Sources of Support part 3: Reading

As is often the case in my life reading has been my saving grace. It is in reading that I have gained some sense of both the emerging Trans identity and my own transitioning identity. There are very few books written from my perspective. This is undoubtedly a huge gap and there is a need for people like me to write.Helen Boyd and Kirstin Collier are among authors who share

open and honest accounts of the transition required to enable meaningful relationships. In the meantime there are many autobiographies of the transitioning person, and they have helped more than I thought. I have binged on autobiographies like ‘My Name is Juno’ by Juno Dawson. Jennifer Finlay Boylan has written prolifically and intelligently. I am currently inhaling all she has to say. The discussion on mental health and the frozen emotional state that comes with this identity confusion makes sense. I have come to wonder how our relationship may have evolved if my partner had been able to more independently process this journey. I read an article during the week about a couple where the coming out and the transitioned identity happened in 2 years. That feels like lightening speed. The most important thing to urge here is that You can’t compare your process to others.

It may kill you if you do.

It takes my partner a year to change a light bulb.Literally. In 4.5 years we have made incremental steps and have arrived at a space where my partner reports they may not be happy in the body they currently have. They accept they identify as feminine. They accept a referral to a gender identity clinic may be relevant ‘at some point’. But to me only. This change has largely been affected by my ability to give voice to the thoughts they have and to facilitate that communication. And this ability comes to me from reading.

I didn’t want to take the primary role in caring for this person because I felt unequipped to provide it. In the end of the day this is probably true of many marital issues. I didn’t understand that processing of their identity was stuck in the mind of a 7 year old boy who had decided that this was wrong and bad and who had turned it into a lifelong expression of addiction and bingeing rather than a defined state of being. I didn’t realise that this would take years and years and years before we came to any equal conversant state. I didn’t realise that I would play the part of facilitator as the identity emerged slowly slowly slowly. And I really didn’t realise how much responsibility I would need to take to enable understanding to exist between us.

Now, through time and reading, I understand. I understand that if you choose to stay in this relationship, however you want to configure this, you need to be the facilitator and the enabler.

Reading has given me much of my strength and I am inhaling each book as it comes my way.

My partner? They are turning each page slowly, each word more emotive than the other. The pile of books that grows as my pile diminishes: a constant visual representation of the hole they have dug to hide in and their daily struggle to be.

The question will always come back to you: How can you support yourself?

Read, read and then keep reading until the words you couldn’t understand and the concepts that you couldn’t imagine become as fluent to you and as real to you as they need to be for your loved one.

Be informed and forgive yourself when it takes longer to achieve than you thought. Use the super power of informed understanding to support the people around you who love you. This is how you know love. This is how you know yourself.