[bryony]

Those whom I do criticise are those who, having allowed a wife to think of them as an ordinary male for decades, bore his children and quite rightly expected them to grow old together, gets blown out of the water by someone who decides that now is the time for him to "find his inner woman", like it or not, giving the wife no choice but to "deal with it" or divorce.

This, to me, is exactly on a par with someone saying "I love you dear, but you just don't turn me on any more, so I want a divorce" and goes off with the bimbo he's been having an affair with.

It's a different kind of misogynistic faithlessness.

B.

That's not exactly as cut and dry as you make it sound. I hardly feel as though I duped my wife into some kind of false pretense about who I am.

Well firstly, you are taking this as having been written specifically at you - why? I was making a general point, (and I disagree with sfem's assertion that generalisations are usually wrong. It always depends on the generalisation.)

Can I remind you that in the "pictures" area you stated that "She's aware of my "condition" now....She was more angry at me for keeping it from her all the years I did than the actual truth. "

I don't mean to be combative, but that kind of sounds like a lie of omission - duping. With no false pretence why would she be angry that you kept it from her?

I'm the same person... I love her just as much now, if not more, than when we were first married.

You are missing the point. Love is a two-way street based on total honesty. You may be the same person to you - but not to her anymore. Now she has to deal with the fact that she has discovered that you are someone other than what she has perceived all these years. Look at it from her point of view.

You may not have seen my earlier response to Flame, but imagine how you would deal with her wanting to take testosterone, have a mastectomy, get phalloplasty. Imagine her with a beard and a deep voice. Can you honestly say that it would not affect your relationship one little bit?

I'm just finally not as terrified to allow myself to present on the outside as I've felt on the inside my entire life. Some of us didn't have the strength or confidence to unearth our deepest darkest secret at the infancy of our relationship.

That's fine, as long as you both agree that it is the right thing to do. If you go off and take hormones and have all sorts of feminising things done without her express permission, it won't end well.

I get the point you're trying to make; but is it necessary to shove salt in an open wound for some of us? To me, to compare this to an affair is a slap in the face.

Then you don't get the point I'm trying to make at all.

If you love her just as much now, if not more, than when you were married, then you will do nothing without her knowledge and buy-in, because to do otherwise is exactly like having an affair.

Ask yourself this: why do men have affairs? Clearly because the mating urge is extremely powerful. In people with sexual disorders it get diverted, but in the standard heterosexual Alpha male it results in the desire to inseminate as many different women as possible, in order to spread ones genes far and wide. That's how evolution works. As time and familiarity do their work, the chemical parts of sexual attraction dies off. There is no longer sufficient "thrill" in lovemaking, so the Alpha starts to notice other, perhaps younger, women.

A very "male" male has as much trouble fighting off this urge, as someone with gender dysphoria has fighting off the urge to secretly feminise.

In both cases, giving in to these urges, both of which are destructive to the marriage relationship, are variations of unfaithfulness, because both involve some form of deceit and betrayal.

In this way, I believe, the two offences are parallel.

However, whereas it is unlikely that a wife would agree to her husband having affairs with other women, they can be persuaded to help with the genuine pain of dysphoria, if you are fortunate - and it sounds like are.

B.