Why I Stay

Cisgender Voices was started near the time when “Inside My Husband’s Closet”¹ was published. The book focused on my experiences during the first year after Marcie began to cross dress but still considered herself a male. Cisgender Voices was initiated to focus on life after that first year, as her gender identity began to morph.

When working on Cisgender Voices I have often gotten ideas, wrote about them, and then moved on to something else. The following is one such post, started in 2024 when Marcie had been dressing for four years. At this point she had presented herself as trans for a couple of years. The content below is important, but due to multiple circumstances I elected to publish other posts before this one.

Because readers of this blog are in various stages of adapting to a gender identity change for their spouse, I thought the content might, even at this point, have value. I’ve edited the post for flow and clarity as best I could without modifying it to reflect my current perception of my relationship with Marcie (after 5 full years). For that you can see other posts within this blog.

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Lying in bed this morning, as often happens, all sorts of monkeys began to crawl around in my brain. My analytical side gets loose and there is no telling where it will go. The question that made itself present hits morning was “Why do I Stay.” My immediate answer, as I lay there cuddled up next to her, was because I like this. I like lying next to her, holding her shoulder in my hand as she is sleeping. But I recognized this question needed more attention.

This is not a subject I had contemplated in quite this way before. In the first couple years I proposed that the sign that I had accepted her would be when I was no longer spending so much time thinking about her and her cross dressing/trans journey. This is now true. These thoughts now rarely occur, but haven’t left completely.

For reasons I can’t determine and which may be unusual I didn’t initially even contemplate leaving her. Rather, I identified my two fears, one that ‘she would leave me’ and two that ‘our love life would disappear’. Neither came to pass.

What I do find curious is she never expressed to me that she had worried I would leave her. So I asked her now, four and a half years down the road. She had previously told me that she didn’t know how I would feel or what I would think about the changes she saw coming. Today she was able to articulate that my leaving was not one of the options she’d even considered.

So why do I stay? How did she know I would?

Then and now I stay because I want to. It’s not because I have nowhere else to go. Unlike many others, I did and continue to have options. Rather I stay because there’s nowhere else I want to be. I’ve been with her for so long I wouldn’t know what to do without her. I’m confident that no one else would ever put up with me. She’s the only person with whom I can be totally myself. This is where I’m most at peace.

Some women have difficulty adapting to the thought of being married to another woman. I spent a lot of time initially contemplating what this meant for me. I go through many of these thoughts in my book, but not in the context of staying or leaving.

A few things helped. We had a strong, long-term marriage so we were both motivated to make it work. For neither of us was our first inclination to leave.

I had a baseline knowledge of those who are transgender so I wasn’t without a few clues of what to expect. Maybe most importantly I had no inherent moral aversion to those in the LGBTQ community, including women who are lesbian, a category into which many might now place me.

Another factor was that she continued to view herself as a man. We spent many a night discussing exactly what this ‘cross dressing’ meant to her. Was this just a hobby, was she playing a role she enjoyed? She was rarely, if ever, able to articulate why she did it, just that she was more relaxed, more comfortable when dressed as a woman.

I found it helpful that she moved slowly. I had time to adapt, to learn how to appear to be part of a lesbian couple in public. Once I adjusted to walking next to her, I spent a fair amount of time looking at other men as we walk down the street. It had been a long time since I’d felt attracted to anyone as much as I was to him, regardless of his clothing. This hadn’t changed.

I’m not saying this has been easy. Maybe most important is she has supported me and not become frustrated when I’ve moved slowly, or when I’ve struggled.

I’ve commonly seen it written that it takes three to four years for a person to move from considering themselves a cross dresser to someone who is trans. I don’t know about others, but I’ve used all of that time and more for my view of her to change. Part of my eventual acceptance was knowing this wasn’t something she could change.

So why do I stay? Many others have done the same. Many not. Each to their own. Individuals arrive at this point by different paths, for varied reasons.

Many like me vacillate back and forth. For me it’s one of an ongoing consideration not a final decision. I stay because I want to. I want to be with her. I want to be sure. I want to know why. It’s in my nature to question.

How did she know I’d stay? Probably for the same reason I do stay, she knows me as well as anyone ever has.

I look now at pictures from the past. Each features a person I have loved. A person I still love, even as they were, more so as they are. A body I’ve lain next to for warm, for comfort, for love. For now and the future I will stay.

1 Thompson, C. B. (2024). Inside My Husband’s Closet, TransGender Publishing, Victoria BC, Canada.

© Cheryl B Thompson: Use of the content for AI training is strictly prohibited. Content may be used to allow internet search engines to find and present data to users.