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An unusual relationship

I AM fortunate to have been blessed with an extraordinary family, who value unity and friendship well above keeping up appearances. As a result, the news of my desire to transition was greeted with interest, curiosity and even happiness. They were happy that I was happy, even if my mother did have some serious reservations about the effects testosterone would have on my anger levels. (She need not have worried – turns out it made me calmer and generally much less angry at the world.) Dealing with friends and colleagues hasn’t always been as smooth or as easy, but most of my friends have come with me – a testament perhaps to the people I choose as friends.

One of the more difficult aspects has been negotiating the minefield of a new relationship which, in my case, is anything but straightforward. I find myself of being in the unusual position of being in a reasonably long term relationship with a straight man. We have been friends and work colleagues for many years. Prior to my transition he made it clear was interested in a relationship with me. The idea of this filled me with dread. I was deeply uncomfortable with my physical self and knew I could not be the ‘female’ in a male/female relationship. I pushed him away, not wanting to start something I couldn’t finish.

I had very definite ideas of the kind of relationship I wanted. I saw myself settling down with a woman and, if not starting a family, certainly living as a man with a woman, the way other men do. I suppose it was a clue that, despite rumours to the contrary, I had never been attracted to women per se. (People mistook the apparent absence of a man in my life as clear proof that I was a lesbian, while conveniently overlooking the absence of any woman either.) On the other hand, I certainly had never sought a relationship with a man, although I had been in a couple of very short and deeply uncomfortable liaisons with men in the past. The fact that, after taking testosterone, I was primarily attracted to men was difficult to reconcile with my expectations.

Even though I did not encourage a physical relationship with this man, I became firm friends with him and was very comfortable in his company. He was one of the few people I could confide in entirely. He was certainly one of the first people I told about my desire to transition. I was discussing this conversation with him recently and I commented on how surprisingly calm he seemed when I told him. He said it was certainly not what he’d been expecting to hear and that his apparent calmness was probably more a matter of not knowing what to say than any thing else. I think perhaps he saw his entire future flash before him as any hope of a relationship with a like-minded woman slipped away.

But then something interesting happened. He said to me on a number of occasions that his attraction to a person was not about the physical being; it was about the intellect and the nature of the person. Like Joe E. Brown’s character, in Billy Wilder’s cinema classic Some like it hot, he was not about to let a little thing like gender variance get in his way. Over the course of my physical transformation, he let me know that the door was still open if I wanted a relationship. I was not so sure and it took five years from his first approach to convince myself it was a good idea. I finally figured it wasn’t every day that you meet a person as patient and respectful (and available) as this and that I’d be nuts not to at least give it a go.

This is when the reality of the situation set in. It was no longer just my feelings I had to consider because now there were two people on my transition journey. I don’t much care if people know about us, but the difficulties of our unusual relationship soon became apparent because he was not happy to make our partnership common knowledge, either among work colleagues, his family or his friends. He was deeply uncomfortable with being identified as a gay man. Ironically, I know of a number of people who think he is gay anyway, so I’m sure it wouldn’t make any difference to the way his friends or colleagues see him, but that is of little comfort to him. When we’re out he introduces me as his friend without further elaboration. Only a small number of our closest friends are aware of the situation. He is not at all comfortable with meeting my family. I personally would like to be acknowledged as his partner but I have to be mindful and respect his comfort level, just as he respected my desire to transition to a more comfortable physical form even though, at the time, he didn’t really understand what that entailed or what it would mean for him.

He doesn’t give much away. He is quiet and reserved, so at times it is difficult to work out where the relationship is headed. I know he has his limits. He has said that, while we might have been friends, he doesn’t believe he would have been attracted to me at all had he met me as a man. The relationship has a solid base of friendship, trust and respect so I know that even if it leads to nothing more permanent we will always be good friends.

John, NSW 2011