These are understandable concerns to have.
They may cry and act out at school and be worried about what their parent’s new identity means for them.
They may well grieve, if your marriage breaks down and your spouse moves out. You may worry about the pain your children might feel. You might perhaps kiss your partner and know it’s for the last time: but it is not the same as knowing that after you kiss them no one will ever kiss them again, that everything in them has stopped. I kissed his face and his hands, felt the ways that they were the same and utterly not, felt the keen pain of knowing that the spark of him was gone. Trust me: I sat in a room with my husband’s body for an hour. You will grieve if your marriage ends, but it is not a death. That kind of goodbye is not like the goodbye I had to give. But there are plenty of reasons people can change in a marriage that mean they are no longer compatible, and it’s alright then to say goodbye. If you marry someone, you are making a commitment to them not at one moment in time, but through all the ways they may change in the future. To that I could answer – that can happen in any marriage, not just when someone decides their gender identity no longer matches the one they were given at birth. It is very hard, to feel that the person you love is no longer the same, to fear that they are going somewhere you can’t follow. Perhaps you feel they are no longer the person you once loved. They are not mentally ill because they want to live in a way that feels more authentic, more like the real “them”. I know a lot about fear and resentment and love tangled together into a knot that makes your stomach hurt all day.īut what your spouse wants, what your spouse is doing, is not yours to control. There have been so many times this year I wished I could control what was happening, felt that if I could we could be happy again. He was very terribly ill with major depression he died, and I couldn’t save him. He took his own life, after a period of several months when his behaviour became more erratic and worrying, when he did things that were strange or perhaps even cruel, and I felt helpless. You see, I am an actual widow, in that my husband – the dear beloved bones of him – is now ash in an urn. That felt good, didn’t it? To have some semblance of control. You found them and they told you that you were right to be afraid, and more – that a grave injustice was being done to you and you should have the right to stop it. You probably sat on Mumsnet or searched hashtags on twitter, looking for people who knew how you felt, who could make sense of your fear that your life was about to change and you didn’t have control over it. It feels good, right, to feel seen? That’s probably what led you to seek out women in similar situations when your partner first announced they wanted to transition. I’ve been seeing a lot about you on twitter lately. Image of a tweet reading “‘Trans widows’ face being trapped in loveless marriages if their spouses no longer need permission to change gender, MPs have been warned”
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