My post history has some context for people who are curious or just don't know what I'm talking about.
Recap TL;DR: I came out to my wife and she was afraid that if I transitioned she would stop being attracted to me. Since I was afraid of divorce, I decided I'd hold off on transitioning indefinitely.
Since then, my wife and I have been bouncing all over the map this week. She was freaked out initially, but then she flipped to being ok with me transitioning - with the caveat that she might not be attracted to me, but she'll always love me. With that in mind, I felt comfortable looking at what transitioning might really look like.
One reason I wouldn't ~~transition~~ start HRT* anytime soon is fertility. I want more kids. I love my child and I want 1-2 more (as was always my marriage's life plan). I know freezing sperm is an option, but in-vitro is so expensive I don't know if we would want to try it. I realize kids are far more expensive than in-vitro, but my wife and I have budgeted for kids - not kids + in-vitro. We have plans to fix up our house, retire early, etc. So I don't want to put undue stress on those plans. We are considering freezing sperm, but not very seriously.
Also, based on some messages I got from users, it seems like having kids prior to transitioning is a contentious concept? I didn't expect that, but some people (mostly in DMs) seemed angry that I didn't know I was trans until after I had my first kid. I think those perspectives are related to divorce since divorce does produce worse outcomes for kids (generally not always). I guess I'm inviting people to come here and elaborate on their thoughts about that.
Anyways, I struggled to hear the harsher words from some people, but I also think they were well-founded. They were a gut-punch that made me reorient my thinking away from selfish thoughts about myself and more about my family and how my choices impact them.
I built up transitioning in my mind. I was feeling a strong sense of dysphoria. I assumed my wife would be ok with it (since we are already inhabiting stereotypical reversed-gender roles in almost every aspect of life). I assumed it wouldn't impact my fertility so quickly/drastically. I thought I was a month or two away from starting HRT. But the more I research it, the more I think I could be years away.
As an attempt to take this slower and more seriously, I have an appointment with a therapist today to start. It really should have been my first course of action anyways. It's possible I could start transitioning with non-hormonal techniques and maybe that's enough for me. If so, that would be ideal. My male physique wouldn't change too much and my wife would be happy about that. Maybe my dysphoria would go away. I've tried that in the past, but I didn't go "all-in" on it. I felt ugly and manly which bummed me out back then, but maybe I just didn't really accept myself and that was hindering the experience.
Generally speaking, I think I was just moving way too fast and unmeasured. I'm assuming that's common in "TransLater communities" because there is a lot of fear that the biological clock is stripping away my opportunity to meet my goals before it's too late. But that doesn't mean it's the right mentality. Plenty of people transition much later than I was planning and it works out fine. So, maybe that'll be my experience. Or maybe I'll never ~~transition~~ start HRT* due to the aforementioned options, therapy, etc. Who knows. I'm probably still going to be active in this community, if that's ok. I sure hate that my whole experience is practically the only thing in this community lol It's a bit embarrassing in a way. Please drown out my posts with some more positive stuff!
I don't know who is angry you had kids before realizing you are trans, but how were you supposed to know you were trans? This isn't your fault. Lots of people don't realize they are trans, and part of that is because we live in a society that deprives trans people of the ability to interpret their experiences, to know they are trans.
A similar thing happens to women, for example it wasn't until the 1970s that the concept of sexual harassment existed and before then society deprived women of the concepts and words to help understand and explain what was happening to them.
In the past, the idea that sexual assault causes trauma was not understood at all, and when the victim behaved like a traumatized person afterwards, clinicians created the concept of "hysteria" to explain why women so often behaved that way. We of course know now that it's trauma, not some inherent irrationality that only women experience, and that it is caused by the way women are oppressed and mistreated in society. (See Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, particularly "The Heroic Age of Hysteria" in the first chapter for more.)
This concept is called "hermeneutical injustice". "Hermeneutic" is basically a fancy word that means interpretation, and the term refers to when people aren't able to understand the experiences of themselves or others because they don't fit the concepts or language available to them, usually due to exclusion or oppression (like when the exclusion of women from education and thus the ability to become doctors results in only male doctors being involved in the treatment and theorizing about female psychiatric patients).
Being angry that you realized you are trans after having kids is basically just victim blaming as far as I can tell. You didn't know you were trans, you can't be responsible if you didn't know.
Now that you do know you are trans, however, you do have a responsibility to make good choices. But ironically I think the right choice is in the opposite direction you are heading.
You basically found out you have a serious medical condition and your response is to refuse treatment because it is socially stigmatized and makes your wife uncomfortable.
In my experience, and I think this might generalize to many of our experiences, when you refuse to transition for other people, you usually aren't doing them any favors in the end. To my mind, refusing to transition is the most irresponsible thing you can do because it is the thing that compromises your well-being the most, creates the most liability, and burdens others in your life the most.
Before transitioning I was obsessed with my sense of responsibility to others - I was burning with a sense of guilt and shame that led me to extreme behaviors. I never gave transitioning a second thought because I believed it was a selfish act, basically a way for me to wear dresses in public and indulge in my bizarre preferences - embarrassing socially, but also burdensome on others. I would have to ask people to call me a different name, it would compromise my relationships with people I loved, and so on.
So of course at the time I thought not transitioning was the most responsible thing to do, so much so that I never even gave much thought to whether I was trans, I just would read the DSM-V definition and claim whatever feelings I had didn't amount to anything like real dysphoria.
But not transitioning also led me to not take care of myself, I gained >100 lbs and was morbidly obese and I basically didn't care. I hated my body, sure - but it was my body and so it didn't matter. What mattered was other people, not me. I made huge sacrifices - I obsessively recycled and composted all waste that I could. I stopped using my car and began to bicycle instead out of a burning sense of responsibility for the harm caused by driving (climate, geopolitical, etc.). This led to being hit by cars several times, and again I didn't care. I got brain injuries from accidents, I caused permanent damage to my body. Again, indifferent on my end. But my partner? Every time I had to go to the ER, I put her in extreme distress. Every time the doctor was explaining how bad off I was, my partner was there and was very much not indifferent.
By being responsible and prioritizing everyone but myself, I had become a burden.
I'll let other trans women share their pre-transition stories, but I am confident I'm not the only person who was causing suffering for others in their life because they didn't transition.
Personally, I look back and think my whole concept of transition was wrong, and now I see that transitioning is the responsible thing to do, for myself and for others.
(It's hard to believe until you start HRT, I know pre-HRT me wouldn't have taken these kinds of comments seriously.)
I socially transitioned before I medically transitioned, and both pre-transition and during social transition, whenever I tried to feminize by wearing women's clothing or trying on makeup, I was hit with the dual feeling of excitement and dread. By caring about my appearance or dress, and especially by being in a female framing, my attention was drawn more towards my male body.
Before transition I didn't even realize what I hated was specifically that the qualities were male, only later did I realize the gendered aspect to my distress. The way a dress looked on me made me want to die, I thought because I was ugly and overweight, but when I imagined being an overweight woman I realized it was the male pattern of fat distribution that disturbed me more than merely the fact of being overweight. In fact, at some point I realized that I liked having some fat precisely because it made me feel more feminine.
All this to say, social transition made my dysphoria so much worse because I started paying attention to my body and making an effort to alleviate my dysphoria was the opposite approach from the dissociation I used to cope previously. It was better, in some sense, to not think about or care about my clothes, how I dressed, etc.
Who knows what your experiences will be, but if you are anything like the average, it isn't because you failed to accept yourself enough that social transition steps like wearing dresses weren't enough or made you feel ugly and manly, it's because you're dysphoric and you haven't taken the only proven treatment to alleviate your dysphoria.
I think it's more common for people to struggle to ever transition, especially later in life, than it is to "go too fast". It's actually difficult to transition "too quickly" because the medical gatekeeping ensures the process takes years to occur.
There are so many cross-dressing support groups and so on. Lots and lots of people never get to the point of recognizing they are trans, let alone to the point of transitioning.
In my experience, lots of people are uncomfortable with trans people and transitioning, so it is treated as some kind of extremely dangerous or likely to be regretted. But this is not the truth, we have actual evidence that it is the opposite: transitioning is life-saving (and not transitioning is extremely dangerous), and transitioning has one of the lowest regret rates of any medical treatment.
And of that 1% who detransition, the vast majority only do so because they were not supported by family, friends, and work so transitioning was not feasible for them anymore. Many of those people go on to transition again later.
Cis people do not try to take cross-sex hormones, the risks that you or other trans people are going too fast and will accidentally transition when you shouldn't are frankly a myth concocted by the fears and prejudices cis people have.
Why wouldn't it be OK? Ironically I can't think of a more stereotypical TransLater story anyway, your experience might as well stand-in for many of us and it is good for others to see it. You won't be the only one.
No matter what you decide, you are welcome here. I hope I am speaking for everyone when I say we love you and are here for you. ❤️
FWIW this was the negative comment I got:
It was much longer and had a lot more context but it was pretty rough.
Don't listen to the transphobes 🫂
I don't really understand their comment, but it doesn't seem related to transitioning ... Either way, to parrot @will_steal_your_username@lemmy.blahaj.zone, don't listen to abusive people.
Trans people get random hate from strangers, it's unfortunate. That's part of why Blahaj as an instance has zero tolerance for transphobes, it's one of the few places that actually takes seriously the need to have a space free of that kind of harassment.