[AnnieBL]

myboobs

Your account of your health problems in your latest post has some similarity to my own - it was the palpitations associated with heart failure that drove me to the ER and the advice I received that precipitated my early retirement less tha a year later. If I had hung on another 5 years I would have retired a lot better off, ... if I had still been around. I definitely lack aggression, but that doesn't provide protection from stressful situations and workoholism.

Thank you all for your insights. We really are all different - but yet in other ways the same.

[GoneGirl]

I should have referred again to the Dear Abby column for December 18, 2013. My wife says DA's answer is spot on. I wonder who wrote it for her.

http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/?uc_full_date=20131218

I remember reading that Dear Abby column when it first appeared in the local paper. Her columns often give good advice, but in this case, not. It shows a lack of knowledge and sensitivity to transgenderism as a natural human condition. I'm not saying that the wife should necessarily stay with her husband, but it seems that giving up on a marriage that would otherwise endure except for her husband's manner of dress, without making an attempt at professional counseling which, I think, would be Abby's usual advice in other potential marriage-ending situations, shows an anti-trans bias on her part.

It's attitudes like that which make it so hard to come out to a wife about one's gender identity, and another sign that we have a long way to go before achieving a measure of acceptance in the larger society.

CK

[AnnieBL]

Both myself and my wife found most interest in the content of the question and the position of the questioner, rather than in DA's advice, which doesn't amount to much without reference to the cited website. I must admit to currently suffering an overload of potentially interesting links and have not yet tried to visit the site to which DA refers. My wife's reaction was immediate on reading the article, and I saw it as both an alignment with the questioners attitude and the drawing of a line in the sand - a line that I should have no difficulty in respecting.