Just learned of your website trying to find someone in a semi similar situation!

Hope all is going well! :)

Anyways, I would be happy to hear on an update from you as your post is not 6 years old.

Hope all is going well! :)

Your blog is truly lovely. You have a beautiful voice and your writing is elegant and lively. Reading of your adventures, fears, hopes, cares, concerns, dreams, and uncertainties is like watching Meryl Streep recount her life in Defending Your Life.

You are a breath of digital fresh air.

I wish I had chosen a different path in dealing with my kids. We took the best approach we thought we could at the time. A different stall in the lu, if you will. We all do the best we can, with the information we have, at the time we have it. I tried to understand – believe me we all have – why I had this desire and need to express myself and experience myself through the lense of being dressed as a woman. And I still have no clinical answer, I suppose. Ultimately, I decided I would try – I would – white knuckle it and purge it from my life.

Years later, after finally finding the courage to step out and discuss all this with a gender therapist, I happened upon the simplest answer to my question of why. And it struck me that the most logical – though certainly not the most believable – answer to my question of why this strong desire, compulsion, and need to appear and express myself as a woman is simply because at my core, in the depths of my most essential being, I am a woman.

And now, decades later, after my kids have learned about the outward expression of that inner reality, it is difficult, though not impossible to repair the damage of deciding to “protect” them from that part of me. I cannot change who I am. I tried masking it, locking it away, denying the truth of who I am – and still do, oy. And after all that masking and shrouding and denial and lying, it is difficult discussing it because they have decades of a visual reality that does not fully express the entire reality of who I am. And trying to resolve that disconnect now is extremely difficult.

I understand the difficulty from my struggle. I battled with it my entire life. I can’t expect others who haven’t experience the internal struggle of my lifetime to resolve an external disconnect in a fraction of that time, while thinking they no longer know who I am. I can’t fully experience their struggle of being confronted with the information that the person they knew as their Dad, doesn’t really identify as a guy. What does that mean? Does he wish he wasn’t a dad? Why did he marry a woman? Why did he have kids? What is wrong with him? Why what where why why why?

While for their sake, it would be better to not have to deal with this at all. The choice was deal with it openly and honestly then, or shield them from what I then understood was an external practice – hoping I could contain and abstain forever. I now know – and to a much lesser extent understood but refused to accept then – that in locking down the practice, I was effectively locking out my self in a very real way from our relationship. And sadly, by doing that, I was inadvertently keeping them from knowing a large part of who I truly am.

Life is messy and we do the best we can. We pick – hopefully – the best paths we can and want what is best for our kids and family.
We just can’t end up denying who we are, or in the end, we fail to do what we set out to do, because we remove a large part of who we are from the picture of we and us. And that isn’t really best for anyone.

As one looking back down the road more travelled, it would be a shame if you were to allow shame to keep Liz from your kids. She is a beautiful and loving person.

Sorry for the long rant. But thank you for your honesty and sharing your life experience.

ooh I’ll take a look!

Get a divorce? But we’re happily married!
How is this child abuse? He’s not being hurt in any way. Yes, it’s disturbing my baby the exact same amount as when I shaved off my beard – should I also never shave ever again?

I’m genuinely curious to understand your reasoning for why you consider this child abuse.

Yeah, that’s going to be a tough one :/ But necessary! Awesome that your daughter will stand up against intolerance! I’ll have to make sure I raise my son the same way <3