I'm not certain that this is where I write with questions, but here goes anyway.

I am coming up on my third year of marriage with a man that I've known since I was thirteen (we are now pushing thirty.) We had some problems with infidelity recently which has caused the both of us to go into therapy, and as a result of husband's sessions, he has decided that he is a trans woman, and he is feeling out the process of transitioning. Here's the problem: I am a straight woman and never in the fifteen years that I've known husband has this come up as a possibility. I'm having a lot of trouble dealing with this.

I don't know if it's the "being straight" or possibly that his idea of being a woman is kind of insulting to me (throwing a fit over not finding the right socks to go with today's outfit, trying to turn 'I shaved my legs today' into an hour long discussion) but I am really struggling with these changes. Maybe if this wasn't only the most recent hurdle we've faced together, or if I was already attracted to women? I want to believe that I'm not so shallow as to let something like gender ruin my love for someone who has been in my life for a really long time, but it seems like every single aspect of his personality is changing and I don't know if I can stick with this if this is the direction his life is taking. Am I terrible for not wanting to stay married to him if he decides to become a woman?

Any Advice Appreciated

My response after the jump...

Sometimes I dash off a quick response, privately and via email, to a question from a reader. Such was the case with AAA—I was moved to send her a short note after reading her letter. This is what I wrote to AAA:

You are not a lesbian. You don't have to become one just because your husband has decided—or, I should say, your husband has realized—that she's a woman. She has a right to be who she is, you have a right to be who you are. You can remain in her life, you can continue to love and support her, but you don't necessarily have remain married to her.

Two days after writing to AAA I got angry, unrelated email from a trans man who accused me of being transphobic. Sigh. Nate objected to some advice I gave ages ago and to a certain word I don't use anymore (and haven't in years) except when I'm forced to talk about how I don't use that word anymore. Nate and I wound up having a short, civil, and constructive email exchange—it was news to him that I had stopped using that word (a fact that somehow never makes it onto Tumblr)—and I thought, Hey, maybe I should share AAA's letter with Nate? Just AAA's letter, not my response. I'm a notorious/imaginary transphobe (sigh) and Nate's a trans man who calls out transphobes. What would Nate tell AAA to do? Would his advice for AAA be different than my own?

And here, with Nate's permission, is his advice for AAA:

This is what I think: that this "husband" is sincerely a transgender woman, not as way to insult the wife, but that she truly has always been so. That being said, I would not expect the wife to be obligated to stay with the marriage, unless she wants to. If she does stay with the marriage, she does not have to consider herself a lesbian, even though her partner is a woman. As for how other people will label her, it's none of their business. Either way, staying with her partner or not, what I think she owes her spouse is respect, even though that may be difficult. I think she owes it to her partner to get educated about transgender people and to begin using the pronouns that her partner prefers and proper transgender terminology.

PFLAG has support for family of transgender people. They also have great information on their website. GLAAD has a wonderful guide for transgender terminology. And I just came across this book: She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, by Helen Boyd. I haven't read it, but it may help. It got 4.5 stars on Amazon.

So one big difference between Nate's advice for AAA and my advice for AAA: Nate thinks AAA can stay with her husband without having to ID as a lesbian. But otherwise Nate's advice for AAA was pretty much the same as mine (you don't have to stay in the marriage, you can be supportive even if you leave), even if Nate's advice was fleshed out with a couple of helpful resources and a book recommendation. Nate's advice is arguably better than mine but I'm the first to admit that my readers often give better advice than I do—and hopefully Nate is reading me now, not just reading about me.