My wife and I were together 10 years before I realized I was trans and started transitioning, and she thinks of me as a totally separate individual from my pretransition self. In her mind, she is married to current me, and we had to take down our wedding photos because it upset her to see her ex-husband plastered on our walls. We also both pretty regularly say [deadname] was an asshole, like that person isn’t me. Does anyone else’s partner compartmentalize like this after you transitioned during your relationship?
Maybe it’s only cause i’m not that far into my transition yet, but i kind of flip-flop back and forth on this depending on the context. Like, I generally think of pre-transition me as “myself but less developed”, but sometimes I do find myself going “Why did [deadname] do this? Wtf was he thinking?” if I’m regretting a poor past decision or whatever.
My partner and I got together long after I had transitioned, so this doesn’t apply, but honestly, I’d find it really upsetting if someone viewed my own experience through that lens.
The way I put it is that the person I was before I transitioned wasn’t a full person. I was hiding/repressing part of who I was. But the part that I wasn’t hiding was still me. Post transition me is a full person. I’m still the me I used to be, but I’m also more than and different to who I was then.
this is my perspective too. i kind of relate it to my autistic masking. i used to do fencing and had spent literally years of my life with one of the other fencers, and we ended up taking over the club together when the previous coach retired. one time he invited me to a little house party with some friends, and afterward he said he had never seen me act the way i did at the party before, like he was shocked at how different my behavior was (not in a bad way i think). he had only ever seen me in the context of fencing, so there were huge parts of my personality he had never interacted with, and seeing a glimpse of the larger me showed him he really didnt know me as well as he thought.
i think of my transition the same, like all the stuff coming out now was always there but i never showed it to anyone, so some people are going to be surprised, or shocked, or angry, or happy, or whatever because im showing them that they didnt really know me that well. or maybe not because some of my friends were completely unsurprised lol.
Such a beautiful way to frame it
I don’t have anyone, but I see myself both as a new person and as a more complete version of the me I always was, depending on the context, which is confusing.
Noooo my wife very much views me as the same person. Just less hidden and more accessible. This has always been part of who I am, it’s just now we know what to call it and I’m doing something about it. It certainly takes her a while to adjust to new developments but I think that’s to be expected. We still have some pre-transition pictures around still.
I’ve been out as trans for so long that most of my memorable accomplishments were either before wrong puberty (so I was just a almost-genderless child) or after I started social transition (way before hrt). In between, was a few years of middle school and high school which were only memorable because of excessive amounts of homework that got me to learn more programming and try on programming socks.
I would think while your change has been positive and you consider the prior an asshole, they’re still inseparable. But so are light and dark. Warm and hot. Yin Yang. To thy own self be true. You wouldn’t be here without the prior… There’s nothing wrong with who you were, necessarily. You’ve nevertheless changed. It’s like the ship of Theseus. Replace enough boards and when exactly does a ship become a ‘new’ one? It’s subjective. Yet the spirit carries on.
It’s so great you’ve grown, changed, found a new you. Perhaps the old ship has sailed. Be the new you. Or simply just be you, and be here now.
Calling myself an asshole is to be honest, accurate. I wasn’t an overall horrible person, but I could sometimes be unpleasant to be around because I compensated for not understanding myself in ways that weren’t healthy and my wife and I both acknowledge that. Our marriage is better now, and I don’t know that I would have ended up with her where we are now had I transitioned earlier, so I don’t regret it. Yes it would have been nice for me if I had figured it out sooner, but it wouldn’t have been nice for us.
