to “grow my breasts” and stop some of the feelings in the genitals.  This had sparked an anatomy conversation about hormones.

“When did you start taking hormones?” I asked expecting that s/he had started out in Denver.

“I’ve been trying to take them for years.  I looked for them and asked doctors about them when I was young, but it wasn’t until we had the shop at the ocean, that I finally found them on the internet.” 

“At the ocean?”  That was ten years before all this happened! We had visited the ocean one year and at the time he was unemployed (again) and wanted to start his own business.  We found a business on the boardwalk that was for sale involving virtual reality games, which sparked my interest.  We had hocked our house and bought the business for him to attempt to reach his life dream of being a business owner.   We had also added an internet café to the virtual reality machines because I had been involved with the internet before most people were aware it existed.  I had heard how internet cafes were popping up all over Europe and other countries, so we started one in our shop. 

“So all those times when you were down the ocean, were you dressed as a man or a woman?”

“When I rode down there by myself while you were teaching, I dressed as a woman. But when in public I dressed in unisex comfortable clothing.”

“So you ordered the hormones and were taking them back that far?”

“I had been taking them back further than that.  Before it was done by mail order, but the internet just made it easier.  By mail order they were coming from South America, and I was always ordering in Spanish and I had no clue what I was getting.”

Woah… my brain was reeling…. “So that’s why when we first got married you didn’t want me to have a key to the mailbox in our apartment complex?”  He just nodded sadly.  Boy… that had hit me hard.  He was even doing this when we first got married!  I had just thought he had a hard time adjusting to sharing with me when I moved into our apartment.  But this was going more deeply than I had envisioned.

As time and his transition went on, and my husband transitioned more and more into his female role, I found myself sitting at dinner one night when s/he was crying about our situation.  S/he had gone to an event and worn feminine clothes.  S/he was upset about the fact that we weren’t close anymore, and s/he had mascara running down her cheeks.  It was at this point that I realized that I was having dinner with “the other woman”.  Even though my husband wasn’t cheating on me with another woman, the “woman” seated at my table was stealing away the husband that I had known for thirty years.  So in reality, my husband WAS having an affair even if the affair was with him/herself.

 More from  Stormy Transitions : The  Memoir of a Str8t Spouse of a Transgender Person

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