A Marriage in Transition

On January 10th, 2017, I told my wife of 7 years that I knew I am a transgender woman and that I needed to become the real me. These posts tell our story.

The Way We Were

This is the first in a series of posts about how my relationship with my wife evolved over the course of my gender transition.

I knew on the first date that I was going to quickly fall in love with Katharine. It was intended to be a trip out to Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma, San Diego. It’s a national park high up on the peak of the peninsula that overlooks San Diego Bay. I wanted to take her there because it is one of my favorite places in the city, the views are just gorgeous, you can see the entire urban center from that peak, and far out to sea. On good days you can see whale pods breaching far off shore. There is always a strong ocean breeze, and it just struck me as a very romantic place to spend some time together.

Katharine at the time was living in Carlsbad, 37 miles north along the I-5 freeway. I drove to her house to pick her up, endured a thorough interview by her parents (they even photographed my car!) and then we headed out. I think I picked her up at 2pm,…

Self Discovery

Two years ago today I realized I was trans.

A week prior, while at a mall with my family, I discovered that one of the developers I knew through twitter was now presenting female online, and seemed to be transitioning. This kicked something, something heavy. I was jealous… extremely jealous, because at that point I still thought I wasn’t trans. I wished I was, I wanted to be trans, I wanted to be a woman with every fiber in my body, but I wasn’t, so I couldn’t, and that was that.

This caused so much inner turmoil. Every time we walked through Target I would get hit with this intense wave of grief as we passed through the women’s section. My wife would wander off to look for clothes and I would stand there at the cart, staring at the mannequins, with my heart being squeezed in a vice. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. No one could know I felt like this. If even one person found out, everything would fall apart. That torment was destroying me. For months I had been getting hit by h…

Opening the closet

How do you tell your spouse that you’ve been living a lie? What do you say to start that conversation? Where do you begin? “Oh, by the way, I’m actually a woman, sorry I never told you.”

This is the problem I faced on January 10th, 2017. I hadn’t slept a wink of sleep the night before, not one bit. When my wife woke up I told her I’d had terrible insomnia and was on the verge of crashing. I blamed it on having drank a ton of iced tea the night before, but really it was just that I was too excited. I finally knew I was trans, I knew I could transition, I knew I’ve been a woman all along. How could I sleep during this revelation? I fell asleep finally at 8am and slept for two hours. I don’t remember much of that day, I spent most of it on Reddit, trying to find how other people had solved this problem.

I couldn’t not tell her, that would be impossible. I couldn’t keep this kind of secret. I could already feel myself becoming obsessed with it, I couldn’t hide the affect this was havin…

The Way We Changed

March 8th, 2017. Selfie taken on our way into the maternity ward for B’s birth. This is the second in a series of posts about how my relationship with my wife evolved over the course of my gender transition. You can read the first post here.

Let me preface this: A lot of this post casts me in a very unfavorable light. I do this because I feel it is important to be honest about the bad parts of transition. Katharine has been involved through the writing of this, she agrees with my descriptions of her feelings in those times, and has signed off on the final draft. This isn’t just my version of the story, it’s ours. For my trans readers, trigger warning, this is not going to be easy to read if you also transitioned while married.

The first six months after the day I came out were the worst months of our lives; Katharine went through all seven stages of grief. Shock laid in immediately and lasted through to the next wee…

Dropping the T(esticles)

When my egg shattered (aka: when I accepted myself as trans) I found myself with pretty much no dysphoria surrounding my phallus. This was, in fact, one of many reasons I had convinced myself I wasn’t trans for so long, I didn’t hate my junk (this changed, but I’ll get to that later). What I did know almost immediately, however, was that I needed to lose the testosterone factories. I hated my testicles with a mad passion, they had provided me with nothing but literal pain for my entire life (also my children, but that is not a saving grace). For, you see, I had a medical condition which had never been discovered and never was treated; a testicular torsion so severe that it pulled the entire testicle up into the inguinal canal, where it could be gradually crushed by my pelvic joints.

This is the problem when you’re an obese teenager; when you tell someone that your groin hurts too much to keep running in gym class, they just immediately write you off as lazy and making up excuses to …

Ten Years of Love

Ten years ago this wonderful woman and I said I Do. She’s still as gorgeous today as she was then (and I got a whole hell of a lot prettier). I thought then that I knew what love is, but it has grown so much since that day.

It’s been an extraordinary decade full of devotion, laughter, losses, surprises, evolutions, blessings, growth and joy. We’ve both changed so much from who we were back then, but our love remained strong through thick and thin.

Happy Anniversary, Katharine. I love you with all of my heart.

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜