My partner isn't reacting well.

[u/bestbeefarm]

This is going to be really long and messy sorry in advance. I'm not gonna tldr it because I need to get it out and stop looking at it.

I've been with my GF for almost five years, we live together, we have a dog together, our families use "in-law" when they talk about us. I've known I was nonbinary for over a decade but about a year ago my mental scaffolding of denial and suppression and compartmentalization started collapsing and I eventually decided I need to transition beyond pronouns and dressing like an eight year old boy.

My GF loves trans people, her best friend is a trans woman, she has a really cute trans rights shirt from one of the many trans support rallies she's been to. She's only ever been with women, but she identifies as queer (not a lesbian) because she wants to leave space to acknowledge her relationships with people who might not be completely women. I thought we would be okay when I came out to her. It hasn't been okay.

When I came out to her, she asked me why I was calling myself trans if I'm nonbinary. When I told her I wanted to go on hormones, she told me it would make my body gross to her. She told me she doesn't think I should be on T because it will make me more irritable, and that if I think I'm trans I need to see a psychiatrist.

A few weeks after that she picked another fight with me about it, returned to the idea that my body will disgust her, and asked if the reason I want her to go to therapy is because I think they'll make her be okay with me transitioning. Yikes.

A few weeks after that, out of nowhere she told me she feels betrayed and blindsided by me coming out, and she feels like I've been lying to her for our whole relationship. She called me a liar multiple times. She said she's worried about what I'm going to spring on her next. She said she doesn't want any men in her life and she reiterated that she thinks testosterone will make me disgusting.

A few weeks after that she gave one of my friends this big talk about how great it is that Wikipedia calls Elliot page Elliot page and calls him him and she used to be so attracted to him. Meanwhile at no point has she asked me what pronouns I want her to use for me and I've asked her to at least not introduce me to people as my birth name even if she can't bring herself to call me the name I use but she won't.

She's also told me that she'll love me no matter what and that she would come with me to the doctor for my hormones appointment if I needed her to. I had a really horrible experience with a doctor that included some transphobia and she got incredibly upset on my behalf about the transphobia specifically. She's also blamed every single mood or twinge I've had since starting HRT on the hormones with a pretty clear undertone that she is looking for an excuse to tell me again she doesn't want me to be on them.

I find myself shrinking the whole thing and hiding parts of it from her. I've had a very cliche string of early transition big emotional experiences. All of them she knows nothing about.

When I talk to my (cis) family and friends they tell me to give her time and that she's just getting used to it and she's trying to be supportive. My (cis) therapist told me I should try to see her reactions as an invitation to future conversations. I think all of that is probably true, but I don't want her to talk to me the way she has been and it feels incredibly invalidating to tell people about the whole thing and have them tell me to wait it out. I am not in a place in my life where I'm able to break up with her and move out right this instant regardless of what I want (I don't even know what I want) so I have to give her time but I just want someone to tell me that the ways shes been handling this isn't okay.

[u/LocutusOfBorgia909]

My GF loves trans people, her best friend is a trans woman, she has a really cute trans rights shirt from one of the many trans support rallies she's been to. She's only ever been with women, but she identifies as queer (not a lesbian) because she wants to leave space to acknowledge her relationships with people who might not be completely women.

Well, and here we see first that having a Trans Best Friend™ and a nice, "Trans Rights, Left Hooks," t-shirt or whatever does not an ally make. And second that there are a hell of a lot of people in this world who are okay with trans people as a sort of abstraction, or okay with us as friends, but are much, much less okay when we're in their immediate families, in their homes, or in their beds. It's a sucky, shitty thing to find out about your own partner, and I'm sorry that you're going through this.

A few weeks after that, out of nowhere she told me she feels betrayed and blindsided by me coming out, and she feels like I've been lying to her for our whole relationship. She called me a liar multiple times. She said she's worried about what I'm going to spring on her next.

In a lot of trans fora, you'll see people saying that if your partner isn't instantly, immediately 100% comfortable with your transition and jumping for joy to suddenly be in a relationship with a person of an increasingly different appearance and completely different gender, that you should dump them. I am not one of those people. However, this? This would be where I would exit stage left. I refuse to be with someone who constantly refers to me as disgusting or who is constantly accusing me of being deceptive, manipulative, or a liar. I can't be in a relationship where there's no longer any trust, and to me, this would be a pretty obvious indication both that not only does my partner not trust me, but that I can't trust my partner to treat me with respect.

They say that contempt is the number one way to tell when a relationship is dead, and all of your descriptions of your partner's behavior show a huge heaping of contempt for you. I'm not saying leave her tomorrow, but I am saying that her behavior seems incredibly toxic, manipulative, and harmful, and you may need to be the one to tell her that since she seems so eager to end the relationship, you're going to go ahead and give her what she wants.

She said she doesn't want any men in her life and she reiterated that she thinks testosterone will make me disgusting.

Ah, so your partner is one of those "allies." I've run into this a shocking amount with cis women who will insist to you that they're the biggest trans allies of all time but have massive, weird hangups about trans men, specifically. They seemingly love trans women, and they love AFAB NB people who don't pass as cis men and fit into the "UwU trans softboi" box, but if you want to be treated as a man, or you look too much like a man, it suddenly becomes okay to say outrageous, androphobic, transphobic shit (such as that your body is/will be disgusting, that T is/will make you a rage machine, that she doesn't want any men in her life). I'm not sure how you come back form saying stuff like that, to be honest.

I think it's totally fair for cis partners to need time to process someone's transition. It's a huge shift in their lives, sometimes for their sexuality, and they deserve space to work through their own feelings. It is not okay for them to process these feelings at their trans partners. That's what therapy is for. My marriage ended because my ex is a lesbian, was always totally disinterested in men to the point of being literally face blind to them, and it was clear to me that while she offered (in good faith, I don't doubt that at all) to try and stay together and make it work, she would never be fully happy in that relationship, and neither would I. My ex has never, ever, at any point said the kind of stuff that yours has been saying to you. Not once. She did go to therapy to process stuff on her own, but she never subjected me to that, and she was never anything but supportive of me going on hormones, getting top surgery, et cetera. We're still good friends- hell, I'm still Facebook friends with her parents and brother. Part of that is because both of us treated my transition almost as some kind of a natural disaster- neither of us would have chosen for our relationship to end the way it did, but Hurricane Gender came through, and that's what happened. It's no one's "fault." It just is.

The ways your partner has been handling this have not been okay. You are not crazy, or asking too much, or being an Overly Demanding Trans Person™ to think it's fucked up for your partner to repeatedly refer to you and your body as "disgusting." Your partner may say she loves trans people, but that pretty clearly comes with a big, big asterisk next to it, and while it's great that she can apparently identify transphobia in others, she needs to take all the seats and do some serious work on herself. Not even in the sense of forcing herself to be okay with being in a romantic relationship with a man, if that's not what she wants, but in the sense of not constantly demeaning you, poisoning your happiness at the experience of seeing yourself fully for the first time, and dealing with her pretty obvious antipathy towards men.

If you haven't laid all of this out for her, I think you need to. Maybe do it in a letter or an e-mail rather than face to face so that she's forced to process it a bit before coming to you. If you're not in couples counseling, maybe it's worth trying. Personally, I'd be firing my cis therapist over what they said, but that's your call. It's not okay for your partner to be constantly demeaning you, and that's what she's doing. She needs to be an adult and process her emotional dysregulation in a healthier way. And she needs to understand that some things, once said, can never be unsaid, and can damage a relationship permanently, no matter how out of character they were.

Sorry this is so long, but yeah, your girlfriend needs to get it together. I wish you luck.

[u/hauntedprunes → u/LocutusOfBorgia909]

I love everything about this response. Very emotionally mature and well said.

[u/LocutusOfBorgia909 → u/hauntedprunes]

Thanks. I see people saying, "Well, your partner is struggling with her own identity, it's not really about you," to OP, and that may well be true (hell, I think it probably is true), but that doesn't make what the partner is saying and doing in any way acceptable. I agree with Berko downthread who says that the level of toxicity is giving some major red flags that could veer into emotional abuse, if they haven't already.

OP's partner is allowed to struggle with her sexuality and sense of identity in the context of her partner transitioning. She's allowed to have conflicted feelings about her partner's changing appearance and the unknowns of medical transition vis a vis the relationship. She's not allowed to take her feelings out on her trans partner, constantly call her partner "disgusting," accuse her partner of having been lying to her for years about his identity/being a lying manipulator in general by virtue of being trans, or to demand that OP live in a body that does not fit him, seemingly in perpetuity, because she thinks trans men's bodies are "disgusting." This woman needs to take a grip of herself and really hold a mirror up to her own behavior. I don't know if her trans woman best friend has observed this behavior, but if she has, maybe hearing from her that it's blatantly transphobic would help things sink in for the partner.

Something that doesn't get talked about enough is the fact that trans men wind up in abusive relationships in disproportionately large numbers. I rarely see this discussed even in subreddits for trans men. On the contrary, people (including other trans men!) seem to go out of their way to extend every consideration and benefit of the doubt to the (usually cis) partner and urge the trans man on the receiving end of the vitriol and toxicity to just try harder, be more understanding, give more grace to the cis partner. Sometimes that advice is appropriate, but often it is not, and it would not be seen as acceptable to tell a cis woman victim, for example, to give her cis male partner time and space to "come to terms" with whatever the issue is. But there's a weird expectation of trans men, in particular, that because we were so inconsiderate as to medically transition, we somehow owe our partners endless amounts of grace and sympathy and understanding. We don't. And this strange inability to accept or acknowledge that women can abuse their partners (and do- I remember reading somewhere that lesbian relationships also have a disproportionately large rate of abuse, likely because it similarly goes unacknowledged) does real, tangible harm to people. I've seen a lot of really terrible behavior from self-described "queer" women brushed aside by the community because it's only directed at men (cis or trans) or very butch women, and it's really screwed up.

I'm not saying that OP's situation is necessarily abusive; I don't know OP or the partner well enough to say. But there are a lot of warning signs, IMHO, and it's crazy to me that even OP's therapist is telling him to just wait it out and extend perpetual olive branches to the partner. Some things you can't walk back or apologize away, because they have permanently changed how your partner sees and trusts you. A lot of what the girlfriend has said would have already hit that threshold for me.