The Art of Compromise
The compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it is compromising.
--Arthur Bloch
It is sometimes said that marriage is the art of compromise. But committed relationships with transpeople often involve compromises from each partner that cut to the bone.
As usual, I will speak from my own experience as a MtF crossdresser in a relationship with a natal woman. But I think the paradigm holds for any type of trans relationship.
For the trans person, the compromise often involves denying at some level or some time her trans nature. If a crossdresser, it usually means staying in the closet, or at very least managing carefully her crossdressing. For more transgendered people, it often means putting off transition or crossliving.
Which I understand. Crossliving or transition completely changes the dynamic of the relationship; Darling Wife and I understand that in the unlikely event I ever went that route, the marriage would be over. But it still puts the transperson with a more transsexual bent in an impossible situation: accept a daily dose of the pain of gender dysphoria, or lose the one person you love more than anyone else.
For the partner, of course, having a trans person can cut to the heart of her gender identity. A heterosexual woman, after all, isn't looking for another woman as a partner, after all; the situation is not helped by the fact that many trans people (your humble correspondent included) can achieve at best a crude facsimile, a pale reflection of womanhood. And of course even for the most liberated of women, the loss of a "man" in public can be threatening; many times I've been only a few feet away from Darling Wife, but some poor excuse for a man and a human being has taken her apparent unattachedness as an opportunity to make some vile comment or another. (But of course I know a little bit about this firsthand.)
And really, there is nothing wrong about wanting to find a partner that complements you. To remove the usual division of gender roles from the relationship can be very destabilizing for most heterosexual people. And just as I must accept and acknowledge that my life is profoundly influenced and shaped by my trans gender identity, my feeling of not being comfortable in my birth sex, so I must accept that for most people the opposite is true, that their life is influenced and shaped by their surety of gender, their feeling of being comfortable in their birth gender.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I am living proof that I believe that it's not. But the compromises are far harder to make and take than those of most relationships.
--Arthur Bloch
It is sometimes said that marriage is the art of compromise. But committed relationships with transpeople often involve compromises from each partner that cut to the bone.
As usual, I will speak from my own experience as a MtF crossdresser in a relationship with a natal woman. But I think the paradigm holds for any type of trans relationship.
For the trans person, the compromise often involves denying at some level or some time her trans nature. If a crossdresser, it usually means staying in the closet, or at very least managing carefully her crossdressing. For more transgendered people, it often means putting off transition or crossliving.
Which I understand. Crossliving or transition completely changes the dynamic of the relationship; Darling Wife and I understand that in the unlikely event I ever went that route, the marriage would be over. But it still puts the transperson with a more transsexual bent in an impossible situation: accept a daily dose of the pain of gender dysphoria, or lose the one person you love more than anyone else.
For the partner, of course, having a trans person can cut to the heart of her gender identity. A heterosexual woman, after all, isn't looking for another woman as a partner, after all; the situation is not helped by the fact that many trans people (your humble correspondent included) can achieve at best a crude facsimile, a pale reflection of womanhood. And of course even for the most liberated of women, the loss of a "man" in public can be threatening; many times I've been only a few feet away from Darling Wife, but some poor excuse for a man and a human being has taken her apparent unattachedness as an opportunity to make some vile comment or another. (But of course I know a little bit about this firsthand.)
And really, there is nothing wrong about wanting to find a partner that complements you. To remove the usual division of gender roles from the relationship can be very destabilizing for most heterosexual people. And just as I must accept and acknowledge that my life is profoundly influenced and shaped by my trans gender identity, my feeling of not being comfortable in my birth sex, so I must accept that for most people the opposite is true, that their life is influenced and shaped by their surety of gender, their feeling of being comfortable in their birth gender.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I am living proof that I believe that it's not. But the compromises are far harder to make and take than those of most relationships.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, August 25, 2005 at 8:50 AM.
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11:02 AMVery well said, I try to be brave, but its hard when there are two women going out sometimes. I feel vunerable, like I have to protect my husband, he seems so open to attack when CD'ed. So for sure he's not available to jump to defend me from some boor.
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